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Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Treatments

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Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Treatments Lysergic Acid Diethylamide also known as LSD or Acid is a hallucinogenic/psychedelic drug that has mind-altering effects on the human body. This paper focuses on the attempted therapeutic, medicinal, recreational, etc. applications of LSD with the goal of “curing” or helping to mitigate some other undesired effect. Use of LSD is not without its own risks so a portion of this paper will also focus on potential problems with short/long-term LSD treatment applications. This paper is by no means cumulative or holistic in its approach to this subject and seeks only to inform the reader on an aspect of legal applications of otherwise illegal drugs. As previously mentioned LSD is a hallucinogenic or psychedelic …show more content…

For the most part LSD treatment plans ceased in the 1970s this was mainly due to the fact that unregulated experiments involving highly hallucinogenic drugs on sometimes unwilling participants became frowned upon and rightly so. LSD can be dangerous depending on the dosage and back in the 50s and 60s researchers would just keep upping the dosages until they felt they got the desired results. You can see how that could get morally and ethically confusing. The first example this paper covers is a study published in 1957 involving the use of LSD on psychoneurotic patients under day-hospital conditions; the overall goal being to make these psychoneurotic people more manageable on a day to day basis. According to the author of the study, Dr. Joyce Martin, the patients selected for treatment had to meet certain criteria such as: no prior psychotic episodes, a good personality and high intelligence. (Martin, 1957). It is unclear if the patients in this study knew what was going to happen to them and it is also unclear if these patients participated willingly. This was of course a time where strict ethics board did not exist and patient consent/knowledge was not always required to conduct scientific experiments. Regardless, the experiments themselves were simple: patient arrives at the hospital, eats breakfast, is put into their own room, an initial dosage of 25 to 50 gamma of LSD was administered, dosage is increased until desired effect is achieved, patients are monitored and offered lunch which they often refused due to nausea and then the reaction was terminated by administering Largactil. Results varied from the patients becoming more receptive to less receptive. Patients were often reported to experience vivid past memories as well as saying they saw themselves as being younger when looking at a

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