> but if taking LSD was a game changer, you'd see a majority of creative workers taking LSD the same way Adderall & co are massively used (there and elsewhere - anywhere where staying more time awake and alert allows you to pull ahead).

Does the same logic apply to eating healthy and exercising?

> Creativity is difficult to measure in the lab, but if taking LSD was a game changer, you'd see a majority of creative workers taking LSD the same way Adderall & co are massively used (there and elsewhere - anywhere where staying more time awake and alert allows you to pull ahead).

Firstly, showing up to work on acid is very different than showing up to work on Adderall. The impact on someone's ability to function normally is incomparable. Secondly, working faster to solve problems is not even close to doing things like honing someone's artistic perception in their medium, and having the mental material to manifest abstract concepts. Many of the benefits people reap from hallucinogens are experiential and could influence someone decades later, like travel or something they read.

> Yet I don't see it: most LSD usage works the same way as absinthe or opium used to be used: as a crutch for creatives suffering a dry spell, with the user feeling improvement - but the public, critics, "consumers" of the creative product not really seeing it.

I am a professional art-school trained artist who almost certainly knows many more successful artists than you do: you're either making things up to justify your existing opinion, or you don't know enough about the topic to realize you're making things up. The preponderance of dedicated professional artists and designers I know (on the artier end of the spectrum) have at least dabbled in hallucinogens. Personally, I have not. If you include marijuana, even though that's far more like Adderall in its usage patterns, that number is nearly 100%. Almost none of that drug usage, from what I've seen, is used in direct response to needing inspiration. Of course, none of this is universal, but to say it's not common or influential because you are not aware of many people that are working while tripping is utterly ridiculous.

> (Usually the crutch becomes an addiction, or the toxicity/impurities in the product take their toll, and you end up with a coda like at the end of PK Dick's _A Scanner Darkly_)

Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.

> What I find most specific to LSD though is that it seems to have produced a long list of LSD advocates, whose work consists only of waxing poetics about how "LSD gives you mental superpowers", and... Not much else. No actual "general" poetry, no Great Text, no theoretical breakthrough in philosophy nor science...)

You can find bullshit artists peddling damned near anything for their own benefit, and hallucinogens are one of the worst offenders. That's not an argument against the efficacy of anything. And to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything. Neither for hallucinogen usage, nor abstinence.

Thanks for your insights.

The fact that almost none of the drugs in the artistic milieu are used to get inspiration is interesting - you'd think those, especially LSD, would have been prime candidates, given their "legendary" reputation in Leary's advocacy work.

And just for the record: >Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.

"A Scanner Darkly"'s coda is not fiction. Here it is:

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it…. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying.” But the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape-recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any ‘sin’, it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene deceased

To Ray deceased

To Francy permanent psychosis

To Kathy permanent brain damage

To Jim deceased

To Val massive permanent brain damage

To Nancy permanent psychosis

To Joanne permanent brain damage

To Maren deceased

To Nick deceased

To Terry deceased

To Dennis deceased

To Phil permanent pancreatic damage

To Sue permanent vascular damage

To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage

…and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The ‘enemy’ was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy."

> The fact that almost none of the drugs in the artistic milieu are used to get inspiration is interesting - you'd think those, especially LSD, would have been prime candidates, given their "legendary" reputation in Leary's advocacy work.

It's not that they don't contribute to inspiration for some, or that some don't deliberately take them, at some point at least, to expand their artistic perspective: they just aren't useful as a work aid to mitigate a lack of inspiration like drinking coffee to mitigate tiredness. Hallucinogens are a leisure drug, not a work aid, and like many other kinds of intense leisure experiences, they can have significant impact on someone's work. Surely people make art while taking acid but it's just not used like you imagine it is.

>And just for the record:

>> Ah-- that you're basing at least some of your conclusions on fiction certainly fills in some holes.

> "A Scanner Darkly"'s coda is not fiction. Here it is:

It was a novel and he was trying to sell books. If you want to know what drug addiction is really like, start with some reputable, published, entirely non-fiction literature written to educate people, not entertain them.

I have not struggled with drug addiction, though being involved in several subcultures in my younger years, many people in my life have, and my list probably rivals his. In my adult life, maybe ten people ranging from fairly close friends, to family, and even an ex long-term live-in girlfriend have died from their heroin (which mostly started with something they were prescribed for pain,) alcohol, and in one case of meth usage. Many more permanently damaged. Their actual stories don't make snappy book codas: they're emotionally exhausting because the sadness of their existence is mundane, boring, and oppressive. Even my best friend in elementary school who after not seeing him for quite some time, I found out was shot by police soon after getting out of jail for robbing a pharmacy to get Oxycontin, seemingly, had an incredibly boring life. He lived with his mother in his late 30s, worked as a grocery store bagger, and didn't really go anywhere besides work, the liquor store, and home, (which is where he was killed.) Also, having worked in nightclubs for many years, I knew many people addicted to cocaine, but I don't know anyone that's died from it or gone to rehab for it (though some for their more severe alcohol abuse... they're very commonly used together.)

Those people that died of alcohol and heroin usage had some similarities in usage patterns. You know what that has to do with artists use of hallucinogens? Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing. Not one single thing. LSD not chemically addictive and it's nearly impossible to fatally overdose on. You will never find it listed in an article about "diseases of despair." People interface with it completely differently than heroin users, drinkers, marijuana users, and coke heads interface with their substances of choice. Consistently drinking coffee in the morning has closer usage patterns to the opioid people than hallucinogen users. Even with all of the artists I've known, only two of those dead people were artists: one was a drummer in a metal band I was briefly in, and another friend picked up painting in an art therapy program in rehab before that one last fateful relapse.

I get it, we all want to feel confident in our understanding of important topics. Being well-read is a good thing, but I think someone you trust needs to give you some version of the Good Will Hunting "You're just a kid" speech. You need to understand the limits of your knowledge. You are trying to pontificate about things you've read about in novels that were written decades ago about drugs that couldn't possibly be less relevant to the ones discussed here. Trying to reason about artists that sometimes use hallucinogens based on the experience of an artist who-- like millions of non-artists-- was addicted to heroin, betrays foundational gaps in your understanding of this topic. If you're honestly interested in this topic, you should read some good, entirely non-fiction, published literature on it.