Psychedelic Truth

Gotta be desperate for a high to take datura. That is a poisonous plant with unpredictable results. It grew regularly where we lived, and we had a physician family member who basically said if you’re going to get high even some of the harder drugs were a better choice than datura. He’d seen too many people who didn’t survive or came out with permanent damage. It was a poorer rural area where they worked, and combined with boredom people tried other shit to get high. Datura’s got a bad track record.

Your experience is valid but Datura seeds are NOT the same thing as acid and shrooms, yeah? Deliriants and psychedelics are completely different experiences. You are much more likely to have horrifying and terrible trips with deliriants, and you will not even understand what's happening to you isn't real, because categorically deliriants take that ability away from you.

In 2025, even in the 2010s, the Psychonaut Wiki is absolutely invaluable for harm reduction like this.

Nope. Bad trips exist. I was sat laying down in my bed the entire time crying while my mind was spiraling down shitty paths that after the trip made zero sense. I was disguested with myself. I couldn't make myself move. Not locked in but zero motivation. Like that feeling when you need to pee but stay in bed because you're too tired to move cranked to eleven. I screamed in my head to raise my hand and it took way too much effort to do so.

I tried to cheer myself up thinking logically about the shit going through my head. It made it much worse. I wanted to die. That's not hyperbole. About three and a half later I finally got out of bed and into the shower to cry there. I remembered everything I thought of and that I hated myself but it all wasn't true. Completely illogical and mostly nonesense.

What did I gain from this? Nothing. You can say whatever you want to pretend there's some underlying massive rebelation or positive that trip should have given me but I reject that whole heartedly. It just made me feel awful for about 5 hours fucked me up for about a week and made me hesitant do mushrooms again. Didn't work though as shrooms are delightful most of the time

There are bad trips. Sometimes, yes, 'bad' trips are just an expression of one's mental state, exacerbed. You can look into it, ponder and maybe do some introspection because it is necessary.

But sometimes bad trips are just bad trips. The drugs just hit too hard, or you're not prepared for it and you go spiralling down an infinite staircase of pain and anguish. But you have nothing to gain from it, except the memory of a bad experience.

People don't like to hear it because it sounds like invalidating toxic positivity, but you're right. Aside from fringe cases, there's no bad trips- only challenging trips. It may even be traumatic, but that doesn't make it an inherently bad trip; it's all about how you respond to it and what you do with it after.