Excessive LSD will most certainly make you crazy. I’m not sure if it’s a traditional madness with a name, though. The way it stretches your brain is dose dependent, and of course too much will stretch it too far and tear things.

Too frequent use is also dangerous. It takes time to settle back down completely, and if not allowed to, the brain can get stuck in the stretched position.

The computer-mining approach to research using survey data can only be suggestive, never definitive. When used by statistically naive persons it is worse than useless, regardless of the raw numbers of respondents.

The authors of the first study looked primarily at psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, but did not look at PCP or other hallucinogens with particularly bad reps.

The use of the term “psychedelic” rather than more specific pharmacological terms raises a concern — particularly as the authors of the first study were clinical psychologists rather than pharmacologists or research psychologists.

The cannabis-psychosis association cannot be easily brushed away, particularly for adolescents.

Phencyclidine (PCP) is another drug that can trigger psychosis in some youngsters.

LSD is less likely than PCP to cause long term psychoses, but particular genetic types may be more predisposed to LSD psychosis of long duration.

Some people seem genetically predisposed to seek out psychedelic experiences. Some of those same people also seem to be vulnerable to developing psychosis from hallucinogenic drugs.

If you want to emulate productive activities of billionaires, emulate what they did before they became wealthy, not after.

I am frequently asked for my opinion on the speculation that Francis Crick was on LSD when he discovered the double helix; or that he was involved with a man named Dick Kemp in the manufacture of LSD. These assertions were reported second hand in an article in the Mail on Sunday by Alun Rees following Crick’s death and they have since gained a certain amount of traction on the internet. Both stories are wrong. The true story, which I was told directly by Crick’s widow and by the man who (as his widow confirms) first supplied the Cricks with LSD, is much less sensational. Crick was given (not sold) LSD on several occasions from 1967 onwards by Henry Todd, who met the Cricks through his girlfriend. Todd did know Kemp, with whom he was eventually prosecuted, but the Cricks did not. As for the implausible idea that the then impoverished and conventional Crick would have had access to LSD when it was newly invented in the early 1950s, there is simply no evidence for it at all. Those who wish to argue that LSD helped Crick make discoveries should note that all his major breakthroughs in molecular biology were made before 1967.

Kary Mullis, on the other hand, does credit LSD for his development of PCR. He’s also crazy.

Not true.

“Done in the right hands — and I stress that, because the whole psychedelic area attracts people who often think that they know the truth before doing the science — this could be a very useful one.”

“Medicinal Fried Chicken” indeed.

That said, shaking the snow globe makes sense when things have settled into a bad pattern of “longstanding narrow-minded, negative outlooks.”

“…these drugs help users release longstanding narrow-minded, negative outlooks.”

The very non-neutral phrasing of this statement makes me suspicious. It sounds like what the drugs do is take the ordered structures of the user’s mind and give them a good hard shake, letting them resettle in different ways. Of course, some of those structures were formed by repeated interaction with harsh reality so shattering them might not be a good thing.

”The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.”

I’d be interested in seeing whether that was true. Of course, even if it was, I can’t say I find myself overawed by the creative leadership of the average modern billionaire as opposed to, say, Hiram Maxim.