Isegoria

A woman contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s. It damaged her feet and ankles and left her in significant pain, which she treated with morphine — until, decades later, she tried another pharmaceutical:

In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually “pure LSD in powder form.”

The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms — equal to 0.1 milligrams.

The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling “pleasantly high” for the 12 hours after that — still vomiting, but less often.

According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later she was able to hold a conversation and “seemed coherent.”

Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LCD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal.

The case studies were compiled by Mark Haden, executive director of Canada’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and an adjunct professor at the University of British Colombia School of Population and Public Health, and Birgitta Woods, a psychiatrist in Vancouver..

They noted that in CB’s case “ingestion of 550 times the normal recreational dosage of LSD was not fatal and had positive effects on pain levels and subsequent morphine withdrawal.”

The authors note in the study that no lethal doses of LSD have been documented, although they said scientists have estimated that a lethal dose in humans would be 14,000 mcg.

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