A student took half a tab of LSD on his way to a party.
The trip lasted until the next morning. And throughout the next day.
And every day thereafter, until he broke down, quit school, and had to enter rehab as doctors were baffled with his condition.
Sounds like a just-say-no campaign from a parent to a teen, right? Actually, it’s a real condition called Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, or HPPD. Like PTSD, it consists of continual flashbacks, with little relief.
Ultimately, it:
warps the perceptual faculties: the external senses are marred by a constellation of mostly visual distortions, while the internal ones are paralyzed by a concoction of dissociative symptoms, panic attacks, and depression…Eventually, a sense of permanent unreality casts a pall over the acid-fuelled dreamscape, and sufferers disassociate—from the world, due to derealization, and from themselves, due to depersonalization.
So much for all those hallucinogens just being harmless, right?
