Before anyone rushes to try LSD or increase your dose significantly, please do your research[1].

Please speak to people who have used it (like me) and can assess how you personally will handle it. I will say LSD is a broad-sword drug and should be used with care. It is not playful. It will last as long as the dose, which may be longer than you had planned to trip. Generally only sleep will stop you tripping, and if you are tripping hard, you will not e able to sleep. One does not 'sober up' like beer.

A lot of the effects depend on your personality, id, self confidence and any bad experiences you may have locked inside. Your biological reaction may be the lesast of concerns.

LSD takes you on a journey, and you may not come the same person. It may give you a bad-trip, where your worst fears and memories manifest x 1000.

I have seen many stable friends flip out, even when having the same dose in the same environment.

Always have supportive straight friends who understand each time you are experimenting. Bear in mind you may be up for 36 hours as a result and they need to lead their normal lives.

LSD starts as a liquid. Eating a drop or two is sometimes is how you take it. But frequently that liquid is dropped with an eye-dropper onto cardboard. This cardboard is perforated and torn into tiny squares.

Roughly one drop per square [also called a Tab of Acid ].

But there you go.

1. How concentrated is the liquid acid?

2. How much was put onto the little square?

3. How long ago was this all made?

4. How accurate was the (illegal) chemist who made the LSD in the first place?

I will say that one TINY drop of acid is enough to make you trip for 24 hours. And on the square of cardboard the LSD is not necessarily evenly distributed, so a corner of the square can be where 90% of the active ingredient is. The effects vary wildly: Some LSD is quite visual, some has almost no visuals but plenty of mind-messing.

All of these factors combine to mean it is EXTREMELY difficult for anyone to estimate what a low dose is. Especially someone experimenting for the first few times.

Please research carefully, and if you still decide to experiment, ensure you are in a safe environment with understanding people.

-------

"I've read that if you take an extremely low dose it's non-psychotic but still has a number of positive cognitive effects"

Non-psychotic depends a lot on who-you-are: not the dose. I don't know you, and further I don't know anyone else reading this in the future.

Depending on the type of person you are, you could flip out badly on any dose.

LSD can unleash things inside you. People who you love... you may see them as snakes/undead. You may see your face melt off. More importantly you will feel horrified when this happens. It takes a lot of training to overcome the horror (if it happens).

I am not going to give the green light for experimentation with something that has such power when the downsides are so grim.

All my friends who flipped out were sold on the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds version of events. But the variability of the ingredients, their situation and their personality sometimes made it awful.

-----------------------------

[1] This is from my 2009 HN post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654676 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=655559