Children and Psychedelics

[Nathanial.Dread]

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT ADVOCATE OR ENCOURAGE THE DOSING OF CHILDREN WITH ANY KIND OF MIND ALTERING SUBSTANCE. THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA

Ahem.

Does anyone know what would happen if a young child (pre-puberty) where to consume something like LSD or magic mushrooms, both short term or long term? Thinking back to my own childhood, and then about the children I work with, I am unsure how radically different a psychedelic headspace is from a child's.

My childhood was filled with high complicated, imaginative interpretations of of the world, and a healthy dose of delusions and fears. Thought patterns that I only experience now while on psychedelics were commonplace, such as seeing connections between unrelated things and an endless sense of wonder and creativity.

Are there any reports of a child getting into some kind of psychedelic situation? What is the youngest age Ayahuasca cults will dose children?

Blessings
~ND

 

[Mandukeya]

There are some accounts from children that lived and was dosed at Milbrook by Leary and co. I found it hard to google now but should be around the interwebs for sure!

If I remember correctly these kids were not that happy about it.

 

[Jellyfox]

well i don't know what you consider young but i can fill you in on some of my experiences. I started using psychedelics at a very young age. I started smoking weed at 9 and was toking up pretty regularly by the age of 12 (it helped me deal with school). My first Mushroom trip was at 13 and was to date probably one of the most intense trips i've ever had, even tho the dose wasn't too heavy. During my summer years of 14-16 i ate a lot of mushrooms and may be the reason why My mushroom trips sound a lot more magical than a lot of people I talk to.

I would often go out into the woods and embark on Mystical Journeys. I can remember Feeling as If the mushroom allowed me to see a whole new world that co-existed with the "real" world. The wooded landscapes would become Lush Jungles full of creatures that beforehand I never bothered to admire. I would attach identities to inanimate objects such as Leaves, trees, rocks and such. Animals would become rich characters with backgrounds and human like qualities. Every trip would seem like a fairy tale or fictional story. A bit like Alice in wonderland if you will.

I first consumed ayahuasca at age 15 and had a very high dose. It was a bit scary because i didn't expect it to be so overwhelming but because I did it with a good friend I got through it and gained a lot of valuable lessons. I remember feeling Jolts of energy all through my body that felt amazing and very severe geometrical patterns. Also strong presences and communications. I know now that I definitely should have waited until I knew a bit more about how shamans use it, but am still glad i embarked because my curiosity would have killed me otherwise.

As to what the long/short term effects are, I can only speculate. I strongly feel that smoking weed at such a young age stunted my physical growth but enhanced my ability to question authority and point out the errors of my elders. I think that mushroom use from a young age widened my mind up to loads of possibilities that i would of otherwise discarded as quickly as someone throws away a piece of trash. Only negative effects from mushroom use from a young age is that my expectations are quite high .

As for ayahuasca, I could tell from the first time that It is something to be handled with extreme care and integrity and only to be used on rare occasion. Like i said I did a heavy dose the first time and I couldn't fathom anyone younger than 15 consuming the dose I took.

So my personal experience is all I have to contribute but I hope it helps. Besides that I'm not too sure about youngins drinking huasca, although I'm sure that in South America theres been some pretty young kids to drink it.

 

[Walter D. Roy]

What would a western shaman look like?

 

[What a substance]

The first mention of hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Western medicinal literature appeared in the London Medical and Physical Journal in 1799: a man had served Psilocybe semilanceata mushrooms that he had picked for breakfast in London's Green Park to his family. The doctor who treated them later described how the youngest child "was attacked with fits of immoderate laughter, nor could the threats of his father or mother refrain him."[7]

See: Psilocybin mushroom - Wikipedia

I think the reference give a fuller story. If not do a search based on the above info...its a good read :lol:

 

[lobo]

In the amazon some tribe give ayahuasca to the childrens, to see and understand the "other world".

 

[universecannon]

Nathanial, i used to enter a few different kinds of psychedelic mind spaces back when i was a kid. I didn't re-access them until my later experiences with ayahuasca, and it was clearly the same sort of phenomenon. I think as we get older our imagination and access to the more mystical and creative side of us dims down as we become more and more left brain dominant.

I don't openly advocate it since its a touchy subject and there is some obvious risks, but as others have said there is groups in the amazon that let children take ayahuasca. I also remember that in Peter Gorman's book ayahuasca in my blood he talks about how common it is for children to drink in ceremony with the group there, and how beneficial it was for him and his young son to have that experience together. I think the overall context is just as important if not more important than the persons age to be honest. Taking aya as a child in that culture is WAY different than just giving a young kid a psychedelic in the context of our western societies

Maria Sabina (the famous mushroom shaman) started eating mushrooms as a young child and learned how to work with them from an early age.

I've also heard of groups who have used ayahuasca during the birth process but i can't remember where

There are some accounts from children that lived and was dosed at Milbrook by Leary and co. I found it hard to google now but should be around the interwebs for sure!

If I remember correctly these kids were not that happy about it.

 

[Gone-and-Back]

I was not really all that young when I started experimenting with mushrooms. About 13-14 years old. I was always a very serious kid though and did not have the imagination that most kids still possessed at that age. They did effect me in much smaller amounts however, that is for sure.

I would say that the use at that age opened my mind to the spiritual side of things, and the true beauty of the world. It made me more interested in art and music, and I think helped form a lot of the questions about everything that I still have today. Questions about life and the world that just cant really be answered, that you just have to constantly search for on your own to understand.

So it was not really a terrible thing, but I do not advocate the use of such things at a young age even though I had done so. It can be devestating to a younger mind if taken wrong.

 

[No Knowing]

That video clip of Leary's son is in sooooo many trippy songs. It does kinda sound like Leary briefed him on what to say....Sounds kinda rote and planned beforehand....

I just finished the book, Harvard Psychedelic Club, which was about Leary and Alpert among other Harvard figures in the early 1960's psychedelic revolution and beyond.[highly recommended]

Leary was estranged from his son by the time his son was 15 and Leary's daughter killed herself in her 20's. Leary's son was urged to come to his father's death bed but only a quick hello was exchanged and Jack Leary quickly left. No reconciliation hug there. Leary was quite the absentee dad and I'm sure giving his children, who he gave little attention, LSD, at such a young age did not make them more fond of him. Especially once they came down and had to deal with integration.

I worked with a kid who was given 4 hits of LSD by his drug addict father for his 12th birthday. He was a troubled youth and had a baby with his step sister by age 14, got into fights, smoked & drank excessively, stole shit, anger issues etc.

My frat brother in college took LSD given to him by an older cousin when he was 12. He was a very strange individual. Punished his body brutally with drugs, crap food, cigarettes, loose women. [Lots of people do that in college though] He seemed very mental like he was always thinking or scheming even more so than the average person trapped in their head. He was lactose-intolerant but would eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's every month and puke and have the runs for 2 days, "Because it was worth it." I could go on, but he was one of the weirdest guys I ever met basically. Very prone to anger too. He was very small but would start fights he would obviously lose...Seemed to have a bit of a death-wish. I'm sure some of that was innate but an early exposure to LSD probably didn't help.

I like when I took LSD at age 21 because my mind was set and kinda bored with itself actually. LSD opened up the world of no-mind or pure experience for me. It seems to me like those who experience the no-mind or mystic experience before they have a fully formed mind often have reactionary or problematic lives. Those who just get a hedonic trip go on to chase pleasure for years and years...

 

[universecannon]

By the sound of it a lot of those people already had bad upbringings/innate problems to begin with....i mean who gives their 12 y/o kid lsd for his birthday? bad parenting can really screw kids up in general... and a substance that powerful could just amplify it all

Like i said i think the context plays probably more a role than the age, in some ways at least. Whatever problems the psychedelics caused or amplified, those problems would probably be avoided if it was just a child in the amazon who grew up within that culture and participated in an ayahuasca ceremony. Its completely accepted and just a part of life there. Here they are not only demonized but associated with insanity. And that starting point for a naive kid, especially in combination with a bad upbringing, is a recipe for disaster.

It also seems to me that lsd is more prone to causing, or bringing to the surface, long-term problems than something like ayahuasca or mushrooms


Thanks for the background info on that video. I didn't know it was Leary's son

 

[universecannon]

I started smoking weed at 13 and i think it was maybe 15 when i began trying psychedelics. They never caused me any real problems UNLESS on occasion when mixing them with marijuana (especially lsd). Weed would give me intense anxiety at times on its own, along with a range of psychedelic effects and profound epiphanies... The first time i smoked it i actually went into one of the most mind blowing psychedelic states i've ever been in, and that night while dreaming i was literally ego-less and lost in hyperspace for an eternity. The next day was like waking up on an alien world.

So having a less than ideal set/setting for an lsd trip and throwing in some marijuana turned out to be a very bad idea ...and did result in some lingering paranoia and fear of insanity/schizophrenia which took a long time to kick. It seems to amplify and solidify the negative effects of the marijuana for me. Not only that but afterwards it made taking lsd on its own even more difficult, since i had to de-condition myself from that paranoid response that become associated with it through mixing it with weed (which is also one reason why i'm very careful about smoking weed with dmt these days, but thats another story)

 

[endlessness]

Not exactly children, but still relevant:

Ayahuasca in adolescence: Qaualitative results - PubMed

Qualitative research was conducted in Brazil among 28 ayahuasca-consuming adolescents members of the União do Vegetal Church, and 28 adolescents who never used ayahuasca. They were compared on a number of qualitative variables, including vignettes measuring moral and ethical concerns...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Ayahuasca in adolescence: a neuropsychological assessment - PubMed

The purpose of the study was to evaluate neuropsychologically adolescents who use ayahuasca in a religious context. A battery of neuropsychological tests was administered to adolescents who use ayahuasca. These subjects were compared to a matched control group of adolescents who did not use...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Ayahuasca in adolescence: a preliminary psychiatric assessment - PubMed

Ayahuasca is believed to be harmless for those (including adolescents) drinking it within a religious setting. Nevertheless controlled studies on the mental/ psychiatric status of ritual hallucinogenic ayahuasca concoction consumers are still lacking. In this study, 40 adolescents from a...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[olympus mon]

Its not really that uncommon in certain groups and cultures. Its taboo in most minds and I think that is very short sighted. Just like adults, in the right setting, company, and information it is a very beautiful thing. To see a child trip with all their purity and innocence is amazing.

I have tripped with young children twice before and with their parents of coarse and its quite beautiful. We drank mushroom tea and they gave their daughter a small cup of what they described to her as plant medicine. She had drank a small amount of mushroom tea with them a few other times and she enjoys it a lot. We were at the beach in Guatemala and Amber, the little girl, she is about 8 years old just marveled at the ocean, the waves and played all day in the sand with us. It was a very special experience for me to get to be part of.

I have also drank in ceremony with a boy from Norway that has partook in over 30 ceremonies with ayahuasca. He was about 10 years old but unlike Amber this boy goes very deep and has very strong ayahausca experiences. Again all with his mother in a traditional ceremony. Claire and I looked after Linn for close t a month In Pisac Peru this last time we lived there.

I enjoyed talking about his journeys with him immensely. He is a brilliant child and the conversations we have are no different than any adult. In fact probably better than the average grown up banter by far.

 

[Metanoia]

My frat brother in college took LSD given to him by an older cousin when he was 12. He was a very strange individual. Punished his body brutally with drugs, crap food, cigarettes, loose women. [Lots of people do that in college though] He seemed very mental like he was always thinking or scheming even more so than the average person trapped in their head. He was lactose-intolerant but would eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's every month and puke and have the runs for 2 days, "Because it was worth it." I could go on, but he was one of the weirdest guys I ever met basically. Very prone to anger too. He was very small but would start fights he would obviously lose...Seemed to have a bit of a death-wish. I'm sure some of that was innate but an early exposure to LSD probably didn't help.

My best friend in high school was exactly like this. Seemed to have a death wish at times, yes. His cousin had given him LSD and PCP when he was ten years old. He used to brag about it like it was some point of honor. So I asked him about it while we were tripping on LSD once. Why he seemed to brag about it, you know. He confessed that it was the most traumatic point in his life. He started crying and I gave him hugs and tried to comfort him. He started talking about how much he used to love his cousin and how cool of a guy he was. He never had any siblings and this cousin was like a big brother to him. So he naturally wanted to "seem cool" and do what he was doing. Smoking weed, the LSD and the PCP laced weed. After a bit he opened up more and told me that this cousin had "groomed" him so that he could have sex with him. It was so terrible to hear, especially while deep into a LSD trip. The sadness overwhelmed me and I sobbed for at least ten minutes. The good thing was that we stayed very good friends for years after this and it even made us closer. He seemed much more positive after getting it off his chest and actually telling someone. He eventually went back into the downward spiral and ended up in jail, psych wards, halfway houses, etc.

I think of him often. It's a terrible story but it shows how psychedelics can be horribly misused if someone has malicious intent.

So having a less than ideal set/setting for an lsd trip and throwing in some marijuana turned out to be a very bad idea ...and did result in some lingering paranoia and fear of insanity/schizophrenia which took a long time to kick. It seems to amplify and solidify the negative effects of the marijuana for me. Not only that but afterwards it made taking lsd on its own even more difficult, since i had to de-condition myself from that paranoid response that become associated with it through mixing it with weed (which is also one reason why i'm very careful about smoking weed with dmt these days, but thats another story)

I had this happen when I was about fifteen as well. My friends and I had been walking around all night tripping out on LSD. It was a great night. When the sun started to come up we went to a corner store to grad some drinks and snacks. We met a guy and his girlfriend who knew one of my other friends. They had a huge bag of really nice weed and a glass bong in their backpack. We're all thinking, nice! Big session to cap off a wonderful trip! I certainly was thinking that. I enjoyed smoking weed a lot, and did pretty much everyday back then. So we head off to find a place to sit and smoke out of this awesome glass bong.

We wander a bit until someone suggests the graveyard. I didn't really think anything of it, we used to go there and smoke joints and bowls all the time. Besides, it's about 6:30am at this point and it's a place where no one will see us. We head up the hill into the graveyard. The LSD isn't very strong at this point, we had dosed at maybe 11pm or midnight, so it was the tail end of the trip. We sit in a circle under this huge oak and start ripping away on this tasty kush. After the second or third bowl, I started to really trip hard again. Anxiety, almost to the point of panic. There's ghost and zombies and vampires all over the graveyard. I look up at the tree and it's like a huge geometric spider's web, with huge tarantula's climbing all over the place. It looked like there was a silvery fog over the ground, and I was running my hands over the grass getting droplets of dew all over them.

My other friend was shaking uncontrollably as he was only wearing shorts and a t-shirt. It wasn't really very cold, but he just couldn't warm up. I gave him my sweater and he paced around for a while to get his body temperature up. He was also having similar waves of panic and crazy visuals too. He said the tree looked like it had a menacing face on its trunk. He pointed it out and I saw the same thing he was seeing. Like a big yawning mouth and a knobby nose. It made the tree look evil and very much alive. It took another couple hours after that session to come down again. We smoked about half a pack of cigarettes between him and I, just talking it out and trying to stay calm. It stands out as one of the scariest trips I've had with LSD.

 

[Guyomech]

My first taste of acid was at about 16 and pretty inconclusive. But I have a friend, a hippie tattoo guy, who was raised by hippie tattoo parents. His father offered him his first taste of acid at 10, and after that went well he started having it regularly, often without adult supervision.

Now, this was a pretty loose family, really no rules or anything. At the time they lived in Goa with no power or plumbing, and ran their tattoo operation off car batteries. Anyway, one day this ten-year-old takes a hit of acid and walks down to the Ganges to watch people burning their dead. He parked himself in a spot where he could get a really good view of a particularly fancy funeral pyre setup, just as they were lighting the fire. At this point he's starting to peak pretty hard. The family is milling around the deceased man, pretty much ignoring the tripping ten-year-old hovering nearby. The fire quickly overwhelms the fabric dressings and a wave of flame comes and goes; as it settles the body starts smoldering.

At this point my friend is entirely focused on the man's head. The hair has been burned away and the skin is tightening and darkening. Suddenly it gives way, breaking apart into animated black ornamental fractal spirals curling around the face. Next the fat starts to boil, becoming infinitely intricate churning golden ornament, morphing and crawling over the face in rapid motion, a mask of living jewelry. Finally the fats dry up and give way to layers of white spiraling Art Neuveau embellishments.

Ever since he told me this story I've wondered how it must have effected him as an adult. No doubt there were many other occasions as well. He is now a brilliant and successful artist, who specializes in (among other things) jeweled skulls. Other artists draw them too, but his have far more life and vitality, more personality. As far as how all that acid at a young age might have effected him outside his art, that's impossible to say- so many things about his upbringing were just completely outside the normal definitions. Acid or not, he was destined to be a bit different.

And yes, he still trips. He's now I'm his late forties.

 

[expandaneum]

first time DMT for me was when I was 16

i don't recommend it :surprised a bit to mutch on that age

 

[SKA]

I personally started smoking Cannabis at the age of 18, then had numerous MDMA experiences at the same age.
It was a rather wreckless, harmfully hedonistic state(taking "extacy" pills, playing chemical russian roulette)
that abruptly ended when I took Psilocybin Mushrooms at the age of 19. From then on I've left MDMA behind and
became fascinated with Psychedelics only. From then on I had numerous Psychedelic experiences with more mushrooms,
LSD & DMT (in that order).

That said, I wasn't exactly a child when I did my first Psychedelic. But I recall a documentairy about LSD
& LSD culture in the 60's. There was one hippie-community where 9 year old boys and girls would take LSD
as a sacrament, in a spiritual setting. They seemed very well spoken and intelligent in the brief interview
in that documentary. Seems like the information you're looking for, but I can't remember the name of that
documentary.

But my gut instinct tells me it wouldn't be wise to expose young children to Psychedelics.
I feel it may interfere with their natural growth towards adulthood. Perhaps that's why I started at 18. I know many people who have been smoking Cannabis from age 13 and taking MDMA & Psychedelic drugs from about the same age....and none of them turned out very...bright.
I feel adulthood, and the level of responsibility that implies, is very much nececairy to make safe & meaningfull Psychedelic journeys.

 

[Entheogenerator]

I know a person who told me and a group of others about having his first LSD experience, and if I remember correctly he was about 7 years old at the time. I'm not 100% positive of that number but it was a very young age somewhere in that ballpark. He didn't go into a lot of detail about the experience, but I asked him if he enjoyed it. I would imagine a lot of kids that young would have a very difficult experience and not know how to deal with the loss of control, but he said it was an enjoyable experience. This man is a very loyal and honorable person, and I have no reason to doubt this story.

I have another friend whose parents are not, from my perspective, very responsible or intelligent. They began to give him hits from joints and small doses of cubensis from a very young age . I recall him saying around 4 or 5. He also didn't go into a lot of detail about how the mushrooms affected him, but he did mention that it was very uncomfortable and not something he ever had a desire to repeat until he was much older. He has smoked cannabis pretty regularly ever since, and now smokes it very habitually (almost constantly). I believe that a person can only say for themself whether or not they are addicted to something, but I have recommended that he really evaluate his cannabis intake.

I did not get the impression that either of them took anything profound from the psychedelic experiences, but I imagine that could be the case for most children. Their minds might just be too fresh to fully interpret the experience. But I could be wrong, who knows...

 

[Inner Paths]

I was first given a toke on a joint at the age of 12 by my Dad. I felt a bit spacey and this definitely would've triggered my interests in psychedelics in general, though I was prone to be interested in esoteric subjects beforehand anyway... I didn't start smoking weed regularly until I was 16 though and psychedelics until I was into my early 20's.

I think, in my humble opinion, in todays western society that a child and psychedelics is a game of russian roulette. In the right context, definitely, but the odds of the average kid being in the right context is pretty small. A commune setup that doesn't have much contact with technology and media and is self sufficient with the right values amongst the community comes to mind as an ideal environment - closer to the way South American cultures that give there children ayahuasca are.

Children, especially the younger they are, are quite wondrous, and don't have nearly as much cultural conditioning and boundaries between themselves and other. It is when the conditioning becomes much stronger and stubborn that psychedelics become invaluable, usually in adulthood, especially in a westernised society that is saturated by mass media.

 

[sleepypelican]

im suprised no one has mentioned the Manson Family kids.