Over the last two decades, people have normalized combining different drugs to achieve a more intense high. It is not uncommon to see an individual mixing alcohol with a prescription drug or psychoactive and psychedelic substances. If someone uses drugs sold on the street, the chances are that this person drinks alcohol too.
Most drug addicts are unaware of the severe short-term and long-term effects of illegal drug combinations. This article discusses hippie flipping, candy flipping, and polysubstance abuse.
Polysubstance use refers to consuming more than one drug at once. When you engage in polysubstance use, you get a more pronounced feeling from consuming illicit drugs.
Most users have a drug of choice that they combine with other drugs to enhance the effect of their primary drug.
Unfortunately, those diagnosed with polysubstance abuse are usually addicted to the feeling of being high using multiple drugs.
Polysubstance abuse may increase the effects of the drugs, but it also has severe adverse effects that most drug abusers are unaware of.
Hippie flipping and candy flipping are the most common forms of polysubstance abuse.
Several factors contribute to polysubstance abuse, including:
Polysubstance abuse has severe long-term and short-term effects. When you combine drugs, the side effects increase exponentially.
The effects also tend to be more potent than those of individual drugs. As a result, you are likely to have acute health problems, and your chances of overdose are much higher. Treatment of Polysubstance abuse is also complicated.
Hippie flipping, also called flower flipping, refers to using psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA simultaneously.
When you hippie flip, you will experience a psychedelic and euphoric trip. Hippie flipping is quite common in clubs and other social settings.
The effects of hippie flipping depend on:
Since the above factors determine the effects of hippie flipping, the effects vary from individual to individual. However, the constant is a mosaic of different sensations and emotions.
Possible side effects are:
The length of your hippie flip depends on how you timed the two doses. The effects of MDMA last for 3-6 hours, while mushroom’s effects last for 4-6 hours. For this reason, a hippie flip can last for anywhere between 6 and 12 hours. However, some people report experiencing side effects like headaches and lethargy two days after hippie flipping.
Like most drug combinations, mixing mushrooms and MDMA has serious risks. MDMA can cause serotonin syndrome, resulting in high body temperature, cardiac arrhythmia, and muscle cramping. On the other hand, mushrooms prevent serotonin reuptake from your brain cells; thus, the drugs remain in your system for much longer.
Mushrooms and MDMA can potentially damage brain cells since they over-activate the cells. Other additional side effects include nausea, weakness, dry mouth, jaw clenching, insomnia, extreme thirst, dizziness, rapid eye movement, and more.
If you start by taking psychedelic mushrooms before MDMA, you will likely have a standard MDMA crash at the end, which includes feelings of anxiety and extreme sadness. If you take the mushrooms last, the hallucinogenic effects of mushrooms may mask the MDMA crash. Although most hippie flippers prefer this, it often creates conditions for a bad trip. Most hippie flippers report that they feel spent and tired during the comedown.
Candy flipping refers to mixing LSD and MDMA. MDMA, commonly sold as ecstasy in pill form, is a psychoactive drug, while LSD, commonly known as acid, is a psychedelic drug.
Most people that candy flip start with LSD then follow it up with MDMA after approximately 4 hours. This way, they feel the peak effects of LSD first, then follow it up with the feel-good vibes of MDMA.
The effects and intensity of candy flipping vary from individual to individual. You may even experience different effects every time you candy flip. For this reason, it is challenging to say what its exact outcome will be.
Most candy flippers claim they experience intense MDMA-like effects, but others claim they experience the effects of both substances in equal measure.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, common MDMA effects include:
Common LSD effects include:
The candy flipping experience lasts for 12-24 hours because LSD effects last for 12 hours,
and MDMA effects last for 3-6 hours.
Candy flipping presents several severe and potentially dangerous risks. Besides the effects mentioned above, you may have a bad trip and hydration issues.
Candy flipping has an unpleasant comedown. The possible comedown effects are:
You may also experience paranoia and depression. These comedown effects may last for several days.
Mixing drugs and alcohol or different kinds of drugs increases your risk of harmful and potentially dangerous side effects. Besides the side effects discussed above, you will likely develop substance use disorders.
If you or your loved one are struggling with hippie flipping, candy flipping, or polysubstance abuse, it would be best to seek professional help. Several treatment programs are available, and you can choose one that suits you best.
You’ve probably heard that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) stays in your body forever. A single LSD trip, usually taken on paper as a small square or liquid, the molecule will embed itself in your spinal fluid and stay there for a long time. There it remains seemingly forever, waiting for the unsuspecting moment when it will release itself and cause you to have a full-on psychedelic effect. In fact, you might even believe that this spinal fluid LSD is the reason for flashbacks. The flashbacks result from the drug leaking out of your spinal column, causing you to trip at the least expected moment.
And with the anti-drug messaging and stories supporting the idea, it makes sense to think so. But do psychedelics like LSD remain in the spinal fluid forever and come back without warning, causing one to hallucinate? Well, that’s what we’ll be discussing in this article. But first, let’s understand how hallucinogens work.
Classic hallucinogens are thought to trigger perception-altering effects by stimulating the serotonin 2A receptor. Their effects mostly happen in the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for perception, cognition and mood, along with other brain parts involved in psychological responses to things like panic and stress.
The effects of using hallucinogenic drugs include seeing images, feeling sensations, and hearing sounds that seem real but don’t exist. Short-term effects of LSD, peyote, and psilocybin include:
An LSD overdose can cause drug-induced psychosis and bad trips that include terrifying thoughts and intense feelings of despair and anxiety, including fears of insanity, losing control, or even death.
A drug-related flashback is a type of distorted sensory experience or disturbing perception that affects a person’s senses long after the drug's actual effects wear off. It is often associated with hallucinogenic drugs like magic mushrooms or LSD (acid). A flashback is different from memory because it feels like it’s happening all over again. It’s important to note that research doesn’t support flashbacks because they are not a real phenomenon. But don't just believe us... Here's Norm Macdonald's hilarious take on the subject.
It is often thought that LSD embeds in the body system for a lifetime and can cause sudden flashbacks from time to time. However, the truth is that there’s still a lot to learn about psychedelics and flashbacks because research on the subject is very limited.
Recently, two neuroscientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studied the link between lifetime psychedelic use and mental health. The investigators used the annual National Survey on Drug use and Health which gathers data on mental health and substance use from a random sample representative of the United States non-institutionalized population.
Over 13% of the 135,095 randomly selected participants said they had used psychedelics like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin at least once in their life. The results showed that psychedelic use was not strongly connected to severe psychological distress, psychiatric symptoms, or needing or getting mental health treatment. The authors also discussed the flashback concept and concluded that hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder, where visual symptoms are connected to using psychedelics, was erroneous. However, other studies suggest that flashbacks long after taking the drug are rare, but possible nonetheless.
Some theories suggest that people who get continuous ill effects after an intense psychedelic experience could have possibly acquired post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mistake it for an LSD flashback. Others claim that psychedelics open a “door” that exposes one to another dimension of reality. This door doesn’t entirely shut for weeks or months of stopping to use the drugs. So, sometimes, all it takes is just one joint to creak the door open even a little and send one into full-on epiphany or realizations that they might have had similar to your acid trip.
One study determined that LSD flashbacks were triggered by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) intake. Other studies suggest these aren’t LSD flashbacks but increased sensitivity to all psychoactive substances. What is real is something called Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). After a psychedelic trip, LSD users can have lingering visuals that can distract them from their everyday lives. They can have tracers that last indefinitely after the trip. Or they can have some haze that goes over everything that they look at. This makes the vision not as clear as it used to be.
People who use hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms, or ecstasy can re-experience the visual disturbance days, weeks, months, or even years after using it. They may see weird, trippy symptoms like flashes of color, intensified colors, size confusion, tracers, images within images, geometric patterns, or even having difficulty reading. And since they’re aware of what’s happening, they may feel uneasy, uncomfortable, or even embarrassed.
According to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an HPPD candidate must experience a spontaneous reappearance of the visual phenomena long after the hallucinogen use has stopped. The effects should cause significant distress and not be explainable by other medical conditions.
However, the connection between Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder and hallucinogen intoxication is still unclear. According to a review by psychiatrist John Halpern and co-authors, it’s hard to cancel other health conditions that might cause flashbacks. These conditions include anxiety disorders, malingering, neurological conditions, current intoxication with other drugs, hypochondriasis, or current psychotic or affective disorders.
In another web-based survey, 60.6% of 2455 participants reported having experienced drug-free visual experiences similar to hallucinogen effects. The chances of experiencing constant or near-constant symptoms were predicted by greater past exposure to specific hallucinogens. While symptoms of HPPD were common, 4.2% of the participants found them impairing or disturbing enough to consider getting treatment.
Gauging from the studies, it is still unclear whether the flashbacks from drugs are a real thing. However, the reality is that these visual disturbances may be more common than previously thought. It’s is therefore worthy of conducting further studies to determine whether there’s a strong connection between the two or not.
