Drugs that change lives? How an LSD trip gave hope

Kai (name changed by the editors) has struggled with his appearance all his life. When he takes LSD one day and looks at himself in the mirror, he laughs out loud for a long time. The man looking back at him looks completely normal, just like any other person in the world. It seems absurd to him that he ever thought he was ugly – and it stays that way. "I've never thought about my appearance again since then."

Kai was 24 at the time and, while he never received an official diagnosis, felt depressed for a long time before he experimented with drugs. He cancels his studies to become a chemistry professor in the middle of his Master's degree. He then moved to another city. "I wanted to start all over again, " he says. But the new degree programme, computer science, didn't bring any improvement either. Kai loses himself in the expectations that others have of him and has the feeling that he can't figure out what he actually wants for himself. "I was constantly putting myself down, telling myself that I couldn't do anything." He seeks help from various psychologists, in whom he has high hopes. When that didn't help, the disappointment was all the greater. He still hasn't managed to find someone who understands him: "It just didn't work out".

Instead, he meets someone who sells drugs. "At that point, I had already read that psychedelics can help people with chronic depression." In the book How to change your mind, journalist Michael Pollen describes how psychedelics can partially inhibit or even completely switch off the connections in our brain that make up normal thinking. "Everything you normally think: who am I, what do others think about me, what is my status in society, what have I done and what do I still want to do – that's all gone. There's time to just be, " explains Kai.

Illegal drugs

In Luxembourg, psychedelic substances are considered illegal drugs under the Narcotics Act. Their production, distribution, possession and consumption are generally prohibited – exceptions are only made for medical or scientific purposes, and even then under very strict conditions. There is still no specific legal basis for the therapeutic use of psychedelics in Luxembourg.