Hallucinogens are commonly used drugs which have many street names such as: acid, LSD, m and m's, and sunshine, shrooms, peyote, orange sunshine, window panes, stamps, mocro-dots, blotter, buttons, and cactus.
Hallucinogens are drugs that cause hallucinations. A hallucination is a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind. It may involve hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting or feeling something that isn't really there. Or, it may involve distorted sensory perceptions, so that things look, sound, smell, taste, or feel differently form the way they are.
Sometimes, the hallucinations can be very frightening to the user. The user may be panic-stricken by what he or she is seeing or hearing, and may become uncontrollably excited, or even try to flee from the terror. Hallucinogen users call these kinds of experiences "bad trips". Users of hallucinogens have been known to be driven into permanent insanity by these experiences. A "bad trip" sometimes may be re-experienced as a flashback. Flashbacks apparently are vivid recollections of a portion of a previous hallucinogenic experience. Essentially, flashbacks are very intense and very frightening day dreams.
It is unlikely that hallucinogens directly are life-threatening. However, overdoses have often indirectly resulted in death. The extreme panic and agitation of a "bad trip" have been known to lead to suicide, or to accidental deaths as users have tried to flee from their hallucinations. The most common danger of an hallucinogen overdose is an intense "bad trip", which can result in severe and sometimes permanent psychosis.
There is some evidence that prolonged use of LSD may produce organic brain damage, leading to impaired memory, reduced attention span, mental confusion, impaired ability to deal with abstract concepts, rapid mood swings, hallucinations, loss of control resulting in panic and anxiety, flashbacks, violent behavior, convulsions, coma, death, permanent changes in mental ability and motor function, visual auditory and moter problems in the children of abusers.
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