Psychedelics can cause HPPD (temporary) and Visual Snow Syndrome (permanent) in people, where they hallucinate while completely sober, sometimes indefinitely for the rest of their lives.
As someone with Visual Snow Syndrome (not contracted from drugs) it is a private living hell that risking it is not worth whatever trade off you get from discovering yourself. This is going to rub some people the wrong way on HN, but until we know more about these neurological conditions, I wouldn't recommend doing these drugs outside of a clinical setting where there are very clear benefits.
Do you have a source about psychedelics being a cause of VS? I'm also curious what makes you say that VS is a hallucination, when it seems much more like a hyperawareness of visual noise.
The short description is it's a hallucination, the long description is that it's not a hallucination, but seeing more of what's there, all the time. Like seeing the white blood cells in capillaries on the surface of your eye lens, the wrinkles in the gel on the back of your eye, and triple imaging between both feeds from both eyes overlaying a consolidated stereo view. IME explaining visual snow syndrome (VSS) to a layman is a lot like trying to explain color to a blind person, so I keep it short.
There isn't much known about the mechanism that causes VSS/HPPD, but the current line in the sand that they draw for performing VSS studies is that HPPD is temporary (<6 months) and VSS is permanent. HPPD is long known to be caused by psychedelics, but the permanent HPPD is now being re-diagnosed as VSS since they're the same symptoms and activity in PET scans.
Unfortunately, there are not a lot of studies I can link to because they've only just started researching it these past couple years, but the neuro opthamologists and psychiatrist I work with have VSS patients who contracted the syndrome after using LSD or acid, with one as far back as the 70's.
If you don’t mind me asking, what is hell about visual snow? I have some visual artifacts including snow but they don’t cause any suffering. They are just things I can see that don’t have any emotional significance. I don’t think about them unless my attention is drawn to them somehow. Maybe the snow is more disrupting for you than my artifacts are? Do they limit your ability to perceive the world?
So it's natural to sometimes see visual artifacts in neurotypical adults.
We don't actually see with our eyes, but with our brains. As a neural network, the brain builds the visual image in one part, and then filters out parts of the image in another part. Kind of like how we have a sense of touch but we don't feel our clothes all the time.
With Visual Snow syndrome, the part of the brain responsible for spatial logic and building the visual image has had all the circuit breakers flipped to on. This means that the image the brain is building is at 100% all the time, and overloading the filters. Just like zooming into a 780p image on a 4K screen, the visual artifacts are visible in everything.
Unless you're seeing them 90-100% of the time you're awake, I wouldn't worry too much about it as it's natural.
As someone with Visual Snow Syndrome (not contracted from drugs) it is a private living hell that risking it is not worth whatever trade off you get from discovering yourself. This is going to rub some people the wrong way on HN, but until we know more about these neurological conditions, I wouldn't recommend doing these drugs outside of a clinical setting where there are very clear benefits.