"I had gotten some new acid this time," Kelly recalls. "I had been used to having tabs that were super weak, and I took more of this new source of acid than I probably should have."
Now 26 years old with pink hair and a pierced nose, the Denverite was just a freshman at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.
“I had kind of been going crazy with psychedelics that summer,” Kelly says. But this trip was different: “It was evident pretty quickly in the trip that it was going to be more intensive an experience than I had had before.”
The strong LSD didn’t stop Kelly from smoking weed and drinking alcohol as its effects intensified.
“I think that the alcohol, especially, wasn’t good for my mental state,” Kelly says. When their experience started to peak, Kelly broke off from their friends and began losing their mind between the campus’s dining hall and dorms.
“I just got hit with this crazy feeling of derealization, where you don’t feel like anything in the entire world is real,” Kelly recalls. After punching a car windshield and breaking a bone, Kelly spiraled in their dorm for about an hour, worried about an imaginary killer, until the dorm's resident assistant called the police.
Kelly recalls charging at police after arrived and being tackled to the ground before being taken to a hospital.
The aftermath of the bad trip was no picnic, either. Kelly was interrogated about the source of the drugs and was on thin ice at school, but still wasn't done with psychedelics. When the next semester commenced, Kelly says “drugs were kind of my personality. Like, I really loved psychedelics.”
But the bad trip echoed through future trips. “The negative state that the first bad trip puts you in doesn’t really stay with you when you’re sober, but when you start taking psychedelics again, it’s very easy to fall back into that exact line of thinking,” Kelly says. “So I’ve had very similar trips to that exact same one, with varying levels of intensity, at least three or four times.”
Rising Need for Psychedelics Education
A recent study by researchers at Denver Health's Rocky Mountain Poison & Drug Safety Center and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus revealed calls to poison control centers for psilocybin exposure went up 201 percent for adults between 2019 and 2023, and by 723 percent for children during the same time period, highlighting the increased concern as psychedelics become more mainstream.After researching psychedelic trauma, Kelly came across a Reddit post by someone from the Coalition for Psychedelic Safety and Education (CPSE), a group founded by four women who lost loved ones to psychedelic-related incidents.
Kelly soon connected with CPSE co-founder Kristin Nash, who lost her 21-year-old son, Will, to an LSD and psilocybin-related accident in 2020. According to Kelly, CPSE didn't have a dogmatic stance, instead seeming "balanced" by focusing more on harm reduction instead of a more hardline abstinence model.
“[Kristin Nash] really connected with my story, and I thought I really connected with the message of the campaign," says Kelly, who is now one of the faces of “Before You Trip,” a psychedelics educational and safety campaign aimed at young people in the Aspen, Boulder and Denver areas.
Bad or challenging trips can make one lose touch with reality, opening up a vast array of opportunities for injury and poor decision making. For instance, one CPSE founder, Kristin Nash, lost her son, Will, after he took psilocybin and LSD and, being terribly thirsty, mistook a protein powder container for a water bottle, asphyxiating himself.
The website urges young people to ask themselves six questions before taking psychedelics:
- What’s driving your interest?
- Have you reviewed your health history?
- How do you process uncertainty?
- Do you know about Set, Setting and Support?
- Do you know the substance, the dose, the risks?
- Have you thought about all scenarios?
For Kelly, harm reduction means having plans in place when using psychedelics, echoing information shared on CPSE's website.
“Really, you’ve got to test your drugs,” Kelly says. “If you’re combining, I would have experience with both drugs first. Before combining acid with weed, maybe take acid five times and smoke weed a bunch separately. And, really, just do research, look into other people’s experiences."
The website also goes into detail about psilocybin and mushrooms as well as other substances like ketamine, MDMA, DMT, and LSD, answering questions like “Who should avoid psilocybin?” along with “What are the potential benefits?”
Psilocybin, DMT, ibogaine and mescaline (not from peyote) are decriminalized for cultivation and possession in Colorado for adults aged 21 and up, and psilocybin is legal for certain therapeutic reasons, as well. Although children and teenagers aren't supposed to have legal access to mushrooms or other decriminalized psychedelics, around 3.8 percent of high schoolers admitted to trying psychedelics in 2023, according to the state Department of Public Health & Environment's Healthy Kids Colorado survey.
The CPSE and "Before You Trip" are not strict anti-drug efforts, which is a mild surprise, given that the founders each had a loved one die in a psychedelic-related accident.
“It’s clear they’re not trying to frame this as a ‘Just Say No’ campaign, which I think would be very emotionally reasonable,” says Mitchell Gomez, executive director of the harm reduction and drug testing organization DanceSafe. “It would be reasonable for that group to found an organization that is philosophically prohibitionist.”
DanceSafe and Gomez had no involvement with Before You Trip, but CPSE partnered with major psychedelic and natural medicine organizations — Fireside Project, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Dr. Bronner’s All-One, and more.
The Denver Department of Public Health & Environment is listed as a campaign partner on the Before You Trip website, too. According to DDPHE communication director Emily Williams, the health department helped review the campaign during development.
"From a public health perspective, we know that harm reduction strategies are effective, and we are supportive of the ‘Pause. Learn. Reflect.’ message approach," Williams adds.
The slow and measured approach toward psychedelics, similar to that of cannabis edibles after recreational marijuana sales began in 2014, is a recognizable approach for Coloradans. According to Kevin Matthews, who led efforts to decriminalize psilocybin in Denver in 2019 as well as Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act, being more open and accepting in educational efforts helps spread the message.
“They’ve obviously been working with a lot of really well-known organizations inside of the existing psychedelic ecosystem,” says Matthews, who is not involved with Before You Trip. “Perhaps, for some people, psychedelics are not the pathway. I think this is something that’s been needed for a long time in the space, and I think it’s critically important that individuals have easy access to this kind of resource.”
Matthews, an Army veteran, is also an advocate for therapeutic use of psychedelics, particularly for PTSD. Gomez credits an LSD trip for rescuing him when he was in his twenties and experiencing suicidal ideation.
"I talk very openly about the fact I think LSD saved my life," Gomez says.
However, in the face of psilocybin’s current cultural prevalence, Gomez believes that "it makes sense to try to frame it in a way that makes the level of risk seem real."
