People use drugs like Xanax to halt a bad psychedelic trip — but "trip killers" also come with risks

It was several hours after taking a large dose of the psychedelic drug LSD that things took a turn for the worse for Nadia. “It made the experience much better since it gave me the option to stop the bad trip,” Nadia, who is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Salon. As a result, using “trip killers” like benzodiazepines or antipsychotics to stop a bad trip is more often unofficially recommended on social media sites like Reddit, according to a study published last month in the Emergency Medicine Journal. “There can be lasting harm where someone has a bad trip and then has lasting dissociative symptoms, lasting anxiety symptoms, or even lasting trauma,” Johnson told Salon in a phone interview. “The sort of bad trip experiences that might prompt somebody to use a trip killer out in the wild happen all the time in the clinical trials,” Nayak told Salon in a phone interview.