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| The general group of pharmacological agents commonly known as
hallucinogens can be divided into three broad categories:
psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants. These classes of
psychoactive drugs have in common that they can cause subjective
changes in perception, thought, emotion and consciousness such
as hallucinations. Unlike other psychoactive drugs, such as
stimulants and opioids, the hallucinogens do not merely amplify
familiar states of mind, but rather induce experiences that are
qualitatively different from those of ordinary consciousness.
These experiences are often compared to non-ordinary forms of
consciousness such as trance, meditation, conversion
experiences, and dreams. One thing that most of these drugs do
not do, despite the ingrained usage of the term hallucinogen, is
to cause hallucinations. Hallucinations, strictly speaking, are
perceptions that have no basis