My recollection was the weight of the blotter paper was considered as the drug itself and that easily increased the federal sentencing guidelines.
That is incredible. For a crime that harms noone.
Is there some reason that's unrealistic?
If you can get 20 years for two sheets of LSD, I’d expect life in prison for everyone at the companies who continue to leak this toxic stuff, and full payment of affected people:s medical bills, for starters.
It doesn’t happen because LSD can be used recreationally, “drugs are bad,” and PFAS is only used by well-respected businesses.
They have and probably still do though[1]. Lived only a couple hours from the location of the film and my wife grew up in a city on the Ohio River they were dumping chemicals into. Was in the local paper here almost weekly during the late 90s and early 00s.
In fact, it sounds like the government was lacking regulations on PFOA.
That said, there's plenty of cases of illegal dumping out there with chemicals that are regulated.
For example: https://apnews.com/9717f8be97db4944a825088dc5eee379/US-prose...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
https://www.salon.com/2016/01/04/teflons_toxic_legacy_partne...
My post was in response to this question:
> I can see the perspective that making, having, or dealing [LSD] is an unacceptable risk of harm to people who didn't consent. Is there some reason that's unrealistic?
My point was that the factors of “unacceptable risk” in regulations are laden with things that have nothing to do with actual levels of harm to people. You corroborated that point with your post; I’m only clarifying here. This is the system we have, and it can be quite bad at actual harm reduction due to cultural factors.
It’s weird to live in a world where a substance that showed great promise in therapy, fighting alcoholism and other addictions etc. has been banned for 50 years, while another substance that makes dish washing and floor cleaning easier but causes cancer and birth defects in people close to where it’s made is broadly sanctioned.
I think a reason why dangerous things are regulated is because even though they don't always lead to harm, the harm can be grave and impossible to undo. Even if an unexpected trip doesn't technically lead to permanent brain damage, if the behavior were misinterpreted (for instance as a psychotic episode) it could permanently wreck a person's life.
This is a non informative answer. Let's talk numbers, is 20 years a reasonable time to be incarcerated for a sheet of LSD? How many years is appropriate for a pack's worth of hand smoke, then? How about carbon monoxide from driving year round?
The other issue I have is that when people say that LSD can harm people with a predisposition to schizophrenia or whatever, it's frightening because it seems like a stereotyped thinking pattern that's useful for denying unacceptable causal hypotheses that might in fact be real.
I don't have a counterexample, as the allegations I was reading on Wikipedia are generally of intentionally drugging people,[1][2] but I wouldn't be particularly confident in your statement; how would one know it hasn't happened?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_Pont-Saint-Esprit_mass_po... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#LSD
It’s completely irresponsible to give someone a drug without consent, outside of some forms of medical intervention, regardless of your intentions.
IMHO if alcohol and nicotine are legal, then anything "soft" that is not particularly addictive should be legal. It's fundamentally unjust to lock people up for using or having substances that are for the most part less dangerous than entirely legal and socially acceptable substances.
Alcohol is actually kind of nasty stuff if you look at the real statistics, especially if used in excess.
I'm not claiming LSD is absolutely harmless, just that it's not physically addictive at all and not nearly harmful enough to merit the harsh criminalization and heavy sentences it receives. LSD can be safe and rather interesting if used occasionally but heavy use or use by people with pre-existing psychotic tendencies can be psychologically dangerous.
My personal opinion is that drugs like LSD should be subject to some kind of licensing regime similar to other hazardous activities like driving a car, flying a plane, or owning and using firearms (in some states). I would also be in favor of blanket bans or at least heavy restrictions on any advertising for drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and pharmaceuticals.
I disagree. Driving a car or flying a plane can directly harm others, so the licensing process makes sense. Consuming LSD though? It doesn't directly harm others when I consume it.
I’m all for legalizing natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis, even coca plants) but once chemists start concentrating things or turning them into droplets it becomes extremely dangerous.
For instance, mushrooms grow on poop (and taste like sh*t), coca leaves are probably bitter to the taste (and not agreeable). So not much incentive to accidentally eat them.
One tab—the whole sheet even—of LSD tasteless and odourless, even hard to detect.
I’m dismissing “think of the children” and “equivalent to a tool designed to kill” (and that tool is completely legal in the US) lines as obvious trolls, I encourage anyone else rebutting to ignore that as well.
Edit: To dismiss your argument that you edited in about dosage size and accidental ingestion. If LSD was legal, manufacturers would want to prevent accidental ingestion and design an RoA that isn’t a tiny tab of LSD. Keeping it legal means it will remain as is now. You’re arguing for legalization and don’t even realize it.
Furthermore, a quick google search shows some academic papers from the 70s about children accidentally ingesting LSD, and a news report from 2016 where a child may have ingested LSD accidentally, but there’s very little evidence that it’s a problem.
To be frank, I have taken a decent amount of LSD in teenage years and suffer permanent effects from it (all mental stuff like anxiety and paranoia). Granted some of it was probably made in someone’s garage (legal stuff could have some sort of standards). But still, LSD is dangerous and point being it has potential to make people do things without cause for concern, and cause damage to others. It also lasts easily 8-24 hours depending on dosage.
Another point: if LSD was legal, then it would be legal for a cult to use it in rituals and as a way to manipulate individuals. Think Charles Manson—that’s a lot more dangerous than run-of-the-mill narcotics.
What proof do you have that your anxiety and paranoia are caused by your teenage LSD intake? There are plenty of people who have issues with anxiety and paranoia that have never taken drugs.
Consider that 70-90% of schizophrenics are tobacco users, and most started young. This is an astounding rate of smoking for a population subgroup. Did tobacco use cause the schizophrenia or did schizophrenics seek out tobacco?
Plenty of cults operate without drugging their members with LSD, if it was effective I assume it would be more widespread considering mental, sexual, and physical abuse are illegal and used as tools by cult leaders to maintain the cult and its membership. See NXIVM for a recent example. Giving people LSD is far more benign than beating or raping them.
I don’t have “Anxiety” requiring meds and such—the effects taper off over the years.
Believe me, I know the effects I felt and what it did to me—statistics and external “scientific proof” are not required.
Also, true there are many ways to manipulate people. It’s what you can make them do while they are on LSD that is scary. If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear. At least if the other methods are used to manipulate people their underlying emotions, hesitations, and consciousness is intact.
Again, I agree certain drugs should be legalized. And perhaps LSD can be therapeutic in a good way. But, it is also very dangerous stuff—more so than other drugs.
That is my opinion and not based on rigorous research. But I have done a lot of drugs in my day—and I can say if I went back in time I still would have done the natural stuff (mushrooms, cannabis) but never would touch the man-made chemicals.
> If you try LSD you will know what I mean—you could walk into a train without hesitation or fear.
I’ve done LSD a number of times, the most recent was 8 days ago. I’ve never lost the interest in self-preservation while tripping on LSD. You cannot control someone’s mind when they’re on LSD.
Please provide me with a drug that LSD is more dangerous than, keeping in mind that mind control with LSD isn’t possible. I’ve been a heroin addict and severe alcoholic, and I’ve also taken LSD a number of times. Being an addict/alcoholic is so much more dangerous and detrimental than any use of LSD than I find it hard to take you seriously when you make such claims.
When all else fails, won't somebody think of the children!!
That just goes to show how weak your argument is.
They found everything else, but LSD is incredibly easy to hide from regular law enforcement.
They found everything else, but in typical stupid-police fashion, they ballsed that up too and ended up entering a nolle prosequi (do not prosecute) at the district court level.
The police prosecutor was sufficiently annoyed, and I was sufficiently elated and thankful for the woman who went before me (case unrelated) and set a strong precedent.
Any chance I get to gloat.
Edit to add: this happened in Australia in 2012. Not keen to repeat the experience.
Not that I intend to leverage that knowledge, but you can't just write this and leave it at that. Why so? I've never seen any LSD, so I am not sure why that would be.
This also presents problems for chemists, because measuring out such small amounts is prohibitively difficult. So typically they dissolve a measurable amount (say, 30mg) into a volume of liquid (water or alcohol) and distribute it across a sheet of blotter paper divided into 100 squares, so that when the liquid dries, each square contains the desired dose (in the example, 300mcg)[1]. This is why the image most people have of LSD is a half-centimeter by half-centimeter square of paper--they're not seeing LSD, they're seeing the paper the LSD crystals are trapped in.
Since I'm posting this under my real name, I should clarify that the reason I've researched this is that I did volunteer harm reduction at festivals. I don't even drink alcohol, let alone take drugs.
[1] To be clear, LSD at stable temperatures is a solid crystal. There's no such thing as "liquid LSD"--that's LSD dissolved in a solvent.
I had no idea the drug was that potent... Presumably some neurotoxins have the same potency? This is quite scary to think of.
This document (PDF) from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) claims:
The LD50 of LSD varies from species to species. The most sensitive species is the rabbit, with an LD50 of 0.3 mg/kg i.v. [52]. The LD50 for rats (16.5 mg/kg i.v.) is much higher [52,53], though mice tolerate doses of 46– 60 mg/kg i.v. [52,54]. These animals expired by paralysis and respiratory failure. Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) have been injected with doses as high as 1 mg/kg i.v. without any lasting somatic effects [55].
There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose. Eight individuals who accidentally con- sumed a very high dose of LSD intranasally (mistaking it for cocaine) had plasma levels of 1000–7000 μg per 100 mL blood plasma and suffered from comatose states, hy- perthermia, vomiting, light gastric bleeding, and respira- tory problems. However, all survived with hospital treat- ment and without residual effects.
https://maps.org/research-archive/w3pb/2008/2008_Passie_2306...
I met a person who, while on a ~1/2 lb dose of psylocybin mushrooms, fell face first down stairs onto a train platform without even putting his hands out, breaking his nose, smashing out all his front teeth, and getting a severe concussion--it's easy to see how this could have been much worse had he fallen off the train platform.
And that's just the physical effects. I've met a few people who were fingerprinted (moisten a finger, press it into a tray of crystalline LSD, and consume whatever sticks to your finger) and at those doses, they all reported long-term hallucinations (in medical parlance, hallucinatory persisting perception disorder or HPPD). Others were diagnosed with PTSD after bad trips (one reported being "psychically attacked" by evil spirits, another was convinced that everyone was trying to kill him).
There are numerous cases of people being assaulted sexually or violently while on hallucinogens, and feeling that they could have defended themselves had they not been tripping. That's not to say they are to blame for the actions of their attackers. People who are on drugs are vulnerable, but the reaction I'd like to see is not to blame them, but instead for communities to care for them and protect them while they're vulnerable.
Now, I'm well aware that as someone volunteering in harm reduction, I only got to see the bad cases. For every patient reporting a negative experience, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who use hallucinogens and have positive experiences. I'm not against drug use, I'm merely advocating that people do so in an educated, responsible manner, understanding the very real risks they're taking. Just because the LD50s of LSD and psilocybin are very high, doesn't mean that a high dose of these drugs is not risky.
You can literally dip a Bible in liquid LSD, let it dry and it would be impossible to tell you're carrying thousands of individual doses.
How’s /that/ for a religious experience?
It looks like a paper sheet.
While it's very difficult to predictable dose LSD off blotter, it may be helpful to know that most folks aim to have a single "dose" be 6-8mm squares
Sheet One is the title of it, not in a position to share the URL but please take a look. Great album and artist too.
http://music.hyperreal.org/library/publicity/plastikman/shee...
If you’re buying small quantities of lsd in a liquid you’d be silly to try and lay blotters from that.
Which was?
Which is of course the entire reason for switching away from using sugar cubes and to blotter paper as delivery media.
USA has the lowest participation on any democracy I know.
Universal obligatory vote is something that does wonders and produce actual change.
Structural problems can cause lack of participation.
I don't know if I would want voting to be obligatory, but it certainly should be universal.