To make an example out of them and discourage others, prevent a cottage industry from forming. LSD manufacturing scales immensely. One lone wolf could create enough LSD to serve the whole United States demand, maybe even the global demand. LSD is also harder to manufacture. You generally need at least a MS degree and lab experience. The people who fit that profile tend to think about the future enough to respond to the possibiliy of a life sentence.
A friend of mine once asked his TA about (my memory fails here) either how to activate a leaving group or set up a protecting group at a given hypothetical structure. The TA, without batting an eyelid, responded "I think you'll find all the precursors are scheduled, too." The next lab, the TA, presumably having reflected a bit and in the middle of an unrelated discourse, added "remember, always characterise any synthesis you undertake."
Edit: (ratelimit, sorry)
group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also
scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.)
characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product.
TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience)
The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
What is a group? (Group of people, or some chemical compound, or some kind of corporate structure, protecting possibly illegal stuff going on in one of the groups?)
Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong?
Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compounds?
Upvoted because these are good questions, indicating a genuine willingness to understand exactly what another poster is saying. That’s the kind of discussion that I come to Hacker News for. Not everyone has the same background and understanding of terminology and they shouldn’t be down-voted for that.
When you do a reaction on a chemical, the reaction can often affect multiple different parts of the structure, even if you only want it to affect one site. So, you can pop a "protecting group" onto the site you don't want modified, and then remove it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
A TA is a teaching assistant; typically a grad student with lots of knowledge teaching a class to undergrads.
You would want to characterize any synthesis- verify your work to make sure you got high quality product that is pure.
The 'groups' are chemical structures present in a compound. The student asks the Teaching Assistant (typically a graduate student who is required to do teach) a general question about how to carry out a multi step process to selectively transform specific regions of chemical compounds.
The punchline is that the Teaching Assistant immediately sees the intent of the question, and goes from the general to the specific and replies: [ you won't be able to synthesise LSD with that approach because ] "all of the precursors are also scheduled."
You design your synthesis around this and try to pick pathways that are easy, have the highest yields, and don't produce undesirable products you have to remove.
In the 1970s, my father worked as a research chemist for CSIRO (Australian government research lab), doing research into new pharmaceutical products. One of his colleagues decided it would be fun to manufacture some LSD after hours for personal use. The colleague made an error in calculating the quantities involved and ended up taking an accidental overdose. It didn’t kill him, but he spent some time in a psychiatric ward as a result. (I’m pretty sure my father was too responsible to try any himself.)
My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
There have been reports of huge overdosis, e.g. by miscalculation by a factor of 1000 or even more.
The physical harm was little to none. The mental harm varied greatly, there were even some people who got improvements in pre-existing mental conditions; with lsd in general, but also with large overdoses in particular.
The former Pink Floyd band member Syd Barret fried his brains from LSD but it is not clear whether he ODed or did too much of it over a long period of time. Once the initial paranoia subsided he became a complete recluse.
Having said that, I think LSD is a fantastic drug but that is not for everyone. I’ve got a friend who did it constantly for over 2 years and he is a completely sane person. He claims it was one of the experiences that put an end to his alcoholist tendency which might as well be genetic. His dad died due to alcoholism.
This, too, is an armchair diagnosis and unnecessarily sensational language. According to Wikipedia:
> Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum".
> Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."
“Fried his brains” is a figure of speech and not a diagnosis. Not to be taken it literally that Syd fried his brains as in frying an omelette. But after doing a lot of LSD seemed to be a turning point in his life.
A case report from 1974 says that massive LSD overdoses can cause bleeding and hyperthermia, symptoms which could potentially be fatal without medical attention (but, in this case, medical attention was received and all survived)
Wow, I wonder if they spoke about it publicly after the fact. There aren't a lot of stories like this. Did they remember the experience? Was it really a coma or some out of body experience? It would be interesting to see how differently their lives went versus their peers.
What hype? I think it is very likely that a sufficiently high dose of just about any drug, LSD included, will kill someone. If no one has died yet, that just means no one has ever taken a big enough overdose.
We know the LD50 of LSD in rabbits, rats and mice [1]. Surely, there exists a human LD50 as well, it is just that hopefully nobody will ever be evil enough to do the necessary human experiments to determine it. (That's true for all drugs – just because we can't ethically discover the human LD50 doesn't mean one doesn't exist.)
What's the biggest overdose anybody has ever taken? This case report is the biggest one I know about. And yet, they each only consumed "two lines" of 3mm by 4mm by 30 mm, which is less than a gram, administered nasally. They were hospitalised. Would they have lived without medical attention? We don't know, but quite possibly not. And surely it would have been physically possible to take an even bigger overdose than that. How do we know an even more massive overdose would not have been fatal?
People rarely take LSD intravenously. I think a fatal overdose of LSD would most easily achieved with intravenous administration. That's what the animal study LD50s are calculated based on.
Unless you are trying to commit suicide or murder, you wouldn't do it. And if you are trying to do either, there are far more practical methods than massive LSD overdoses.
EDIT: I deleted my back of the envelope calculations about how much the people took in mg/kg. I don't have confidence I'm doing it right so better not to.
i once took 82 hits of acid. ahh, to be 17 years old and think you're invincible again.
each hit was a gellcap with about 4 hits like blotter paper. this was at an outdoor rave-festival.
i was curled up in a ball in a tent for 2 days. fully immersive hallucinations. the good thing is when you are so incapacitated, you cant get up and move around to hurt yourself and others. i had sitters watching me and feeding me water.
nothing happened. i slowly returned to sober consciousness with zero bad physical side effects. except dissappointment that i had missed the entire rave.
that was the greatest spiritual experience i have ever had. none of the hallucinations were scary or negative, likely because the setting was outdoors on a rural camp ground in nature. i was talking to the Sun. and the blades of grass. and they talked back. i felt an indescribable oneness with all living beings and a realization that all life is sentient. meaning that our "human consciousness" model is just a tiny sliver of the full spectrum of "living consciousness", only we dont see the greater consciousness while we go about our daily lives trapped inside our limited minds. as an analogy, think of human consciousness like a language--C or assembly. then Universal Consciousness is like Leibnitz's mythical Perfect Language which simultaneously describes and creates our Monadic world.
decades later, that experience is still one of my happiest and i can remember it more vividly than more recent milestone events.
i understand why Steve Jobs said his first time tripping was his #2 greatest life experience.
if you ever have the opportunity to take 360 hits of acid, i recommend you go for it. you will see God and it will permanently reprogram your brain.
You also need precursors (like ET) which is difficult to get. Though China is a pretty good source if you can pull it off (and for other things like safrole, etc.).
Difficulty is relative. Laundering Sigma Aldrich purchases at scale is challenging but not out of the realm for the level of resources + expertise needed for an LSD manufacturer.
It's not "backyard meth lab ordering 40ft container of pseudoephedrine" levels of ridiculous.
What's ET? It's pretty difficult for me to Google this acronym given that it mostly finds "et al" when I couple this with LSD queries. Is it ergotamine from the other subthreads here?
As does Psilocybin in Magic Mushrooms. Back when we used to sell the stuff (UK, 2005 or so), we had a small 'lab' (a grand term) run by someone who suffered serious cluster headaches and had gotten involved with us through our selling of 'shrooms.
We used to sell to quite a few people who similarly suffered from the condition, and used mushrooms to treat it - but it was an impossible thing for us to market or advertise, due to the way the MHRA (Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency) dictates what beneficial claims can be stated about retailed items.
On the other hand if you have a migraine while tripping, it's not great. Taking triptanes is, well, risky as their interaction has not been thoroughly researched (i wonder why) and they both do stuff to HT receptors - so it's probably safer to endure the trip and take drugs afterwards. Good thing is that on LSD it is not "you"that suffers, just someones' body ;)
Various parties have pulled it off in recent years, as AL-LAD, 1P-LSD and a couple of other very close relatives (not prohibited at the time in various countries), have been produced and sold (mostly) legally in a variety of countries.
Considering that this is coming from the same drug culture that uses the word "molly" refer to "some mixture of empatheogenic drugs and possibly some amphetamine", expecting specificity from your terminology is a bit unrealistic.
I'm not (just) being judgmental here: volunteering harm reduction at festivals, the number 1 problem we had was that users had no idea what they had put into their bodies.
Actual chemists, no doubt, don't use any of this terminology since chemical reactions don't produce the desired results if you're vague about what you put into them.
The way I learned it, if you mix an acid and a base, you get a salt and water. Table salt (NaCl) is the result of mixing hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH):
HCl + NaOH -> HOH (water) + NaCl
But if you mix a different acid and a different base, you'll get a different salt, for example if you mix sulphuric acid and calcium hydroxide, you get calcium sulfate:
Organic chemicals are often “salted” to cause them to precipitate out of the solution they’re synthesized in. It’s a salt in the chemical sense, but not in the culinary sense.
My friend who is a pharmaceutical chemist said LSD is actually quite difficult to make, compared to other illicit drugs:
- Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases.
- It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs
Do criminals actually respond to deterrents though? Sam Harris argues otherwise in a couple of podcasts and I tend to agree...people break the law constantly without thought of the penalties. People text while driving when that could kill someone else.
I don't really believe anyone reacts to harsh deterrents for a low probability outcome. The only way is to increase the probability of being caught, but that's super super hard. So instead, we just throw the people we do catch in jail for life.
It's so fucked up, it makes me disgusted even thinking about it.
I don't believe they do either. For example, it's often said that the death penalty is used as a deterrent, though it is clear from the data that isn't true.
LSD use is actually higher than it has ever been in the US. i apologize for lacking a source, but this was something i saw about a week ago, in the context of highlighting its relative popularity with young, college-educated americans.
that said, it’s hardly a cash cow in the way meth and fentanyl are; and as someone said elsewhere on this thread, one person could probably suppy the whole country.
I'm 99,9% positive demand for LSD is not higher than it has ever been in the US because of the hippie era, when it was huge.
The problem with LSD as a product is not only that few people use it. Amongst those that use it, most won't use many times.
Compared to my social circle I'm a pretty heavy user, had around 30 trips in the span of almost 15 years. Most people I have met didn't trip more than 3 or 4 times in their lifetime. A few from 5-10, and only 2 or 3 over that.
The only reason LSD is and was in the past cheap is because of how easy it is to scale it's production + how high the barriers for production are. Otherwise a hit would cost very very high, considering the economics of the matter.
You’re probably right about the demand. Our population is higher now, and there’s the microdosing trend to account for, but it’s certainly not in the public consciousness in the same way cannabis is—I’m almost as certain that that IS higher than ever.
I’m curious about your last statement. Scaling makes sense as a cost factor, but are you saying that lower barriers for production would increase the cost? That seems backwards to me.
I perceive microdosing as a very fast dying fad, but it's only an opinion of course.
About the cost, the way I understand it, the definitive factor is scalability. It's MUCH more scalable than the production of other drugs. If this was not the case, it probably would be VERY expensive, because of the very high barriers to entry and very low and distributed demand.
LSD is not something Mexican cartels would be interested in. It is far, far more difficult to manufacture than growing plants (marijuana, cocaine, heroin). And the demand is nowhere near as much as the drugs they typically sell. LSD is also not addictive and thus not nearly profitable enough for them to consider.
With some "seed money" I'm sure you could get a lot of it in India or China. The people who work in those factories are the same people who put lead paint on children's toys to save a few dollars. Its precursor literally does grow on wheat plants but I digress.
