I ask the questions because I think about them and I value the thoughts and opinions of my fellow TASPers. You guys are great and I haven't seen most of you in a very long time (and the rest a lesser-long time). As far as the acid question goes, I’m sure you could guess my answer, but these days the stuff is extremely difficult to get. You literally need to have a Ph.D in chemistry to make it, and since all of the precursor chemicals are illegal, have to go through a lot of hoops to make it. The DEA looks into people when they let their wheat fields grow too much ergot let alone when they buy the lab equipment necessary for lsd production. Thanks to supply and demand, the acid drought since 2000 the price per tap (if you can find them) has rocketed from $1-$5 to an average of $12. The DEA claims it reduced the LSD supply by "95 percent" with two arrests in rural Kansas in November 2000.
"Clyde Apperson and William Leonard Pickard were charged with and eventually convicted of possession and conspiracy to distribute LSD. According to court testimony, the DEA seized the largest operable LSD laboratory in agency history, as well as 91 pounds of LSD and precursor compounds for the potential manufacture of nearly 27 pounds more. [Addendum, March 21: The 91-pound figure appears to be a myth of the government's making. See this follow-up story.] If you define a dose of LSD as 100 micrograms, Apperson and Pickard had around 400 million hits in stock. At the more common dosage level of 20 micrograms, the two were sitting on 2 billion hits. Apperson got 30 years in prison, and Pickard got two life sentences. The Kansas bust marked the third time in four years that the DEA had arrested Apperson and Pickard on LSD lab charges. The LSD market took an earlier blow in 1995, when Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died and the band stopped touring. For 30 years, Dead tours were essential in keeping many LSD users and dealers connected, a correlation confirmed by the DEA in a divisional field assessment from the mid-'90s."

anyway I've been doing a lot of reading recently; almost all the crap they told us in 8th grade about acid causing brain damage and chromosomal anomalies is bunk. It is one of the most benign drugs in the world (and when I use drugs here, I include things like caffeine and aspirin) and a lot of the studies that fueld the 1967 acid panic were based on unscientific reporting and politics. For example, the "many acid related deaths" quote you find is never ever cited to any actual statistics, the real number of associated deaths is 5, with only 2 due to the substance itself (this is lower than most of today’s prescription medications) and the rumor that lsd causes chromosomal abnormalities is based on a study where they essentially poured acid on dividing cells. That same study also showed that caffeine and aspirin caused chromosomal breaks at a much higher rate, but that part is never mentioned.
...

"For a long time I took it to be the great experience of my life," says Metcalfe, who later became one of the founding members of Greenpeace, then a Zen monk, and now is 82 and living on Vancouver Island. "Then I woke up again to the fact that life itself is a great experience. And that includes the LSD experience."

For 12 straight hours, Metcalfe was thrust into "the blast furnace of truth," as he described it in a series of articles for The Province - weeping at the beauty of his hands, replaying every memory of his life, wading into the Milky Way and measuring his own insignificance against the infinite majesty of the cosmos. "Then I became part of men again and joined their quarrels, not as a so-called civilized man, but as a frightened, primitive thing looking into the faces of all the gods," he wrote. As he discovered, LSD therapy forced patients to realize that they were utterly alone, and responsible for their fate. It packed years of psychoanalysis into a single day."

...

Anyway, I have great hope that some of the recent conferences among psychiatrists and politicians may allow the drug to make a come back in controlled settings. If any of you get a chance, read the lsd article on wikipedia, its pretty good.

posted by Adrian   [7:46 AM]

[ website ] :: [ contact ] :: [ home ]

XML