Selects: How LSD Works

In 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hofman discovered he'd created what may be the most potent hallucinogen known to humankind. Then he took a bike ride. Learn about the chemistry, neurology, history and cultural impact of LSD-25 in this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everyone, it's your Buddy Josh and for this week's
select I chose our two thousand and sixteen episode on
L S D. We really took our time with this
one and it's the longest regular single episode we've ever recorded,
clocking in at over seventy five minutes. Originally it was
even longer, with a thirty minute interview with John Hodgman,

(00:22):
but we chose to remove that from this select because
we've only recently broken hodgment of the habit of hanging
around the studio hoping for a chance to be in
the show, and we think that including the interview in
this rerun might send some mixed signals to him. If
you want to hear that interview, go back and listen
to the original episode published in Two Thousand and sixteen,

(00:42):
where it will remain a part of that forever and ever.
One note. We recorded this several years back, as evidenced
by Chuck's I can has cheeseburger reference. So some of
the phrases we use our out of date, like committed suicide.
Sorry for that at any rate. Tune in, turn on
and enjoy the heck out of this classic episode. Welcome

(01:06):
to stuff you should know a production of I heart radio. Hey,
and welcome to the PODCAST. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
W Chuck Bryant and Jerry and this is stuff you
should know. The podcast. It's right, Josh Uh, I'm gonna

(01:28):
wish you two things. Happy Anniversary. Yes, happy anniversary, because
the day that we're recording, it was eight years ago
this week that we released. Well, not we've you. We
I wasn't even there yet. You were here in spirit.
I appreciate that. It's when stuff you should know. I
was born. Yeah, two thousand and eight, mid April, eight

(01:49):
years ago. We got forty. Two years ago. And Happy
Bicycle Day. Did you know that it was bicycle day
when you picked this out? No, really, really, that's actually
that's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, it was.
The thing that prompted it was that recent study about
LSD and I was like wow, yeah, we should totally

(02:09):
do LSD. We've never done it, and it was I
think yesterday that I realized today is Bicycle Day. And
for those of you who aren't in the know, Bicycle
Day not about riding bicycles to work. No, it's not.
As a matter of fact, somebody on twitter said every
day's bicycle day. To me I'm like, I bet you
don't so. Bicycle Day commemorates the day when Um, Albert Hoffman,

(02:33):
the discoverer or Creator, I guess, depending on how you
look at it, of LSD Um, experimented on himself and
part of that included him riding his bike back home
from work while he was yeah, and we'll talk about
that here in a minute. But Bicycle Day itself was
started supposedly by Professor Thomas Roberts of Northern Illinois University.

(02:58):
Go huskies and commemorate ration of that what some people say.
It was a great day in history. It certainly was
the day that changed history. You really can't argue that. No,
and Um, if you want to just hear all things
LSD and stuff, you should know we and did two
other shows. Two Thousand Eight. Did the CIA test LSD
ON UNSUSPECTING AMERICANS? The answer is yes. Mind opening and October.

(03:24):
Can you treat mental illness with psychedelics? And now, in
typical stuff, you should know backward form. We're gonna DO LSD. Yeah,
we like to nibble around that. Do L S D.
You know that'd be Weird Oh, we weren't supposed to. Oh,
we better get through this quick we got about thirty minutes. Oh,
we should also point out at the end of this

(03:45):
episode we have John Hodgment on is in a very
special listener male audio segment where he rebuts our nostalgia episode.
Although it seems like we agreed more than we didn't,
he didn't end up for butting anything. Yeah, uh, and
that's we worked out. That the the misunderstanding. How about that? Yeah,

(04:07):
and we like all times that you sit down with Hodgeman.
We talked for thirty minutes about one small thing. That's
why this episode is Super Long, because this is gonna
be long too. It is so it's super size robuts,
which it saw like eight more extra ads. Oh, let's
just kidding. Yeah, like Tommy Chong would probably one in
on this one. He's got some businesses, doesn't hey? Yeah,
I shouldn't joke, because sales will be like knocking on

(04:29):
the door. All right, chuck really really said Chuck. We're
talking about LSD today, Um, and L S D again.
That that Bicycle Day, that first day seventy three years ago.
I think it really did change the world, because there
are very few substances that have ever been created by
man that had a more sweeping, profound effect than LSD.

(04:53):
Like you kind of a lot of people associate LSD
with hippies. They're grateful dead. Sure, maybe ravers that kind
of thing, but if you really start to kind of
poke around popular culture here in the West, you start
to see it turn up everywhere. Like every American president
has taken LSD. Right. Well, it's part of the oath
of office, like the Bible is laced with lst. Put

(05:15):
their hand on their hand and it actually let's debunk
that myth right now. Apparently LSD is non absorbent through
the skin. Yeah, which means that those says. Well, there's
a bunch of rumors, but the one with Jimi Hendrix
would put LSD in his sweatband. He may have. I
wouldn't have done anything, although it could have trickled down
into his mouth maybe. Yeah. Uh, here's some other popular

(05:38):
LSD myths. I don't think there have been any other
drugs that have spawned. Maybe these days, but I'm not
hip to all these new drugs, man, and it's impossible
to be. I was doing research for this and I
ran across like all the new drugs that are available today.
It's incredible. There's just like an avalanche of new, new,

(05:59):
virtually untested drugs that's being they're they're going from synthesis
to human trials by way of customer like people are
taking these things and they're essentially like guinea pigs for
these things. Still extremely dangerous. Yeah, Molly and Billy and
Jim's way beyond that, Jimmy, Jimmy's old news, Jimmy's oldness. Uh.

(06:20):
Here just a few quickie UH highlights. Um, the guy
that thought he was an orange, so he like peeled
his skin off. Clearly LSD did that. Not True? Uh,
college kids who stared at the Sun until they were blind.
Clearly LSD is responsible for those children lick and stick
tattoos given out to children at Halloween. UH, seven hits

(06:43):
will make you legally insane. Right, you can use that
as a defense in court. Diane Link Letter jumped from
a window because she thought she could fly. So that
was a big one. That kind of changed public opinion.
She jumped from a window, she definitely did, but she
was also suicide and she had taken LSD before. What
made it such a huge case was that. Um, she

(07:06):
was art link letters daughter, art link letter. At the time,
this is, I think, the early Seventies. When his daughter
committed suicide, Um, he was already a bit of a
he was like the bill cosby of the age, which
is not surprising, and in the moral crusader and kind
of UM social scold of everybody and how things are

(07:27):
just not like they used to be in the good
old days. are so much better and everybody's just letting
their kids get away with so much and pull up
your pants and that kind of stuff. He was a
bit like that already. And then his his daughter, committed
suicide and Um, he was understandably uh devastated by that
and he turned his ire toward drugs because she had

(07:48):
taken LSD before. But there's no evidence that she was
on on LSD at the time. She was already suicidal.
But again, art link letter is going to all of
the kids parents and saying like, you can't let your
don't let this happen to your children too. Scared America's
parents and really kind of sealed the deal of public
opinion against LST at the time. Yeah, uh, and how

(08:08):
about one more for you, uh, Pittsburgh Pirates Pitcher, doc
Ellis those a no hitter on acid. That's true. That's true. Well,
I know we've covered it, dufus. Okay, Oh, you were
putting one into yeah, oh, sorry, there's a great documentary
about it and, Um, true is the only person's word

(08:29):
we have to go on. WAS DOC ELLIS LIST? Well,
his girlfriend also, I don't want to say testify, but
she she backed it up. She was like yeah, we
took acid into it, though, and apparently the story changed
a bit over the years and he also said other
things that didn't quite match up. So there's a little
speculation that he might have gussied it up a little bit. Oh,

(08:51):
like the ball was telling him what pitch to throw
and maybe when he took the acid. Um, so supposedly
took it at noon and he was pitching it like seven, yeah,
six thirty. So I mean he still would have been
on acid, he just wouldn't have been speaking on acid
or something. But it's a great documentary. You should check
it out. Yeah, it's good. Okay, you threw me off
with that. When you got me I was like, Chuck, wait,

(09:13):
we did an internet round up on that. Yeah, that's right.
So there was another thing, chuck, that I remember growing
up with is that acid. If you took acid, it
would mess up your chromosome so that when you had
offspring kid they would be all kinds of messed up, disfigured, deformed,
would have severe developmental defects, all sorts of terrible stuff.

(09:35):
That's what we call it back in the early eighties,
by the way. Um, it could put holes in your brain. Yeah,
that's another one too, that everybody ringing around and believing,
and one of the reasons everyone ran around believing all
of these weird myths. By the way, no, LSD doesn't
affect chromosomes. That actually is metabolized. It out of your
system faster than just about any other drug on the planet.
You pee it up very quickly, your liver starts breaking

(09:57):
it down immediately. Um, so it certainly doesn't affect your
chromosomes and it doesn't put holes in your brain. But
the reason why these myths are around and the reason
why people believe them is because the authorities are the
ones who either made up these myths or latched onto
them and basically amplified them through these kind of public
service announcements and through the media, and so a lot

(10:20):
of people walked around believing this and and on the
one hand you can say, well, that's fine, it kept
some kids maybe off of heroin or something. Lying to
kids is fine when it comes to drugs. You can
make that case right, but at the same time you
can also point to the real chilling effect that the
LSD hysteria had on Um understanding consciousness, potentially treating mental

(10:48):
illness which were just now starting to realize, like yeah,
it has that a lot of potential for that, treating alcoholism. Um,
there's a lot of people whose lives could have been
helped had at the very least uh science been allowed
to continue his inquiry into LSD. But the the the
fear of LSD was so widespread and so profound that

(11:09):
even science was clamped down. Yeah, the CIA was like
only week and good people LSD, not you scientists in
controlled settings. There's this one guy. I don't know where
the lawsuit is now, but he uh, I don't think
we covered it on our show about the CIA, but
the family of a guy that supposedly jumped from a
window after being dosed. Yeah, but his family is suing

(11:33):
the CIA saying no, he was beaten up and shoved
out the window because he had information. I think he
was actually dosed, though, and he was losing his stuff.
I don't know he was dosed, but they're there. Their
contention the families that he was thrown out is that
he was murdered. I saw that too. Yeah, yeah, that's
the Frank Olsen Project DOT org. Maybe is what the

(11:54):
website is, and we definitely covered that. The CIA thing,
because he definitely he was around at the time. That
happened at that time, because that was the time when, like,
if you went to a party with CIA, maybe we
were all just dosing one another for fun. If you
went to a San Francisco CIA party, you're a hardcore
at that. You'RE gonna drinking acid unwittingly. All right. So

(12:16):
we should, uh, even though we've covered it before, the
story is so wonderful, we should go over the creation
of LSD by Albert Hoffman again, do you think? Please begin.
You didn't want to skip this, did you know? I was?
I was. I think we should put in like a
little accompanying music or some of the yeah, like uh,
some Jefferson airplane maybe. So, Um, a Swiss chemist. His

(12:40):
name was Albert Hoffman. Like we said a few times.
He was working at a lab called Sandoz. Uh. They
were a farmer company and now they're uh, they're still around,
but there's a subsidy or I can't remember who. They're
not making drugs anymore. Okay. Uh. So he was working
on a project involving something called Ergot. It's a fungus,
it grows on Rye and it's and blamed, uh, notably

(13:02):
this woman named Linda L oh. I know what you're
talking about. Yeah, she put forth a theory that the
Salem witch trials were kicked off by a round of
Ergot poisoning, and she has a lot of good evidence. Um,
we'll go over it all. It's it's cool to look up, though,
and a lot of people came out and like, you
know what, I bet she's right. So you're going to

(13:22):
talk about the Hoffman? Yeah, so he was working with Ergot,
which grows on Rye and Um, did a lot of
poisoning over the years, notably in the Middle Ages. Even
though they used it medicinally, midwives used it to help
speed up labor until they decided in the nineteenth century.
That's pretty dangerous actually. Maybe we should just not poison

(13:45):
these pregnant women with Ergot. Well, they were. They were
not just giving them ergant to poison him for fun.
Apparently it um contracts muscles, right, so it would speed
up labor, right, exactly. Um, and they figured out that
they would actually prove it would slow bleeding, I think
by dilating blood vessels. Maybe. So they would give it

(14:06):
to a woman after Labor still, but they stopped giving
it to him, like to to create, to put a
woman into Labor. But it was it was remarkable enough
that even after this level of medicine Um went away,
scientists were still figuring out there like there's something with Ergot,

(14:26):
we've got to be able to do something with it.
It's just too potent, you know. So, uh, in the
nineteen thirties. This was the nineteen thirties. It's just so
crazy to think about when you see pictures of the
nineteen thirties. Yeah, they're like wires hanging everywhere, new electric lamps,
like experimenting with LSD. But it happened. Um at the
Rockefeller Institute in New York City, they isolated lysurgic acid

(14:49):
from ergot and Um. This is where Hoffman kind of
started his work resulting in ninety eight and the derivative,
the number twenty five, is and he did twenty four previous.
He finally landed on LSD and uh, that was kind
of it. Yeah, and LSD, we should say, stands for

(15:10):
lysergic acid die ethyl minde. And Uh, basically he started
with this lisergic acid um and just basically tinkered around
with it until he, like you said, arrived at LSD.
And again, he wasn't looking for the most potent psychedelic
known to humankind. No, he's looking for medicine exactly. He
was looking for, I think, a respiratory Um um stimulator,

(15:34):
something like that, maybe with asthma. So yeah, give these
kids some LSD twenty five right up. And Uh, he
the first time he messed around with it, he sent
it off to the pharmacologists to look because he was
a chemist at Sandos. Chemists at Sandos they figure out
processes to extract stuff, to make new compounds, that kind

(15:56):
of thing. But that's that's the sum of their job.
Once they come up with a new pound that they're satisfied,
but they send it off to the pharmacology department. The
Pharmacology Department says Uh Yeah, actually this made that frog's
leg jump by itself all the way across the room.
I think there's some potential here. The pharmacologe just got
their hands in on LSD, examined it, said we don't

(16:17):
think there's any pharmacological potential here. Throw it away, and
Hoffman did as he was told. Five years later, he
um suddenly just thinks about LSD tent again and it's like,
you know what, I think they missed something. I'M gonna
make a new batch just on my own. Later on

(16:39):
he was quoted as saying I did not choose LSD.
LSD found and called me. So him deciding to make
a batch on his own is highly irregular. For the
first for one, he's a chemist. You know, the chemist
don't go and tell the pharmacologist they missed something. They
certainly don't have a hunch five years later they missed something.
And then, thirdly, for him to make a batch of

(16:59):
LSD was very weird. It was contrary to his work orders,
and also Ergot was very expensive and Sandoz was trying
to keep a lid on expenses. So it was really,
really weird that five years later he mixes up another
batch of LSD. That is true. But while he was
mixing it up, it was a sort of a little
like a Peter Parker experiment gone wrong. He got a

(17:23):
little inside of him somehow. Uh, they think now he
probably got on his fingers and maybe like licked his
finger while he was he had been eating KFC for lunch.
Maybe so. And Uh, it got into his body. Uh,
and he, you know, he had a acid trip. He
had an accidental one at first, the world's first acid trip,

(17:45):
that's right. And that happened unless one of those pharmacologists
I was keeping something on the download. He's like, yeah,
this is useless, throw all this away, except to save
me like tab since my head stats. So that was
April eighteen, nineteen, prety three. and Um, the next day
Albert Hoffman's like, I got to try that again. So

(18:06):
he takes some LSD. I think he took two fifty
micrograms at PM. YEA or not. I noticed that too,
almost on four nineteen, but that's a marijuana thing. Yeah,
I just I just it kind of jumped out at me,
is like, I thought I saw that too. I'm sure
everyone who's ever read that was like, Oh, dude, nineteen,

(18:27):
oh he was so close. That's the universe. So he
took two fifty micrograms, is that right, which is about
ten times the minimum dose that an average person takes
these days, and that's a lot. And he he shot it.
He injected it intravenously, I believe. Yeah, didn't he? Or
did he take it orally? I'm sorry, no, he took
it orally. Yeah, I don't I don't see in there

(18:49):
where he injected it. And Uh, he started to have
a wild ride. He did. He went to the doctor.
At first, he asked his assistant. He was like, Um,
I am tripping pretty hard. You don't know what that
is yet, but I do. And he said I think
I should go to the doctor. And he went to
the doctor and the doctor was like, Dude, you're fine. Uh,

(19:09):
you're not fine, but there's nothing physically going on with you, right,
and we should say he was that. He made it
to his house with his assistant and they were on
their bikes. This is why where bicycle day comes from.
And he was like, Oh my God, how long did
it take for us to get home? And as the
system was like actually, we made it home really fast,
and he's like what, he's freaking out, he's like go

(19:32):
give me some milk from the neighbor. Ends up drinking
two liters of milk that night. Yeah, because milk could
supposedly quell the effects of different drugs at the time. Ye, sense,
it did nothing for this no and his neighbor. Later
on there's a couple of stellar quotes. Let me jump back. Sorry,
Jump Back Jack, that's all right. After forty minutes after

(19:52):
that initial dose, He wrote down in his journal Seventeen
hundred hours beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortion, symptoms
of paralysis, desire to laugh full stop. Uh. And then,
following that closely, I was able to write the last
words only with great effort. And then who wrote that

(20:15):
last lot? And when he got the milk, he said, Um,
the lady next door, whom I scarcely recognized, brought me milk.
She was no longer Mrs r but rather a malevolent,
insidious witch with a colored mask. So people think now
he was fearful going into this experiment, and that's what
you know. We'll talk about setting, setting and your mindset

(20:36):
going in has a lot to do with what kind
of trip you have. And people think now like he
went into it fearful and ended up, by all accounts,
having a bad trip. He had a bad trip, but
then the doctor came and was like look, man, uh
you're something wacky's going on with you, but physically you're fine.
You don't have to worry about it, and I believe

(20:56):
that's what kind of freed Hoffman up to have a
good time, have a good trip. After that he uh,
really started to go oh wow and really took in
what he was seeing, what he was thinking, what he
was experiencing and Um, moved from dysphoria to euphoria. Is
it the way he would have put it? That's right.
And he goes into work the next day tells everyone

(21:18):
about this amazing experience and uh, everyone else tries it. Well,
not everyone, but other people at Sandos. His two bosses did,
I think, his boss and his boss's boss, and the
reason they were like Nah, uh was because he said
I took two and fifty micrograms. They're like that's astounding.
Two fifty micrograms right that they've never heard of a

(21:41):
compound having the kind of effects that Hoffman was reporting.
And he's like, I measured it myself. I know what
I was doing. And it was two D fifty micrograms.
These guys each took a third of that and they
tripped pretty hard themselves, and from that moment on sandals
was like we're onto something here. Yeah, he also experimented
on animals. He started dosing boy, you name it. He

(22:03):
gave it to mice and he said they moved radically
and showed alterations in licking behavior. They taught themselves to
tide cats. Cats hair stood on end and they salivated.
He put cats and mice together and instead of the
cats attacking the mice, said the felines would ignore the
rodents or sometimes even appear frightened by them. How about that?

(22:25):
That's a cat on a trip. It said chimpanzees did
not show any obvious signs of being affected, but normal
chimps around them became upset, which he his theory was
they failed to maintain these weird social norms that are
only perceptible to other chimps. Fish swam oddly and finally,
spiders altered web building patterns. At low doses the webs

(22:48):
were even better proportioned and more exactly built than normally,
but in higher doses the webs are badly in rudimentary,
rudimentarily made. Yeah, so he would give it like look,
there's a roach crawling across the floor, let's doe s
it see what happens. And there's also a very famous case,
and it wasn't Hoffmann who's who tested it, this dude
in Oklahoma Um who was a professor of maybe pharmacology

(23:11):
and I'm not sure psychology. He shot an elephant. He
got his hands on the like Oklahoma City Zoos Elephant
and shot it full of LSD. The elephant, like trumpeted once,
fell on its side, started seizing its eyes, roll back
on its head a bit, part of its tongue off.
It stayed like this for an hour. He finally, ultimately

(23:33):
a lot of people point to this as a fatality
from LSD proving that you can die. There's such a
thing as a fatal overdose from LSD Um, but other
people say, well, actually, and then he shot the elephant
with even more tranquilizers to try to calm it down,
and that's probably what killed the elephant, but this guy.
But it was like that for like an hour and
a half, just suffering on just an enormous amount of acid.

(23:58):
And the guy actually used to most about it. He
kind of wore it like a badge, like it made
his career and it was just such a foul thing.
But even the scientologists were mad about it and released
like articles criticizing the guy in his work. Right. Yeah,
and then there's a lot of questions about whether he's
actually Um and a CIA funded scientists as well. Well,

(24:20):
he had a Blowgun as the first thing they give
you when you sign up with the CIA. Here's your
blowgun and gallon of LSD. Yeah, R I p Tusky,
the elephant. He went in a really bad way. Is
that his name? That's terrible. Uh. So, long story short,
sandals is onto something. Um, they say this research is compelling.

(24:42):
We're gonna patent this stuff and market it as delicid
delsid D E L Y S I D and uh,
they started advertising it for use. Like psychiatrists, you should
get some of this stuff. Get some you should use
it yourself and use it on your patients and see
what happens. They said it again. I just want to
repeat what Chuck said. Use It on yourself. Well, yeah,

(25:05):
so you know what's going on exactly. Well, that's highly
irregular compared to the psychiatry of today. They don't usually
go like here's a here's a couple of any bars
for you to try. Just, you know, eat some and
then you'll know what your patients are going through. They
don't do that anymore. So well that they they they're

(25:25):
not supposed to chuck Um. But yeah, sandals was like
sending the stuff out as an experimental drug. That's how
it was labeled at first, and as it caught on Um,
they moved it into like full on marketing and started
selling them like hot cakes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. If
you look up delicid for Google images, you know it's

(25:48):
just package right there. It looks like it's a very
nineteen sixties boss, says, Del said LS. Here it is
in the vials. So Weird. And they came in uh,
microgram doses, which is a it's a low dose. It's
about half of what an average dose you would buy
today would be at a fish concert, I guess. I'm

(26:09):
sure that's even a dated reference. What were people doing
lsd these days? E D M shows, sure, uh, scrillics shows,
how about that? That's probably dated. It probably we're old chucks,
you know. We're old billy Joel Concert. Sure people inject
LSD at Billy Joel concerts right in their eyeball. So
by Um, by the mid nineteen sixties, uh, is when

(26:33):
it actually became illegal, in nineteen sixty six. Stop making
it before that, though, as when it was selling like hotcakes,
like it was having a real beneficial effect in the
psychiatric setting. Doses were given to patients. Patients got doses
just in the U s alone, right. I mean like

(26:55):
a lot of doses were sold, and that was just
the U S. and it was having an effect. And
the in Europe they used it for Um this they
used it for I can't remember what it was called.
I want to say like psychotronic or something like that,
where they just give you like the the average dose,
maybe two pills, a low dose, and then they would
talk about your childhood and that kind of thing. They
used it to to kind of disarm the patient. Right.

(27:18):
In the US they used what was called psychedelic therapy
where they would give you about ten times the minimum dose,
about what Hoffman took when he experimented on himself, right,
and that was meant to just not not just break
down your defenses but to completely blow your mind basically
so that when you came back down you had had

(27:40):
all these revelations and you were essentially a better person
with a more fulfilled sense of self and meaning in
your life. Yeah, those were the two schools of thought,
like in Europe, we'll talk about your childhood and give
you a little acid. In America we're gonna open all
these doors of perception and the thought was that you
could skip years of psychotherapy with like a good acid trip,

(28:01):
and a lot of people had this experience very famously.
Carrie grant was um hugely into acid as a result
of going to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. And
there's a really, really great article from Vanity Fair from
a few years back called carrying the sky with diamonds
that I would strongly recommend going and reading because it's
really interesting and it gives you a really good glimpse

(28:23):
of this era where, like, like the mad men era,
everybody's taking LSD for at their psychiatrist's Office for eight hours. Well,
there was an LSD episode for madness right. I think
it's mentioned in that article. It's it was one of
the best of a great show when Roger Sterling takes
acid yeah, it was. It edit psychiatrists. Uh No, it

(28:46):
was Um, it was just like a you know, like
a party. Right, okay, but like a party where they
were saying like do this to expand your mind. It wasn't,
you know, slip to him or anything, right, but I
had a profound effect on him. In the show and Chuck,
there's actually this awesome little quote from Carrie grant that
makes it in that that article about his experience with LSD,

(29:07):
one of them at least. He said, Um, when I
first started under LSD, I found myself turning and turning
on the couch. And you have to imagine carry grant
saying this right, which makes even better. I said to
the doctor, why am I turning on the SOFA and
he said don't you know why? And I said I
didn't have the Vegas idea, but I wonder when I
was going to stop, when you stop it? He answered, well,

(29:29):
it was like a revelation to me. He felt like
he was under the spell of LSD, or there's whatever.
He realized like he had control over his life. It's
kind of cool. So it did have a really big
effect on people in real life as well. But, like
you said, very quickly, in very short order. Within ten

(29:49):
twelve years of it being marketed for the first time
by Sandoz, it starts to become outlawed around the country
and around the world by nineteen sixty five. Uh, not
a lot of research was done in the United States. Um,
by nineteen sixty nine there were only six projects conducted.
By seventy four the National Institute of Mental Health said

(30:12):
that had no therapeutic value and then the final experiments
in the United States took place in the nineteen eighties. Uh,
and those studies and most of the newer studies now
are concerned with end of life care and terminally ill patients. Yeah,
but the the the window is starting to open once
more to studying lst and its effects on neurology and

(30:36):
Um psychiatry and that kind of stuff. Um. And actually,
when it started to get outlawed in Sandos stopped making it.
They recalled their stocks of it and Um handed it
over to the National Institutes of Mental Health for study.
But within a few years the National Institutes of mental
health staid like no, no therapeutic value whatsoever, despite forty

(30:58):
people in the US alone based singing its praises. No
therapeutic value whatsoever. Yeah, well, I don't know if all
forty people said it was great. I would say a
significant portion of it. If you go back and look
at the media coverage of it at the time, it
was mostly favorable. It's very promising. All right, so we're
gonna take a break here and come back and teach
everyone how to make LSD. Srye. All right, Josh. Alright,

(31:41):
the first thing that you want to do if you
want to make LSD is be a really, really good
qualified chemist. Yeah, with a really good qualified set up. Yeah,
this is not meth. You can't go to Walmart making
it in a mountain dew bottle. And make it in
a mountain dew bottle on aisle six, shake it up
real good and you've got math. Yeah, Um, this is

(32:04):
the ingredients are tough to get and they're highly regulated. Yeah,
they're not found on drug store shelves. It's very different. No, plus,
I mean you can start with Um and there's actually
other natural sources of LSD precursors, including Um morning glory
seeds in Hawaiian baby wood rows seeds, and there are

(32:25):
some LSD recipes that call for extracting the stuff called
L s a Um from these things and starting with that.
But it's it's a coin toss what kind of quality
your ultimate LSD is going to be, because you don't
know how how good the L S A is in
these things. Plus, the government, Um, in a nod to
their prohibition era tactics, actually put a toxic coating on

(32:49):
these seeds to discourage people from using them to create
LSD or even eating them, which some people do. So
I guess if you're a legitimate LSD Keem, you are
starting with ergic like Hoffman did. That's right, just like
in the old days, in the nineteen thirties. Uh, what
you want to do? You get this fungus, which is

(33:11):
the Erg it, and you have to culture it to
extract the alkaloids from that Erg it. Right, you have
to have a dark room because just like sheets of
acid can be contaminated by sitting it out in the
sun in the back of your Jetta, the fungus itself
will decompose under bright light. Right, so you gotta do

(33:34):
some of this early work in a dark room, right, exactly. Um.
And Uh, you take the org it once you have
it extracted. Um, you, you're you're isolating the alkaloids. Right,
organ alkaloid. and Um, when you've got the alkaloid you
add some solvents and reagents to it which themselves are
dangerous as well. Um, one of them is chloroform, which

(33:56):
is no joke chemical. Yeah, Hoffman actually the next day
thought he didn't quite know for sure that it was
the LSD. So he huffed chloroform because he thought, you know,
it's probably the chloroform. He's like Jeff Bridges and the vanishing.
He has some chloroform and I guess woke up a
little while later and said, nope, that wouldn't acid. Nope,

(34:19):
something different, must be the LSD. Um. So chloroform is
not good for you. Another one of the re agents
is uh an, hydrous hydrazine, which sounds like a Douglas
Adams character, and it's a known carcinogen, very poisonous. And
both of them are easily breathed in and absorbed through
the skin. So it's these things are no joke and

(34:40):
they're important in turning erget alkaloids into LSD. So it's
very difficult, very dangerous if you're not getting that picture. Yeah,
hopefully no one's like setting up in their kitchen and
like following along hit sweet. Well, I mean you would
get nowhere very quickly. We're not giving out detailed information.
And what's funny? It's funny you bring that because until

(35:00):
I think, like nine, you could mail off to the
U S Patent Office and for fifty cents they would
mail you the patent to LSD, which is the recipe
for LSD. You could get it directly from the US
government for a few years. I bet it's online somewhere,
don't you know? I'm sure. Yeah, on the dark web,
probably not even on I ken has cheeseburger. So the

(35:25):
ERGIC alkaloid is in synthesize into lesurgic acid compound. It's
called ISOLOSURGIC acid hydrolyzed, I'm sorry, hydrazide. And you, uh,
do you do that? By adding some chemicals, heat it
up a little bit. Uh, shake it in your milk jug,
put a little basil in there. Um, is it okay
to joke about this? If it's not okay to joke

(35:46):
about this, chuck, then we've lost our sense of humor.
That's right. Uh, then that is isomarized, which means, and
this is pretty advanced chemistry, but it's really advanced chemistry. Yeah, uh,
it means the atoms are actually the molecules are being
rearranged in a chemical process with a little heat, a

(36:07):
little reagent, solvent, that kind of stuff. It's taking a
compound and basically doing the old switcheroo and then Bam,
you have an entirely new chemical as a result. That's right. Um,
you cool that down, you mix it up with an
acid and a base, evaporate it and you were left
with ISOLESURGIC diathylamide. I summarize it again, because you know,

(36:27):
if once it's good, too is better. And then you
have LSD, and it's it comes in the form of
a crystallized powder, I believe. I think it also says
you can also make it a liquid. No, you have
to do something else to make it a liquid. So
when you have LSD that you've synthesized from Ergat alkaloids,

(36:48):
it's a crystalline powder, a white powder. Yeah, and then
the old days, in the in the sixties, Um, you
could make micro dots, which is a tablet form. Uh,
you could just mix it with liquid and, you know,
use it, you know, put this drop under your tongue.
Um or you know, make tea out of it or whatever. Uh.
And then window pane, which was gelatine squares. So that's

(37:09):
still around. I saw on Reddit some kid was like
look at this and he was holding like a huge
thing of window panes and I think he called them. Well,
window panes too. Yeah, they're uh, the great, great movie
flirting with disaster. Did they take Gel tabs? Well, that
one of the Sun Lily, Tomlin and Ellen all the
son at the end of the movie doses everyone at
dinner with window pane. That's what he calls it and

(37:31):
I always just think that that's a funny word for it.
But these days you're more than likely going to see
what's called the blotterer acid. Uh. And what they do
is they just dissolve that powder in ethanol and then
dip a sheet of blotting paper that's conveniently perforated in
diod tiny little squares about a quarter inch by a
quarter inch. Yeah, they're little and and he soaks up

(37:53):
into that paper. Um. Sometimes the paper is just plain white,
sometimes it's got a little cartoon characters and things a
lot of times and uh, then that's you know, that's
a sheet of acid right there's actually a dude in
San Francisco who has an acid museum and he has
a book, like a huge binder of sheets of acid

(38:14):
just to basically show off the artistry on it. And,
um it's like how has this not been rated by
the D A? I think the answer that is because
the d e a doesn't know it exists. It's probably fake, right, no,
I would say that's stupid because he his waste of money,
his Um, well, I meant fake paper in there and

(38:35):
tell everyone it's acid, because what he's he's not trying
to sell it. He's trying to say, like, look at
the art that people make. You know what I'm saying
that why would he waste all that money putting the
drug on something? He's not. He's buying it. I don't follow.
Like he's going out and being like wow, that's a
really beautiful sheet of acid, buy it and put it
in my museum. Well, that's even dumber. So he said

(38:55):
that these things have been exposed to light over the
years and that they're they're most likely totally inactive. That
he said. The last twelve times I tried to take it.
It didn't work. He's like, but I traveled back in
time couple of times. So each square is a dose
and you can get up to nine doses on a

(39:15):
single sheet. UH, and we'll get to this later, but
the only might as well talk about it now. Uh,
there was a supreme court ruling in early nineties where
they said, Um, the weight of the drug is also
the weight of the paper, which, uh, yeah, I mean
a lot of people got really and remain upset about this. Uh. there.

(39:36):
The argument is that's the equivalent of saying, well, this
cocaine came in this Um suitcase, so just wigh the
suitcase with the cocaine and if it adds eight pounds,
then it adds eight pounds. Instead of measuring the actual
quantity of the drug itself, it's measuring the carrier device, right.
And one reason they did that was because the weight

(39:57):
of again LSD when you're looking at a minimum dose
of about a quarter quarter of a Microgram, that's like
the weight of two grains of salt. So if you're
trying to bust people you could be like well, a
quarter microgram get to a year. So that's why I'll
see why they didn't do that. Just rewrite the law
to reflect the weight of the real drug, because that's

(40:18):
all they'd have to do. I know it was very weird,
Sam fisted. Can I say that? Yeah, you just did.
But the long and short of that is there are people, uh,
that dealt acid at a fish show that are in
prison for longer than you know, rapists and murderers. Oh Yeah,
there's a guy who's Um in prison for life without parole.

(40:40):
He's like sixty six now. He's been in there for
a while because he got busted with some acid. Um
for life. He's spending his life in jail because he
had acid with and he's seen violent criminals all around
him get out of parole. I'm pretty interesting. Uh So,
should we talk about what an LST trip is like? Yeah,

(41:01):
according to whoever wrote this article, I think this is
a shane of Freeman joint. Yeah, I thought most of
this was pretty good. There were a few parts that
I was like, come on, it was very straightforward and
logical and a reasonable and rational and myth busting too. Yeah,
I agree. Uh so the hallucinations that one would have
on LSD. I think there's there's a bit of a

(41:25):
misnomer there and that some people might think, Oh, you know,
I saw a pink elephant coming in the room and
sit down beside me and I thought it was real. Um,
that's not exactly what they mean by an LSD hallucination.
What they mean more is, Um, you know, I stared
at the wall and the wall looked like it was
pulsating and breathing, or that painting had a glow around it. Uh.

(41:49):
And and it's also a case of not oh my God,
what's happening to my brain, it's Oh my God, this
acid is awesome or bad or strong, but I know
that I'm on a drug and it's making all these
hallucinations happen precisely right. And Yeah, it's a great way
to say I mean it's it's it's away from the
classical definition of a hallucination, because you don't and it's

(42:11):
also you don't, you don't believe what you're seeing is
like real. You realize that it's the results of the drug,
although I'm sure some people have taken asset and really
uh thought like you know, it's done such a number
on the brain that they didn't know that they were
on the drug, which is why you have your buddy
there to say no, no, no, that's the asset right. Well,
that's that's another point that Um Shane of Freeman makes

(42:34):
in this article is that because of the trip and
how what a profound impact that has on the brain, Um,
you typically want to trip with other people who have
experienced tripping in a very calm place. And you mentioned
set and setting earlier. I think that was Timothy leary
that came up with that. And set, reminds, refers to

(42:56):
mindset and setting refers to the setting that that you
and you take your acid in. Right. So you want
to be in a positive frame of mind or else
you're going to probably have a bad trip and you
want to take it in a calm, comfortable setting like
your home or Shane of Freeman suggests the park. Yeah,
maybe don't. If you're stressed out about finals, maybe don't

(43:19):
take acid before you go to class to take those finals.
You're probably going to have a bad time. That would
betray set and setting in a profound way. Exactly. So
the trip itself typically lasts for something between maybe seven
to twelve hours. About halfway through you're going to experience
what's called the peak and the whole thing is going

(43:40):
to really start about thirty to sixty minutes after you
take acid. Uh. Yeah, and if you've ever been to
college and seeing someone taking acid on the dorm floor,
you might hear a lot of like, I don't know
if it's working yet. I don't think it's working yet.
I don't know. I think we got ripped off, man,

(44:00):
I don't think. And then all of a sudden, yeah,
and then you just shut the door and then you
go and study like a good student. Right. Physically, Josh,
you might have dilated pupils, increase blood pressure, your body
temperature might raise, you might go a little sweaty and dizzy.
You might be drowsy. Um, you might be tingly in

(44:21):
the extremities. Right, your stomach might feel kind of weird,
have a metallic sensation in your mouth. Yeah, you're probably
not hungry, right. Um, and you may uh, you're seeing
things in a very weird way. You will probably start
to notice patterns basically in the air. You could see
a wall breathing, like you said. Um, you're going to

(44:44):
see things in a different way than you normally do.
Is the best way to put it. Um. In some
extreme cases, some people have reported synaesthesia triggering in them,
where their senses are basically getting mixed up. I wonder
if they're synistas maybe in that like locked it. Maybe, UM,
that's entirely possible, because there's a pretty well established school

(45:06):
of thought that says that if you are predisposed to
a brain based mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, Um,
taking LSD can hasten its onset. It's not going to
give you schizophrenia, it's not going to give you bipolar disorder,
but if you were already predisposed to it and the
symptoms hadn't started yet, it could hasten that. True. Emotionally,

(45:31):
Shanna points out that kind of can run the gamut
from happiness and euphoria. Uh, you love everything, you love everyone.
Everything's magical. That's the key word right there. What's that? Magical? Yeah,
everything seems magical to you. or it can go the
other way, Um, and you can have, you know, bad
emotions and that's, you know, probably part of the bad trip.

(45:54):
Go into it in the wrong headspace, like we talked about.
But that's the crux of it's still the magic. Is
still the crux of it, regardless of whether you're having
a u fork or a dysphoric experience, it still seems
to have supernatural qualities to it. It's not just normal Um,
having a bad experience, bad mood kind of thing. It's

(46:15):
like the Universe is coming apart and it's it's all
reflecting poorly on my life. Yeah, and I think with
a lot of hallucinogenics. That's why they're used in in
spiritual and religious ceremonies all over the world, because it's
a profound experience. It can make you very contemplative, uh,

(46:36):
you know the things you think. It can make uh,
people look inward and discover things about themselves, and so
that's why I mean like Ayahuasca and Uh Ayahuasca, iyahuska, Iyahuska, iyahuascajuaca,
and there's somewhere in magic mushrooms. We did a great
episode on that. Um. They've been used for millennia around

(46:57):
the Campfire for people to, you know, quote unquote, unlock
these doors in their mind that they don't readily have
access to the doors of perception. It's right, uh, if
you are an observer of people on LSD and you're
not on lst, you might think, man, there talking a
lot about really things that aren't very important, but to

(47:19):
the person on the LST. It's very important. It's the
most important thing in the world at that moment. The
person not on LSD and the person on lst will
both mutually scare one another and usually end up in
different rooms at a party. Uh. And then there is
the the the time jumps. Um, it just really will

(47:40):
mess with your sense of time, according to research, and
they will say that you might think you've been doing
something for five minutes and it's been an hour, or
it might be the reverse and you might not have
any idea how much time is passing. So, whether you're
having a good trip or a bad trip, the one
thing that all trips are gonna have in common is
that they end within about twelve hours or so. Like

(48:02):
the magical thinking goes away. What you would perceive as
normal reality starts to step back in and Um, there
may be some sort of emotional or mental hangover, not
a hangover like when the alcohol brings on, but more
just like a whoa kind of thing after a profound

(48:23):
emotional mental exercise or being put through the grinder. Um,
you're going to you will have some sort of you'll
be awash in something, but you reality will return eventually.
That makes sense that you would have an emotional hangover, chuck,
because LSD basically mimics the shape of serotonin and kind

(48:48):
of hijacks your serotonin receptors. is how it does its thing.
So Sarahtonin is in part responsible for mood regulation, emotions,
that kind of thing. So it makes sense that you'd
be a little wacky the day after you trip on
lst interesting. Uh. Sometimes you might see, uh I always
say college students, and to keep picking on college students,

(49:10):
I mean when it happens about of acid trips are
undertaken by college students. Um You might see a college
student admit themselves to the e R or call an ambulance.
The doctors like this was a terrible decision on your part. Yeah,
and you go, why are you talking to me about this?
Just heal me and the doctor will pat you on
the head and put you in a in a quiet room.

(49:32):
And you know, the doctor coming to the hospital while
you're on acid. I got you. But when you get
to the R, the doctor will patch you on the head,
put you in a nice, quiet dark room that everything
is okay. They may give you some anti anxiety meds
or a tranquilizer to sort of chill you out a
little bit. But basically they just keep you in there

(49:53):
and tell a nurse like do me a favorite every
hour going there and make sure that guy isn't breaking
some equipment and he'll be fine. And you know, it
sounds like about six hours. So that's tripping, tripping, one
on one. Um, you want to take another break before
we get into like what's going on in your mind? Yeah,
why not? All right, so everybody bear with us. Man. So, Chuck,

(50:37):
what's going on right now? Yeah, well, you just went
and pep, you went to a little podcasters room and
now you're back during the break. That's what's going on. Uh,
what's going on in the mind? You mean on LSD?
Funny you should ask h here's the deal. When this
article was written she said researchers aren't a hundred percent

(51:00):
it sure what LSD is doing in the brain. They
still aren't. We have a better idea. that a much
better idea. Um, wells of back a little bit. As
of two thousand six. Well, yeah, this this one was
from two thousand eleven. A Yale psychiatrist named Andrew Sewell,
one of the few dudes in the US who uh

(51:21):
does psychedelic drug research. He's not l seven, he's not square.
Remember that band else seven? Yeah, yeah, they were good. Remember.
It was them, the breeders and four non blondes all
came out with like great albums all at once and whole.
And I'm gonna take issue with whole. All right, I'll

(51:41):
take that one back. No, fourn blonds. They have that
hey song. That whole album was pretty good. Alright, we
one bad. Okay, I was listening to payment the entire time.
You could listen to all of it, all right, I
was listening in payment to now. I'm just kidding. I
like dl seven, though. Um, Andrew Sewell, uh, he was
a Yale ychiatrists, like I said, or maybe still is,

(52:02):
and he said at the time, uh, that it had
to do with the Thalamus. Sensory impressions are routed through
the Thalamus. Jack's as a gatekeeper. So his theory at
the time, which was built upon research from Franz Volvida, Switzerland,
said that drugs like LSD and psilocybin Um, they toned

(52:25):
down the Thalamus's activity. So, in other words, the gatekeeper
doesn't work. The he liken to a spam filter on
email said it's not working as well. So it lets
it lets unprocessed information through to consciousness, which is a
great explanation of it. That was two thousand eleven. But
you got this, you got that from live science, right. Yeah,

(52:45):
I think so. That was a good, good explanation of it. Yeah,
but we have brand new, hot off the press's information
which I which doesn't necessarily contradict that. Right, agreed. So
I think Imperial College of London researchers got their hands
and some acid, gave them to some people and threw
them in a wonder machine and looked at their brain. Volunteers. Volunteers,

(53:06):
we should add that had all taken LSD before. This
wasn't against their will, no, and that they wanted people
that have tripped before and people that knew they could
handle taking acid and being an M R I machine,
which we already have mentioned, is weird and loud and Claustrophobic,
you know. Yeah, that's a good point. That was very
wise of those guys. Yes, so the upshot of it

(53:28):
was that we now have brain scans of people under
the influence of LSD for the first time in human history,
and it's it's really kind of opened up some new
ideas for what's going on on an acid trip. And
you should see the difference of these, like the comparison
to control brain scheme and the one on acid. It's

(53:49):
like you don't even have to read the caption to
know which one's which. Like one is like, okay, I'm
I guess I'm thinking, I'm aware of myself, my toe witches, wow,
am I going to pay the water bill this month?
And then the other one just like yeah, like that.
It's amazing what they said. I'm just gonna read it
because they say it better than I ever could. Um

(54:12):
they said LSD simultaneously creates hyper connections across the brain,
allowing the functions of seemingly unrelated regions of the brain
to ooze into one another. At the same time, the
drug apparently chips away at organization within networks. Like all
of this sounds like right on the money, uh, including
a system the brain differs to at rest called the
default mode network, which normally governs functions of such as

(54:36):
self reflection, bing, autobiographical memory, bing and mental time travel bing. Bing. Right.
So what? What the what they're saying is is that
the idea that you see things differently, that you think
about things differently, that you understand concepts like the universe
and reality in your place in it differently than you

(54:56):
normally do, is accurate. It like LSD changes literally the
way you think about the world by changing the connections
in your brain. Yeah, and notably, they point out, Um,
in the sixties you would always hear a lot about
the ego and the sense of self. Uh, they think

(55:17):
they have proven through brain scans, the LSD literally makes
you forget your sense of self for that time. Right,
and and it allows you to do something that LSD
is very famous for, which is makes you feel connected
to the universe, to humanity, to the Gazelle population, to everything,

(55:39):
just fuel connected. And again, it's called Um Ego dissolution, right, yeah,
which is one of the you know, it supports the
notion that when you take acid with somebody you have
this bond with them, uh, perhaps even a lifelong bond.
They also found that the effects, the psychological effects in
the individual as well, have lasting impacts as well. So

(56:02):
it's not just like you're on the drug, you're under
the influence of the drug. What you're thinking and feeling, Um,
is temporary. It actually creates a pronounced and most commonly
positive change in the individual's outlook on life, in sense
of well being, which is pretty amazing. But now we
have brain scans of it. The brain scans just in

(56:24):
every way seemed to support everything everyone has always said up,
not everyone, but the people that weren't making up stories
about acid, about acid, the people who never said, Oh,
I see a pink elephant in their room, the people
who never went up to somebody and like wave their
hand in front of their face. Oh Yeah, I saw
somebody do that like a couple of summers ago at

(56:44):
my neighborhood pool. There's this new behaving strangely and I
was like, I wonder, and then somebody went up and
went like that too. I was like, oh no, I know.
So super promising research and I think it's awesome that
they're looking into this stuff again. Um, do you know,
are they doing this in the United States? That all yet?
Because it didn't they sort of allow it again. Yes,

(57:04):
three years ago there was a two Um study with
like twelve terminally ill patients with cancer in the United States,
but it's still like very small groups of scientists are
probably working on like like twelve oh yeah, yeah, and
they're using very small study populations. But the results that

(57:24):
they're finding, like in this case, um, that the cancer
patients reported, even twelve months on, a more positive outlook
on life, despite the fact that their life was coming
to an end prematurely, in their opinion, um, because of
the acid. They're finding, like all of these, the studies
that are being carried out are are finding such sweeping

(57:48):
Um conclusions about the potential for LSD to positively impact
people's lives that, Um, they're all of them. Are Like
we need more studies, more these, more studies, we need
more people involved in I'm like, let's get back to
studying this, which we left off of like forty years
ago for no good reason. And in forty and fifty

(58:10):
years ago is when the scientists thought like they were
on the cusp of making some real breakthroughs. When everything
gets shut down. Um, and back then, like there the
way they do the studies now. It seems like our
way better. They didn't have controls back then, but they
didn't use controls in most of these experiments. Timothy Leary
was carrying out these studies. I mean, give me a break.

(58:31):
All right, let's talk about acid flashbacks. This, yeah, I
mean Shanna calls it very controversial among LSD users and researchers. Um,
I'M gonna say false outright, because there's zero evidence that
it's a real thing and that the body actually retains

(58:52):
some bit of LSD. But you've heard, you know, the rumors,
like it's in your spinal fluid. Uh, it's in your
fatty deposits, and year, years later you can be sitting
in a meeting and have a full on hallucinatory acid flashback. Right.
There's no mechanism that this could be carried out by
where there's like just yeah, like your your body stores
some acid for later and you start to trip again. Suddenly.

(59:15):
There are people who have reported it, Um, but it's
entirely possible that they're mentally all right, or it's entirely
possible they're suffering from something called hallucinogen. Hallucinogen, hallucinogen, persisting
perceptive disorder. This sounds pretty awful if you ask me. Yeah,
and this I did a little more research. Apparently this

(59:37):
is linked to persistent LSD use. Um, someone who's done
a lot of acid and it is even then it's
still not due to a build up of LSD molecules
in the body. So what? Maybe they rearranged their neural
connections well where they also predisposed to mental illness? Well,
I think a lot of times it's as current. Medical

(59:58):
opinion is divided as to the OS. UH, some people
think it's a form of PTSD. Other people think there
were changes in the brain morphology because they did so
much acid. But it's still not like the old story,
like you had acid in your body from a trip
long ago. Now he's just reactivated, just like burned out
sitting in the corner. Yeah, and supposedly where this was

(01:00:21):
all born. At an educational meeting for a D A
agents in San Francisco, a speaker said, uh, he suggested
that the rerelease of LSD hidden in the bodies of
users led to untimely psychotic flashbacks. And no one has
tape of this, but there are people that wrote about
it and all evidence points to like this is where

(01:00:42):
the acid flashback myth. Myth was born from this one speaker.
That's that's really interesting. You know, sway to go, Dude.
So Um again we were talking about like there's a
lot of hysteria surrounding lst. People have died on LSD.
What's what's that? Issue is, well, a couplefold. One, is

(01:01:04):
there a lethal dose of LSD? That's never been proven.
Despite the millions of acid trips that people have taken,
it's never been conclusively shown that LSD led to the
death of a human being. Yeah, I would assume, like
there's a lethal dose of water, so I would assume
if you drank five gallons of LSD you might die.

(01:01:25):
But then it it's so out of the realm of
believability it's just like why even talk about it? Right.
And there have been cases of people ingesting massive amounts
of LSD. So the minimum dose is a quarter Microgram,
which is Um like twenty five thousands of a Graham,
I believe. Is that like what an asset hit is

(01:01:46):
these days? I think it's. That's about a half of
a hit. It's a mild hit from what I understand.
So if you go split sease with your girlfriend at
the fish concert, then you'd have like yeah, yeah, that
would be that kind of dose, I guess right. So, Um,
the the that's a that's a very small amount, like

(01:02:06):
thousandths of a gram. Some people have taken like no
thousands of a milligram. I'm sorry, that's the that's the dose.
Some people have taken milligrams of this stuff accidentally. Um,
there was a group of people in and at a
party and they thought they were snorting cocaine, but it

(01:02:27):
turned out they were snorting powdered LSD. Boy Oh boy.
And One person was shown to have had seven, have
ingested seven milligrams of LSD. So That's like seventy thousand
times the minimum dose, something like that. Yeah, and I
think this is actually in the Western Journal of Medicine
and they most of the people just boom. It knocked

(01:02:49):
him out immediately and they passed out. The people that
were awake, well, everyone went to the hospital because it was,
by all accounts, an overdose of LSD. But every everyone
was fine. So that's what it was. That's like seven
thousand micrograms and a minimum dose is a quarter of
a microgram. So yeah, like twelve hours later they were

(01:03:11):
fine and twelve years later they, five of them were
examined for years for long term issues, Um, and no
one had any issues at that party, at least right.
There's another one, another person who shows up in one study.
I'm not sure what the case was around it, but
the person survived in justing forty milligrams, which is forty

(01:03:33):
micrograms Um, and apparently survived. So so the toxic dose,
the LD fifty dose, which is where half of the
people who took that dose would be expected to die. Um,
it's never been established. We don't know what it is,
but it's it's huge, it's massive. So the pharmacological deaths

(01:03:54):
from LSD have probably never happened. What what is what
has been documented? His behavioral deaths. People who um took risks,
potentially that Um they wouldn't normally have under the influence
of LSD. If he went swimming in a place, they
wouldn't have normally gone swimming. Maybe jump from a building,

(01:04:15):
not because they thought they could fly or anything like that,
but because I think I can make it to the
Ledge and go party over there, whereas if they were
under normal conditions they wouldn't have engaged in that behavior.
So the poor judgment basically right. But again those are
pretty few and far between, although when they do happen
there there tragic yeah, and there there are also cases

(01:04:36):
of like heart attacks and strokes. But Um, with something
like that there's usually other drugs involved and you can't
conclusively say like the LSD caused the heart attack. There's
also apparently no documented, confirmed, confirmed report of somebody committing
suicide under the influence of LSD. It's more like art
link letters daughter somebody who had taken LSD before and

(01:05:00):
the l their their previous LSD use was blamed for it.
But there's, from what I could find, not a documented
case of someone who was on LSD and went nuts
and killed themselves, and even then I think uh it
was it's a that's a difficult thing to prove that
something caused something because then you start digging into that

(01:05:22):
person's UH closet and find out that they were suicidal anyway,
and this was a long time coming. Um, who knows?
It's it's a tough thing to prove. The upshot of
it is that the documented evidence of the positive effects
that LSD can have on the human psyche Um vastly

(01:05:43):
out number the recognized tragic events that have taken place
as a result of LSD. Can I read this one
part about heavy LSD users, because I thought this is
kind of funny. Heavy LSD users can develop profound social
problems completely ruin their sleep cycles and lose entry just
an eating and personal hygiene. They turn into hippies, is

(01:06:05):
what they're saying. Yeah, and and she says something I
do take issue with that there's no one and and
Rehab for LSD. That's not true. There are people in
Rehab for LSD. It's not common, because she rightly points
out that when you do LSD and then you do
it again the next day, you and then the next
day and the next day, you become uh, you build

(01:06:26):
up atolerance really fast and you just need more and
more LSD and it doesn't work after a very short time. Right. Well,
like I said, things normalize and you don't get the
experience you're looking for. Um. So, like more most other drugs,
it's not the kind of drug that you usually see
people doing a lot of day in and day out

(01:06:48):
all the time. Right. And what she's also saying is
there's no no means for becoming psychologically or physically dependent
on it, which makes it a non addictive drug, although
the feds have under schedule one, which means that it
has a high likelihood for abuse addiction and that it
has no medical usefulness whatsoever. So both of those two, um,

(01:07:11):
but that's false for for both, Um, both of the
reasons that, yeah, both of the criteria for schedule one drug. Um.
She also points out, and this is something I never considered,
but I think it makes a lot of sense. Um,
the effects of LSD aren't dependable, like you never know
what you're gonna get, and addicts crave that dependability. They
want to know, like cocaine will do the same thing

(01:07:33):
to me every time, that bottle of Jack Daniels will
do the same thing to me every time, or that cigarette. Yeah,
but Um, I don't know what I'm going to get
out of acids. So it just doesn't lend itself to
that sort of addictive nature. Pretty interesting. Plus it's also
further interesting that a lot of people have used I
don't want to say a lot, I have no idea
the number, but I know it's been used in the past.

(01:07:53):
People have used LSD and other psychedelic drugs to quit
addictions like cigarette smoking, like alcoholism and Um again, you
mentioned our can you treat mental illness with psychedelics episode,
which was awesome, but we talked about that in that
that episode. Two. All right, Josh, let's I know this
is a long one. Plus we got the Hodgman bit.

(01:08:14):
This is gonna be our first two hour show, oh
my gosh. But we can't finish the show unless we
talk a little bit about the cultural history. Uh, notably
someone you mentioned, Timothy Leary. Dr Timothy Leary actually worked
at Harvard almost single handedly is responsible for the initial
turn against LSD by the public and science he took.

(01:08:38):
He took what was a legitimate field of inquiry and
um made it completely illegitimate. Like he's almost single handedly
to blame for acid being first science turning its back
on acid. Yeah, he had he had a loud voice
and talked about a lot of like Hippie dippy things
that people didn't like. Scientists didn't like them associating it

(01:08:59):
with LSD. He founded a church where LSD was the
sacrament of it, the League for spiritual discovery. Previous to that, though,
at Harvard, he and his colleague Richard Albert Um we're
actually trying to study it a little more legitimately. Then
he got fired from Harvard and sixty three and that's
when he sort of went full bore towards uh, you know,
tune in, turn in, drop out, which he regrets that phrase. He, he,

(01:09:22):
and he he should not be blamed for that, because
he said later on that he did not mean like
drop out of society and like don't he said that
it was taken like, Um, that people's people took it
to mean get stoned and abandoned all constructive activity and
that that's not at all what he meant. That he
went when he was saying turn on, he was saying like,
you know, turn on your brain. Yeah, turn on your brain,

(01:09:45):
like turn on your potential, like like let's get things going, Um,
tune in to uh, interact harmoniously with the world around you.
And then drop out was to become self reliant, not
dependent on the man. or so it it was basically an
after schools special that he was trying to make sure, basically,
the more you know. And it was taken, you know,

(01:10:09):
people take things like water, like they're looking for the
path of least resistance in a lot of ways. So
they took it to mean like, Oh, it's great, Timothy
Leary just gave us all license to like not do
anything useful and didn't really upset all the crew cuts
over there who are carrying everybody right now. Then there
was kin Kisi, UM, author of many books, uh, notably

(01:10:31):
one flew with the CUCKOO's nest, Um, which that alone
makes him a great yeah, or just like a major
contributor to popular culture, or culture even yeah, just that agreed. UH,
he was notable for being a part of the Mary Pranksters, which, Um,

(01:10:54):
it's documented in the great, Great Tom Wolf Book, the
electric Koolait asset tests, that his favorite books required reading
really good Um, and it documents in Mary prankster was
basically a school bus, uh, psychedelically painted, full of hippies
driving around with gallons and gallons of acid at the
time when the cops had no idea what acid was, yeah,

(01:11:17):
or when it was not yet illegal. Yeah, but he
got into acid because of the CIA. He was a
volunteer in the late fifties to dose himself and uh,
he was, what did she call him here? An acid populace.
So he was one of those that thought everybody needs
to do this and it will be a different world. Uh.
And then, UH, finally, Mr Owsley, Stanley, all the dead

(01:11:39):
heads out there just went. You about time. They were
so mad. While they never get mad, but mad because
they they have a profound social interaction problems. He was
a chemist who was in hate Ashbury and San Francisco,
studied at cal Berkeley and he was like, you know what,

(01:12:01):
I'm taking a lot of bad LSD and so I'm
gonna Start making it myself. He was a self talk chemist.
Did you say that? Yeah, and he got really, really
good at it. And owsley L S D became the
standard for good, clean acid in the nineteen sixties and
seventies and they used them at the acid tests which
Um Ken Kesi used to hold in San Francisco and

(01:12:24):
the grateful dead used to play. And osley Stanley was
also the sound engineer. Did He create the wall of sound?
Was that him his doing? No, that was Phil Specter.
But he was the dead's original sound man and what
he got known for was he was one of the
first people to mixed concerts live and in Stereo and
plug right into the board. So all those old, you know,

(01:12:46):
deadheads love to trade the old bootlegs. Those bootlegs sounds
so good because of Owsley um, because he was, you know,
he was an innovator as a sound man and he
was one of the first investors in the financially and
because he was a millionaire, Alice tea millionaire. PA said
he made like ten thousand or ten million hits of

(01:13:08):
acid in his lifetime. Uh, he gave away a lot
of it, though. There was one it was a sit in,
I can't remember what it was called, where he gave
out and by all accounts three hundred thousand people took
acid all in one place. Wow, where I had to
be San Francisco. Uh. And he also designed the steely

(01:13:29):
with Bob Thomas. The very famous lightning bolt skull logo
on the grateful dead album steal your face right off
of your head was designed by Owsley. Did Not know that? Yep,
and now all the dead heads are going. Okay, he
mentioned the steely. I'm sure we got something two and
a half hours in. Um and acids making a bit

(01:13:52):
of a comeback in San Francisco to among all the
little technocrats that took that town over and they're tripping
and stuff, not really tripping their micro dosing there. Basically
Albert Hoffman had the idea that Um, taking minuscule amounts
of LSD, could improve cognitive function. So basically they're they're
getting better at coding. They're taking it and going to

(01:14:15):
work and Um, not fully tripping, but just having it's
having some effects. Supposedly that's like the new thing with acid. Yeah,
and that is another reason I want to punch San
Francisco in the face. You're not the town you used
to be. So and they all know it, so don't
get mad at me. They it's true. They there's also

(01:14:36):
some other stuff chuck like. Apparently, if you buy LSD
these days there's a really high likelihood that you're actually
getting something called ND Bomb Dash N B o m e.
is it just another chemical? It's like a much more
intense psychedelic that's very similar to LSD, but it does

(01:14:58):
have show own toxic effects, like people actually have died
from overdoses on this stuff thinking that they had LSD,
which is not cool. Man. No, you don't sell something
saying it's one thing, stay away from the Orange Sunshine Um.
And then there's also some other thing called one P LSD,
and it's LSD with an extra pro pion Il bond

(01:15:22):
that technically makes it legal that. Apparently it's open season
on the Internet with that stuff right now. Camaloi, the
great comedian and friend of the show, has a great
bit about some designer drug which is heroin and uh,
Thailan al or Thailan AL, Cold Medicine, Oh, codeine. Yeah,

(01:15:45):
like with heroin. Okay, it's just funny. He's like you're
already doing heroin. It's like the heroine is enough. Thailand. Yeah,
it's just this. It just seems like, Um, well, these
are like waxing nostalgic for the good old days of
just I said. But it seems like if people are
dying on something they think is as said, then maybe
you're not doing it right. There you go, so chuck.

(01:16:07):
I think that's it. That's LSD. Man. This could have
been a two parter. It could have been, but we're
not greedy. We stayed true. Just one UH. If you
wanted more about LSD, just type those three letters into
the search bar how stuff works dot com and it
will bring up this great article. Uh. And if you
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(01:16:27):
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(01:16:50):
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