Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How LSD Works

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's your buddy Josh and for this week's select, I chose our 2016 episode on LSD. We really took our time with this one and it's the longest regular single episode we've ever recorded, clocking in at over 75 minutes. Originally it was even longer with a 30-minute

interview with John Hodgman, but we chose to remove that from this select because we've only recently broken Hodgman 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 2016 where it will remain a part of that forever and ever. One note, we recorded this several years back as evidenced by Chuck's icon has cheeseburger reference. So some of the phrases we use are out of date like committed suicide.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 to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart 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. That's right, Josh. I want to 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, you. We. I wasn't even there yet. You were here in spirit. I appreciate that. Yeah. It's when Stuff You Should Know was born. Yeah. 2008 and mid-April. Eight years ago. We got 42 years to go. 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, oh yeah, we should totally do LSD. We've never done it. And it was, I think yesterday that I realized today is bicycle day. Yeah. And for those of you who aren't in the know, bicycle day. It's 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 know. You must take a live asset. So bicycle day commemorates the day when Albert Hoffman, the discoverer or creator, I guess, depending on how you look at it, of LSD experimented on himself. And part of that included him riding his bike back home from work while he was wigging. Yeah. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. But bicycle day itself was started in 1985,

supposedly by Professor Thomas Roberts of Northern Illinois University, Go Huskies, in commemoration of that. What some people say was a great day in history. Sure. It certainly was a day that changed history. You really can't argue that. No. And if you want to just hear all things LSD and stuff you should know, we did two other shows. 2008, did the CIA test LSD on unsuspecting Americans? That's a good one. The answer is yes. Mind opening. And October 2010, can you treat mental illness with psychedelics? Yeah. And now, in typical stuff you should know, backward form, we're going to do LSD.

Yeah, we like to nibble around the edges. Do LSD. That'd be weird. Oh, we weren't supposed to? Uh-oh. We better get through this quick. We've got about 30 minutes. Oh, we should also point out at the end of this episode, we have John Hodgman on in a very special listener male audio segment where he rebuts our nostalgia episode. Although, it seems like we agreed more than we rebudded. Yeah, he didn't end up rebudding anything. Yeah. We worked out the misunderstanding. How about that?

Yeah. And we like all times that you sit down with Hodgman, we talked for 30 minutes about one small thing. That's why this episode is super long because this is going to be long too. It is. So it's super size, robust. We should sell like eight more extra ads. Oh, let's. Just kidding. Yeah. Like Tommy Chong would probably want in on this one. He's got some businesses, doesn't he? Yeah, I shouldn't joke because sales will be like knocking on the door. All right.

Hey, Chuck, really? Really? So, Chuck, we're talking about LSD today. And LSD, again, that bicycle day, that first day, 73 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. Like you kind of, a lot of people associate LSD with hippies, the Grateful Dead, 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. Yeah. Like every American president has taken LSD.

Right. Well, it's part of the oath of office. Like the Bible is laced with LSD. They put their hand on it. They put their hand on it. Actually, let's debunk that myth right now. Apparently, LSD is non-absorbent through the skin. Yeah, which means that those, well, there's a bunch of rumors, but the one with Jimmy Hendricks would put LSD in his sweatband. He may have, wouldn't have done anything, although it could have trickled down into his mouth. Maybe. Here's some other popular 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, it's impossible to be out. I was doing research for this and I ran across all the new drugs that are available today. It's incredible. There's just like an avalanche of new, new virtually untested drugs that's being, they're going from synthesis to human trials by way of customer. People are taking these things and they're essentially like guinea pigs for these things still. It's just extremely dangerous. Yeah. Molly and Billy and Jenny and- No, no. It's way beyond that. Jimmy's old news.

Jimmy's old news. Here are just a few quickie highlights. The guy that thought he was an orange, so he peeled his skin off. Clearly, LSD did that. Not true. 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. LSD. Laced with LSD. Seven hits will make you legally insane. Right. You can use that as a defense in court.

Diane Linkletter jumped from a window because she thought she could fly. That was a big one. That kind of changed public opinion. Well, she jumped from a window. She definitely did, but she was also suicidal and she had taken LSD before. What made it such a huge case was that she was Art Linkletter's daughter. Yeah. Art Linkletter at the time, this is I think the early 70s when his daughter committed suicide. He was already a bit of a, he was like the Bill Cosby of the age.

Which is not surprising because in the moral crusader and kind of social scold of everybody and how things are just not like they used to be in the good old days are so much better. Gotcha. And everybody's just letting their kids get away with so much and pull up your pants and that kind of stuff. Oh boy. He was a bit like that already. And then his daughter committed suicide and he was understandably devastated by that.

And he turned his ire toward drugs because she had taken LSD before, but there's no evidence that she was on LSD at the time. No. She was already suicidal, but again, Art Linkletter 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. Right. Scared America's parents and really kind of sealed the deal of public opinion against LSD at the time. Yeah.

And how about one more for you? Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, Doc Ellis, those are no hitter. Those are no hitter on acid. That's true. That's 100% true. Well, I know we've covered it, Dufus. Oh, okay. Oh, you were putting one in.

Yeah. Oh, sorry. There's a great documentary about it. And 100% true is the only person's word we have to go on was Doc Ellis's. Let's just say that. Well, his girlfriend also, I don't want to say testified, but she backed it up. She was like, yeah, we took acid and I realized he was pitching into it though. And apparently the story changed a bit over the years.

Oh, yeah. 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, like the ball was telling him what pitch to throw. Well, and maybe when he took the acid. So supposedly he took it at noon and he was pitching at like seven. Yeah, 6.30. So, I mean, he still would have been on acid.

He just wouldn't have been peeking on acid or something. Yeah. 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, oh no, Chuck. We did an internet roundup 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.

That's what we call it back in the early 80s, by the way. Yeah. It could put holes in your brain. Yeah, that's another one too, that everybody ran around believing. And one of the reasons everyone ran around believing all of these weird myths. By the way, no LSD doesn't affect your chromosomes. It actually is metabolized and out of your system faster than just about any other drug on the planet. Yeah, you pee it out.

Very quickly. Yeah. Your liver starts breaking it down immediately. 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 of people walked around believing this. 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? Yeah. But at the same time, you can also point to the real chilling effect that the LSD hysteria had on understanding consciousness, potentially treating mental illness,

which we're just now starting to realize like, yeah, it has a lot of potential for that, treating alcoholism. There's a lot of people whose lives could have been helped had at the very least science been allowed to continue its inquiry into LSD. But the fear of LSD was so widespread and so profound that even science was clamped down. Yeah, the CIA was like, only we can give people LSD. Right.

Not you scientists in controlled settings. Right. There's this one guy, I don't know where the lawsuit is now, but he, 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. Frank Olson. Yeah, but his family suing the CIA saying, no, he was beaten up and shoved up 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 their contention, the family- That he was thrown out. Is that he was murdered. I saw that too. Yeah. Yeah.

That's like the frankolsonproject.org maybe? Yeah, yeah. That's just what the website is, and we definitely covered that in 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, they were all just dosing one another for fun. Yeah, if you went to a San Francisco CIA party, you were hardcore at the time. You were gonna be drinking acid unwittingly.

All right, so we should, even though we've covered it before, the story is so wonderful, we should go over the creation of LSD by Albert Hoffman. And again, don't you think? Please begin. You didn't want to skip this, did you? No, I was, I think we should put in like a little accompanying music or something, the way you set it up, it was beautiful. Yeah, like some Jefferson airplane maybe.

So, a Swiss chemist, his name was Albert Hoffman, like we said a few times. He was working at a lab called Sandos. They were a pharma company. And now they're, they're still around, but they're a subsidiary. I can't remember who. They're not making drugs anymore? No, they are. Oh, okay.

Yeah. So, he was working on a project involving something called ergot. It's a fungus that grows on rye, and it's been blamed notably this woman named Linda. Ron, 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. Yeah. And she has a lot of good evidence.

I won't go over it all. It's cool to look up though. And a lot of people came out and were like, you know what? I bet she's right. So, you were going to talk about the Hoffman story. Yeah. So, he was working with ergot, which grows on rye and 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 19th century, that's pretty dangerous actually. Maybe we should just not poison these pregnant women with ergot. Well, they were, they were not just giving them ergot to poison them for fun. Apparently, it contracts muscles, right? Yeah. So, it would speed up labor. Right, exactly.

And they figured out that it would actually, it would slow bleeding, I think, by dilating blood vessels maybe. Oh, yeah. So, they would give it to a woman after labor still, but they stopped giving it to them like to create, to put a woman into labor. Gotcha. But it was remarkable enough that even after this level of medicine went away, scientists were still figuring out, they're like, there's something with ergot.

We've got to be able to do something with it. It's just too potent. Right. You know? So, in the 1930s, this was the 1930s. It's just so crazy to think about when you'd see pictures of the 1930s. Yeah, they have like wires hanging everywhere. Think about people.

Or they're new electric lamps. Like experimenting with LSD. That's weird. But it happened. At the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, they isolated lysergic acid from ergot. And this is where Hoffman kind of started his work, resulting in 1938. And the 25th derivative, the number 25, as in he did 24 previous, he finally landed on LSD 25.

And that was kind of it. Yeah, and LSD, we should say, stands for lysergic acid diethylamide. And basically, he started with this lysergic acid and just basically tinkered around with it until he, like you said, arrived at LSD 25. 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 stimulator.

Something like that. Maybe for kids with asthma. So, yeah, give these kids some LSD 25. They'll cure their asthma right up. And the first time he messed around with it, he sent it off to the pharmacologist to look because he was a chemist at Sandos. Now, chemists at Sandos, they figure out processes to extract stuff, to make new compounds, that kind of thing.

But that's the sum of their job. Once they come up with a new compound that they're satisfied with, they send it off to the Pharmacology Department. The Pharmacology Department says, yeah, actually, this made that frog's leg jump by itself all the way across the room. We think there's some potential here. The pharmacologist got their hands in 1938 on LSD 25, examined it, said, we don't think there's any pharmacological potential here.

Throw it away. And Hoffman did as he was told. Five years later, he suddenly just thinks about LSD 25 again and is like, you know what? I think they missed something. I'm going to make a new batch just on my own. Yeah, later on, 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 chemists don't go and tell the pharmacologists 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 LSD was very weird. It was contrary to his work orders. And also, Ergut was very expensive and Sandos 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 little inside of him. Somehow. They think now he probably got it on his fingers and maybe like looked his finger while he was. He had been eating KFC for lunch. Yeah, maybe so.

And it got into his body and he, you know, he had an acid trip, an accidental one at first. The world's first acid trip. That's right. And that happened. Unless one of those pharmacologists was keeping something on the down low. He's like, yeah, this is useless. Yeah, throw all this away, except just save me like 10 tabs. This is my head stash.

So that was April 18, 1943. And the next day, Albert Hoffman's like, I got to try that again. Yeah. So he takes some LSD. I think he took 250 micrograms. At 420 PM, believe it or not. Yes, I noticed that too. Almost on 419.

Yeah. But that's a marijuana thing. 420 is. Yeah, just, I just, it kind of jumped out at me as like. I thought, I saw that too. I'm sure everyone who's ever read that was like, oh dude, 419. Oh, he was so close. That's the universe.

So he took 250 micrograms. Is that right? Which is about 10 times the minimum dose that an average person takes these days. Yeah, that's a lot. And 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 see in there where he injected it. And he started to have a wild ride. He did. He went to the doctor at first. He asked his assistant and he was like, I am not sure.

I'm 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. You're not fine, but there's nothing physically going on with you. Right. And we should say, he was at, he made it to his house with his assistant

and they were on their bikes. This is where Bicycle Day comes from. Yeah. And he was like, my God, how long did it take for us to get home? And his assistant was like, actually we made it home really fast. Yeah. And he's like, what? And he's freaking out.

He's like, go 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. Yeah. So it made 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 40 minutes after that initial dose, he wrote down in his journal, 1700 hours. Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh, full stop. Yeah. And then following that closely, I was able to write the last words only with great effort.

And then who wrote that last line? And when he got the milk, he said, the lady next door, whom I scarcely recognize, brought me milk. Oh, yeah. She was no longer Mrs. R, but rather a malevolent and city-ish witch with a colored mask. Yeah. So people think now, he was fearful going into this experiment, and that's what,

you know, we'll talk about set and setting and your mindset going in has a lot to do with what kind of trip you have. Right. 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. Yeah. But then the doctor came and was like, look, man, something wacky is going on with you,

but physically, you're fine. You don't have to worry about it. And I believe that's what kind of freed Hoffman up to- Have a good time. Have a good trip after that. He really started to go, oh, wow, and really took in what he was seeing, what he was thinking, what he was experiencing, and moved from dysphoria to euphoria is the way he would have put it. That's right.

And he goes into work the next day, tells everyone about this amazing experience, and everyone else tries it. Well, not everyone, but other people at Sando's try it. His two bosses did. I think his boss and his boss's boss. And the reason they were like, uh-uh, was because he said, I took 250 micrograms. They're like, that's astounding. 250 micrograms.

Yeah, that's nothing. Right. That they've never heard of a 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 250 micrograms. These guys each took a third of that, and they trip pretty hard themselves. And from that moment on, Sando's was like, we're onto something here. Yeah, he also experimented on animals.

He started dosing. Boy, you name it. He gave it to mice, and he said they moved erratically and showed alterations in licking behavior. They taught themselves to tie-dye? 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? Yeah, that's a cat on a bad 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. Yeah. Fish swam oddly, and finally, spiders altered web building patterns. At low doses, the webs were even better proportioned and more exactly built than normally,

but in higher doses, the webs were badly and rudimentarily made. Yeah. So he would give it like, look, there's a roach crawling across the floor. Let's dose it. See what happens. And there's also a very famous case, and it was at Hoffman who tested it. This dude in Oklahoma, who was a professor of maybe pharmacology, I'm not sure, psychology, he shot an elephant.

He got his hands on the like Oklahoma city zoo's elephant and shot it full of LSD. Oh my God. The elephant like trumpeted once, fell on its side, started seizing its eyes roll back on its head, it bit part of its tongue off. It stayed like this for an hour. He finally ultimately, 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.

Wow. But other people say, well, actually, 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 gave this. The worst thing I've ever heard. But it was like that for like an hour and a half, just suffering on just an enormous amount of acid. And the guy actually used to boast about it.

He kind of wore it like a badge, like it made his career. And it was just such a foul thing. Even the Scientologists were mad about it and released like articles criticizing the guy in his work. Really? Yeah. And then there's a lot of questions about whether he's actually a CIA-funded scientist as well. Well, he had a blowgun. That's the first thing they give you when you sign up for the CIA.

Here's your blowgun and gallon of LSD. Yeah. But R.I.P. Tuske the elephant. He went in a really bad way. Was that his name? Yep. That's terrible. So long story short, Sandos is on to something.

They say this research is compelling. We're going to patent this stuff and market it as a delisid, delisid, T-E-L-Y-S-I-D in 1947. And they started advertising it for you. It's like, psychiatrist, 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, again, I just want to repeat what Chuck said, use it on yourself. Well, yeah.

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 couple of Zany bars for you to try. Just eat some and then you'll know what your patients are going through. They don't do that anymore. Come on. So they're not supposed to Chuck.

Okay. But yeah, Sandos was sending this stuff out as an experimental drug. That's how it was labeled at first. And as it caught on, they moved it into full-on marketing and started selling them hot cakes. Yeah, it's pretty neat. If you look up Delisid for Google Images, it's just packaged right there. It looks like it's a very 1960s box. It says Delisid LSD25.

Here it is in the vials. So weird. And they came in 25 microgram doses, which is 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 sure. That's even a dated reference. What were people doing LSD these days?

EDM shows? Sure, Skrillex shows. How about that? That's probably dated. It probably. We're old, Chuck. I know. We're old.

Billy Joel concert? Sure. Yeah. People inject LSD at Billy Joel concerts right in their eyeball. So by the mid 1960s is when it actually became illegal in 1966. Well, hold on. Sand does stop making it. Before that though, when it was selling like hotcakes, it was having a real beneficial

effect in the psychiatric setting. Oh yeah, 40,000 doses were given to patients. 40,000 patients got doses just in the US alone. I mean, a lot of doses were sold and that was just the US. And it was having an effect. And in Europe, they used it for a camera or what it was called, I want to say like psychotronic or something like that, where they just give you like 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 kind of disarm the patient, right? In the US, they used what was called psychedelic therapy, where they would give you about 10 times the minimum dose. About what Hoffman took when he experimented on himself, right? And that was meant to just not just break down your defenses, but to completely blow your mind basically, so that when you came back down, you had had 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. Right. In America, we're going to open all these doors of perception. And the thought was that you could skip years of psychotherapy with like a good acid trip. And a lot of people had this experience. Very famously, Kerry Grant was 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

Carry in 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 of this era where like the Mad Men era, everybody's taking LSD at their psychiatrist's office for eight hours. Well, there was a LSD episode for Mad Men. Right. I think it's mentioned in that article. It was one of the best of a great show when Roger Sterling takes acid. Yeah.

Was it at a psychiatrist's? No, it was just like a party, but like a party where they were saying like, do this to expand your mind. It wasn't like slip to him or anything. Right, gotcha. Yeah. But it had a profound effect on him in the show. And Chuck, there's actually this awesome little quote from Kerry Grant that makes it in that

article about his experience with LSD, one of them at least. He said, when I first started under LSD, I found myself turning and turning on the couch. And you have to imagine Kerry Grant saying this, which makes it even better. Oh, I am. 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 stopped it, he answered.

Well, it was like a revelation to me. He felt like he was under the spell of LSD or whatever. He realized like he had control over his life. Wow. It's kind of cool. Nice. 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 10, 12 years of it being marketed

for the first time by Sandos, it starts to become outlawed around the country and around the world. Yeah. By 1965, not a lot of research was done in the United States. By 1969, there were only six projects conducted. By 74, the National Institute of Mental Health said that it had no therapeutic value. And then the final experiments in the United States took place in the 1980s. And those studies and most of the newer studies now are concerned with end-of-life care and terminally ill patients. Yeah.

But the window is starting to open once more to studying LSD and its effects on neurology and psychiatry and that kind of stuff. And actually, when it started to get outlawed and Sandos stopped making it, they recalled their stocks of it and handed it over to the National Institute of Mental Health for study. But within a few years, the National Institute of Mental Health said like, no, no therapeutic value whatsoever, despite 40,000 people in the U.S. alone, basically singing its praises, no therapeutic value whatsoever.

Yeah. Well, I don't know if all 40,000 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 was very promising. All right. So we're going to take a break here and come back and teach everyone how to make LSD. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world can crash down. The situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Josh. All right.

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 setup. 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. Right.

Shake it up real good and you've got meth. Yeah. The ingredients are tough to get and they're highly regulated. Yeah, for sure. They're not found on drugstore shelves. No. It's very different. No, plus, I mean, you can start with, and there's actually other natural sources of LSD precursors,

including Morning Glory Seeds and Hawaiian Baby Woodrow Seeds. Yeah. And there are some LSD recipes that call for extracting this stuff called LSA from these things and starting with that. But it's a coin toss. What kind of quality your ultimate LSD is going to be? Yeah. Because you don't know how good the LSA is in these things. Plus, the government, in a nod to their prohibition error tactics, actually put a toxic coating on these things.

Yeah. To discourage people from using them to create LSD or even eating them, which some people do. Right. So, I guess if you're a legitimate LSD chemist, you are starting with ergot, like Hoffman did. That's right, just like in the old days, in the 1930s. What you want to do, you get this fungus, which is the ergot, and you have to culture it to extract the alkaloids from that ergot. 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 got to do some of this early work in a dark room. Right, exactly. And you take the ergot once you have it extracted. You're isolating the alkaloids, right, ergot alkaloid. Yeah. And when you've got the alkaloid, you add some solvents and reagents to it, which themselves are dangerous as well.

Yeah. One of them is chloroform, which is a 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 in The Vanishing. So, he huffed some chloroform, and I guess woke up a little while later and said, nope, that wasn't acid. Nope. Something different.

Must be the LSD. So, chloroform is not good for you. Another one of the reagents is anhydrousine, which sounds like a Douglas Adams character. Yeah. And it's a known carcinogen, very poisonous, and both of them are easily breathed in and absorbed through the skin. So, these things are no-joke, and they're important in turning ergot 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.

Well, I mean, you would get nowhere very quickly. We're not giving out detailed information. And what's funny is, funny, you bring that because until I think like 1965, you could mail off to the U.S. Patent Office, and for 50 cents, they would mail you the patent to LSD, which is the recipe for LSD. Wow. You could get it directly from the U.S. government for a few years. I bet it's online somewhere, don't you think? Oh, I'm sure, yeah.

On the dark web? Probably not even. On ICANN has cheeseburger? Probably. So, we're going to do Lysergic Acid Compound. It's called Iso-Lysergic Acid Hydralyze, I'm sorry, Hydrazide. And you do that by adding some chemicals, heat it up a little bit. Shake it in your milk jug. Put a little basil in there.

Is it okay to joke about this? If it's not okay to joke about this, Chuck, then we've lost our sense of humor. That's right. And then, that is isomerized, which means, and this is pretty advanced chemistry, it's really advanced chemistry. It means the atoms are actually, the molecules are being rearranged in a chemical process. Right. With a little heat, a 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. You cool that down, you mix it up with an acid and a base, evaporate it, and you are left with isolysergic diethylamide.

Isomerize it again? Uh-huh, because, you know, if once is good, two is better. Then you have LSD, and 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. When you have LSD that you've synthesized from ergot alkaloids, it's a crystalline powder, a white powder. Yeah, and in the old days, in the 60s, you could make microdots, which was a tablet form. You could just mix it with liquid and, you know, use it like, you know, put this drop under your tongue.

Or, you know, make tea out of it or whatever. And then, windowpane, which was gelatin squares. So that's still around. I saw on Reddit, some kid was like, look at this. And he was holding like a huge thing of windowpane. And I think he called them windowpane, too. Yeah, they're the great, great movie, Floating with Disaster. Did they take gel tabs? Well, one of the son, Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda's son, at the end of the movie,

doses everyone at dinner with windowpane. Yeah. That's what he calls it. And 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 blotter acid. And what they do is they just dissolve that powder in ethanol and then dip a sheet of blotting paper that's conveniently perforated into tiny little squares. About a quarter inch by a quarter inch.

Yeah, they're little and you soak up into that paper. Sometimes the paper is just plain white. Sometimes it's got little cartoon characters and things. Oh, a lot of times. And 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 just to basically show off the artistry on it.

And it's like, how has this not been rated by the DEA? I think the answer to that is because the DEA doesn't know it exists. It's probably fake, right? No. I would say that's stupid because it's just a waste of money. Why would you just put fake paper in there and tell everyone it's acid? Because he's not trying to sell it. He's trying to say like, look at the art that people make for acid.

No, that's insane though. Why would he waste all that money putting the drug on something? 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. I'm going to buy it and put it in my museum. Well, that's even dumber. So he said that these things have been exposed to light over the years

and that they're most likely totally inactive. He said the last 12 times I tried to take it. It didn't work. He's like, but I traveled back in time a couple of times. So each square is a dose and you can get up to 900 doses on a single sheet. And we'll get to this later, but the only minus we'll talk about it now. There was a Supreme Court ruling in early 90s where they said the weight of the drug is also the weight of the paper, which it's nuts.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people got really and remain upset about this. The argument is that's the equivalent of saying, well, this cocaine came in this suitcase. So just weigh 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 of, again,

LSD, when you're looking at a minimum dose of about a quarter of a microgram, that's like the weight of two grains of salt. Yeah. So if you're trying to bust people, you could be like, well, a quarter microgram gets you a year or something like that. Well, that's why I don't see why they didn't do that. Just rewrite the law to reflect the weight of the real drug. I don't know. Because that's all they'd have to do.

I know. It was very weird. It was hand-fisted. Yeah. Can I say that? Yeah, you just did. The long and short of that is there are people that dealt acid at a fish show that are in prison for longer than rapists and murderers.

Oh, yeah. There's a guy who's in prison for life without parole. Yeah. He's like 66 now. He's been in there for a while because he got busted with some acid for life. Yeah. He's spending his life in jail because he had acid with him. And he's seen violent criminals all around him get out on parole.

Pretty interesting. So should we talk about what an LSD trip is like? Yeah. According to whoever wrote this article. I think this was a Shayna Freeman joint. Yeah. I thought most of this was pretty good. There were a few parts that I was like, come on.

It was, yeah, very straightforward and logical and reasonable and rational and myth-busting, too. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So the hallucinations that one would have on LSD. I think there's a bit of a misnomer there in that some people might think, oh, you know, I saw a pink elephant come in the room and sit down beside me. And I thought it was real.

That's not exactly what they mean by an LSD hallucination. What they mean more is, you know, I stared at the wall and the wall looked like it was pulsating and breathing. Right. Or that painting had a glow around it. 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. Right.

Or bad or strong. But I know that I'm on a drug and it's making all these hallucinations happen. Precisely. Right. Is that fair way to say it? Yeah, it's a great way to say it. I mean, it's away from the classical definition of a hallucination. And it's also, you don't believe what you're seeing is real.

You realize that it's the result of the drug. Although I'm sure some people have taken acid and really 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 acid. Right. Well, that's another point that Shayna Freeman makes in this article is that because of the trip and how what a profound impact it has on the brain, you typically want to trip with other people who have experience 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 mindset. And setting refers to the setting that 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 Shayna Freeman suggests the park. Yeah, maybe don't, if you're stressed out about finals, maybe don't 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 12 hours. About halfway through, you're going to experience what's called the peak and the whole thing's going to really start about 30 to 60 minutes after you take acid. Yeah. And if you've ever been to college and seen 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. 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? Probably Josh, you might have dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, your body temperature

might raise, you might feel a little sweaty and dizzy, you might be drowsy, you might be tingly in the extremities. Right. Your stomach might feel kind of weird. Have a metallic sensation in your mouth. Yeah. You're probably not hungry. Right.

And you may, 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. Sure. You're going to see things in a different way than you normally do is the best way to put it. In some extreme cases, some people have reported synesthesia triggering in them where their

senses are basically getting mixed up. I wonder if they're synesthetes. Maybe in that like unlocked it. Maybe. That's entirely possible because there's a pretty well-established school of thought that says that if you are predisposed to a brain-based mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, 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. Shayna points out that it can run the gamut from happiness and euphoria. 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 and you can have bad emotions and that's probably part of the bad trip if you go into it in the wrong headspace like we talked about. But that's the crux of it still.

The magic is still the crux of it. Sure. And whether you're having a euphoric or dysphoric experience, it still seems to have supernatural qualities to it. It's not just normal having a bad experience, bad mood kind of thing. It's like the universe is coming apart and it's all reflecting poorly on my life. Yeah. And I think with a lot of hallucinogenics, that's why they're used in spiritual and

religious ceremonies all over the world because it's a profound experience. It can make you very contemplative. The things you think, it can make people look inward and discover things about themselves. And so that's why, I mean like ayahuasca and ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca.

It's in there somewhere. And magic mushrooms. We did a great episode on that. They've been used for millennia around the campfire for people to like quote unquote unlock these doors in their mind that they don't readily have access to. The doors of perception. That's right. If you are an observer of people on LSD and you're not on LSD, you might think, man,

they're talking a lot about really things that aren't very important, but to the person on the LSD, it's very important. It's the most important thing in the world at that moment. Right. The person not on LSD and the person on LSD will both mutually scare one another. Yeah. And usually end up in different rooms at a party. And then there is the time jumps.

It just really will 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 going to have in common is that they end within about 12 hours or so. Like the magical thinking goes away. What you would perceive as normal reality starts to set back in and there may be some

sort of emotional or mental hangover. Not a hangover like one that alcohol brings on, but more just like a whoa kind of thing. Yeah, after a profound emotional, mental exercise. Or being put through the grinder, you're going to, you will have some sort of, you'll be awash in something. Yeah, agreed. But 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 of hijacks your serotonin receptors is how it does its thing. So serotonin 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 LSD. Interesting. Sometimes you might see, I always say college students, keep picking on college students. I mean, I would guess about 98% of acid trips are undertaken by college students. You might see a college student admit themselves to the ER or call an ambulance.

The doctor's 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 quiet room. No, no, the doctor meant coming to the hospital while you're on acid. I got you. But when you get to the ER, the doctor will pat you on the head, put you in a nice quiet

dark room, reassure you 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 and tell a nurse, like, do me a favor every hour, go in there and make sure that guy isn't breaking some equipment. Right. And he'll be fine. And, you know, sounds like about six hours.

Yeah. So that's tripping. Tripping 101. You want to take another break before we get into, like, what's going on in your mind? Yeah, why not? All right. All right, buddy, bear with us, man. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. I think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesha Chiklur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, what's going on?

Right now? Yeah. Well, you just went and pee-peed, you went to the little podcasters room and now you're back. During the break? That's what's going on. What's going on in the mind, do you mean? Yes.

On LSD? Yeah. Here's the deal. When this article was written, she said researchers aren't 100% sure what LSD is doing in the brain. They still aren't 100% sure. No, we have a better idea though. A much better idea. Well, let's go back a little bit.

As of 2016. Well, yeah. This one was from 2011, a Yale psychiatrist named Andrew Sewell, one of the few dudes in the US who does psychedelic drug research. He's not L7. He's not Square. Remember that band, L7? Yeah, yeah, they were good.

Remember it was them, the Breeders, and Four Non-Blons all came out with great albums all at once, and Hole. Yeah, I'm going to take issue with Hole and Four Non-Blons. I'll take that one back. No, Four Non-Blons, they have that Hayah song. That Hole album was pretty good. All right. Well, I'm bad.

Okay. I was listening to Pavement the entire time. You could listen to all of it. All right. I was listening to Pavement too. No, I'm just kidding. I liked L7 though. Andrew Sewell, he was a Yale psychiatrist, like I said, or maybe still is, and he said

at the time that it had to do with the thalamus, sensory impressions are routed through the thalamus, which acts as a gatekeeper, so his theory at the time, which was built upon research from Franz Wollinweide, Switzerland, said that drugs like LSD and psilocybin, they toned down the thalamus' activity. So in other words, the gatekeeper doesn't work, he likened to a spam filter on email. He said it's not working as well, so it lets unprocessed information through to consciousness. Which is a great explanation of it. That was 2011, but like this week.

You got that from Live Science, right? Yeah, I think so. That was a good explanation of it. Yeah, but we have brand new hot off the presses information. Which doesn't necessarily contradict that, right? Agreed. So I think Imperial College of London researchers got their hands on some acid, gave them to some people, and threw them in a wonder machine, and looked at their brain.

20 volunteers, volunteers we should add, that had all taken LSD before. This wasn't against their will. No, and they wanted people that have tripped before and people that knew they could handle taking acid and being in an MRI machine, which we already have mentioned is weird and loud and claustrophobic. Right. You know? Yeah, that's a good point.

That was very wise of those guys. Yes. So the upshot of it was that we now have brain scans of people under the influence of LSD for the first time in human history. And 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, the control brain scan, and the one on acid. It's like, you don't even have to read the caption to know which one's which.

Like one is like, okay, I guess I'm thinking I'm aware of myself, my toe which is, well, I'm going to pay the water bill this month. And then the other one's just like, yeah, like that. It's amazing what they said, I'm just going to read it because they say it better than I ever could. They said LSD simultaneously creates hyperconnections 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, including a system the brain defers to at rest called the default mode network. Yeah, that's a big one. Which normally governs functions of such as self reflection, auto biographical memory, and mental time travel, bing bing. Right. So what they're saying is that the idea that you see things differently, that you think about things differently, that you understand concepts like the universe and reality and

your place in it differently than you normally do is 100% accurate. Like LSD changes literally the way you think about the world by changing the connections in your brain. And notably, they point out in the 60s, you would always hear a lot about the ego and the sense of self. They think they have proven through brain scans that LSD literally makes you forget your sense of self for that time. Right.

And it allows you to do something that LSD is very famous for, which is make you feel connected to the universe, to humanity, to the gazelle population, to everything, just feel connected. And again, it's called 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, 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 it's not just like you're on the drug, you're under the influence of the drug. What you're thinking and feeling is temporary. It actually creates a pronounced and most commonly positive change in the individual's outlook on life and sense of well-being, which is pretty amazing. But now we have brain scans of it. The brain scans just in every way seem to support everything. Everyone has always said, not everyone, but the people that weren't making up stories about acid said about acid.

The people who never said, oh, I see a pink elephant in the room. That's right. The people who never went up to somebody and like wave their hand in front of their face. Oh yeah. Those people. I saw somebody do that like a couple of summers ago at my neighborhood pool. Oh really? There's this dude behaving strangely and I was like, I wonder, and then somebody went

up and went like that to him and was like, oh, now I know. Oh wow. So super promising research. And I think it's awesome that they're looking into this stuff again. Are they doing this in the United States at all yet? Because didn't they sort of allow it again a few years ago? There was a 2014 study with like 12 terminally ill patients with cancer in the United States. But it's still like very small groups of scientists are probably working on this.

Yeah, like 12. Oh yeah. Yeah. And they're using very small study populations. And the results that they're finding, like in this case that the cancer patients reported even 12 months on a more positive outlook on life despite the fact that their life was coming to an end prematurely in their opinion because of the acid. They're finding like all of these, the studies that are being carried out are finding such

sweeping conclusions about the potential for LSD to positively impact people's lives that all of them are like, we need more studies, more studies, more studies, we need more people involved in them. Like let's get back to studying this, which we left off of like 40, 50 years ago for no good reason really. And 40 and 50 years ago is when the scientists thought like they were on the cusp of making some real breakthroughs when everything gets shut down. And back then, like the way they do the studies now, it seems like are way better.

They didn't have controls back then or they didn't use controls in most of these experiments. Right. Well like Timothy Leary was carrying out these studies. I mean, give me a break. All right. Let's talk about acid flashbacks. False. Yeah.

I mean, Shannon calls it very controversial among LSD users and researchers. I'm going to say false outright because there's zero evidence that it's a real thing and that the body actually retains some bit of LSD, what you've heard, you know, the rumors like it's in your spinal fluid, it's in your fatty deposits and 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 body stores some acid for later and you start to trip again suddenly.

There are people who have reported it, but it's entirely possible that they're mentally ill. Right. Or it's entirely possible they're suffering from something called hallucinogen, persisting perceptive disorder. This sounds pretty awful if you ask me. Yeah. And this, I did a little more research.

Suddenly this is linked to persistent LSD use, someone who's done a lot of acid. And even then it's still not due to a buildup of LSD molecules in the body. So what, maybe they rearranged their neural connections or were they also predisposed to mental illness? Well, I think a lot of times it says current medical opinion is divided as to the cause. Some people think it's a form of PTSD. Other people think it, 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. Right now you're just reactivated. It's just like burned out, sitting in the corner. Yeah. And supposedly in 1991 is where this was all born at an educational meeting for a DEA agent in San Francisco, a speaker said, he suggested that the re-release 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 the acid flashback myth was born from this one speaker. That's really interesting. Yeah. Way to go, dude. So again, we were talking about like there's a lot of hysteria surrounding LSD. People have died on LSD. What's that issue is, well, a couple fold.

One, is 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. But then it's so out of the realm of believability, it's just like why even talk about it. And there have been cases of people ingesting massive amounts of LSD.

So the minimum dose is a quarter microgram, which is like 25,000th of a gram, I believe. Is that like what an acid hit is these days? Like a single acid. I think that's about a half of a hit. It's a mild hit from what I understand. So if you go splitsies 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 that's a very small amount, like 1,000th of a gram.

Some people have taken like, no, 1,000th of a milligram, I'm sorry. That's the dose. Some people have taken milligrams of this stuff accidentally. There was a group of people in 1975 at a party and they thought they were snorting cocaine, but it turned out they were snorting powdered LSD. Boy, oh boy. And one person was shown to have ingested seven milligrams of LSD. Unbelievable.

So that's like 70,000 times the minimum dose, something like that? Yeah. And I think this was actually in the Western Journal of Medicine and most of the people just boom, it knocked them 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 everyone was fine. So that's what it was. That's like 7,000 micrograms and a minimum dose is a quarter of a microgram.

So yeah, like 12 hours later, they were fine. And 12 years later, five of them were examined for years for long-term issues and no one had any issues at that party at least. Right. There was another person who shows up in one study. I'm not sure what the case was around it, but the person survived ingesting 40 milligrams, which is 40,000 micrograms, and apparently survived. So the toxic dose, the LD50 dose, which is where half of the people who took that dose

would be expected to die, it's never been established. We don't know what it is, but it's huge, it's massive. So the pharmacological deaths from LSD have probably never happened. What has been documented is behavioral deaths. People who took risks potentially that they wouldn't normally have under the influence of LSD, maybe went swimming in a place they wouldn't have normally gone swimming, maybe jumped from a building, 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. Yeah. Poor judgment basically. Right. But again, those are pretty few and far between, although when they do happen, they're tragic. Yeah, and there are also cases of heart attacks and strokes, but with something like that, there's usually other drugs involved, and you can't conclusively say the LSD caused the heart attack.

Right. There's probably no documented confirmed report of somebody committing suicide under the influence of LSD. It's more like Art Link Letter Starter, somebody who had taken LSD before, and their previous LSD use was blamed for it, but from what I could find, not a documented case of someone who was on LSD and went nuts and killed themself. Right. And even then, I think that's a difficult thing to prove that something caused something.

Right. Because then you start digging into that person's closet and find out that they were suicidal anyway, and this was a long time coming. Who knows? 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 vastly outnumber 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 was kind of funny. Heavy LSD users can develop profound social problems, completely ruin their sleep cycles, and lose interest in eating and personal hygiene. They turn into hippies is what they're saying. Yeah, and she says something I do take issue with, that there's no one in 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, and then the next day and the next day, you build up a tolerance really fast, and you just need more and more LSD and things normalize. Or it doesn't work after a very short time. Right. And then things normalize and you don't get the experience you're looking for. So like most other drugs, it's not the kind of drug that you usually see people doing a lot of day in and day out all the time.

Right. And what she's also saying is there's no means for becoming psychologically or physically dependent on it, which makes it a non-addictive drug. Although the feds have it under Schedule 1, which means that it has a high likelihood for abuse, addiction, and that it has no medical usefulness whatsoever. So both of those two, that's false for both of the reasons that- Criteria, yeah. Yeah, both of the criteria for a Schedule 1 drug.

She also points out, and this is something I never considered, but I think it makes a lot of sense, the effects of LSD aren't dependable, like you never know what you're going to get. Right. And addicts crave that dependability. They want to know cocaine will do the same thing to me every time. That bottle of Jack Daniels will do the same thing to me every time. Yeah, or that cigarette?

Yeah, but I don't know what I'm going to get out of acid, 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. People have used LSD and other psychedelic drugs to quit addictions, like cigarette smoking, like alcoholism. And again, you mentioned our, can you treat mental illness with psychedelics episode,

which was awesome. But we talked about that in that episode too. All right, Josh, let's, I know this is a long one, plus we got the Hodgman bit. This is going to 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, notably someone you mentioned, Timothy Leary, Dr. Timothy Leary, who actually worked at Harvard. Just single-handedly is responsible for the initial turn against LSD by the public and

science. He took, he took what was a legitimate field of inquiry and made it completely illegitimate. Like he's almost single-handedly to blame for acid being, for science turning its back on acid. Yeah. And talked about a lot of like hippie-dippy things that people didn't like, scientists didn't like them associating it 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 Alpert, were actually trying to study it a little more legitimately, then he got fired from Harvard in 63. And that's when he sort of went full bore toward, you know, tune in, turn in, drop out, which he regrets that phrase. He, 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, that people, people took it to mean get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.

Right. And that's not at all what he meant that he, when he was saying, turn on, he was saying like, you know. Turn on your brain. Yeah. Turn on your brain. Like turn on your potential. Like, like let's get things going.

Yeah. Let's get things going to interact harmoniously with the world around you. And then drop out was to become self-reliant, not dependent on the man or whatever. So it was basically an after-school special that he was trying to make. Sure. Basically. The more you know. And it was taken, you know, 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 a license to like not do anything useful and really upset all the crew cuts over there who are carrying everybody right now. Then there was Ken Keezy, author of many books, notably One Fleur of the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah. Which that alone makes him a great author. Yeah.

Or just like a major contributor to popular culture. Agreed. Or a culture even. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. He was notable for being a part of the Mary pranksters, which is documented in the great, great Tom Wolf book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, one of my favorite books.

Required reading. Really good. And it documents a Mary prankster. It was basically a school bus, 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 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 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'll be a different world. Right. And then finally, Mr. Owsley Stanley, all the dead heads out there just went, oh yeah. It's about time.

They were so mad. Well, they never get mad, but they don't get mad because they get even. They have a profound social interaction problems. He was a chemist who was in Heydashbury in San Francisco, studied at Cal Berkeley and he was like, you know what, I'm taking a lot of bad LSD and so I'm going to start making it myself. He was a self taught chemist. Did you say that?

Yeah. Wow. He was really, really good at it and Owsley LSD became the standard for good clean acid in the 1960s and 70s. Yeah. And they used them at the acid tests, which Ken Keesey used to hold in San Francisco and the Grateful Dead used to play and Owsley Stanley was also the sound engineer. Did he create the wall of sound?

Was that his doing? No, that was Phil Spector. Oh, okay. But he was the dead's original sound man and what he got known for was he was one of the first people to mix concerts live and in stereo and plug right into the board. So all those old, you know, dead heads love to trade the old bootlegs. Those bootlegs sound so good because of Owsley. Gotcha.

Because he was, you know, he was an innovator as a sound man and he was one of the first investors in the dead financially. And because he was a millionaire, LSD millionaire. Probably. And he said he made like 10 million hits of acid in his lifetime and he gave away a lot of it though. Yeah. There was one, it was a sit-in, I can't remember what it was called, where he gave out and

by all accounts, 300,000 people took acid all in one place. Wow, where? Oh, it had to be San Francisco. Oh, yeah. And he also designed the Steely with Bob Thomas, the very famous lightning bolt skull logo on the Grateful Dead album, Steal Your Face. Right off of your head. It was designed by Owsley.

Did not know that. Yep. And now all the dead heads are going, okay, he mentioned the Steely. Okay. I'm sure we got something going. Two and a half hours in. And acid's making a bit of a comeback in San Francisco too among all the little technocrats that took that town over and raised it.

What? They're tripping and stuff? Not really tripping, they're micro dosing. Basically, Albert Hoffman had the idea that taking miniscule amounts of LSD could improve cognitive function. So basically, they're getting better at coding. They're taking it and going to work and not fully tripping, but just having, it's having some effect.

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 are not the town you used to be. And they all know it. You get mad at me. Yeah, it's true. There's also some other stuff, Chuck, apparently, if you buy LSD these days, there's a really

high likelihood that you're actually getting something called n-bomb, 25i-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 have its 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.

And then there's also some other thing called 1P LSD, and it's LSD with an extra pro-pionel bond that technically makes it legal that apparently it's open season on the internet with that stuff right now. Crazy. Camel Nogiani, the great comedian and friend of the show, has a great bit about some designer drug which is heroin and Tylenol or Tylenol cold medicine. Oh, codeine? Yeah, like with heroin.

Okay. It's just funny. He's like, you're already doing heroin. Right. It's like, the heroin's enough. Don't add Tylenol. Yeah, it just seems like I'm waxing nostalgic for the good old days. The days of just acid, but it seems like if people are dying on something they think

is acid, then maybe you're not doing it right. There you go. So, Chuck, 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.

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