The Unforeseen LSD Overdose of 1972 | Hacker News Reader

The Unforeseen LSD Overdose of 1972

notsoprofound.com

29 points_j9fj27 comments

I knew a woman who in 1970 was pulled over by the police in Altadena CA. They were particularly aggressive when it came to "hippies" and so she swallowed her entire cargo of LSD, which was, iirc, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hits.

She was out of commission for roughly 72 hours and months later still not back to normal, according to what she told me.

One of my favorite early blog stories is from stilldrinking.org, where he accidentally ingested way too much and ended up institutionalized. It's great writing about the entire experience going there and back. http://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1

I first read this a few years ago, it's great. Haven't seen it since and had no idea how to find it, thanks for posting!

https://www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.15288/jsad.2020.81.115

Described three similar but more recent case studies of massive LSD overdoses. Notable in two cases are longterm positive psychological effects that the subjects attributed to the experience.

Popsci write-up here: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/27/health/lsd-overdoses-case...

A veteran of the 60's and 70's. Much preferred psilocybin mushrooms. Knew a young lady who grew them in her closet. Spectacular visuals, no "bad trips" and you never woke up the next day feeling like your dog had died...

Bad psilocybin mushroom trips are similarly common as bad LSD trips.

Never had one. Then again, my shrooms were plucked directly from the soil and popped into my mouth. But there has always been a truth-in-labeling problem in the clandestine recreational drug market...

I find that article to be almost unreadable. I recommend the original scientific paper instead, which surprisingly doesn't have a paywall: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/pdf/wes...

Summary: 8 people snorted lines of pure LSD by mistake, resulting in coma, respiratory arrest, blood clotting problems, and other life-threatening symptoms. All were normal after 12 hours and discharged from the hospital after 48 hours. Followup over a year showed no residual problems.

It's pretty surprising that one can take thousands of doses of LSD without lasting effect. Most drugs would kill you long before a 1000x overdose. I'm also a bit surprised that they didn't get shot or something for wasting maybe $100,000 worth of LSD.

Thanks. Extremely obnoxiously written article-- the excessive use of emojis and gratuitous jokes to describe what must have been a nightmare for the victims is icing on the trashy cake.

> [...] wasting maybe $100,000 worth of LSD.

You're high by roughly an order of magnitude. LSD is only $1-2 per 100ug (one "tab"/"hit").

Eight people * 1000 tabs/person * $1.5/tab = $12,000 over everyone; $1,500 per person.

Maybe that was the going rate at the time, but GP's estimate is roughly accurate for contemporary retail prices.

Chubby Emu should do an episode on this

getting down voted for no good reason so I will explain.

Chubby Emu is a youtube channel from a doctor who explains in medical detail cases like this, weird overdoses and such.

I can hear his voice! ... presenting to the emergency room with hyperspace vision. Hyper, meaning high, space, meaning the geometric fractal we call home, and vision, meaning vision.

He did an episode where some teenager ate 500 melatonin gummies, that one was pretty entertaining. Not something you should try though.

Funny how this story has entered the folk lore around LSD. I remember hearing some version of it in the early 2000s in New Zealand.

The other one was the story of a guy who had taken so much LSD he thought he'd turned into a glass of orange juice. Couldn't lie down or he'd spill, couldn't go outside or he would evaporate. I wonder if it has any basis from a real story.

I don't know about the orange juice guy, but I can tell you personally that I smoked salvia a decade ago and turned into a shopping mall / department store.

I lost my internal monologue, and found my universe replaced with an infinite, bright wide void. I slowly made out vaguely shadowy humanoid forms, and massive, infinitely tall monolithic structures arranged in rows.

As I studied them I realized it was people walking through aisles. I heard some vague noise slowly rising in volume but couldn't understand it. As I looked through these "aisles", I noticed aisle signs hanging above them. The words on these signs turned out to be sets of words which fractally related to some "essence" of a thought I was having.

For each parallel thought I was experiencing, I could see an aisle containing these semantic markers which broke the thoughts down into individual words representing some aspect of the thought. This went on as far as I could see. There was again no accompanying inner monologue like there normally would be, these thoughts were felt and understood silently through these semantic markers, experienced as I read them.

The noise became loud enough and I realized it was a woman over a PA system describing my thoughts. My inner monologue had dissolved and re-emerged as a disembodied voice which told me what I was thinking and seeing and feeling at the moment I felt it, or even before. Every thought I had was not my own, but instead I found myself a passive observer to a physical space representing my mind. Complete ego death.

It was quite meta, as I listened to her first describe my experience of being confused and then slowly understanding what I was seeing. At a point of inflection, she began describing the experience of me listening to her describe me listening to her, and how it made me feel. It's hard to describe what this felt like.

This lasted for what seemed like a very, very long time. The experience was enough for me to never touch the stuff again. The memory is viscerally burned into my head and will never leave.

this is a common folk story around the world. other variations are that he thought he was an orange. or he put a sheet of lsd under his clothes and absorbed them by sweating while running from police

> I wonder if it has any basis from a real story.

There's something of the glass delusion about it (eg my legs are made of glass and will shatter if I move, or I swallowed a glass piano as a child and if it shatters it will puncture my organs). The similarities in the thought processes suggest it could be real.

Solo on a tropical island LSD could potentially be the one catalyst for survival for the average first worlder, just the ability to reset the mind and enter “the now” would be huge for adapting to what it would take to survive.

It sounds like a documentary waiting to happen. Imagine spear fishing in paradise on a few hits of sunshine, in the sunshine? I’d go.

> But I find it hard to believe there were "no apparent psychologic" effects after taking over 26,000 μg to 210,000 μg OR 260 to 2100 hits of LSD.

Is it possible the body’s reaction to the high does protected it? Maybe the brain shut down in a way where it reduced the uptake? Did the cocaine compete? Some if them went into comas?

"All eight individuals had plasma levels of 1000-7000 μg per 100 mL of blood plasma."

Those were the gastric concentrations. Blood concentrations were about 2 to 25ng/ml.

Not happy about this sort of terror talk for extreme cases. It's like launching yourself into the sun and then writing a piece about the extreme temperatures in excruciating detail. Most people do not interact or engage with the sun in a "launch myself into it directly" way and therefore mentioning such stories in a fresh landscape that will invariably become baseline pieces in search sequences, is something I'm not thrilled with. It is an amazing molecule and we should be working to research all the miraculous benefits possible at small quantities (we concentrate soap, why is it surprising that concentrated medicine exists).

What was that trippy, AI-fueled nightmare animated GIF from?

Filename indicates the Doctor Strange film.

Not so profound

The story was mildly entertaining, but the authors style is intolerable. I feel like I received some obscene *psychic* damage reading this.

You failed your idea roll and took 1d10 sanity damage. Good thing you didn't succeed the roll, you'd have gone temporarily insane.

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