In the US you can get life in prison for a single hit of acid.

The idea grew out of a real feature of federal law: LSD sentences are set by weight, and the weight includes whatever the drug is on. An appeals court put it at its starkest in 1990. "An average dose of LSD weighs .05 milligrams, which is less than two millionths of an ounce", it noted, yet "Someone who sold a single hit of LSD dissolved in a tumbler of orange juice could be exposed to a ten-year mandatory minimum."[1]

The press carried the cases. In 1993 Reason wrote of a defendant whose crime was this: "he sold 199 hits of LSD to a friend at 65 cents each". On blotter paper, "that means a mandatory minimum sentence of five years".[2]

The weight rule is real. The Supreme Court held in 1991 that "the statute requires the weight of the carrier medium to be included when determining the appropriate sentence for trafficking in LSD".[3] The thresholds are low. Five years starts at "1 gram or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)", where the sentence "may not be less than 5 years and not more than 40 years".[4] A single dose on sugar crosses that line, since "The sugar cube on which the dose may be dropped for purposes of ingestion and transportation, however, weighs approximately 2 grams".[3]

The top of the scale is "10 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)", and there the sentence "may not be less than 10 years or more than life".[4] Life is the ceiling there, not the rule. The mandatory life term came from a person's record: before December 2018 the law said that "after two or more prior convictions for a felony drug offense have become final, such person shall be sentenced to a mandatory term of life imprisonment without release".[4]

That is what happened to Tim Tyler. He was "sentenced to a mandatory double-life term in prison without the possibility of parole for conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute".[5] He was a Grateful Dead follower "who at 25 was sentenced to life in federal prison for possession with intent to deliver LSD", and President Obama commuted the sentence in 2016: "He is now set to be released on August 30, 2018, conditioned upon enrollment in residential drug treatment".[6]

The First Step Act of 2018 replaced that mandatory life term with one where "such person shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment of not less than 25 years".[4] So a few hits on heavy paper or sugar can still mean years in federal prison, but no law gives life for one dose.