Too much LSD left a young man in a mental hospital, convinced he was a glass of orange juice.

The story as Snopes gives it: "Excessive LSD use left a young man in a psychiatric hospital, believing himself to be a glass of orange juice."[1] Snopes counts it among the "pieces of LSD scarelore" of the 1960s.[1]

The earliest version Snopes found is in a Los Angeles Times article headed "LSD Ties with Happiness Declared Hokum", dated "12 July 1966". It lists cases of harm, and "One involves a heavy user who is convinced he is an orange."[1] Two years later the story was being told as a case history, about "a teenage boy who locked himself in his room because he thought he was an orange and that if someone touched him, he would turn into orange juice".[1]

The details move from one telling to the next. In early versions heavy use causes the delusion; in later ones a single accidental large dose does.[1] No version we found names the patient, the doctor or the hospital, so there is nothing to check the story against.

Orange juice did reach the federal courts, as a thought experiment about sentencing. LSD sentences are set by the weight of the mixture, so in 1990 the Seventh Circuit noted that "Someone who sold a single hit of LSD dissolved in a tumbler of orange juice could be exposed to a ten-year mandatory minimum."[2] Judge Posner's dissent worked it through: a man who "dropped a square of blotter paper containing a single dose of LSD into a glass of orange juice and sold it to a friend at cost (perhaps 35 cents), he would be subject to the ten-year minimum". He added: "There are no reported orange juice cases".[2]