Urban legends

LSD

• False

  Acid is cut with strychnine, and that is what gives you the body load.

  A blotter square weighs about 2 mg, too little to hold an active dose of strychnine, and the street-drug labs that tested LSD did not report finding it. The one documented case is a powder sold as LSD in the late 1960s.

  First documented: 1985, Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, page 188, as cited by a reader to Ask Erowid

  Origin, evidence and 4 references

  Origin

  There is one documented case behind the story. In his book LSD: My Problem Child, Albert Hofmann described "a case in the late sixties of strychnine being found in an LSD sample that was a white powder".[1]

  By 1985 the claim was in print as history. Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, blamed part of the decline of Haight-Ashbury on "samples of LSD showing up laced with amphetamines and strychnine". Erowid later noted the authors gave no source, and filed the claim as a myth "without a reference or additional data to back it up".[2]

  On Usenet it was already a running argument. A 1992 post to alt.drugs said "the most likely place to find strychnine is in myths posted to alt.drugs".[1]

  The evidence

  The chemist Alexander Shulgin wrote that he had looked at a large number of illicit street samples and "never detected the presence of strychnine" in them. He added that "strychnine is not needed to bond LSD to blotter paper", and that it is not a breakdown product of LSD either.[1]

  Street-drug testing programs agree. Published analyses by PharmChem and the Los Angeles County street drug analysis program are described as ones "which likewise never found any strychnine".[1] George Root, who ran Florida's anonymous street drug testing program from 1972 to 1977, wrote: "I recall no instances of samples of actual LSD being combined with strychnine".[1]

  The arithmetic rules it out for blotter. A standard 5 mm square weighs about 2 mg. Even "if the paper itself was made completely out of pure strychnine", the dose would sit at the very bottom of its range of activity.[1] Erowid puts it plainly: "It is virtually impossible to fit enough strychnine to have any effect" in most LSD preparations.[3] The 1960s were different only in form, since then "LSD was sold primarily in tablet form" and a tablet is easier to fake.[2]

  Strychnine does turn up as an adulterant, in other drugs. A 2011 review of adulterant studies lists it in heroin and notes that the amounts found, "such as strychnine in heroin, are not life-threatening".[4]

  The body load has other explanations. Cramps and nausea are reported with LSD itself, and "poorly synthesized LSD might have other ergot derivatives in it".[1]

  References

  1. Strychnine in LSD (collected by Lamont Granquist, 1994). Erowid, from the Hyperreal drug archives, Wayback capture
  2. Was LSD laced with strychnine in the 1960s? (Ask Erowid, question 2988). Erowid (2002), Wayback capture
  3. How do I test for strychnine in LSD? (Ask Erowid, question 191). Erowid (2000), Wayback capture
  4. Adulterants in illicit drugs: a review of empirical evidence. Drug Testing and Analysis 3:89 (2011), via PubMed
• False

  College students on LSD stared at the sun until they went blind.

  The famous version, six Pennsylvania students blinded in 1968, was invented by a state official who admitted it within days. Sun-gazing on LSD has burned retinas in a few documented cases, but not blinded a group of students.

  First documented: 19 May 1967, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, reporting four Santa Barbara students, as quoted in a 1994 Snopes post

  Origin, evidence and 5 references

  Origin

  The first version came from Santa Barbara. On 19 May 1967 the New York Times ran an Associated Press item saying "the vision of four users of LSD has been impaired for life" after they stared at the sun. Its only source was an unnamed spokesman for a local ophthalmological society.[1] Reviewing the coverage in 1994, Snopes noted that "nowhere in this entire article is a single name mentioned".[1]

  The famous version came from Pennsylvania in January 1968. Norman Yoder, the state commissioner for the blind, said six college students had taken LSD, lain in a clearing and stared at the sun, and that "the retinas of their eyes were destroyed". He would not say where: "Yoder had refused to identify the college or name the students".[2] Newsweek described them as "all nice kids, not hippies", found "all totally, permanently and helplessly blind".[1]

  The evidence

  Governor Raymond Shafer ordered an inquiry, and "within a week the hoax was revealed".[3] The state attorney general said inconsistencies in the "case records apparently doctored to fit the story" led investigators to question Yoder "until he admitted the incident was false". Yoder was suspended, and a state official said he had been sent to a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia.[2] Newsweek later printed a correction saying it had "ran the story in good faith".[1]

  Sun-gazing on LSD can still hurt. The pharmacologist David Nichols points to "two documented cases of eye damage" in the medical literature.[1] One is a 1973 report titled "Solar retinopathy from sun-gazing under the influence of LSD".[4] The other describes a 23-year-old man who "sustained severe macular damage by sun gazing" while on a hallucinogen.[5] Each is one patient with a burned macula, not a group of students struck blind.[4][5]

  The propaganda

  The story travelled because officials and the national press carried it. It reached readers through the Associated Press and Newsweek before anyone checked it.[2][1]

  References

  1. Urban folklore: LSD users stare at the sun until blind (Snopes, alt.folklore.urban, October 1994). Erowid, from the Hyperreal drug archives, Wayback capture
  2. Fear over use of LSD starts hoax (Associated Press, Harrisburg). The Michigan Daily, 20 January 1968, page 8, Wayback capture
  3. A 1960s state official claimed Pa. college students took LSD and went blind, and newspapers believed him. Billy Penn (WHYY), 23 January 2022, Wayback capture
  4. Solar retinopathy from sun-gazing under influence of LSD. British Journal of Ophthalmology 57:270 (1973), via PubMed
  5. Severe solar maculopathy associated with the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). American Journal of Ophthalmology 81:413 (1976), via PubMed
• False

  LSD stays in your spinal fluid forever and can trigger a trip years later.

  LSD has a plasma half-life of a few hours and spinal fluid is renewed about four times a day. No study has found LSD stored in a user's spinal fluid. Flashbacks happen, rarely, but they are not stored drug.

  First documented: 10 August 1999, Straight Dope Message Board, thread on acid flashbacks

  Origin, evidence and 6 references

  Origin

  The story was being passed around and argued about by 1999. On a Straight Dope Message Board thread about acid flashbacks, one poster blamed stories of trips set off by exercise for "the myth that LSD can be stored in your system" and "later released by heavy activities".[1]

  Erowid's page on the myth describes the spinal version directly: people claim that "LSD has been found in spinal fluid years after the last time LSD was taken".[2]

  The evidence

  LSD does not stay. In a 2017 study, healthy volunteers took 100 or 200 micrograms by mouth. "The plasma half-life was 2.6 h", and the drug showed "first-order elimination up to 12 h".[3]

  Spinal fluid is not a store. A review of its physiology states that "CSF is renewed about four times every 24 hours".[4] A drug dissolved in it would be washed out, not kept.[4]

  Nobody has shown LSD there years later. Erowid says of the claim: "There is no support for this claim." It asks to hear of any study that has "looked at spinal fluid of LSD users for LSD".[2]

  Flashbacks are a separate and real thing. A 2003 review of 20 studies from 1955 to 2001 found that the word flashback "is defined in so many ways that it is essentially valueless". The persistent visual form, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, "appears to be a genuine but uncommon disorder".[5] A 2014 review says its mechanisms "are largely unknown" and that "low-level visual processing may play an important role".[6] None of the proposed causes is a dose of LSD waiting in the spine.[2][6]

  References

  1. Acid flash backs (thread, Factual Questions). Straight Dope Message Board, August 1999, Wayback capture
  2. Myth debunking: LSD does not stay in your body forever. Erowid (v2.2, May 2006), Wayback capture
  3. Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide in Healthy Subjects. Clinical Pharmacokinetics 56:1219 (2017), via PubMed
  4. Anatomy and physiology of cerebrospinal fluid. European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases 128:309 (2011), via PubMed
  5. Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder: what do we know after 50 years?. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 69:109 (2003), via PubMed
  6. Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder and the serotonergic system: a comprehensive review including new MDMA-related clinical cases. European Neuropsychopharmacology 24:1309 (2014), via PubMed