LSD
Courtney Haller
Who the heck made this thing?
LSD was actually an accident, it was never purposely made. “All that 32-year-old Albert Hoffman wanted to do in 1938 was synthesize a chemical compound that would stimulate the respiratory and circulatory systems.” He had gone to work for Sandoz, a Swiss chemical company, in 1929, after graduation from the University of Zurich. Sandoz, founded in 1886, had started out manufacturing dyes and, later, saccharin. There wasn’t even a formal pharmaceutical department until 1917, when professor Arthur Stoll isolated an active substance called ergotamine from ergot, a fungus found in tainted rye that had been used as a “folk medicine” for generations.
In its natural form and in quantity, ergot was a deadly poison and a scourge responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over many centuries. In 857 in what is now Germany, a contemporary accounting of the events of the year recorded that “a great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death.”
What exactly is in this drug?
Some blotter and liquid acid has been sold since 2013 in the Americas and Europe contains “NBOMe compounds” instead of LSD. The NBOMe chemicals are active under one milligram, and can cause strong effects even on a single 1/4" square. The blotter or liquid with NBOMe compounds is usually identifiably bitter, where LSD-containing liquid or blotter has a very mild metallic flavor or no flavor at all. LSD is one of the most powerful mood-changing chemicals. It is a clear or white odorless material made from lysergic acid, which is found in a fungus that grows on rye and other grains. LSD has many other names, including Acid, Blotter, Dots, and Yellow Sunshine.