LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD (from German Lysergsäure-diethylamid), and known colloquially as acid or lucy is a potent psychedelic drug.[12] Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception.[13] At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, visual, and auditory hallucinations.[14][15] Dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, and increased body temperature are typical.[16]
Effects typically begin within half an hour and can last for up to 20 hours (although on average, experiences last 8–12 hours).[16][17] LSD is also capable of causing mystical experiences and ego dissolution.[15][18] It is used mainly as a recreational drug or for spiritual reasons.[16][19] LSD is both the prototypical psychedelic and one of the "classical" psychedelics, being the psychedelic with the greatest scientific and cultural significance.[12] LSD is synthesized as a solid compound, typically in the form of a powder or a crystalline material. This solid LSD is then dissolved in a liquid solvent, such as ethanol or distilled water, to create a solution. The liquid serves as a carrier for the LSD, allowing for accurate dosage and administration onto small pieces of blotter paper called tabs. LSD is typically either swallowed or held under the tongue.[13]
LSD is pharmacologically considered to be non-addictive with a low potential for abuse. Adverse psychological reactions are possible, such as anxiety, paranoia, and delusions.[7] In rare cases, LSD can induce "flashbacks", known as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, in which a person experiences apparent lasting or persistent visual hallucinations or perceptual distortions, such as visual snow and palinopsia.[20][21] LSD is structurally related to substituted tryptamines, a class of compounds that includes psilocybin, the active compound found in psychedelic mushrooms; this LSD shares some mechanisms of action and psychedelic effects with psilocybin and other tryptamines.[22][23][24]
The effects of LSD are thought to stem primarily from it being an agonist at the 5-HT~2A receptor. While exactly how LSD exerts its effects by agonism at this receptor is not fully understood, corresponding increased glutamatergic neurotransmission and reduced default mode network activity are thought to be key mechanisms of action.[7][12][25][26][27] In addition to serotonin, LSD also binds to dopamine D~1 and D~2 receptors, which is thought to contribute to reports of LSD being more stimulating than compounds such as psilocybin.[28][29] In pure form, LSD is clear or white in color, has no smell, and is crystalline.[13] It breaks down with exposure to ultraviolet light.[16]
LSD was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 from lysergic acid, a chemical derived from the hydrolysis of ergotamine, an alkaloid found in ergot, a fungus that infects grain.[16][20] LSD was the 25th of various lysergamides Hofmann synthesized from lysergic acid while trying to develop a new analeptic, hence the alternate name LSD-25. Hofmann discovered its effects in humans in 1943, after unintentionally ingesting an unknown amount, possibly absorbing it through his skin.[30][31][32] LSD was subject to exceptional interest within the field of psychiatry in the 1950s and early 1960s, with Sandoz distributing LSD to researchers under the trademark name Delysid in an attempt to find a marketable use for it.[31]
LSD-assisted psychotherapy was used in the 1950s and early 1960s by psychiatrists such as Humphry Osmond, who pioneered the application of LSD to the treatment of alcoholism, with promising results.[31][33][34][35] Osmond coined the term "psychedelic" (lit. mind manifesting) as a term for LSD and related hallucinogens, superseding the previously held "psychotomimetic" model in which LSD was believed to mimic schizophrenia.
In contrast to schizophrenia, LSD can induce transcendent experiences, or mental states that transcend the experience of everyday consciousness, with lasting psychological benefit.[12][31] During this time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began using LSD in the research project Project MKUltra, which used psychoactive substances to aid interrogation. The CIA administered LSD to unwitting test subjects in order to observe how they would react, the most well-known example of this being Operation Midnight Climax.[31] LSD was one of several psychoactive substances evaluated by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps as possible non-lethal incapacitants in the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments.[31]
In the 1960s, LSD and other psychedelics were adopted by, and became synonymous with, the counterculture movement due to their perceived ability to expand consciousness. This resulted in LSD being viewed as a cultural threat to American values and the Vietnam war effort, and it was designated as a Schedule I (illegal for medical as well as recreational use) substance in 1968.[36] It was listed as a Schedule 1 controlled substance by the United Nations in 1971 and currently has no approved medical uses.[16] As of 2017, about 10% of people in the United States have used LSD at some point in their lives, while 0.7% have used it in the last year.[37] It was most popular in the 1960s to 1980s.[16] The use of LSD among US adults increased 56.4% from 2015 to 2018.[38]
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History
... affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.
—Albert Hofmann, on his first experience with LSD[145]: 15
Main article: History of lysergic acid diethylamide
LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938[146] by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. The abbreviation "LSD" is from the German "Lysergsäurediethylamid".[147]
LSD's psychedelic properties were discovered 5 years later when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical.[148] The first intentional ingestion of LSD occurred on April 19, 1943,[145] when Hofmann ingested 250 µg of LSD. He said this would be a threshold dose based on the dosages of other ergot alkaloids. Hofmann found the effects to be much stronger than he anticipated.[149] Sandoz Laboratories introduced LSD as a psychiatric drug in 1947 and marketed LSD as a psychiatric panacea, hailing it "as a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, 'sexual perversions', and alcoholism."[150] Sandoz would send the drug for free to researchers investigating its effects.[30]
Duration: 5 minutes and 29 seconds.5:29'Effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) on Troops Marching' – 16mm film produced by the United States military circa 1958
Beginning in the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a research program code named Project MKUltra. The CIA introduced LSD to the United States, purchasing the entire world's supply for $240,000 and propagating the LSD through CIA front organizations to American hospitals, clinics, prisons and research centers.[151] Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subjects' knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report in 1975.
In 1963, the Sandoz patents on LSD expired[136] and the Czech company Spofa began to produce the substance.[30] Sandoz stopped the production and distribution in 1965.[30]
Albert Hofmann in 2006
Several figures, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Al Hubbard, had begun to advocate the consumption of LSD. LSD became central to the counterculture of the 1960s.[152] In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Leary, Huxley, Alan Watts and Arthur Koestler,[153][154] and according to L. R. Veysey they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.[155]
On October 24, 1968, possession of LSD was made illegal in the United States.[156] The last FDA approved study of LSD in patients ended in 1980, while a study in healthy volunteers was made in the late 1980s. Legally approved and regulated psychiatric use of LSD continued in Switzerland until 1993.[157]
In November 2020, Oregon became the first US state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of LSD after voters approved Ballot Measure 110.[158]
Society and culture
Counterculture
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By the mid-1960s, the youth countercultures in California, particularly in San Francisco, had adopted the use of hallucinogenic drugs, with the first major underground LSD factory established by Owsley Stanley.[159] From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events primarily staged in or near San Francisco, involving the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony.[160][161] The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).[162]
In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened the Psychedelic Shop in January 1966.[163] The Thelins opened the store to promote safe use of LSD, which was then still legal in California. The Psychedelic Shop helped to further popularize LSD in the Haight and to make the neighborhood the unofficial capital of the hippie counterculture in the United States. Ron Thelin was also involved in organizing the Love Pageant rally, a protest held in Golden Gate park to protest California's newly adopted ban on LSD in October 1966. At the rally, hundreds of attendees took acid in unison. Although the Psychedelic Shop closed after barely a year-and-a-half in business, its role in popularizing LSD was considerable.[164]
Duration: 3 minutes and 3 seconds.3:03
by Lambert P. Lambert and the Gorgettes, from the album Abbra Cadaver, 1967
A similar and connected nexus of LSD use in the creative arts developed around the same time in London. A key figure in this phenomenon in the UK was British academic Michael Hollingshead, who first tried LSD in America in 1961 while he was the Executive Secretary for the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange. After being given a large quantity of pure Sandoz LSD (which was still legal at the time) and experiencing his first "trip," Hollingshead contacted Aldous Huxley, who suggested that he get in touch with Harvard academic Timothy Leary, and over the next few years, in concert with Leary and Richard Alpert, Hollingshead played a major role in their famous LSD research at Millbrook before moving to New York City, where he conducted his own LSD experiments. In 1965 Hollingshead returned to the UK and founded the World Psychedelic Center in Chelsea, London.
Music and art
Main article: LSD art
Psychedelic art attempts to capture the visions experienced on a psychedelic trip.
In both music and art, the influence of LSD was soon being more widely seen and heard thanks to the bands that participated in the Acid Tests and related events, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and through the inventive poster and album art of San Francisco-based artists like Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson, meant to evoke the visual experience of an LSD trip. LSD had a strong influence on the Grateful Dead and the culture of "Deadheads."[165]
Among the many famous people in the UK that Michael Hollingshead is reputed to have introduced to LSD are artist and Hipgnosis founder Storm Thorgerson, and musicians Donovan, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison.
Although establishment concern about the new drug led to it being declared an illegal drug by the Home Secretary in 1966, LSD was soon being used widely in the upper echelons of the British art and music scene, including members of the Beatles,[166] the Rolling Stones,[167] the Moody Blues,[168] the Small Faces,[169] Syd Barrett,[170] Jimi Hendrix and others, and the products of these experiences were soon being both heard and seen by the public with singles like the Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park" and LPs like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Cream's Disraeli Gears, which featured music that showed the obvious influence of the musicians' recent psychedelic excursions, and which were packaged in elaborately-designed album covers that featured vividly-coloured psychedelic artwork by artists like Peter Blake, Martin Sharp, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Nigel Waymouth and Michael English) and art/music collective The Fool.
In the 1960s, musicians from psychedelic music and psychedelic rock bands began to refer (at first indirectly, and later explicitly) to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music. A number of features are often included in psychedelic music. Exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla are common.[171]
Electric guitars are used to create feedback, and are played through wah wah and fuzzbox effect pedals.[172] Elaborate studio effects are often used, such as backwards tapes, panning, phasing, long delay loops, and extreme reverb.[173] In the 1960s there was a use of primitive electronic instruments such as early synthesizers and the theremin.[174][175] Later forms of electronic psychedelia also employed repetitive computer-generated beats.[176] Songs allegedly referring to LSD include John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," although the authors of the latter song repeatedly denied this claim.[177][178][179]
In modern times, LSD has had a prominent influence on artists such as Keith Haring, electronic dance music, and the jam band Phish.
Legal status
The United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (adopted in 1971) requires the signing parties to prohibit LSD. Hence, it is illegal in all countries that were parties to the convention, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. However, enforcement of those laws varies from country to country. Medical and scientific research with LSD in humans is permitted under the 1971 UN Convention.[180]
Australia
LSD is a Schedule 9 prohibited substance in Australia under the Poisons Standard (February 2017).[181] A Schedule 9 substance is defined as a substance which may be abused or misused, the manufacture, possession, sale or use of which should be prohibited by law except when required for medical or scientific research, or for analytical, teaching or training purposes with approval of Commonwealth and/or State or Territory Health Authorities.[181]
In Western Australia section 9 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1981 provides for summary trial before a magistrate for possession of less than 0.004g; section 11 provides rebuttable presumptions of intent to sell or supply if the quantity is 0.002g or more, or of possession for the purpose of trafficking if 0.01g.[182]
Canada
In Canada, LSD is a controlled substance under Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.[54] Every person who seeks to obtain the substance, without disclosing authorization to obtain such substances 30 days before obtaining another prescription from a practitioner, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years. Possession for purpose of trafficking is an indictable offence punishable by imprisonment for 10 years.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, LSD is a Schedule 1 Class "A" drug. This means it has no recognized legitimate uses and possession of the drug without a licence is punishable with 7 years' imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine, and trafficking is punishable with life imprisonment and an unlimited fine (see main article on drug punishments Misuse of Drugs Act 1971).
In 2000, after consultation with members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Substance Misuse, the UK Police Foundation issued the Runciman Report which recommended "the transfer of LSD from Class A to Class B."[183]
In November 2009, the UK Transform Drug Policy Foundation released in the House of Commons a guidebook to the legal regulation of drugs, After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation, which details options for regulated distribution and sale of LSD and other psychedelics.[184]
United States
LSD is Schedule I in the United States, according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.[185] This means LSD is illegal to manufacture, buy, possess, process, or distribute without a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). By classifying LSD as a Schedule I substance, the DEA holds that it has a high potential for abuse and no legitimate medical use, and is unsafe to use even under medical supervision.[185]
There can also be substantial discrepancies between the amount of chemical LSD that one possesses and the amount of possession with which one can be charged in the US. This is because LSD is almost always present in a medium (e.g. blotter or neutral liquid), and in some contexts, the amount that can be considered with respect to sentencing is the total mass of the drug and its medium. This discrepancy was the subject of 1995 United States Supreme Court case, Neal v. United States, which determined that for finding minimum sentence lengths, the total medium weight is used, while for determining the severity of the offense, an estimation of the chemical mass is used.[186]
Lysergic acid and lysergic acid amide, LSD precursors, are both classified in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.[187] Ergotamine tartrate, a precursor to lysergic acid, is regulated under the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act.
Personal possession of small amounts of drugs including LSD (40 units or less) was decriminalized in the U.S. state of Oregon on February 1, 2021.[188] This came as a result of the passing of 2020 Oregon Ballot Measure 110. The movement to decriminalize psychedelics in the United States includes LSD in the ongoing effort in California. In November 2020, California State Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill to decriminalize psychedelics such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and LSD in California. In April 2021, the bill was approved by the Senates Public Safety Committee and the Health Committee, in May 2021, it was cleared by the Senate Appropriations Committee and approved by the California Senate, and in June 2021, advanced by the Assembly Public Safety Committee.[189] In mid-2022, the bill was gutted by committee and limited to organizing a study. Wiener announced that he is planning to reintroduce the bill in 2023.[190]
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