i like your point, but your shame has no place here.
Isnât it more likely we have a case of ergot poisoning? Ergotamine is used to create lysergic acid the precursor to LSD. History is full of stories of people eating a grain infected with ergot that causes sickness, hallucinations, and even death.
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@spacedoggity; true. My only point was that it wasnât necessarily âtamperingâ which is what the source article implies. Itâs also possible that the LSD result was unrelated to the sickness - ergot in the beef (or rye bread) might lead to a false positive, while something else led to the illness.
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Precisely what I was thinking. What a waste, if itâs really attributable to LSD at all. Iâve been sick with food poisoning while in the woods and well away from any medical help, and the hallucinations combined with the utter lack of light pollution out there made for quite an experience.
Even though I did puke/shart a lot.
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Heck, until Decimalization we used to use LSD as currency in the UK; and people ask what the Romans ever did for us?!
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I would expect the children to have shown signs tripping balls first. I wonder why they were the last to be hit?
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So out there somewhere is a cattle mutation that naturally produces LSD?
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This is blatantly wrong. LSD does not hang around in the body long enough or in sufficient quantity to cause âflashbacks.â Flashbacks are a psychological phenomenon that has nothing to do with a fat-soluble redose two years later.
It is also not fat soluble - check your polar chemistry. Itâs water soluble, last I checked.
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Tainted? Sure. But with LSD? Seems damn unlikely.
I agree with the majority on this thread â story sounds like BS. There are thousands of things that can cause hallucinations. Considering that LSD is active at microgram doses, I think that medical examiner is probably just making shit up. They do that some timesâŚ
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-clears throat-
Prove it.
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Doesnât say they were unconscious - just that they were experiencing shortness of breath, which could have been hyperventilation from panic. It may have been done as a precaution, in case they had an anaphylactic reaction to an at-the-time-unknown contaminant.
Iâm not saying the medical treatment they got was wrong - just that if the medical staff had known at the time it was LSD they were dealing with, they might have been able to adjust the treatment accordingly.
LSD has basically no physical symptoms other than dilated pupils. There are literally no known instances of LSD overdose. But someone on a heavy trip, especially not realizing why, can definitely have an incredibly intense panic reaction, combined with other hallucinated physical symptoms. âPsychedelic first aidâ is actually a fully legitimate thing, but you can only know to administer if it you know youâre dealing with a psychedelic reaction.
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I used to do the olâ hippy bus/free festie/peace convoy thing for a while back in the day, and hash was our de facto currency/welfare state. If you lived on site, hash was a tenner an eighth, and fifteen to townies, meaning anyone completely on their uppers always had a way to get back on their feet. I was a staunch adversary of legalisation for many years just because of that: it was ours, not theirsâŚ
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Sayinâ it so I donât have to. Merci.
Much like seasickness, my immediate prescription would be, âsit under a treeâ.
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OK, it looks like I was misinformed. If weâre talking about unspecified ergot metabolites rather than LSD proper, though, we canât assume anything about polarity.
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If youâre a medic and know somebodyâs taken LSD and is having a bad trip, the appropriate treatment is to get them into a nice calm environment, possibly with padded walls and quiet music, and maybe consider giving them a small dose of a benzodiazepine (e.g. valium) to help them calm down, and 6-12 hours later theyâll have come down from the trip.
If youâre a medic and you donât know that theyâve taken psychedelics, but theyâre having hallucinations and panic attacks, and itâs multiple people so you rule out one person having psychotic problems, youâre probably going to assume some kind of neurotoxin poisoning, and you might overreact as a precaution, especially with the pregnant woman. Intubation surprises me a bit, but panicky people may be hyperventilating as well as overheating, so it may look like theyâre having breathing trouble.
Iâm a bit skeptical that LSD would have survived cooking meat (especially steak, where itâs unlikely to penetrate to the less-hot middle; itâd be a lot more credible in hamburger), but not everybodyâs careful about cross-contamination when theyâre cooking, maybe they carved the steak on the cutting board which had LSD-tainted meat juices or something, or theyâd used steak sauce which was actually dosed or something.
Back in the 60s and 70s, there were people who thought dosing their friends was funny, which was a real asshole move. A friend of mineâs one experience with it was when one of her husbandâs friends dosed her with about 500mcg, which she said was 18 hours of bad trip hell. And back then, medical treatment for bad trips tended to be thorazine, which did much more damage than anything the acid would do.
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A website that constantly writes about âBad Scienceâ and the insanity of the drug war parroting an extremely dubious âscientificâ finding by the police deserves a massive cone of shame!
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This story appeared in the Gawker-verse the same news cycle as the NYT article âLSD, Reconsidered for Therapyâ. Such coincidences are illustrative of fnords the statistical likelihood of many phenomena that otherwise seem improbable.
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Botulism would fit with the requirement for mechanical ventilation but not with the confusion or hallucinations. Could they have picked their own mushrooms for the red wine sauce (doesnât explain the ventilation)?
anticholinergic poisons like atropine/datura could fit this toxidrome as well - the old saw red as a beet, dry as a bone, mad as a hatter.
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Shit, Iâd probably decide I was your friend if you offered me that whatever state I was inâŚ
[edit: and yeah, spiking people is no joke. Iâve warned folks before that think that shitâs funny Iâll scar them for it. Fucking evil]
