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Hacker Dosed with LSD While Restoring Historical Synth (2019)
- bashinator 6y ago> Hacker Dosed with Historical LSD While Restoring Historical Synth Sounds like the acid had been in there since the get-go.
- girvo 6y agoThats... unlikely. LSD is not particularly active transdermally (despite it being "well known" that it is), so unless he tasted the crystals... It's also a remarkably unstable molecule for a well-known drug. And anecdotally, I can say that administering a number of drops from a vial of dissolved LSD did not give me anything remotely approaching a trip.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoMaybe the contact cleaner helped dissolve and transport the LSD into his skin?
- girvo 6y agoA technician in Dave Nichol's lab tried this with DMSO, a well-known and much more potent solvent for attempting this: > And yesterday I was talking to Nick Sand, and Nick said, "I made a solution of LSD in DMSO…" -- DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is a chemical that greatly enhances absorption of other chemicals through the skin -- he says, "…I painted it on my skin. Nothing happened." A concentrated solution and nothing happened! How did this very meticulous Swiss chemist get the LSD into his body? I don't know.
- gavinray 6y agoHaha, it's not even that DMSO is just a solvent, that garlicky stuff is a magic potion for turning things into transdermals. Testosterone ester crystals? Not bioavailable at all, but put it in some DMSO and lather on and you're in business. It works for, astoundingly, most anything. And if there's any man you're to trust on the pharmacokinetics of psychedelics, it would be Nichols, our co-founding father of all modern phenethylamine, tryptamine and lysergamide knowledge. Complete hoopla I say.
- girvo 6y agoAnd yet amusingly my initial comment is downvoted and most of the comments here are arguing with me regarding it. LSD is not active transdermally!
- pharrington 6y agoWould you believe https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/21/1960s-rock-music-san-francisco-lsd-buchla-100-synthesizer-grateful-dead/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/21/1960s-rock-musi... ?
- smabie 6y agoApparently it was stored in a cool and dry corner of a classroom. I don't see why LSD couldn't last this long without degrading given the ideal conditions. Also the LSD was found on the inside of the machine, so there wouldn't be any light exposure either.
- ackbar03 6y agoYea I'm putting my money on him having tasted the crystals
- esperent 6y agoUnlikely but not impossible. He could have rubbed his eyes or lips after getting some on his hands. > administering a number of drops from a vial of dissolved LSD did not give me anything remotely approaching a trip What do you mean by "administering"? And what did you dissolve it in? Chlorine will destroy LSD so if you used tap water that might be the reason. Alcohol or distilled water is fine as a storage medium.
- pengaru 6y ago> so unless he tasted the crystals... It doesn't seem too far-fetched that he would do a licked finger dip taste test to help identify what he had found, nor does it seem too far-fetched that he wouldn't want to admit his curiosity. I would have assumed it were a bit of long lost cocaine, nobody expects to have much of a reaction from a little taste test. But LSD is pretty unique in that regard.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- craigmcnamara 6y agoYou can absolutely trip from a transdermal dose. The kind of prying and jimmying required to disassemble a vintage synth unit could easily spread any film or sludge all over a significant part of a person's hands without gloves. Then all it takes is a bit of sweat or touching your face and you'll be unintentionally tripping.
- warent 6y agoThe hardest part for me to believe isn't the transdermal application. I've definitely known of people who who handled LSD and learned to wear gloves the hard way. What is difficult to understand is how a molecule that unstable was able to survive for... over half a century?
- esperent 6y agoWhat makes you think it's unstable? UV light, heat, chlorine, (and perhaps some other things) degrade the molecule. In the absence of those it should be stable for a long time, in salt form (as it's usually made).
- LilBytes 6y agoI've had tabs of acid sitting in a fridge which is naturally light and heat controlled, in a sealed container (within the fridge) be absolutely benign when consumed after being left for over a few months. The only way I've managed to keep LSD protected/improve shelf life is to keep it in it's liquid form and store it in a dropper. I don't doubt that LSD could survive for some period of time on a natural surface but to provide a big "trip" after it was on a surface like a Synth seems a stretch. I'd love to find out the half life of LSD in an open atmosphere like a Synth, I imagine it wouldn't be very long at all.
- 01100011 6y agoand I've had tabs of acid wrapped in tinfoil inside a small ziploc inside a filing cabinet with questionable temperature stability work just fine after several years. Some of that acid, if I remember right, was taken into a rave, lived in my pocket for a few hours inside... foil or a ziploc, I forget, and then came home to rest in that filing cabinet.
- bagacrap 6y agothe concentration in your vial was probably orders of magnitude less than it could have been. We know a very concentrated amount of LSD can cause tripping when applied transdermally, as its effects on humans were first discovered that way.
- ashtonkem 6y agoLSD is one of, if not the, most potent drugs known to humans. Not many other drugs have threshold doses in the micrograms.
- malwarebytess 6y agoHaving worked with crystal I have to agree. And knowing how delicate LSD is to heat, light, air, and moisture I significantly doubt it lasted decades. Similarly, the "thumbprint" urban legends are mostly that...legends.
- Eremotherium 6y ago"Urine fortified with LSD and stored in amber glass or nontransparent polyethylene containers showed no change in concentration under any light conditions. Stability of LSD in transparent containers under light was dependent on the distance between the light source and the samples, the wavelength of light, exposure time, and the intensity of light. After prolonged exposure to heat in alkaline pH conditions, 10 to 15% of the parent LSD epimerized to iso-LSD. Under acidic conditions, less than 5% of the LSD was converted to iso-LSD. We also demonstrated that trace amounts of metal ions in buffer or urine could catalyze the decomposition of LSD and that this process can be avoided by the addition of EDTA. This study demonstrates the importance of proper storage conditions of LSD in urine in order to insure proper analytical testing results over time." https://www.erowid.org/references/refs_view.php?ID=8647 https://www.erowid.org/references/refs_view.php?ID=8647 As to the transdermal activity IIRC Hofmann himself said that it isn't really active and his own trip was probably caused by him getting some on his hands and then rubbing it into a mucous membrane (eyes, nose, mouth).
- LilBytes 6y agoInteresting! Thank you for the source.
- tlrobinson 6y agoI also feel like it's even less believable given it was already an urban legend.
- flattone 6y ago> anecdotally, I can say that administering a number of drops from a vial of dissolved LSD did not give me anything remotely approaching a trip. This indicates to me that it was not LSD. I too have administered drops in a casual fasion (first time) on a 'number of drops' (one should suffice) scale. And it wasnt about does this work it was about will this ever end.
- flattone 6y agoThis summer i simply touched pices of paper which MONTHS earlier had a drop on it. This was stored in foil in a safe. I then tasted my finger, and spent hours feeling possibly good up down feverish. It is true if you dont do the whole deal you just limbo on the terroble initial 'i feel weird maybe good maybe bad probabaly goood maybe bad' But image just puddles of then dried lsd residue .. and this guy hour + after working on those surfaces certainly ate lunch etc. great times.
- girvo 6y agoI wasn't clear with that sentence, I apologise: I applied those drops transdermally. Nothing happened. But taken sublingually/orally, different story!
- ex3ndr 6y agoIsn't this is how LSD was discovered?
- Threeve303 6y agoI've ...heard through the grapevine that if you handle large quantities of the stuff with your bare hands you will trip for a long time
- bitexploder 6y agoWell they tested it right? So the LSD was on it somehow. Maybe it wasn’t from the 60s, but it makes for an amusing story regardless.
- awtawtwat3aw 6y agoyou are _very_ ignorant. liquid lsd will work just fine being dropped in your hand. research what the family members had to go through in order to handle crystal and lay sheets. they had to go through what they did because of the extremely high chance you'd be tripping just from working with it.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI have no idea how long LSD would last on a surface, but I do know transdermal absorption is a thing. A friend of mine in college had it happen, but but he was handling sheets with several hundred doses on them. It's also possible some transferred to his fingers and made its way to his mouth. If there were an accidental dosing, I suspect the original dosage would have been quite high. Anecdotally, I can say that taking a thin sheet smaller than the end of a pencil eraser I tripped for a solid 4-5 hours. LSD dosage and purity varies greatly, but where it used to be cheap and strong from what I understand it's quite difficult to find "good" LSD now.
- sigstoat 6y agohe was cleaning it off using solvents and no gloves. that’s exactly how you get things through your skin.
- zelly 6y agoIt sounded like he encountered a massive amount of pure crystals. If he touched it then touched his nose or ate something with his hand, then he could have gotten a huge dose.
- coldtea 6y ago>Thats... unlikely. LSD is not particularly active transdermally It can be and of course you can always touch your mouth, eyes, etc if you have it and you don't know it. Not to mention - there are several varieties of LSD (liquid, crystal form, etc), and it can be soaked, have stabilisers added, etc. >And anecdotally, I can say that administering a number of drops from a vial of dissolved LSD did not give me anything remotely approaching a trip. Could it be the dealer duped you? A "a number of drops from a vial of dissolved LSD" will very much give you a trip (100% so if administering means "orally").
- girvo 6y agoNo, the dealer didn't dupe me, and we had many successful trips when taking it normally (and laying it on blotters). It was not active transdermally. Dave Nicholl's own technicians attempted to make LSD active transdermally using DSMO and failed.
- goatsi 6y agoNick Sand was the individual who attempted transdermal absorption using DMSO: >Another fact: I've made LSD in my lab on many occasions for research purposes, possibly in not so meticulous a manner as Albert Hofmann. Nothing ever happened. I had several graduate students who made LSD as an intermediate for projects. No accidental ingestion of LSD ever occurred. A technician in my lab makes it routinely because we use it as a drug to train our rats. He's learned by experience that he never gets high, nothing ever happens. And yesterday I was talking to Nick Sand, and Nick said, "I made a solution of LSD in DMSO…" -- DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is a chemical that greatly enhances absorption of other chemicals through the skin -- he says, "…I painted it on my skin. Nothing happened." A concentrated solution and nothing happened! How did this very meticulous Swiss chemist get the LSD into his body? I don't know. https://erowid.org/general/conferences/conference_mindstates4_nichols.shtml https://erowid.org/general/conferences/conference_mindstates...
- erickhill 6y agoHe might have even dosed by accidentally getting it on his fingers then rubbing his eyes or (not trying to be gross) pickin' that nose, yo. Get it into some mucus membranes and off you go. The tongue is the most common way to absorb the stuff, though. From what I was told, you didn't eat the tiny paper that was soaked in it - the LSD was absorbed through your tongue.
- DanBC 6y ago> so unless he tasted the crystals We have plenty of evidence that people's hand hygiene is often pretty poor, so licking his contaminated fingers isn't surprising to me.
- dleslie 6y agoLSD ought to be legal.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI suspect that LSD and other psychedelics will be the next area in the drug legalization war, now that weed is basically down to rearguard actions.
- centimeter 6y agoIt’s already easy enough to acquire relative to the low frequency with which people want to use it. As an entirely non-habit-forming drug, you’re unlikely to find a population of people motivated to get easy access to it.
- dbuder 6y agoNon habit forming? Let me take you to a bush doof.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWeed is relatively low habit forming, significantly less than a lot of other legal drugs, especially nicotine. I’m not sure if the difference between weed and psychedelics in the habit area is enough to affect the formation of a reform movement.
- ajzinsbwbs 6y agoIt’s a controversial statement to describe weed as addictive or habit-forming, but in any case, many people use it daily. The same isn’t true of LSD. Anecdotally, I saw a lot of friends get cranky when their weed supply was briefly interrupted by covid-19. The public reaction was strong enough that dispensaries got to reopen almost immediately.
- quickthrowman 6y ago
- thought_alarm 6y agoLet me tell you about the time I got chalked up on blow, dusting out the pots of an old Yamaha DX7.
- qntmfred 6y ago> We’ve learned this lesson ourselves cracking open broken laptops. You might find anything from coffee to soda, to pet urine or worse. or black beans https://youtu.be/4HhPK8XC75A https://youtu.be/4HhPK8XC75A
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peterkos 6y agoI thought it was going to be that baked beans meme but no, they literally brought some random repair guy over to "fix" a computer Full of Beans
- mercer 6y agoLove how the repair guy didn't respond to the guy's confusion over it being Windows 7 and him only having like five windows open at a time. After years of helping people with 'computery' stuff, I've just stopped explaining things (when I can) if I notice there's no way they'll get it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jdkee 6y ago“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
- bredren 6y ago“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
- monadic2 6y agoLSD is volatile; there's a reason you store it away from moisture and light. I find this narrative unlikely. Even the moisture in the air will reduce the potency very rapidly.
- palijer 6y agoSeeing how fond the Dead were about dosing people without their knowledge (which is horrible and despite being a deadhead, I find abhorrent), I'm sure Bear would be glad he got someone tripping from beyond the grave.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWhile extremely unethical, there is something to this as a social strategy. We know that exposure to psychedelic drugs alters one of the “Big Five” personality traits, openness to new experience, permanently. A large group of people doses by LSD without their knowledge would actually emerge from the experience markedly different than they went in. Also, probably more than a little freaked out or pissed off.
- deathgrips 6y agoSome of the OG psychologists working with LSD wanted to mail samples to world leaders so they would achieve world peace.
- ashtonkem 6y agoMailing unmarked drugs to world leaders seems like a good way to get a ballistic response.
- jeffdavis 6y agoWhat do you mean "social strategy"?
- ashtonkem 6y agoI mean if you wanted to affect a change on a society.
- sigstoat 6y agothe forensic toxicologist and biochemist sitting next to me, who also has at least as much experience with LSD as any of you lot, sees nothing at all improbable about the events described.
- monadic2 6y agoCare to explain rather than flaunt credentials?
- monadic2 6y agoApparently not lol
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoI am struck dumb with awe in the presence of such eminent authority as your friend :P I have a serious question for someone with your friend's expertise, though. I always thought that LSD "blotters" have a use-by date after which they lose their potency. Word was that they evaporate or some such. Is that true, or is it just an urban legend? I don't reckon any of the people I've had this kind of conversation with would have kept any LSD blotters around for long enough to really find out. Obviously, having heard this rumour I was surprised by the article. Friends I read it to also thought the LSD should have expired by then.
- capableweb 6y agoWith the right conditions, you can store LSD indefinitely (well, until the end of the world or similar). I've certainly managed to keep my own LSD still potent after ~2 years of first getting it, by storing it in a cold, dark and dry place. Some older friends have described to me finding ~5 year old LSD that still worked, but not sure I trust that.
- dekhn 6y agoIt's normally stored in liquid form, not in blotters. To keep it for long periods it needs to be temperature stable, humidity stable, and extremely low light. All of this is well-documented in the literature.
- zapzupnz 6y agoThe article isn't interesting for the content so much as the comment section. Check that out immediately after reading the article, it's much more entertaining and informative.
- artursapek 6y agoImagine accidentally taking the same acid that Jerry Garcia might have taken 60 years ago. That's wild.
- staticautomatic 6y agoI would just like to say how pleased I am that Hacker News is the kind of place where you can have a conversation about drugs and not a single person refers to themselves as SWIM.
- SenHeng 6y agoI'm not sure I want to google what SWIM stands for.
- astronautjones 6y ago"not me personally but a guy i know"
- nefitty 6y agoSWIM is "Someone Who Isn't Me". People use it instead of "I" as in "I committed the crime" becomes "SWIM committed the crime." Presumably people really believe that this is some sort of legitimate infosec behavior. I like that it makes infosec important, but it might trick people into thinking infosec is as easy as just using an acronym.
- baby 6y agoA lot of people did it for fun.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- WaxProlix 6y agoAttitudes have changed, and the HN posting crowd is much more insulated from the vagaries of law enforcement. The veneer of plausible deniability just isn't needed here as much I think.
- rowawey 6y agoI'll raise my home-made, precisely-formulated CBD tincture to that. Ingredients: - 99.9% CBD isolate bought in bulk with real batch lab results - organic coconut oil - a tiny bit of pure vitamin E T-50 All ingredients sourced from good vendors. Mixture stored in a batch-dated, dark glass container (olive oil containers are good), and delivered sublingually in an eye-dropper bottle where the mg/drop is known. The exact recipe depends on the volume to be made and the desired dosage per drop. Tools / supplies: - 0.5 mL glass pipette - 20 g scale (sub-mg accuracy and precision) - 1 L dark glass bottle
- rendall 6y agoI'm glad the hacker is ok. Getting dosed is no joke, especially with no previous experience. It can cause long-lasting psychological effects. Context is key. Fortunately, the hacker recognized what was happening.
- mastrsushi 6y agoWoah so cool he was on drugs while he did it??? That amplifies everything, so meaningful.
- Stratoscope 6y agoRelated discussion, including a story of how I met Art Garfunkel on the way to visit Don Buchla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19992038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19992038
- dang 6y agoThat's a great thread! Far better than this one. Everybody go there.
- rowawey 6y agoIf there is a moral here, it should be to take precautions when working on equipment which might contain dangerous substances. We’ve learned this lesson ourselves cracking open broken laptops. You might find anything from coffee to soda, to pet urine or worse. A box of nitrile gloves definitely should be standard equipment in any hacker’s lab. _Louis Rossmann entered the chat_ See also: - Louis repairs flies-infested laptop - Louis repairs semen-"water damaged" laptop - Louis repairs cockroach-infested laptop
- kotutku 6y agoThis story is almost too good to be true. I can confirm from my own experience, that it's pretty easy to accidentally absorb LSD by skin contact.