3 ms·

Thats... 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 rema

by girvo 6y ago

Thats... 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 ago
Maybe the contact cleaner helped dissolve and transport the LSD into his skin?
- girvo 6y ago
  A 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 ago
    Haha, 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 ago
      And 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 ago
Would 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 ago
Apparently 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 ago
Yea I'm putting my money on him having tasted the crystals
esperent 6y ago
Unlikely 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 ago
You 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    What 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 ago
      I'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 ago
        and 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 ago
the 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 ago
  LSD is one of, if not the, most potent drugs known to humans. Not many other drugs have threshold doses in the micrograms.
malwarebytess 6y ago
Having 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 ago
    Interesting! Thank you for the source.
tlrobinson 6y ago
I 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 ago
  This 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 ago
  I wasn't clear with that sentence, I apologise: I applied those drops transdermally. Nothing happened. But taken sublingually/orally, different story!
ex3ndr 6y ago
Isn't this is how LSD was discovered?
Threeve303 6y ago
I'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 ago
Well 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 ago
you 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.
- warent 6y ago
  Someone sharing an opinion on this hardly makes them "_very_ ignorant." Relax
- ElFitz 6y ago
  See comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535697
ogre_codes 6y ago
I 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 ago
he was cleaning it off using solvents and no gloves. that’s exactly how you get things through your skin.
zelly 6y ago
It 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 ago
  No, 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 ago
    Nick 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 ago
He 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.

by girvo 6y ago

annoyingnoob 6y ago

Maybe the contact cleaner helped dissolve and transport the LSD into his skin?

girvo 6y ago
A 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 ago
  Haha, 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 ago
    And 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 ago

Would 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 ago

Apparently 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 ago

Yea I'm putting my money on him having tasted the crystals

esperent 6y ago

Unlikely 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 ago

You 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 ago
The 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 ago
  What 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 ago
    I'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 ago
      and 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 ago

the 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 ago
LSD is one of, if not the, most potent drugs known to humans. Not many other drugs have threshold doses in the micrograms.

malwarebytess 6y ago

Having 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 ago
  Interesting! Thank you for the source.

tlrobinson 6y ago

I 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 ago
This 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 ago
I wasn't clear with that sentence, I apologise: I applied those drops transdermally. Nothing happened. But taken sublingually/orally, different story!

ex3ndr 6y ago

Isn't this is how LSD was discovered?

Threeve303 6y ago

I'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 ago

Well 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 ago

you 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.

warent 6y ago
Someone sharing an opinion on this hardly makes them "_very_ ignorant." Relax
ElFitz 6y ago
See comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535697

ogre_codes 6y ago

I 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 ago

he was cleaning it off using solvents and no gloves. that’s exactly how you get things through your skin.

zelly 6y ago

It 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 ago
No, 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 ago
  Nick 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 ago

He 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.