This brief article and the associated video clip mention a girl who slipped into a coma and died after taking 10 hits of LSD.
Now, I’ve always heard that the chances of overdosing on LSD are insignificant. I’ve heard stories of someone who snorted a line of acid, thinking it was cocaine, and suffered no physical harm.
The “moral” of the clip seems to be that acid is too dangerous to mess with, and I’m wondering if fact checking took a back seat to the delivery of that moral. The clip says she was taking prescription medication; could an interaction between LSD and another drug have caused her death? Is this a rare case of LSD overdose, or is it more likely that she actually took a different drug?
The misconception that LSD is non-toxic stems from the fact that that the average dose is mesured in micro-grams. Even a heavy overdose of 100 hits (a milligram) is not likely to be immediatly fatal.
But I nsure wouldn’t want to be that guy.
A “line” of pure LSD would probably weigh out to a tenth to a quarter gram.
If it didn’t kill you outright, you would never be able to wipe your own ass again.
EvilGhandi, 100 hits of acid is not a milligram, rather 6-10 milligrams. The ED50(threshold dose) is 25 mcg, so a dose can’t be 10 mcg.
LSD is non-toxic. This comes down to semantics. Every substance has a lethal dose. Every. The estimated lethal dose (via inter-species scaling) in humans is around 15 milligrams. There has been one documented death by LSD poisoning so far, when a male mistaking LSD in powder form for speed, snorted 320 mg. There have been other cases of people consuming 30-40 mg and surviving after recovering in a hospital for a couple of days.
According to the DEA’s intelligence alert from a year back, 5-MeO-AMT has been appearing (search on that page for ‘blotter’) on blotter papers and cubes, like acid. The threshold dose for 5MeO is 4-5 mg, but 15 -20 mg is an overdose, which means the margin is much much narrower than LSD’s. Remember that you can’t know what’s actually in a pill or cube or paper. Now that poor girl died 3 days after consuming. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did turn out to be LSD, but it remains to be seen what they detect in her blood.
Furthermore, IIRC from my psychopharmacology class lo these many years ago… LSD is the only psychoactive substance for which there is a known antidote. I believe it’s Thorazine, which can stop a good acid trip in seconds. So, even if someone ingests 100 hits, if the person has some friends, a trip to the ER could save one from a really, really bad trip.
I think this post is misleading. Thorazine has been used for LSD overdose, but is not ecommended, precisely because it brings the user down with a ‘crash’. Also can cause serious complications if there are other drugs involved (alcohol, barbiturates, narcotics, etc.). Also, it only terminates the altered mental state, not any toxicity
By contrast, several other ‘psychoactive’ drugs have “complete antidotes”. Naloxone and naltrexone are opioid antagonists that can instantly end both the “high” and the toxicity of overdoses of opium , heroin, morphine, etc. In the ER, it’s “the drug no one ever thanks you for” because it plunges a overdose victim from the ultimate opioid high of their lives into instant withdrawal. In most cases, Flumazenil counteracts the effects of benzodiazapines (a class of hypnotics/sedatives including Valium, Librium, Versed, and Rohypnol aka “roofies”) almost as rapidly and thoroughly.
There are many different definitions of the term “psychoactive”. Perhaps you are using it in the sense formerly indicated by the word “psychometic”?
Assuming an LD50 in humans of 15 mg/kg (from the linked thread, with a little averaging), a 150 lb person would have to ingest over a gram of LSD to have a 50% chance of death. Ten hits is less than 2 milligrams. Does that mean we can reasonably rule out LSD as a cause of this girl’s death?
There are numerous toxic hallucinogens available for purchase on the Internet. Plus, a couple years ago the DEA busted some people who were responsible for manufacturing over 90% of LSD in the U.S.
Well, I’m not a pharmacologist, but based on the information I dug up for that other thread, as well as by other posters there, I’d have to say it probably wasn’t the LSD itself. It seems more likely, to me at least, that some other substance, which either the LSD was laced with, or was ingested around the same time may be the culprit. Or perhaps the girl had some latent medical problem that the drug(s) exacerbated. As it stands, I can’t see how that relatively samll quantity of LSD on its own could kill an otherwise healthy person.
II Gyan II
“EvilGhandi, 100 hits of acid is not a milligram, rather 6-10 milligrams”
Correct of course. I didnt think through the numbers.
I will disagree that there are any semantics involved. If a half a gram of something will kill you dead as dead can be, we aint talking purified spring water here.
I will wager I could swallow half a gram of OTC rat poision with little to no effect. Is rat poision concidered non toxic at a half gram level?
It comes down to what is the “normal” dose, not to any specific quantity. Caffeine is not generally considered toxic, yet 10 grams of caffeine could kill you. A normal dose of caffeine would not. Nor would a normal dose of LSD. A normal dose of rat poison, whatever that might be, might well do.
To follow up on what InvidiousCourgette said, there are a couple of metrics to indicate safety. One of them is the ‘therapeutic index’ == LD50/ED50 (dose that will kill half divided by dose that is active in half) == ~15000 mcg / 25 mcg = 600. Another ratio, considered a better indicator is LD1/ED99 = 9 (I don’t have the component values handy.), which is higher than many prescription drugs.