Okay, so Mr. Rilch told me some anecdotes from his co-worker. One of them involved Co-Worker dropping acid with friends of his, when they were either in high school or home from college. "So they started driving somewhere, and they were really paranoid that they were going to get pulled over, but then they realized they were near the airport. So they got on a side road and parked there for hours watching the planes take off. Then they got back to his house and crashed out, and the next morning, his mom came storming into his room. 'You guys are on drugs! You were doing drugs all night!
"‘Uh…No, mom, we were just driving around!’
“‘Driving around? You never left the driveway! You were sitting in that car all night!’”
Now, I’d swear that I heard that one before. In fact, I think I even heard it on this board. And Co-Worker also claims that having dropped acid more than six times makes him legally insane, so I’m highly :dubious:
I have not heard the story. It sounds fake to me, though. If the mom was so concerned about the kids being on drugs, why didn’t she bust them while they were in the driveway? Surely she would not have wanted them to drive around stoned. No way she would have left them out there all night.
Never heard that one. But. My brother and his friend went to leave the house after getting quite stoned. They cranked the car in the garage but fell asleep talking. Next morning woke up and the car had run out of gas. So, it might be possible. YMMV.
That’s what I thought, too. Urban legends often have such flaws. But Mr. Rilch is determined to believe this guy for some reason. Re: the legal insanity: “He’s a big stoner, so he’d know about the law.” Um…yeah. Who is the lawyer on here who grumps about having wasted time and money going to law school when he could have gone to jail and learned everything?
NinetyWt: No offense, but now I have to ask you, even if the garage door was open, wouldn’t there still have been some ill effects from the exhaust?
Sounds like BS to me. The claim that having dropped acid more than six times makes him legally insane is a blatant UL and doesn’t withstand more than half a second of rational examination.
I guess I could see that maybe they were hallucinating hard enough that they imagined planes. But most LSD open-eye visuals aren’t as vivid and lifelike as that IMO. It can happen, sure, but usually it’s more like trails, funky colors, and little extra “notes” tacked on to the end of things. I’ve never dropped acid (though not for lack of trying), but I’ve studied it and I’ve been on other hallucinogens; IME, if I’m fucked enough to see imaginary airplanes with my eyes open, I’m probably in my own private Greenland and would have no idea that I’m in a car or in a driveway. Closed-eye visuals that vivid aren’t too unusual, though.
Bullshit. I used to be one of those stoners who knew a lot about the law, and I can tell you that most stoners have no clue. I mean, come on! Fifty percent of baby boomers used some illicit drug at least once (cite)–how many of those dropped acid more than six times?–and 16% of those who were aged 19-28 in 2002 had used LSD at least once (cite). That’s a hell of a lot of legally insane people.
This is a thorough treatise on the “legally insane” UL.
A friend of mine and a friend of his dropped acid in the '80s. They were pulled over by a cop. The cop knew they were high, but there was no evidence of alcohol or marijuana and F & FOAF were obviously not on cocaine. Acid never occurred to him. Since he didn’t know what to arrest them for, he told them to start walking. He would come back, and if he found their car gone he would arrest them.
I presume the amount and type/quality of the acid is a factor; but in my friend’s case he was still functional and not hallucinating about being somewhere he wasn’t.
An important point to consider is that hallucinating something does not actually mean one believes it is true. For example, a close friend and I once had shared psychedelic visions (closed-eye visuals, to be precise) of “the pink man”, a man aged between 45 and 60 who was colored solid pink, lived in a pink world and was made of the essence of pink, and who was defined solely by his pinkness. The fact that we vividly hallucinated the pink man didn’t mean we thought there was an actual pink man. She once crawled under the yellow wallpaper in American Lit class, and I traveled the galaxy with her boyfriend. Those were hallucinations. She didn’t actually think she was under wallpaper and we didn’t actually think we were in outer space.
So, basically, it’s one thing to hallucinate an airport, and quite another thing to actually believe one is at an airport. The former is a neat perception trick while the latter is the fundamental deconstruction of the reality-checking process, a total breakdown in one’s understanding of the world around oneself. LSD can do that, sure, but there are too many things falling into place together in FOAH’s story: up to four people share the same hallucination, all of them have their reality check shattered by prodigious amounts of acid, and somebody’s mom notices and doesn’t say a word, presumably sitting inside knitting or watching Jeopardy like nothing was going on. Bullshit. DXM creates shared hallucinations, Datura and salvia divinorum reliably shatter the reality-check process (for days and minutes at a time, respectively), and LSD might convince someone they’re at an airport when they’re not but that’s a hell of a lot of coincidences to line up in one place at one time.
Yea, I’ve only done acid once, but having done a number of other hallucinogens I would have to say that acid is nowhere near as potent as some people make it out to be. The first and only time that I took acid it was about two little pieces of blotter paper maybe the size of the fingernail on my pinky and I’ve heard that’s about the standard amount. The duration of the trip lasted maybe six hours and mostly it was a feeling of intense euphoria but I also got closed eye visuals and tracers. It seems hard to believe that somebody could take so much that they would see something or invent something in their minds that completely isn’t there.
The most powerful hallucinogen I think I’ve taken is 2ci which may or may not be illegal in the United States at this point. Either way it was pretty interesting.
No, but I’ve heard (presumably) real-life stories about hippie kids driving home stoned, driving very cautiously - and getting pulled over because they were going way under the speed limit on the highway. Seems kind of similar to me. The driveway story isn’t a certified urban legend, but I suggest you send your coworker to Snopes.
FWIW, 2ci is not specifically outlawed, but it can be considered an analogue of 2cb, which is illegal. In other words: technically no, pragmatically yes if the DA is sharp enough and really cares.
The more than six times thing is a UL that has been around for a long time. I first heard it in the early 80’s and it was probably old then. As others have cited, it is obviously not true. If it is, I am insane many, many times over so assuming that the last twenty years and all of you guys aren’t just a figment of my imagination, we can put this one to rest.
As to the airplane story, I’ve heard plenty of similar BS stories over the years. As a veteran of many trips, some of which were very intense and lasted for over 24 hours, that story just not plausible. It doesn’t work that way.
One time about a half-dozen of us took acid (little pieces of blotter paper printed with King Tut, BTW), and climbed into one our parents station wagon and drove on the remote backroads through the hills of Green County, Wisconsin in pitch black night.
Everyone was laughing his ass off as the driver mashed the gas pedal because the faster we went, the slower we seemed to be going. Sheer hilarity!
Maybe because I worked at the cemetery and had buried several of my friends who’d died while road-drinking, I had a moment of clarity after we’d spun round a few corners “farting gravel,” but still didn’t want to be a buzz-killer, so instead I suggested we let the engine idle and see what 3 mph felt like.
It felt like we were in a spaceship going through clouds of stars (lot of lightning bus and humidity clouds, actually) as super-light speed. Everyone suddenly went “Wow…Fuck!”
None taken, Rilchiam. If I recall correctly yes, they both had splitting headaches the next day; and felt very ill. In retrospect, they were lucky that the garage door was open.
Reminds me of the night me and a friend snuck out to his car to smoke a bowl. We were astounded, because the bowl just would not cash out, no matter how many times we hit it. It took a really embarassingly long time for one of us to realize that the bowl was totally empty, and it wasn’t smoke coming out of our mouths when we hit the pipe: it was our condensed breath in the cold night air.
That’s what I told Mr. Rilch! But he has a huge chip on his shoulder re: debunked ULs. A few years ago, when I cited both Snopes and Jan Harold Brunvand to refute the “Trick-or-treaters are routinely being given tainted candy” UL, he turned his nose up at Snopes, on the grounds that it’s “just a website” and guffawed when I showed him the relevant Brunvand passage. “Folklore? He teaches folklore? BWAH!”
I believe you, but neither of us has ever dropped acid, so I can’t speak from authority.
Well, I told him that too! And I put “knows a lot about the law” in big honking air quotes. Didn’t matter to him. I also pointed out how many guests of the state “know a lot about the law”, and he said, “Well, that’s different.”
Thanks, though that doesn’t help the current situation.
Anyway, I’m not the one who has to be educated here, and I didn’t have much hope of convincing Mr. Rilch either. The reason I asked is because I was sure I’d heard that exact story before. Drop acid. Drive somewhere. Watch some kind of cool visual. Next morning, get busted (by parent who could have intervened at the time but did not), and find that car never left driveway. It didn’t just sound unlikely; it also sounded very familiar.
