Disclaimer: this post in no way advocates or describes the use of illegal drugs.
The claim is often made that one cannot “overdose” on LSD - that no plausible amount of this drug taken will result in death. However, LSD is a very potent drug, and several grams of the stuff would be equivalent to tens of thousands of a typical street dose. What would happen if someone ingested such an amount? I find it hard to believe that the results would be harmless. Are there any recorded instances of mega-overdoses of LSD and their repercussions? It seems like any drug that could have this powerful a psychotropic effect on the mind would result in permanent incapacitation or death as a result of a megadose. Any studies or other documented or observed instances of the results of such doses are appreciated.
Alternately, I suppose it’d be possible for a human to be killed by LSD without actually being poisoned by it…like, say, if you were hit on the head by a 55 Gallon Drug filled with LSD. Or if a crate of LSD fell on you in an abandoned warehouse, pinning you underneath it until you starved.
Well, I am not a doctor, chemist, or drug user, so take this as you will.
I would expect drugs that can cause overdoses to have a physical as well as a mental reaction: cocaine increases heart rate and morphine decreases it, for example. If LSD stimulates only “mental” functions of the brain (optic centers, “consciousness”, etc) without affecting any of the limbic systems (heart, lungs, etc), than more of the drug won’t cause an overload or shutdown of the body.
I think the point may have been that if you took a subject, restrained them (so they couldn’t take any actions to hurt themselves) and gave them a megadose of LSD, their body would have no ill effects. Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if a dose of sufficient size could “burn out” the subject’s brain, leaving them a vegetable, but their body could just keep on ticking.
Great, it’s on that pleasent note that I’m off to bed…
Urk, although on preview the link in Ranchoth’s post is even more disturbing…
I remember reading an article some years ago about a famous Australian murder mystery, Bogle and Chandler. They and their friends were scientists and quite the trendy party animals. Both were married to other people and were found deal in a public park with no apparent cause. A pathologist in the article speculated that LSD could have been the poison used because its metabolites cannot be found after exposure to light and the process of an ordinary autopsy in 1963.
Actually I just found this which indicates that LSD was established as the cause of death.
The TDL0 in your cite, refers to ‘lowest dose that causes a toxic effect’. The figure 700 ng/kg translates to 49 micrograms for an individual weighing 70 kg. That is a ‘threshold dose’ and is also a ‘toxic dose’ only if you consider the tripping itself to be a toxic effect. The LD50s are more relevant to the OP’s question, but don’t indicate anything by themselves. In humans, the LD50 has been estimated to be around 15 mg, via interspecies scaling. This is not an empirical determination. Indeed, only one death has been reported to be due to the pharmacological effects of LSD (see 3rd entry under ‘LD50 Sources’).
The caveat here is that ‘behavioural toxicity’ is a lot more of a concern than ‘physical toxicity’. In plainspeak, behavioural toxicity can refer to tripping itself or “losing your mind” or “losing your mind and having lethal/fatal injury inflicted”, depending on who the speaker/writer is. In this regard, LSD’s effects are indeed unpredictable. You can have a bad trip on 60 micrograms and a pleasant one on 300 micrograms. However, above ~400 micrograms, the chances of having a bad trip increase substantially.
I had a friend who had a bag of LSD laying out and her cat got into it. They called LSD Rescue (which you could actually DO in the late 60s, early 70s). The cat lived.
And another theory was that the poison was dog wormer. Another theory is trifluoroacetic acid. The LSD one is not taken very seriously from my readings.
antechinus: I did a cursory search, but didn’t find any indications as to the equivalent volume of blood serum (blood w/u clotted solids) in a human body. In other words, 2.1 ng/ml in serum corresponds to how much LSD in 4.7 litres of blood?