Re: MAPS: historical use of strychnine in acid

[Robert Bennett <Robennett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7.5.99 Arjun wrote:

>The "myth" about strychnine in acid is actually based in fact. Albert
>Hofmann reports in his book (LSD: My Problem Child) of a powdered material
>sent to him by the police that was supposedly being sold as LSD. When
>analyzed, this sample was found to contain no LSD and only strychnine. 
>This may have been only an isolated incident (this was in 1970)


Dear Arjun, Trinity and anyone else who may be interested,

I am an old hippie and took a lot of what was sold as LSD in London in the
early 1970's. I remember vividly one "trip" with a friend in 1971. He had
obtained some so-called LSD; round pills about aspirin size. I was quite
sure, during and after the experience, that what I had taken was not LSD.
It was a very strange experience, not one I wished to repeat. But in those
days my friends and I were all painfully aware that pure LSD was hard to
come by and we took into account that "rip-offs" were common when buying
black-market drugs.

Some time later I heard from my friend that he, having taken a double dose
of those pills (we had luckily taken only one each), had been admitted to
hospital, where, after a blood test, he was diagnosed as suffering from
strychnine poisoning. Thankfully he survived the ordeal.

This was one of my all too frequent bad experiences with so-called LSD
which led me to stop my own experimentation with the drug. Thereafter I
decided only to take mushrooms because I could be sure that they were pure
psilocybin.

Later in 1971, I met Basil Comnas, an American who told me that he had
studied chemistry at Berkeley and had conducted an analytical survey of
street acid bought in the bay area in 1969. His findings were very
depressing. He maintained that less than 40% of the substances tested
proved to be pure LSD. Many samples contained various kinds of amphetamines
mixed with LSD, there were pure animal tranquillisers and pure strychnine.
Some samples proved to be LSD which had deteriorated. Now San Fransisco was
considered by us in London to be the Mecca of hippiedom and pure acid. If
things were that bad there, how much worse might they be in London. This
led us to question whether many of the bad trips attributed by the media to
LSD might actually be caused by adulteration or blatant substitution. We
also wondered who might be behind this; were they simply idiots out to make
a fast buck or was there something more sinister about it?

Am I right in the assumption that what is sold as LSD nowadays tends to be
more reliable? I dearly hope so. Also, is it true that the dosage of a
single trip is usually much smaller today than it was back then?

Rob Bennett

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