This site is an "old internet" gem and I hope it never changes. I saw Earth and Fire (the creators of the project) speak at the Psychedelic Science conference a few years ago, quite a treat! Genuinely great people oozing integrity
This site helped me tremendously in my youth, with staying safe and giving me actual knowledge about different chemicals, rather than the complete abstinence information from programs like DARE. At one point, I found that a psychoactive chemical I was taking had a serious side effect with a prescription I was taking, and that information was nowhere to be found through web searches. Without Erowid, I definitely would have permanently damaged my liver! I don't think we should necessarily be marketing psychoactives to the youth, but I'm glad that this type of information is available for those that choose to search for it.
I would have as well. I remember in the 1990's seeing teens on TV that had taken it, and they were smoking imaginary cigarettes, and speaking to people that weren't there. I thought that sounded amazing until I read the trip reports about psychosis and the lethality of the dosage.
My friends and I used to visit this site a lot in high school and got kicks out of reading experiences for the more "hardcore" drugs like nightshade. Who knows how many of them were legit, but it was a great stoner activity. Glad to see this site is still around.
I first came across Erowid in college when my friends were getting me into psychedelics. It’s an incredibly informative site, and as a kid who read the warning labels on _everything_, it really helped me feel comfortable.
I ended up trying them around 2 decades ago (I do not recommend lol) and learned so much from that site. The information about the long time for it to take effect (1.5 hours AFAIK), warnings to take the right dose and no more, and the vision side effects the next day, along with horror stories of what could go wrong, Erowid probably saved us a trip to the ER or even worse.
Likely. I spent a lot of my youth exploring the idea that the brain is sort of like a radio that could be tuned to different layers of reality using psychoactives. Also had a bit of a love affair with DMT for awhile, as well as trying to find the right combo of “soft” drugs that would induce hypnogogic dream states.
As fruity as all that sounds, I learned a lot about chemistry and how to conduct (or not conduct, perhaps), verifiable research, which is an important part of my thinking today as we navigate an ever-increasing flood of claims about tech, medicine and mental health. I have to imagine HN attracts some pretty analytical minds by default, my own being novice, at best.
I have a lot of great respect for the folks at erowid and I’m glad to see they’re still around.
Erowid facilitated my deep dive into psychedelics in 2010 or so. Such a treasure trove on information about harm reduction, dosage, etc.
My old bad trip was meticulously documented and is published on the site (don’t mix cannabis with psychedelics, yo! You don’t wanna get paranoid as the walls are melting)
Funny aside: I think I spent 13 BTC to buy some LSD on the dark web at the time. Years later, the change from that transaction was enough to pay a month’s rent in London. Not only I spent what is a small fortune today, but the parcel was seized by the authorities so I never had the pleasure of trying LSD. Maybe one day…
Reading Erowid trip reports persuaded me to try high dose tripping on Robitussin (DXM). From Wikipedia:
The first plateau (1.5 to 2.5 mg per kg body weight) is described as having euphoria, auditory changes, mild stimulation, and change in perception of gravity.
The second plateau (2.5 to 7.5 mg/kg) causes intense euphoria, vivid imagination, and closed-eye hallucinations.
I like recovered.org's description of fourth plateau dose experiences:
The fourth plateau (at extremely high doses) can cause complete disconnection from reality, a sense of entering “another universe,” and a loss of sensory contact with the environment.
Sounds about right. Definitely kills some brain cells, but a hell of a ride. Would not recommend it if you don't like dissociatives.
I would also recommend checking that the cough syrup you pick does not contain large doses of sugar alcohols like sorbitol, which in high doses, function as a very effective laxative. Nothing like spending 4 hours on a toilet emptying your bowels while tripping balls.
I'm curious how people go about finding safe sources for something like LSD (to be clear I'm not asking for anyone to give specific details, just an explanation). While psilocybin is easy to try safely (just travel to a place where it is legal), LSD is illegal in every jurisdiction as far as I know. The thought of ingesting some substance from dubious sources, that could be contaminated with absolutely anything, terrifies me and I honestly don't know how people bring themselves to take this kind of risk. Am I missing the point and there is some safe underground supply chain for this sort of thing?
- Buy on the darkweb. Marketplaces exist with established vendors, open forums, feedback, customer support, escrow... I could write a long text about how this is an infinitely better way to do things for all concerned than to "force" non-violent people to interact with violent drug traders and adulterated products, but let's leave that for now. You can pay with Monero for untraceability.
- Test what you get. Some stuff being sold as LSD might actually be another synthetic psychedelic, potentially dangerous (unlike LSD). So test: even in jurisdictions in which LSD is banned, you can easily buy tests; for LSD, this would be Erhrlich's reagent. If it tests positive, and since there's no reason to have LSD and an adulterant (unlike other drugs such as cocaine), you're safe.
Why is that? From what I understand LSD is pretty challenging to produce, so isn't there an advantage to an unscrupulous producer using something easier/cheaper?
From my old and hazy memory (someone correct if wrong):
There are few psychoactive compounds that work in the same microgram range as LSD. So if you're getting blotter then the size of the tab is important. The other compounds such as the NBOMe series use bigger blotters that are easy to spot.
I think generally yes, phenethylamines are the primary compounds known to work in the same dose range as LSD. Unfortunately they are much cheaper to produce, and the majority of the 25C- and 25I-NBOMe fatalities occur after people believed they were taking LSD. I have read similarly, that tab size of a dose might be an indicator, but I don't think it's a fully reliable method. Check out the old 2013 Erowid "Spotlight on NBOMes" article [1]-
> Silk Road prices for pure 25I-, 25C-, and 25B-NBOMe powder currently range from $90 to $200 per gram. The most problematic listings are vendors selling blotter that begs to be resold as acid: 1/4-inch perforated squares in 100-hit sheets bearing designs such as Albert Hofmann's bike ride and The Beatles Yellow Submarine, among other acid-blotter designs from the past. One vendor states "each tab is acid size, no big blotters here". Another offers hits supposedly containing 1 mg of 25I- and 25B-NBOMe each! Dosages range from 500 micrograms to 2 mg per 1/4-inch hit, with advertised doses averaging around 1 mg. On Silk Road, LSD blotter is 5-10 times more expensive than NBOMe blotter.
I think unfortunately toxic and potentially fatal doses can fit on a 1/4 inch hit or in a single liquid drop. There needs to be a lot more active chemical though, whereas you get a slight metallic taste with LSD, the article says NBOME is extremely bitter due to the higher concentration, which is sometimes covered up with mint or other flavor (never heard of this with LSD).
There's an interesting 2019 article "Multimodal imaging of hallucinogens 25C- and 25I-NBOMe on blotter papers" [2] that analyzed a random seized NBOME sample from Germany. It has lower concentration per cm² than what Erowid cited, but I don't think it's a technical limit unfortunately that prevents scary doses from fitting on a standard blotter.
In addition to what others are saying, I think it's important to think "apples to oranges" here.
Think about it this way, if you're a dealer you want to inflate your supply right? So, if you have a street drug that is an 'upper' and you want to cut it, you need to cut it with uppers, or something that can mask an upper. That cut needs to blend in, if you're expecting something blue, and it has red in it, then you'll know its off.
Psychedelics would need to be cut with other psychedelics, but it's not as easy as mixing two things and having it come out. LSD comes as a crystal and is then put in an alcohol solution and dried on paper, there's not many things that would work that way. If the goal is to stretch your supply, you just further dilute it, and many people do.
Where there are cheaper/easier alternatives are things in the 2c family, or others that are _close_ to the experience of LSD but not, and are also more toxic.
I don't know if any of that is clear, or makes sense but
My friend was extra careful and sent it to a PO box kind thing, with a fake name and throwaway email just in case. But he thinks that is overly paranoid: if the letter was intercepted (highly unlikely), there would be no legal consequences because there is no link between him and the purchase (therefore strictly speaking all that happened was that someone mailed him illegal drugs without his knowledge ;)).
It's a bad idea to send darkweb packages to a PO box, as the USPS will require a lower threshold of evidence to search the package. As it is they can't inspect your mail without a warrant, which is exceedingly rare for them to procure for a random package. Having it shipped to your home, although maybe somewhat nerve-wracking, is the simplest and most secure option in the United States (for now).
This is what my friends in the bodybuilding world have come to accept.
Yes packages get intercepted. But it isn’t the legal liability of an addressee for what is in some box that SOMEONE put in the mail. Otherwise it would be an amazing blackmail (nigh literally) tool to target any enemy.
Every jurisdiction has its own rules but in broad strokes: receiving a package containing drugs isn’t illegal, otherwise, anyone could send their enemy drugs.
To safely receive drugs through the mail, you do not do anything clever (like mailing them to an empty house) instead you behave in a way that gives you plausible deniability. And you do not do anything that would lead police to think you’re distributing.
Order small, personal use quantities to your name and your address and leave the package on your counter for a couple of days after it arrives. If the police show up, say you didn’t recognise the package and left it on the counter until you had time to return it to the post office.
Where you’re ordering from and to matters too. Ordering from the Netherlands into Australia almost guarantees the drugs will be found because all international mail is processed by Australia’s postal service and the Netherlands is an obvious source country. Order nationally to avoid processing.
Ultimately, it’s just like buying drugs on the street: be a nobody buying for personal use.
The biggest risk is that inevitably the seller will eventually get busted and your address will be in the seller’s records. If you’ve bought large quantities, the police will see you as a dealer and try to catch you in a sting. The best sellers do not keep records for this reason, but it’s something you won’t know until they get caught. If you buy personal use quantities, the police aren’t going to waste time on you, even if they have records of your orders.
Back in the day (90s and before) the other substances that could fit on a blotter and still have an effect were very, very niche, and somehow LSD was very very cheap so if it worked at all it was probably the real thing.
> The thought of ingesting some substance from dubious sources, that could be contaminated with absolutely anything
People used to trust networks of friends, rather than stereotypical 'gangs' or 'dealers'. The problem now is that there is so much other stuff floating around that nearly anything you go after could be nearly anything else.
In the UK there is a service called WEDINOS, which is of interest in this area - you can anonymously submit them a sample of whatever it is and they will publish the result on their website. They use the data to track drugs (their particular interest is novel or 'emerging' drugs) around the country. You basically get a number, fill in a form and post it to them alongside a sample, and they will do GCMS. You're not supposed to send them things you know are illegal, but ... looking at the website people do, a lot.
As the other poster mentions reagent tests are available fairly widely and can give you a rough idea.
Also in many countries some LSD derivatives are not (yet) illegal, and in those it is quite often possible to order things like 1P-LSD, which is (as far as can be ascertained) a pro-drug that is quickly metabolised into LSD, on the open internet.
This is funded by the mushroom dispensary stores operating in the open in Vancouver. LSD is very low risk for adulterants, partly because it’s cheap to produce and is somewhat separate from other supply chains, partly because the effective dose is so small, but it never hurts to send in a sample of anything, particularly white powders.
you would go to where trustworthy people are selling it. you would have your friend try it first if purchased from random street dealer. i think many of these get confused in the street, like how would you know it is true lsd and not some other research chemical?
in america there are pockets of psychadelic support that would provide clean sources, you'd maybe network with them through campus norml groups, or that cool chemistry TA. these people have zero incentive to sell you something different or contaminate it with anything (more work).
when it is dosed correctly, you can take a small dose of lsd and see if it is the effect you recognize or something else. definitely just do some homework to make sure that it can be trusted.
There used to be some darkweb marketplaces that were extremely reliable for psychedelics, for example "The Majestic Garden" was an old PHP message board which specialized in psychedelics and had a strict whitelist about what substances could be sold. TMG has since shut down unfortunately, but there are lots of other providers. Some "well-known" manufacturers used to hang around TMG, and if a listing on some other site mentions that it's their LSD then IMO it's a good place to start. General methodology is to get a burner laptop running some secure *nix OS (ie. Tails), acquire some Monero, navigate to an appropriate marketplace via Tor, and make your purchase. Use your real address and name for the shipping; it seems scary but in the US it's the most secure way (least likely to trigger a warrant being issued to search your package). Once that's done you head over to dancesafe.org on your normal laptop and order what they recommend for LSD reagent testing. Then you wait for everything to arrive, follow the instructions in the reagent testing kit, and if everything comes out "okay" then you're good to go.
In general it's fairly rare for someone to sell "fake" or "cut" LSD. This is for two broad reasons:
1. LSD isn't addictive in the same way as some other illegal substances, so there's much less profit in faking it. If you sell someone fake LSD and they have an awful trip they're never going to buy from you again and you've burned a profit stream. If you sell someone coke cut with meth they're probably going to come back anyways, because they're hooked on the drug.
2. The things you might adulterate or fake LSD with (ex. NBOMe) are also somewhat difficult and expensive to make, so it's not like one would really save much time or money. If you're trying to burn someone in an LSD sale, the simplest and most profitable thing to do would be to just sell empty blotter paper, rather than wasting research chemicals you could potentially sell to some psychonaut with the correct label.
With that said NBOMe and some other synthetics have been cropping up in the last 20-ish years. If someone at a party or festival is selling single tabs that's definitely the place where you might get burned with NBOMe, since by the time your trip ends the dealer will be long gone. In general it's always best to test everything you ingest, and dancesafe.org is definitely the place to get info on how to test stuff.
I love erowid. It is a very thorouly handcrafted factual database of real information on any drug, including personal experiences, hepatoxicity, addixtiveness, etc. without any one sided agenda. I hope it stays for many years
when I was a teenager back in web pre-alpha erowid either put me in grave danger or saved my life, depending on whether you emphasize the drug use or the fact that I survived it relatively unscathed
This site is an "old internet" gem and I hope it never changes. I saw Earth and Fire (the creators of the project) speak at the Psychedelic Science conference a few years ago, quite a treat! Genuinely great people oozing integrity
I ran into them at Burning \Man in the early aughts. They're awesome!
Do you have a link to the video?
I'm not finding the exact one I was at (I saw them at the 2023 conference) but here is one from 2017- https://youtube.com/watch?v=lk9-PMKZPAY
Thanks!
This site helped me tremendously in my youth, with staying safe and giving me actual knowledge about different chemicals, rather than the complete abstinence information from programs like DARE. At one point, I found that a psychoactive chemical I was taking had a serious side effect with a prescription I was taking, and that information was nowhere to be found through web searches. Without Erowid, I definitely would have permanently damaged my liver! I don't think we should necessarily be marketing psychoactives to the youth, but I'm glad that this type of information is available for those that choose to search for it.
Without erowid I would have tried datura.
I would have as well. I remember in the 1990's seeing teens on TV that had taken it, and they were smoking imaginary cigarettes, and speaking to people that weren't there. I thought that sounded amazing until I read the trip reports about psychosis and the lethality of the dosage.
[dead]
Some previous discussions of Erowid:
What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports (263 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171007
An Experience with Modafinil (343 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067264
> An experience with Modafinil
Well, there went two hours of my morning, and I only made it halfway through the comments.
When I was young, I looked at this site like a TODO list...
As did I, and I made a pretty good dent in it!
Me still....
My friends and I used to visit this site a lot in high school and got kicks out of reading experiences for the more "hardcore" drugs like nightshade. Who knows how many of them were legit, but it was a great stoner activity. Glad to see this site is still around.
I first came across Erowid in college when my friends were getting me into psychedelics. It’s an incredibly informative site, and as a kid who read the warning labels on _everything_, it really helped me feel comfortable.
I've spent a lot of time reading those. They are entertaining and terrifying.
Erowid's a really good source of "Hey, you know, maybe I don't want to get involved in that" at times.
We did exactly the same :) The thornapple trip reports were particularly nasty.
I ended up trying them around 2 decades ago (I do not recommend lol) and learned so much from that site. The information about the long time for it to take effect (1.5 hours AFAIK), warnings to take the right dose and no more, and the vision side effects the next day, along with horror stories of what could go wrong, Erowid probably saved us a trip to the ER or even worse.
Love those guys, incredible resource.
So you read the trip reports and decided to give it a try nevertheless? Wow...
Absolutely critically experience vaults here. In my youth these were invaluable
This feels like a good audience for Erowid.
I'm sure there's already a significant overlap.
Likely. I spent a lot of my youth exploring the idea that the brain is sort of like a radio that could be tuned to different layers of reality using psychoactives. Also had a bit of a love affair with DMT for awhile, as well as trying to find the right combo of “soft” drugs that would induce hypnogogic dream states.
As fruity as all that sounds, I learned a lot about chemistry and how to conduct (or not conduct, perhaps), verifiable research, which is an important part of my thinking today as we navigate an ever-increasing flood of claims about tech, medicine and mental health. I have to imagine HN attracts some pretty analytical minds by default, my own being novice, at best.
I have a lot of great respect for the folks at erowid and I’m glad to see they’re still around.
Erowid facilitated my deep dive into psychedelics in 2010 or so. Such a treasure trove on information about harm reduction, dosage, etc.
My old bad trip was meticulously documented and is published on the site (don’t mix cannabis with psychedelics, yo! You don’t wanna get paranoid as the walls are melting)
Funny aside: I think I spent 13 BTC to buy some LSD on the dark web at the time. Years later, the change from that transaction was enough to pay a month’s rent in London. Not only I spent what is a small fortune today, but the parcel was seized by the authorities so I never had the pleasure of trying LSD. Maybe one day…
I hope your dealer held on to your million pounds.
The exact figure eludes me, but it could also have been 130 BTC, as we’re talking 2010/2011 when bitcoin was around $1.
In the 8 figures range today.
Reading Erowid trip reports persuaded me to try high dose tripping on Robitussin (DXM). From Wikipedia:
The first plateau (1.5 to 2.5 mg per kg body weight) is described as having euphoria, auditory changes, mild stimulation, and change in perception of gravity.
The second plateau (2.5 to 7.5 mg/kg) causes intense euphoria, vivid imagination, and closed-eye hallucinations.
I like recovered.org's description of fourth plateau dose experiences:
The fourth plateau (at extremely high doses) can cause complete disconnection from reality, a sense of entering “another universe,” and a loss of sensory contact with the environment.
Sounds about right. Definitely kills some brain cells, but a hell of a ride. Would not recommend it if you don't like dissociatives.
I would also recommend checking that the cough syrup you pick does not contain large doses of sugar alcohols like sorbitol, which in high doses, function as a very effective laxative. Nothing like spending 4 hours on a toilet emptying your bowels while tripping balls.
That sounds like a vital life experience that can connect you to your ancestors.
I'm curious how people go about finding safe sources for something like LSD (to be clear I'm not asking for anyone to give specific details, just an explanation). While psilocybin is easy to try safely (just travel to a place where it is legal), LSD is illegal in every jurisdiction as far as I know. The thought of ingesting some substance from dubious sources, that could be contaminated with absolutely anything, terrifies me and I honestly don't know how people bring themselves to take this kind of risk. Am I missing the point and there is some safe underground supply chain for this sort of thing?
- Buy on the darkweb. Marketplaces exist with established vendors, open forums, feedback, customer support, escrow... I could write a long text about how this is an infinitely better way to do things for all concerned than to "force" non-violent people to interact with violent drug traders and adulterated products, but let's leave that for now. You can pay with Monero for untraceability.
- Test what you get. Some stuff being sold as LSD might actually be another synthetic psychedelic, potentially dangerous (unlike LSD). So test: even in jurisdictions in which LSD is banned, you can easily buy tests; for LSD, this would be Erhrlich's reagent. If it tests positive, and since there's no reason to have LSD and an adulterant (unlike other drugs such as cocaine), you're safe.
Of course, this is what my friend told me.
Interesting. Can you clarify this part?
> there's no reason to have LSD and an adulterant
Why is that? From what I understand LSD is pretty challenging to produce, so isn't there an advantage to an unscrupulous producer using something easier/cheaper?
From my old and hazy memory (someone correct if wrong):
There are few psychoactive compounds that work in the same microgram range as LSD. So if you're getting blotter then the size of the tab is important. The other compounds such as the NBOMe series use bigger blotters that are easy to spot.
I think generally yes, phenethylamines are the primary compounds known to work in the same dose range as LSD. Unfortunately they are much cheaper to produce, and the majority of the 25C- and 25I-NBOMe fatalities occur after people believed they were taking LSD. I have read similarly, that tab size of a dose might be an indicator, but I don't think it's a fully reliable method. Check out the old 2013 Erowid "Spotlight on NBOMes" article [1]-
> Silk Road prices for pure 25I-, 25C-, and 25B-NBOMe powder currently range from $90 to $200 per gram. The most problematic listings are vendors selling blotter that begs to be resold as acid: 1/4-inch perforated squares in 100-hit sheets bearing designs such as Albert Hofmann's bike ride and The Beatles Yellow Submarine, among other acid-blotter designs from the past. One vendor states "each tab is acid size, no big blotters here". Another offers hits supposedly containing 1 mg of 25I- and 25B-NBOMe each! Dosages range from 500 micrograms to 2 mg per 1/4-inch hit, with advertised doses averaging around 1 mg. On Silk Road, LSD blotter is 5-10 times more expensive than NBOMe blotter.
I think unfortunately toxic and potentially fatal doses can fit on a 1/4 inch hit or in a single liquid drop. There needs to be a lot more active chemical though, whereas you get a slight metallic taste with LSD, the article says NBOME is extremely bitter due to the higher concentration, which is sometimes covered up with mint or other flavor (never heard of this with LSD).
There's an interesting 2019 article "Multimodal imaging of hallucinogens 25C- and 25I-NBOMe on blotter papers" [2] that analyzed a random seized NBOME sample from Germany. It has lower concentration per cm² than what Erowid cited, but I don't think it's a technical limit unfortunately that prevents scary doses from fitting on a standard blotter.
[1] https://erowid.org/chemicals/nbome/nbome_article1.shtml
[2] https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/do...
In addition to what others are saying, I think it's important to think "apples to oranges" here.
Think about it this way, if you're a dealer you want to inflate your supply right? So, if you have a street drug that is an 'upper' and you want to cut it, you need to cut it with uppers, or something that can mask an upper. That cut needs to blend in, if you're expecting something blue, and it has red in it, then you'll know its off.
Psychedelics would need to be cut with other psychedelics, but it's not as easy as mixing two things and having it come out. LSD comes as a crystal and is then put in an alcohol solution and dried on paper, there's not many things that would work that way. If the goal is to stretch your supply, you just further dilute it, and many people do.
Where there are cheaper/easier alternatives are things in the 2c family, or others that are _close_ to the experience of LSD but not, and are also more toxic.
I don't know if any of that is clear, or makes sense but
I think what OP is saying is that if a manufacturer is putting real LSD on a tab, it's unlikely that they're also adding an adulterant.
How does your friend receive the mailed packages?
My friend was extra careful and sent it to a PO box kind thing, with a fake name and throwaway email just in case. But he thinks that is overly paranoid: if the letter was intercepted (highly unlikely), there would be no legal consequences because there is no link between him and the purchase (therefore strictly speaking all that happened was that someone mailed him illegal drugs without his knowledge ;)).
It's a bad idea to send darkweb packages to a PO box, as the USPS will require a lower threshold of evidence to search the package. As it is they can't inspect your mail without a warrant, which is exceedingly rare for them to procure for a random package. Having it shipped to your home, although maybe somewhat nerve-wracking, is the simplest and most secure option in the United States (for now).
This is what my friends in the bodybuilding world have come to accept.
Yes packages get intercepted. But it isn’t the legal liability of an addressee for what is in some box that SOMEONE put in the mail. Otherwise it would be an amazing blackmail (nigh literally) tool to target any enemy.
Every jurisdiction has its own rules but in broad strokes: receiving a package containing drugs isn’t illegal, otherwise, anyone could send their enemy drugs.
To safely receive drugs through the mail, you do not do anything clever (like mailing them to an empty house) instead you behave in a way that gives you plausible deniability. And you do not do anything that would lead police to think you’re distributing.
Order small, personal use quantities to your name and your address and leave the package on your counter for a couple of days after it arrives. If the police show up, say you didn’t recognise the package and left it on the counter until you had time to return it to the post office.
Where you’re ordering from and to matters too. Ordering from the Netherlands into Australia almost guarantees the drugs will be found because all international mail is processed by Australia’s postal service and the Netherlands is an obvious source country. Order nationally to avoid processing.
Ultimately, it’s just like buying drugs on the street: be a nobody buying for personal use.
The biggest risk is that inevitably the seller will eventually get busted and your address will be in the seller’s records. If you’ve bought large quantities, the police will see you as a dealer and try to catch you in a sting. The best sellers do not keep records for this reason, but it’s something you won’t know until they get caught. If you buy personal use quantities, the police aren’t going to waste time on you, even if they have records of your orders.
Back in the day (90s and before) the other substances that could fit on a blotter and still have an effect were very, very niche, and somehow LSD was very very cheap so if it worked at all it was probably the real thing.
> The thought of ingesting some substance from dubious sources, that could be contaminated with absolutely anything
People used to trust networks of friends, rather than stereotypical 'gangs' or 'dealers'. The problem now is that there is so much other stuff floating around that nearly anything you go after could be nearly anything else.
In the UK there is a service called WEDINOS, which is of interest in this area - you can anonymously submit them a sample of whatever it is and they will publish the result on their website. They use the data to track drugs (their particular interest is novel or 'emerging' drugs) around the country. You basically get a number, fill in a form and post it to them alongside a sample, and they will do GCMS. You're not supposed to send them things you know are illegal, but ... looking at the website people do, a lot.
As the other poster mentions reagent tests are available fairly widely and can give you a rough idea.
Also in many countries some LSD derivatives are not (yet) illegal, and in those it is quite often possible to order things like 1P-LSD, which is (as far as can be ascertained) a pro-drug that is quickly metabolised into LSD, on the open internet.
Find a source, get a test kit, test meticulously, stick to the source. If you're getting a new source, test again and try a very small dose first.
Also, besides Erowid, other reliable information sources have popped up. Psychonautwiki, tripsit.me for example.
Some countries have anonymous test pipelines via hospitals or universities, but it's less common. Test kits are available online.
This is funded by the mushroom dispensary stores operating in the open in Vancouver. LSD is very low risk for adulterants, partly because it’s cheap to produce and is somewhat separate from other supply chains, partly because the effective dose is so small, but it never hurts to send in a sample of anything, particularly white powders.
https://getyourdrugstested.com/
you would go to where trustworthy people are selling it. you would have your friend try it first if purchased from random street dealer. i think many of these get confused in the street, like how would you know it is true lsd and not some other research chemical?
in america there are pockets of psychadelic support that would provide clean sources, you'd maybe network with them through campus norml groups, or that cool chemistry TA. these people have zero incentive to sell you something different or contaminate it with anything (more work).
when it is dosed correctly, you can take a small dose of lsd and see if it is the effect you recognize or something else. definitely just do some homework to make sure that it can be trusted.
DMT vape pens are "legally" available in parts of Canada last I checked.
There used to be some darkweb marketplaces that were extremely reliable for psychedelics, for example "The Majestic Garden" was an old PHP message board which specialized in psychedelics and had a strict whitelist about what substances could be sold. TMG has since shut down unfortunately, but there are lots of other providers. Some "well-known" manufacturers used to hang around TMG, and if a listing on some other site mentions that it's their LSD then IMO it's a good place to start. General methodology is to get a burner laptop running some secure *nix OS (ie. Tails), acquire some Monero, navigate to an appropriate marketplace via Tor, and make your purchase. Use your real address and name for the shipping; it seems scary but in the US it's the most secure way (least likely to trigger a warrant being issued to search your package). Once that's done you head over to dancesafe.org on your normal laptop and order what they recommend for LSD reagent testing. Then you wait for everything to arrive, follow the instructions in the reagent testing kit, and if everything comes out "okay" then you're good to go.
In general it's fairly rare for someone to sell "fake" or "cut" LSD. This is for two broad reasons:
1. LSD isn't addictive in the same way as some other illegal substances, so there's much less profit in faking it. If you sell someone fake LSD and they have an awful trip they're never going to buy from you again and you've burned a profit stream. If you sell someone coke cut with meth they're probably going to come back anyways, because they're hooked on the drug.
2. The things you might adulterate or fake LSD with (ex. NBOMe) are also somewhat difficult and expensive to make, so it's not like one would really save much time or money. If you're trying to burn someone in an LSD sale, the simplest and most profitable thing to do would be to just sell empty blotter paper, rather than wasting research chemicals you could potentially sell to some psychonaut with the correct label.
With that said NBOMe and some other synthetics have been cropping up in the last 20-ish years. If someone at a party or festival is selling single tabs that's definitely the place where you might get burned with NBOMe, since by the time your trip ends the dealer will be long gone. In general it's always best to test everything you ingest, and dancesafe.org is definitely the place to get info on how to test stuff.
So easy hell my legal weed dealer delivers lsd now and shrooms can be bought from head shops all day long
I found a hippie with a jar of liquid lsd in a safe.
You just gotta trust people and be a Guinea pig, if you aren’t going to test drugs you buy.
I love erowid. It is a very thorouly handcrafted factual database of real information on any drug, including personal experiences, hepatoxicity, addixtiveness, etc. without any one sided agenda. I hope it stays for many years
And for the modern era there is Drugslab, a Dutch channel where the hosts describe drugs, take them on camera, and show their experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/@Drugslab
when I was a teenager back in web pre-alpha erowid either put me in grave danger or saved my life, depending on whether you emphasize the drug use or the fact that I survived it relatively unscathed
Ah Erowid, grew up in front of my computer and on irc chat rooms; that website taught me a lot. I submitted a few trip reports back in the day.
This was my Most Valued Resource of the old internet.
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"news"
ahahaaha you people just found out about this?!>?!