Get Along Kid Charlemagne

Not noted in the article: if you have to shell out $20 you might just as well take Ecstacy and not spend 13 out of 14 hours wishing you hadn’t taken that goddamn hit of acid.

Surely you’re not condoning drug use?!

As I understand it, large-scale LSD production in the US pretty much ended in 2000. There is still some stuff going around; this is either made by more paranoid, personable chemists, imported from another country, or left over from a few years ago. Anyway, in the US at least, LSD is a thing of the past. The only drug that I know of that the black market has ceased to provide with any reliability.

I may be wrong, but I think this is a worldwide thing. The rumors are that the series of late-90s busts in the US actually took out the suppliers not just for this continent, but for the whole world. It’s plausible: the stuff is so easy to smuggle, so hard to manufacture, and so plentiful when you do manufacture it, that one or two chemists could literally saturate the worldwide demand. Perhaps we should ask Owsley.

So maybe you spend 13 of the next 14 hours wishing you hadn’t dropped acid. Better than spending 24 of the next 36 hours wishing you hadn’t taken E?

Strange about LSD being just so hard to make. I mean, any fule can make crystal meth. I don’t know about the Bartok Macrocosmos, bob, but let’s not forget about The Incredible String Band. I discovered them in high school and played it at my house, but it totally provoked flashbacks in my mom and she made me turn it off. She was like, “aaah, get that shit off the stereo!” “I will lay me down, with my arms around a rainbow…”

It’s still around in the UK, although not very popular compared to pot, E, mushrooms, speed, ketamine and a variety of other drugs. The people I know who did acid often (relatively speaking – every couple of months at the most I guess) usually did it with E. It was a minor component of their diet compared to the other aforementioned substances though (so obviously we are talking about some fairly self-destructive behaviour here).

I think for most people it is quite an intense experience, and not something you would want to do very often, if at all. It is nowhere near as accessible as something like E, which is basically a lot of fun for the vast majority of people who take it (although by no means for all). Having said that, mushrooms (which obviously have similar effects) seem very popular at the moment, partly because they are legal. From what I understand the mushroom stalls in Camden and Notting Hill are very busy indeed these days.

As for the harmful physical and mental effects – please folks, can we avoid the whole “x is worse than y” thing? Drug use is risky, and taking any drug can potentially lead to terrible consequences. All I am going to say is that if you want to try something, make damn sure you do your research first and understand what you are doing. Oh, and kids – don’t be bloody stupid. Leave it for later. You’ll enjoy it more and you’ll be far less likely to screw up really badly.

“As for the harmful physical and mental effects – please folks, can we avoid the whole “x is worse than y” thing? Drug use is risky, and taking any drug can potentially lead to terrible consequences.“—dude

I’m trying to understand the point of view from whence this comment arises, but I’m having difficulty.

If one doesn’t have enough sense to differentiate between more and less harmful drugs, then one doesn’t have any business taking them. It’s alanironic that (many) people are scrupulous about being aware of and comparing the safety of legal drugs—where there’s a regulatory agency, doctors, and pharmacists doing it for you; when, in contrast, with illegal and unregulated drugs one is (relatively) completely on one’s own.

Erowid is a good resource and there you’ll find that they (and any other responsible resource) will make explicit or implicit comparisons of the safety of different drugs. Marijuana, alcohol, LSD, ecstasy, and methamphetamines greatly differ from each other in both specific and overall effects on health. Aspirin and thalidomide greatly differ and I doubt you’d contest this. Why wouldn’t psychoactive drugs similarly differ, and why would you discourage discussion of it? Because doing so can be controversial? That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

LSD and mushrooms are very similar. Mushrooms are a slightly shorter trip, and more physical, in my and my friends’ (old) experience. Sorry to hear about LSD disappearing, it’s a remarkable drug.
Evidently ecstasy is declining too, says Mark Kleiman who also has a post or two on the utterly fraudulent government reports on its danger, picked up and further debunked by Peter Jennings this week. This is Mark’s bag.
And to think no-one has mentioned nitrous oxide.

Thanks for using the Steely Dan song in the title for this post. That’s a great song, very appropriate for this topic,and I sang it to myself when I saw the Slate article.

Kid Charlemagne
by Steely Dan (from Royal Scam)

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco Nights,
You were the best in town.
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl.
You turned it on the world,
That’s when you turned the world around.
Did you feel like Jesus?
Did you realise
That you were a champion in their eyes?

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean.
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all.
You’d go to LA on dare
And you’d go it alone.
Could you live forever?
Could you see the day,
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?

Get along, get along Kid Charlemagne,
Get along Kid Charlemagne

Lyrics continue here:
http://www.banyantrees.net/rscam.html#kid

I wouldn’t look too incredulously at Kansas—the Sunbelt/flyover country is a major production center for manufactured drugs. Meth is an enormous and growing problem/recreational avenue for the heartland.

I don’t know if this will bore people, it kinda bores me a little but I have given the subject some thought. It may be long.

1)Been sober for 25 years, unless you count freshly ground Guatemala Antigua with a touch of French Roast.
2)Never done many drugs, including alcohol and pot. Found them boring. Mushrooms, mescaline, etc too much physical effects, distracted me. A waste of time.
3) People waste their youth in different ways. At one point I thought it would be exciting and important to understand Finnegan’s Wake. After two years of intense study, well, was not very exciting or important.

4) And 1965-1975 did acid more than 100 times. As an intellectual challenge. Many might say it damaged my life and brain, I think not. Tho it probably changed them.
….
5)My best experiences:Schoenberg Concerto for 18 Instruments, W Stevens “Comedian as the Letter C”(I know, not his strongest poem,I am not very smart)…and the Mahler 9th. God is good, life is good enough, because of the Mahler 9th.

6) “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” after the first few times, you learn you are not going to go crazy or jump out a window. And the effects diminish drastically. A real effort has to be made, tho hard to describe the nature of the effort, to avoid reaching a point “Walls are melting, ho-hum, think I will turn on Scooby Doo”

7) Think of a common optical illusion, the lady and the vase, for instance. You stare at it, the perspectives keep shifting, you make whatever kind of effort needed to see one or the other (perceptual scientists help here)….and a certain frisson or anxiety is experienced. And maybe unavoidable. And I think this may be 90% of the LSD experience, this anxiety of perceptual dissonance. Maybe just a scam.

8) And it is not memorable. Ok, some obvious hallucinations, but they were not what was important to the experience. Ask me what I saw, what I heard, and I can describe little that was different. It just felt different.

9) Was it worth it? Well, would I recommend someone study FW? I would probably recommend against it. Anyone who sticks with it, for most people will abandon it, will get exactly what they deserve. And in general, don’t bother with LSD.

But I will carry that long night with the Mahler 9th to my grave.

Well other things that might affect this, the drug war’s focus on LSD in the 90s made it likely that anyone caught with a couple sheets by Feds would be doing around 10 years, as LSD was never the most profitable drug this no doubt helped deplete the number of sources, either from fear or just getting busted (in fact a little family of ‘committed hippies’ i knew stopped dealing LSD in about 92 because it was just too dangerous [chickenshit fuckwads]).

According to various studies the amount that one needs to be effected by lsd is 60-70 mics, hence the 100 micrograms as a normal dosage in the 80s always struck me as a reasonable level. The 250 mic dosages of the 60’s no doubt had a lot to do with its ‘spiritual’ significance, but was not the best thing to give someone on their first time out.

LSD may also have suffered a decrease in usage because of the increase in designer psychedelics, http://mdma.net/pea.html http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/adsarchive/2cb.htm , which basically work off the fact that psychedelics are built very easily from a benzene ring as foundation. Various amines, including LSA the precursor to LSD, are psychedelics, I believe ketamine was popular in the nightclubbing scene a few years back. So I would assume basically heterogeneity of tastes led to the dilution of demand among the cognoscenti, which given the basically nerdy subculture of psychedelics was much more important than whether or not one had a bunch of the great unwashed still clamoring for doses.

I actually have some small personal knowledge on this subject, from the 80s and 90s wave.

In my experience, there is really one reason why LSD is less popular, there is no guarantee. People who take drugs want a guarantee that they drug they are taking is going to produce the desired effect.

The problem with LSD was two-fold, first the quality control issue. You did not know what you are getting because you could not use any of your senses to investigate the material that was on the blotter. Frequently users were getting bad or bum hits. The bad hit is the one where there may be little LSD on the blotter, or the blotter may be old, so the blotter is contaminated with another compound, usually an amphetamine. The bum hit, is the one that is a pure fake, with nothing in it but your own imagination.

Second, there is the effect issue. If you were to take a dose of the drug, there was no guarantee that you would have a positive effect. Many users have extremely negative reactions “bad trips”, even if they get a pure dose. For teens, the “bad trip” in many instances takes on urban legend proportions, scaring many away from the drug, while others were scared away from first hand experience.

Psilocybin mushrooms (for some reason) and MDMA both have qualities that mitigate against one of the above. One can develop a knowledge of mushrooms so that one knows what one is taking to ensure that they are taking the correct drug. The “bum trip” issue still exists, however that can be mitigated against by controlling dosage throughout the experience and because the effects are temporally shorter. MDMA appears to be 99% effective at producing positive results for users, however the quality issue is significant and many users are willing to take the risk of taking the drug unverified because if it is the right thing, it will always produce a positive result.

hubb rubb’s comment is quite apt, I think.

People take drugs which have a predictable effect far more easily than they do a drug which may, in enough dose, cause you to rethink your entire life. LSD is always described as ‘walls melt’, which is really to deny it’s primary effect, which is the fucking ordeal of the many hours you may spend dwelling on the intimate actions and behaviors of your life. Many hours of introspective hell? Are you kidding?

That said, LSD was a quite profitable drug while I was in college. A sheet (100 hits) for $100, resale at $5/hit? Who needs a job? (I didn’t)

“that LSD experiences range very, very far beyond the kind of sensory level provoked anxiety you experienced”

Well. Certainly have had a wide range of experiences, many outside of drugs, many very intense and even ecstatic, but none of them “spiritual”. This may be a matter of interpretation, or some kind of personal inhibition.

And I have read some of the literature, and without much offense intended, drugs or non-drugs, white-light stuff, leaving one’s body,
seeing Granddogbody on his throne surrounded by the Seraphim….and whatever Shirley MacLaine has really truly experienced this week….as may be apparent, I am skeptical by nature.

Sounds like if your brain’s big enough, you have a lot more fun–thank god for a big, fat brain!

I’m kinda amused at all the interspersed solemn warnings that Drug Use Is Bad.

As if:

a) folks here who have done it in the past don’t have their own experience to draw upon.

b) this is revelatory, never-before-heard advice.

c) without such cautions, thousands of CT reeaders would be rushing out to get acid, hearing that it’s been endorsed by such wise, um, heads.

d) I’d also be surprised to find that the majority of people’s experience isn’t more than twenty-five years in the past. Mine was mid-Seventies. But now that I’m warned, I know not to do it again!

e) I’m reminded of the acquaintance in a written precursor to online exchanges, an amateur press association, who, at the age 15, in 1974, solemnly explained that drugs are bad, so one should push really hard on your closed eyeballs with your fingers, and it will work just as well.

Climate change, or global fever, is imminent. And directly attributable to petroleum combustion.
The leading cause of death for people under 30 is traffic fatalities.
The amount of non-fatal carnage on the highway is staggering.
The oil/auto cartel commits thuggery to preserve itself and its markets on a scale that makes the cocaine industry look like a bunch of teenagers at a car wash.
Yet recreational drug use is a societal evil. Why?
Why is it acceptable to carve children up with steel and broken glass, yet the thought of them stoned and laughing is terrifying to most “decent” people?
–
No argument applied to illegal drug use couldn’t be applied just as accurately to the use of gasoline.
The illusion of power, the false sense of necessity, the dependence, the denial, the damage.
Our prisons are filled with criminals whose “victims” aren’t suffering, while the richest gated communities are teeming with businessmen whose “customers” have a death rate every year that’s greater than all the drug-caused deaths of the 20th century.
What’s up with that?