Erowid - Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives

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.

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.

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.

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.

How does your friend receive the mailed packages?

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.

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.

DMT vape pens are "legally" available in parts of Canada last I checked.

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 ;)).

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...

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.

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.

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).

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