LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison • Hacker News Board

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#111

Post by plmu » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #91

non-entity wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is LSD schedule I in the US? If so it might be prosecutable under the federal analogue act, although whether that act matters seems to be somewhat debated. I know some other countries have blanket bans on RCs and analogues as well.

> Is LSD schedule I in the US? Yes. Most psychedelics are Schedule I. Though to be fair, that's in large part due to the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, of which only 11 UN member states are not party.

The US was and is one of the driving forces behind the UN convention, however.

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#112

Post by jschwartzi » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:22 PM UTC

Bootwizard wrote: post #93

masklinn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some reasons the feds in the 90s were unusually interested in prosecuting psychedelics. Psychedelics = hippies = anti-war left. A well-known and somewhat similar "unusual interest" was in prosecuting crack versus coke.

Oh it wasn't unusual. It was intentional. A war on poor and minority (mostly black) communities starting with Reagan's "War on Drugs"

Yeah the whole point of the war on drugs for the most part was to punish people who wanted to see things differently. There are only a few scheduled drugs that are actually harmful. If alcohol were discovered today it would certainly be scheduled because its side effects and potential for addiction are far worse than EG todays normal dosage of MDMA or LSD. The whole notion of jailing drug users actually made their lives far worse than the drugs themselves ever did. And the aggressive prosecution created openings for the modern drug cartels by eliminating competition.

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#113

Post by Enginerrrd » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #77

masklinn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As zelly notes below the US has mandatory life sentence for certain amounts of drug production. Under 21 USC § 848(b), a life sentence is automatic for the principal administrator of a "continuing criminal enterprise" involving in excess of 300 times the quantities listed at 21 USC § 841(b)(1)(B), which for LSD would be (v): > 1 gram or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid di…

Reminder that leaded gas is still in use.

In the US? Not really. Its sale is banned for use in cars. Wikipedia says there are a few exceptions for aircraft, farm equipment, and marine engines, but even in those fields I've never heard of it being used. It's also been pretty much phased out worldwide with a few tiny exceptions. What exactly are you referring to?

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#114

Post by monkeycantype » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #44

082349872349872 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine once asked his TA about (my memory fails here) either how to activate a leaving group or set up a protecting group at a given hypothetical structure. The TA, without batting an eyelid, responded "I think you'll find all the precursors are scheduled, too." The next lab, the TA, presumably having reflected a bit and in the middle of an unrelated discourse, added "remember, always characterise any synth…

What is a group ? (Group of people, or some chemical compound, or some kind of corporate structure, protecting possibly illegal stuff going on in one of the groups?) Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong? Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compo…

The 'groups' are chemical structures present in a compound. The student asks the Teaching Assistant (typically a graduate student who is required to do teach) a general question about how to carry out a multi step process to selectively transform specific regions of chemical compounds.

The punchline is that the Teaching Assistant immediately sees the intent of the question, and goes from the general to the specific and replies: [ you won't be able to synthesise LSD with that approach because ] "all of the precursors are also scheduled."

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#115

Post by hanselot » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #71

MayeulC wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but LSD is incredibly easy to hide from regular law enforcement Not that I intend to leverage that knowledge, but you can't just write this and leave it at that. Why so? I've never seen any LSD, so I am not sure why that would be.

It's odorless and colorless. You can literally dip a Bible in liquid LSD, let it dry and it would be impossible to tell you're carrying thousands of individual doses.

And just like the real thing can cause delusions and hallucinations.

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#116

Post by sova » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #59

rapsey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how the feds when weighing pot plants weighted them with pots and all.

we should be grateful they were not weighting the transporting truck right ?

Carry the mass of the earth and... you're imprisoned for

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#117

Post by skissane » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

plmu wrote: post #106

skissane wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1970s, my father worked as a research chemist for CSIRO (Australian government research lab), doing research into new pharmaceutical products. One of his colleagues decided it would be fun to manufacture some LSD after hours for personal use. The colleague made an error in calculating the quantities involved and ended up taking an accidental overdose. It didn’t kill him, but he spent some time in a psychiatric…

There have been reports of huge overdosis, e.g. by miscalculation by a factor of 1000 or even more. The physical harm was little to none. The mental harm varied greatly, there were even some people who got improvements in pre-existing mental conditions; with lsd in general, but also with large overdoses in particular.

A case report from 1974 says that massive LSD overdoses can cause bleeding and hyperthermia, symptoms which could potentially be fatal without medical attention (but, in this case, medical attention was received and all survived)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#118

Post by simlevesque » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

d33 wrote: post #31

kitteh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need precursors (like ET) which is difficult to get. Though China is a pretty good source if you can pull it off (and for other things like safrole, etc.).

What's ET? It's pretty difficult for me to Google this acronym given that it mostly finds "et al" when I couple this with LSD queries. Is it ergotamine from the other subthreads here?

Something that comes from ergot.

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#119

Post by dekhn » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #44

082349872349872 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine once asked his TA about (my memory fails here) either how to activate a leaving group or set up a protecting group at a given hypothetical structure. The TA, without batting an eyelid, responded "I think you'll find all the precursors are scheduled, too." The next lab, the TA, presumably having reflected a bit and in the middle of an unrelated discourse, added "remember, always characterise any synth…

What is a group ? (Group of people, or some chemical compound, or some kind of corporate structure, protecting possibly illegal stuff going on in one of the groups?) Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong? Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compo…

A "group" is a bundle of atoms that hangs off the side of a core structure, typically. http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/G/group.html

When you do a reaction on a chemical, the reaction can often affect multiple different parts of the structure, even if you only want it to affect one site. So, you can pop a "protecting group" onto the site you don't want modified, and then remove it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group

A TA is a teaching assistant; typically a grad student with lots of knowledge teaching a class to undergrads.

You would want to characterize any synthesis- verify your work to make sure you got high quality product that is pure.

Re: LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison

#120

Post by kerkeslager » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

mindfulhack wrote: post #35

seesawtron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tobacco and alcohol industry are getting government subsidies, bailouts and huge profit margins. Not sure about the other "illegal" drug manufacturers.

It's more acceptable and state-sanctioned to sell drugs that kill people while keeping them subdued, than ones that keep them alive and open their minds. I don't want to sound like a crazy 'conspiracy theorist' or a 'hippie', but I don't know to distill this sad and truthful statement more simply than that.

The problem with what you're saying isn't how it sounds, it's that there's no evidence for what you're saying.

My understanding, looking at the history of psychedelic regulation, is that it had nothing to do with preventing people from opening their minds: the people who did the regulating don't think the concept of "opening your mind" even exists. I'll let John Ehrlichman (Nixon aide) explain:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. [...] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

You might say, "well that's the same thing as being against opening minds" but it's really not. Keep in mind, a lot of times cops simply planted drugs on people to arrest them: why would they wrongly accuse someone of trying to open their mind if their intent was to prevent people from opening their minds? The answer is, that wasn't their intent. They didn't plant drugs on people to prevent them from opening their minds, they planted drugs on them because they were black or antiwar.