Possible rare LSD overdose in Cotton death

Possible rare LSD overdose in Cotton death
Thadeus Greenson/The Times-Standard
Eureka Times Standard
Article Launched:08/24/2007 09:21:58 AM PDT

Martin Cotton II had a potentially lethal dose of LSD in his system when he died in custody on Aug. 9, according to a toxicology report released Thursday.

Toxicology tests done by Central Valley Toxicology in Fresno show Cotton had 10.6 nanograms of LSD per milliliter of blood in his system, 10 times what is considered potentially toxic and twice what is considered potentially fatal, according to Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager.

The official cause of death will be determined by Ken Falconer, the doctor who performed Cotton's autopsy, and it will probably be released next week, Jager said.

”Since I've been coroner here, I've never seen someone overdose on LSD, so this is pretty unusual, if that's what it is,” Jager said. “It's just not very common. I don't know how he got that much in his system.”

Craig Hill, senior program manager for Mental Health Branch Dual Recovery Programs, said LSD is rare in Humboldt County, and overdoses are exceptionally rare anywhere.

”There's been possibly eight cases of overdose ever, and all of those are controversial at best,” Hill said, but added that he'd never heard of a dose as high as the one reportedly in Cotton's system. “Just about everything we know about LSD goes out the window because of how much he had on board.”

Cotton died in custody just hours after being involved in several altercations in front of the Eureka Rescue Mission, including one with Eureka police officers. From many accounts, Cotton was agitated and combative from the moment he arrived at the mission.

The Eureka Police Department was criticized by some in the ensuing weeks for not taking Cotton directly to the hospital after the altercation. Some have also alleged that officers on the scene used excessive force.

In a statement released Thursday, Eureka Police Chief Garr Nielsen said while Cotton's death was tragic, the toxicology report reaffirms his view that his officers acted appropriately given the situation.

”In this particular case, Mr. Cotton was so highly impaired and his actions so violent that it was impossible for law enforcement to subdue him peacefully,” Nielsen said in the statement.

Thadeus Greenson can be reached at 441-0509 or [email protected].

link

funny how the media writes how rare LSD is in the Humboldt County area ( what!?!?) but somehow somebody, in spite of it's rarity managed to ingest (acidentally or not) enough to overdose.

That is terrible. Not only for Cotton, but for LSD in general.

This story is BS...... that guy would have to have consumed like a gram of raw LSD crystal to OD

Anything else in his blood?

"10.6 nanograms of LSD per milliliter of blood"
If a 150lbs person has 5L of blood in them...

10.6*5000=53000 nanograms
53000nanograms=53micrograms

is that right?

i was under the impression you couldn't OD on LSD. maybe the cops scared him to death. literally.

squirrel_master said:

i was under the impression you couldn't OD on LSD. maybe the cops scared him to death. literally.

Click to expand...

LD50 = 12,000 ug
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml

how could i forget good ol' erowid?

9mm Censor's calculations are correct. Given the stupidity of the mainstream media, there are several possibilities:

1. The media dunces incorrectly intepreted, misread, or got creative with the coroner's report and instead of ng/mL it was really

A. mcg/mL = 5300 mcg total LSD in his body. Probably not a lethal dose.
B. ng/uL also = 5300 mcg total LSD.
C. mg/mL = 5,300,000 mcg = 5.3 g total LSD in his body. Most likely a lethal dose but also quite hard to believe.

2. The coroner's figure is correct and 10.6 ng/mL = 53 mcg total LSD in his body. While his figure is correct, he has either screwed up the math when calculating total LSD ingested or he has no idea that 53 mcg is only about half the typical dose.

3. The police kicked the shit out of Cotton while in their custody and they need a way out. They know that the media and the public won't bother to question the numbers because LSD is a public bogeyman lethal to sheep worldwide in any amount.

It will be quite an interesting read when the "official" cause of death is released next week. I know I'm gonna be looking at it real closely...

EDIT: Of course, this a simplistic calculation and does not account for metabolism of the drug. However, clinical research in human volunteers given 70 mcg of LSD showed peak plasma concentrations of 1.9 ng/mL, so by extrapolating this figure and multiplying it by about 5.6 to obtain a 10.6 ng/mL concentration, we still arrive at an estimated ingestion of 390 mcg. This is considered a moderate to strong recreational dose.

The Eureka Police Department was criticized by some in the ensuing weeks for not taking Cotton directly to the hospital after the altercation. Some have also alleged that officers on the scene used excessive force.

Click to expand...

Hmmm.. something is telling me that it wasn't directly LSD that caused his system to "shut down"... But damn, if that toxicology report is right... that sure is a shit-load of acid. You'd think you'd fall into a seizure or have a heart attack or something before all that even kicks in.

^^ it's true. The coroner in that article seems to know what he's talking about - I'd read about the controversy over the previous supposed cases of OD on LSD before - I remember the case of a junkie who injected himself with LSD thinking it was some completely different substance, but it was still debatable if that was the reason he died.

What a way to die though...

synaestasia420 said:

Hmmm.. something is telling me that it wasn't directly LSD that caused his system to "shut down"... But damn, if that toxicology report is right... that sure is a shit-load of acid. You'd think you'd fall into a seizure or have a heart attack or something before all that even kicks in.

Click to expand...

390 mcg is not a shit-load. Why would you look at 10.6 ng/mL and just assume that it's a shit-load without checking the figures?

While 390 mcg is a hefty dose and can make people do crazy things, the claims made by the coroner in this piece of "journalism" are lies. Since the story also states,

...some have also alleged that officers on the scene used excessive force...

Click to expand...

perhaps these lies have something to do with this assertion.

Craig Hill, senior program manager for Mental Health Branch Dual Recovery Programs, said LSD is rare in Humboldt County

Click to expand...

LOL

tobala said:

390 mcg is not a shit-load. Why would you look at 10.6 ng/mL and just assume that it's a shit-load without checking the figures?

While 390 mcg is a hefty dose and can make people do crazy things, the claims made by the coroner in this piece of "journalism" are lies. Since the story also states,

perhaps these lies have something to do with this assertion.

Click to expand...

How do you figure the coroner is lying? He hasnt said LSD is the official cause of death, all he really said was LSD overdoses are extremely rare in general, and he has never seen one either.

Just because it has to do with drugs, youre gonna get defensive and call the first person you can a liar? Im sure the coroner isnt that educated about drugs as some other people, so he probably isnt aware that 10.5 ng/ml isnt too outrageous. Its possible he is also misinformed about what the LD50 is, considering nobody knows for sure. Matter of fact, a few posts above someone quoted an incorrect LD50, and youre not on his ass calling him a liar for it.

Id like to see more facts before I go calling anyone a liar. This is too little information to form an opinion on.

I call BULLSHIT, the cops probably killed him and had their inbred brother the corner try to cover it up.

“ LSD is rare in Humboldt County” so are redwood trees. haha

IForgett said:

...Just because it has to do with drugs, youre gonna get defensive and call the first person you can a liar? Im sure the coroner isnt that educated about drugs as some other people, so he probably isnt aware that 10.5 ng/ml isnt too outrageous. Its possible he is also misinformed about what the LD50 is, considering nobody knows for sure. Matter of fact, a few posts above someone quoted an incorrect LD50, and youre not on his ass calling him a liar for it...

Click to expand...

Actually, ace, I personally have nothing to be defensive about, in fact it seems to me that the ones who need some defending would bees them cops and the coroner.

The fact is, when someone is taken into police custody, the police become responsible for their safety and well-being. In this case, it seems that they abdicated this responsibility and the gentleman died.

Now if Mr. Cotton had somehow posed a threat to these officers--a possibility I wouldn't dismiss out-of-hand when attempting to subdue an individual under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen--then it's quite possible that the attempts to subdue resulted in physical damage to his body resulting in death, and I could even be persuaded that the death was not the result of negligence or overly-aggressive manhandling.

What bothers me, however, is that the coroner is attempting to manipulate public sentiment by implying that the death was the direct result of an "LSD overdose." I don't buy your assertion that he possibly "isn't as educated" as some people about LSD plasma levels and LD50's, because a major part of his job is interpreting toxicology data and in this regard he should be an expert.

He knows what the average half-life of LSD is in the human body and how to estimate dosages ingested. He knows what the theoretical LD50's of LSD are, how they vary widely amongst the "experts" in the field, and that the plasma LSD level in this particular case equates to a dose hundreds of times lower than the lowest LD50 tossed around by these "experts".

So as I mentioned above, there are really only two possibilities. Either the media has either misquoted or misinterpreted his comments, or he is deliberately misleading the public via the media. And if this is the case, whatever his motivations are, I still call that lying.

And if I were the dead man's friend or relative, I would want to know why he is lying.

tobala said:

390 mcg is not a shit-load. Why would you look at 10.6 ng/mL and just assume that it's a shit-load without checking the figures?

While 390 mcg is a hefty dose and can make people do crazy things, the claims made by the coroner in this piece of "journalism" are lies. Since the story also states,

perhaps these lies have something to do with this assertion.

Click to expand...

Assuming that the LD50 they provided was right.. that would be a crazy-shit-load. I took a quick read at the article and didn't do the calculating as I know I would come back on here to see what people have to say about it.. like how it was a false LD50. Since this is a death off acid case, of course it's going to be real fishy. Hence why the journalist provided

The Eureka Police Department was criticized by some in the ensuing weeks for not taking Cotton directly to the hospital after the altercation. Some have also alleged that officers on the scene used excessive force.

Click to expand...

In my opinion, the dude took a pretty good amount of acid and started wiggin out.. it's always possible something happened internally as a freak accident or the cops helped him out.. doesn't change anything on my views of acid.

^^^^ I totally agree with what you say here. Depending on the person, the potential to wig out starts at around 100 mcg, IMO.

But dying because you wigged out, threatened the cops, and got hurt as a result is one thing--I'm sure such a thing is not all that rare.

On the other hand, dying as a direct result of LSD toxicity is almost unheard of, and for the coroner to make the statements he did reminds me of the "big acid bust" a few weeks ago where a "big acid dealing ring" that supposedly supplied 90% of the West coast's acid turned out to be a couple of small-time punks. In that particular article it was a local cop that spewed the lies that ended up in newspaper headlines.

In my view, the purpose of "Drugs in the Media" is partly to examine fabrication, sensationalism, and lies in the media as they relate to topics of drugs and their effects on society. This story and the one from a few weeks back are quintessential examples of how collusion between the "authorities" and the media serve to mislead the public, and it doesn't really matter if the true story comes out a few days or weeks later, because by this time the original blurb has burned itself into the public consciousness and no amount of truth or logic will remove it.

Reading between the lines, it appears that there may be a wrongful death claim here against the police, either because they physically mishandled Mr. Cotton, or because they failed to get him medical treatment. Of course, I'm relying on incomplete information, but I speculate that there's an impending lawsuit in the works against the county and the police in association with this death, and that this "misinformation feed" to the media is a pre-emptive strike against it.

He had 10.6 mcg/l -- the average person after receiving an average dose of LSD (2mcg/kg) has a blood level of 1-5 mcg/l, and this is only within say an hour of dosing. The half life of LSD in plasma is just a few hours (though LSD gets stuck to serotonin receptors in the brain a while longer).

( more info: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_pharmacology1.shtml )

tobala said:

What bothers me, however, is that the coroner is attempting to manipulate public sentiment by implying that the death was the direct result of an "LSD overdose." I don't buy your assertion that he possibly "isn't as educated" as some people about LSD plasma levels and LD50's, because a major part of his job is interpreting toxicology data and in this regard he should be an expert.

Click to expand...

The point im trying to make is, nobody knows the actual LD50 for lsd. Maybe, through all his (the coroner) years of training, he was tought an LD50 that made the amount in this dudes blood look totally outrageous. What I mean by "as educated as some people" was actually a bit of sarcasm. Everyone thinks they know it, when in fact its debatable still.