Blue_Phlame
Bluelight Crew
Lysergic acid diethylamide used to be everywhere. LSD played a huge role in shaping pop culture in the 1960s, and in the 1980s everyone lived in fear of LSD-laced temporary tattoos and acid-popping Satanists. But nowadays, you rarely hear about it. What happened?
First, some statistics.
We do know that LSD-related emergency room visits dropped from over 5,000 in 1999 to just 900 in 2002, and have hovered between 2,000 and 4,000 per year since. According to the DEA, the age group most likely to do LSD in the past was high school seniors, and a University of Michigan survey of teen drug use finds a sharp decline in LSD use among 12th graders:
Plus if you google the phrase "LSD shortage," you find lots of message boards discussing this question, although there are plenty of people on those boards saying they still know where to get it.
While reading this article, I noticed that a 2010 bluelight thread had been referenced in that last paragraph. (link)
So if there is an actual decrease in the supply of LSD, what's going on?
The Pickard bust
Most people will point to the 2000 arrest of a man named William L. Pickard, a UCLA researcher who allegedly was one of the biggest LSD suppliers in the world, and was trying to turn a decommissioned missile silo into a drug lab. He was a "superbrilliant chemist" and a Buddhist priest who had already served a four-year stretch for LSD possession in the late 1980s.
The feds claim that Pickard's arrest permanently reduced the supply of LSD in the United States — and there seems to be some truth to this.
Another possible explanation for the decline in LSD availability is that a major distribution network dried up when the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia died and then Phish stopped touring as much. As a poster on one of those message boards explains:
Jerry died & that was a huge hit, then Phish stopped touring like they used to, and that's that. Say what you want about those bands, but their tours provided a pipeline for LSD that sent it trickling down into all the nooks & crannies of the country.
Full story here:
