Over here in America, LSD is far cheaper than all the legal lyseragmides, even 1p-LSD and ALD-52. It's about as cheap as it was in the 90s if you go to dark parts of the web. AL-LAD is much more expensive, though that might not have been the case when it first came out as LSD has gotten much cheaper since then, most likely someone is making a shit ton of it again like in the 90s, is my guess. But yeah, as far as I know, same precursors.
AL-LAD synthesis was always viable, just from my understanding it's modern methods that have made it possible to not produce LSD as an intermediary step. Before, the only known synthesis route required you to make LSD first and go from there. This is what I heard through the grapevine anyway (about new routes that don't require LSD). These new routes make it viable for a known company to produce them in mass quantities for long periods of time and not get raided.
I was told in an email from the producer that the reason they've stopped is because it's not economically viable and they're making tons more money from the R1 subs (1p-LSD and ALD-52). None of the lysergamides but LSD itself are illegal in the USA or anywhere in the Americas as far as I know, there's still a huge market.
Can't discuss specific pricing on here obviously but AL-LAD and 1P-LSD were the main RC lysergamides doing the rounds here before the blanket ban came in and both were at least half the price of most DNM LSD even from resellers. ETH-LAD was around for a select few who knew the producers but wasn't mass marketed and therefore was more expensive. I never saw ALD-52 around anywhere that I can remember.
You could buy as little as 25 tabs of AL-LAD or 1P-LSD and you could pay a quarter of the price of LSD per tab or less, easy.
I think the UK was seriously one of the major markets for RC's. We have a history with them too - between 2007-2010 mephedrone became the second most popular drug in the entire country while there was a coke and MDMA drought. Since that drought ended and mephedrone was made illegal it isn't topping any lists these days but it's still a common street (and DNM) drug. So we didn't tend to see RC's as something to resort to if you couldn't get a dealer, but rather as good drugs in their own right, especially pre-PSA when they were cheap and pure and anyone with a credit card and a laptop could have them in their letterbox by tomorrow.
So we were buying a fuckload of these things. Psychedelics and empathogens in particular since the UK drug scene loves "party drugs."
Surprisingly though, benzos were the top seller throughout all RC websites, etizolam leading the way. I knew sites set up only to sell the lysergamides that also ended up selling benzos too just because they were so high in demand it was an easy way to keep business going strong.
I found it strange the media largely ignored how huge RC benzos were, there was only one scare story about etizolam and that's it, and it stayed legal right up until the blanket ban. So it was absolutely no surprise to me when after the PSA became law, that's when pressed bars suddenly became a thing in the UK. A market had been opened for potent benzos in a country that was used to only diazepam. Alprazolam, being potent and having that established "Xanax" brand hype, was the perfect new drug to fill it. And it was easy to ask the same labs knocking out etizolam to produce alprazolam.
The media doesn't seem to be making this connection but to me it is very obvious. The marketing of pressed bars on the DNM began only after the PSA was announced and sales only exploded after it passed. Considering the immense popularity of etizolam and others, it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots.
We also had more RC benzo selection than the US did at the time. Keep in mind I'm talking 2010-2016 here. But we were always one of the first countries to get a lot of the novel benzos way before the US including flubromazepam, flubromazolam, nifixiopam, diclazepam, pyrazolam, clonazolam, meclonazepam, nitrazolam, etc. Sweden was the producer of some of those (e.g. f-lam and clonazolam) but literally within a month of any new benzo being invented, every single UK RC site was stocking it.
Now those days are over and what do you know, alprazolam everywhere. Black market benzo demand hasn't been this high since the 90's.
Anyway, bit of a tangent I guess, but I do miss the days when you could buy hundreds of blistered Etizest super cheap and legal on the clearnet. I far prefer that to these dodgy pressed bars we now have because the only guys pressing good ones got busted.
I also miss AL-LAD, it was a pretty fun lysergamide with much more of a "happy" headspace than acid, shorter duration too, more of a chill casual trip.
