Yeah, I agree with the op and the other posters, at the end of the day, for all practical purposes whether you have dogcrap or needlepoint or amber or silver or black, you have to wonder does it make that much difference, especially if you have few other options. What a dealer tells you is just going to be marketing boolscheet, needlepoint LSD and the like, its easy to be cynical and laugh off such claims, as it surely doesn't matter to most producers or dealers, most of them are not LSD religionists or not primarily anyway and are not in it to spread the good trips out of the kindness of their hearts, though they are kind enough if it does do the trick, I think even providing us with what they provide us is often a godsend, but its easier just to say its needlepoint and sell it as that for double the price and most people will hardly be the wiser so why bother and they'll get off so they'll feel they got their money's worth anyway, what more do you want? Perhaps you could even say you've done people a favor by telling them it was 99% pure needlepoint when in fact it was good enough 70% pure amber crystal and bestowed the blessing of a placebo effect with the white lie about the blotter being laid from needlepoint.
But I think the whole thing about, what the hell have you got under your tongue anyway has a lot of levels and is pretty interesting to consider, if not also, at times, damn annoying and adding to the perplexity and already uncertain set of circumstances you are putting your self into dropping acid in the first place. Though maybe thats why we do it! Its a hell of a thrill, or it should be. Who the hell wants a present if you know already what it is, well OK if you are going to buy me a brand new 2021 Dodge Demon I certainly am not going to be unhappy with that if I know ahead of time thats what you are getting me it also comes with a lifetime supply of free gasoline. Gas guzzlers they are. LSD give us our presents and new ones all the time and likes to give you a sock full of coal from time to time or nothing at all as has happened to me a few times when there seemed to be negligible effect from some blotter or other consumed. I laugh at the situation now when I confronted a dealer about not getting off and asked for a refund, "Oh you didn't trip off of it, eh? You idiot! Look! Ya know, some people they take acid and all that happens they say is that they see little fuckin squiggly lines and after that it just made them throw up or have a heat stroke or something they want their damn money back! But thats just how it is! Thats just what is acid is about! Some people just pass out! Nothing happens for them, they can't deal with it. Thats not my problem! If passing out is not tripping to you that just your opinion! Look I don;t know what your problem is man but you want your fuckin money back, do ya? OK, I'll tell you what, I'll give it back to ya! How many times have you taken acid anyway, once?! OK rookie! You're an idiot, here's your 5 bucks back, get off my lawn and don't come back! Moron!" Hilarious, I still was clueless, why I really didn't have anything at all happen. It was terrible sitting there after school alone at my desk in my room just staring at the blank white wall for 2 hours and nothing. It has happened to me with mushrooms. Its like taking what they call a ghost shit, you felt it, heard it and smelt and when you got up to flush there was nothing there. Your toilet is like the fucking Bermuda Triangle and shit, that shit just disappeared off the face of the earth. You shove a stick down the toilet hole to probe that shit and see if you can scrape some of it off...nothing. Its just not fucking there in the toilet. You take acid and Rod Serling rang the doorbell and said, "Imagine one day...you dropped about 300 mikes...and nothing happened. (Twilight zone theme song). You've just entered...the Twilight Zone."
Seriously though, I just happened to be looking over isomer structures and names of isomers of all the various lysergimides, and I think it was Shulgin who mentions the activity and presence of isomers or other "impurities" as being present in less purified products of the LSD making process. I am by no means a chemist or even any good at science or math, but I do find the molecular structure diagrams of all of these psychoactive compounds interesting in the way I find looking at all the different species of plants or animals is. They have cool shapes and forms and behavior and habitats and habits etc. Molecular structures are like constellations which while initially are very dry I find develop a kind mesmerizing allure, the configurations of stars their colors, distances from us, masses and brightnesses and now we know vaguely what kind of planets some of them have, the mythology connected to constellations etc and the different mythologies from culture to culture, Orion is a dog in Southeast Asia he doesn't have dogs as he does in the west, or he is a major god in Egypt as Osiris not just a minor and hapless titan who gets torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. And so these days I've started to get drawn in by the star like configurations of these isomer and analog molecules, particularly since they may have an effect on mind these different configurations of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Or given that you can tack just a few atoms onto the LSD molecule and have a compound like AL-LAD or ETH-LAD that most agree are quite different in their effects while other variations on LSD-25 like 1p-LSD do not seem to vary so much, or so seems to be the consensus. But then its like a kind of reverse ghost shit, there shouldn't be anything there yet there is with acid, why is it so different when you take it, and how can you ever really say AL-LAD or ALD-52 is different from acid or that there is dirty acid and clean acid. Yet I think you can in the way that you can say you felt different drinking tequila one night and drinking whiskey another night. But perhaps that analogy doesn;t work, its puzzling.
As for active compounds in so-called dirty acid, considering that setting is anything that isn't the target compound and its target of action, perhaps we could be more constructive and think of active non-LSD "impurities" as a part of the setting and something to be arranged and rearranged and researched and investigated and tweaked and refined. Perhaps there are some desirable characteristics in 70% pure LSD that aren't in 99%. I don't know myself, I was always more of a mushroom man back in the day, I really don;t have that level of experience with acid. Yes, back in the day when I would take the occasional 6 times year tab of street acid, you never knew what you were getting as of course you do not now, its just part of the whole experience given that the manufacturing is unregulated and given the corruption and complete cynicism of our world today, you probably couldn't trust LSD makers in this day and age even if it were legal. Fancy a tab of Pfizer acid? Ha! You gotta be kidding. I remember trusting the guy I used to buy from, a guy at my high school he had a very wise and wizardly demeanor, he was the go-to dealer at school amongst us nerds and turds claimed his older brother was in with the acid illuminati up in the Bay Area, and he'd get his acid from Deadheads and we were all there in the scrum dumb smog mid-late 1970's suburban Los Angeles, little access to hippes or counter-culture at that time, though as an outsider you might object that Hollywood babylon was right there at your doorstep, no it wasn't, suburban Los Angeles may as well be in Illinois or Texas and you go to Hollywood and they know you're not one of them. Anyway, our dealer Gandalf, we'll call him, might say, in his kindly big brotherly way, "OK these purple microdots are all I got, sorry, but they're OK, they're cut with a bit of speed, so you don't want to take more than 2, alright? Its just not as good as it could be, I took a few the other night, so thats what I copped onto, you'll just be getting too much speed if you take more than 2. I'll have some blotter thats better next month when the Dead come back from tour." I, not being wise to speed at the time, still, I had read in Peter Stafford's Psychedelic Encyclopedia that LSD was really remarkable in that it took such a small amount to get tremendously altered, so I wondered, how much speed could there actually be in these teeny tiny little microdots? Is what Gandalf said right, or what? But then, sure enough, you felt as wired as you did trippy so you felt you wasnt sure what was going on with any of it. Little did I or my dealer know, it just didn't seem to be common knowledge at the time, but its just a pretty obvious characteristic of LSD's effect, that it can be quite stimulating on its own, like a type of speed. So that blindspot about the stimulant qualities of LSD always morphed into the rampant, at the time, Speedy acid, I think 5 years os so earlier it was like one poster here said strychnine acid. Maybe we had that one in my time, a bit but not as much as the speed-acid one. Speed wasn't as popular with everyone then too. I think by the 80's alot of people would be like, "Oh speed too eh? Well good! Thats sounds like a nice combo! But then amongst 16 year old nerds it was like, "That Dark Star acid's bunk man! it's just fuckin speed dood! All that happened to me when I took it is I ground my teeth, peed my pants, and I had to get off somehow so I humped this big fat lady's leg on the RTD bus when we were smashed in together when everyone's getting off work and stuff got off on that more than your dealer's bunk acid man! That shit is bullshit man!"
Sorry, long folklorist digression there. Let me continue my point regarding perhaps re-thinking "impure" acid:
Basically it is that:
1.
Isomers are present and they may be valuable as part of the effect: You have all of these isomers of LSD or LSD analogs which may or may not be part of what constitute impurities, depends on your lab technique I suppose and also I have close to zero knowledge or training in chemistry so I just simply don't know. I think very few have any idea of what activity and or effect isomers have on their own or on the main psychoactive and on each other as they in combination modulate the main dish as it were. The isomers are for me a pet and developing obsession, an interesting other side of things, the ergo-loids, which could I suppose be thought of as being of a different class from analogs if they aren't already and which themselves have whole groups of isomers that one also wonders about , "How would these effect one upon ingestion?" Is what I wonder as though I were gazing once again in awe at the constellation of Gemini and the 9 star system that appears as a single star to us called Pollux. But, there are 11 isomers of LSD-25, (an isomer of a compound, as I understand it, being the same element components but simply a re-structuring) such as N,Butyllysergamide, et al they are listed and gone into on the fascinating Thikal website:
Explore the structures and analogues of LSD-25
isomerdesign.com
Also an interesting article I stumbled onto along these lines regarding ergoloids and speculation that much of what we are told by our chemists and dealers as being LSD-25 may indeed be decently active other kinds of ergoloids from LSD-25:
Non-LSD Ergoloids
isomerdesign.com
Other LSD analogs of course have isomers too. On the isomer design site ALD-52 is listed as having 3 somers, Al-LAD 11, ETH-LAD 9, 1-CP-LSD 5, etc. You wonder what effects if any these might have. If I were a chemist in a kinder time, I no doubt would be on it cooking that stuff up and trying like old Professor Shulgin.
2.
Other non-active components in less purified acid may also modulate the effect: I think there is a lot of nonsense in the notion or assumption that pure is better, that pure LSD-25 is the only thing we ought to be ingesting in an ideal world or that the lens of science is ever very good at identifying what anything is actually. I question the notion that you can really ever pinpoint LSD 25 or anything for that matter. Things are also what they are not and what they are in interaction with. Take the other things away and things just aren't what they were. "Acid in the 60's! Yeah that was it man! Its nevr been the same!" No it hasn't nor has acid today on Saturday been what it was Wednesday two weeks ago. Or A clear example of perhaps the haste with which you have to run off and declare you have discovered something in order to keep your research or your university job, or marketing and profit motives warping science would be the way you used to hear that through research we have isolated all of the components of what makes sound what it is and based on that knowledge we have created the electronic synthesizer which can be programmed to sound like anything you want it to given you have a good enough equipment. In reality no, sorry, it never sounds like anything but a synthesizer, no matter how top of the line and flexible the synthesizer is, as close as you come to mimicking regular non-electronically produced sounds you only have a synthsizer that sounds a lot like an electric guitar or the wind or a flute but if you listen carefully it ain't the sound of those things. Even the actual sound of those things aren't those things, they are the sound of those things via the media they were recorded with, the equipment they are re-played through etc. By the same token needlepoint acid isn't that, its at best needlepoint acid on the paper it was laid on and thats just the start and I think acid is so sensitive so Zen that its effect is affected by everything, even the astrological configuration of the planets as they were when a particular batch was synthesized (yes, there is a quantum solar system field or scalar phsyics field something like that (yes I know I am half talking out of my ass, it just an intuition) that is effected by where the planets are, which disrupt and modify the resonance of that field as created by the magnetic interactions of the planest with the sun and each other which shifts according to where the planets are) the state of mind of the person or people making the acid. I don;t know maybe these are what they call quantum level effects, where mind effects matter and mind etc. And it doesn't seem implausible, I know that the effects of mantra can be very concrete and powerful, you could change the effect acid has with mantra.
Or on a more down to earth level, the way different kinds of alcohol do indeed all get you buzzed, drunk if you like, but their effects are clearly not the same. Alcohol from grapes doesn't effect you in any way like alcohol from grain or potatoes. I drink vodka and I go to sleep. Drink beer and I'm up all night ranting. Drink wine and I go into almost profound reveries or too much and who knows, its like acid really, you might go out screaming at people or decide to sit there on the sidewalk and feel sorry for yourself. Its rather too bad there isn't more interest in that, why and how wine is different in its effect from beer and whiskey, or even how different wines can effect you differently especially red wines versus white wines. I guess its all forbotten, taboo, at least in America where you aren't allowed to say you drink to get drunk or get buzzed, that its nothing more than a kind of food else you get an entire Prebstetyrian congregation and Alcoholics Anonymous lobbying to have child protection services come and snatch up your kids because you're a gasp...alcoholic. Well, maybe thats a bit hyperbolic, but having lived in many countries over the years I am struck by how free and tolerant the U.S. is on many social levels, people are much more forgiving of character difference, flaws than are Asians or Europeans, who often look down on our friendly and open nature as just stupid. But regarding alcohol the US is the worst kind of nanny society, lorded over by the AA Taliban. Its nice to be able to go out and do a bit of heavy drinking now and again and be able to admit it and be in good company as you are in many countries, most of them I would argue. But again I digress. Why not look at the compounds of both actives and non-actives that occur with LSD as being what might make up a varietal. The LSD being like the ethanol which no one would want to drink or few anyway. I suppose we don't get into that because it just is so inaccessible and because we just cannot trust anyone who makes acid to do it for us without guffawing and saying oh come on don;t give me your marketers crap juts give me my acid! Rather a shame you can't home brew acid, or very few of us can, practically nobody even if you are a brilliant chemist, you just don;t even have a way to get the chemicals needed as I understand it, even the chems you need are banned and they'll arrest on suspicion if you order other things that are available. Oh well. Just have to become a breatharian and say mantra over your tabs to do experiments then I guess. Or just take up a tequila tasting hobby.
OK, well, maybe thats long enough for now to get myself flamed, cursed and banned into oblivion, heheh. Sorry, if lengthy posts offend, I'm just a lonely old man with no one to talk to I suppose, so when I do talk I just jabber interminably.