OK, I'm gonna join tobala on this one and be a part of the minority of two.
I think that crystal to paper post is a real disservice.
I really think that there are enough scientists here to recognize that what has been posted is pretty sketchy at best, and some of those people are moderators.
And unfortunately there seems to be too much interest on this board by people that get compounds like DOC and DOI and want to know how to lay paper with them. Which is kind of scary in itself, but what is even scarier is that everyone seems to be so enamored with this whole thumbprint business that nobody seems to recognize that anyone on this board could see this thread, somehow buy into the apparently popular opinion that this guy is the holy grail, and try to use the really shitty "guidelines" above to lay DOC or DOI or Br-dragon while in fact having no fucking clue about the actual dose levels they were making.
If the purpose of this forum is really "harm reduction" let's at least have a basic objective evaluation of what has been transcribed here. I think if you are going to have this here at all, it needs to be given with some strong disclaimers.
"#14 or equivalent" does not tell you shit about the dosing properties of a piece of watercolor paper. As far as I know it does not tell you shit about watercolor paper at all. I think the normal metric is pound weights. Please, I really hope that someone can prove that I am wrong and post some meaningful physical characteristics of a well known standard of "#14 watercolor paper".
Second even if you know something about the weight of a paper, what size is it? How big is a sheet? How big is a hit? I've seen everything under the sun, big hits, little hits, thin hits, thick hits. Some prints are different sizes than others. And if you want to at least have a theoretical add-on on target you have to have a reasonably good idea of what the wet pickup % of the paper you use is based on the solvent you use, and make up a solution accordingly, not by some magical number of 1/110 gives you 95 mics.
And we are talking about putting very small amounts of a compound on paper here. Cellulose equilibrates rapidly with the ambient humidity which would in turn impact the add on by a dipping processing. I'm gonna guess that people who actually know what they are doing dry the paper and get an average wpu% starting with paper known to be conditioned to dryness so they can get a reproducible dip.
And what about drying? Oh just dip it, the alcohol dries quick. Yeah, sounds real reliable to me. When cellulose dries it can wick like crazy. Which means a solute can migrate all over the place. Assuming LSD is big enough to stay in place, which I seriously doubt myself given that dye molecules which are much much larger still migrate during drying, does that mean a radically different molecule like DOI will behave the same?
Maybe you think that I am making things too complicated, and that as long as a person absorbs all the solution into 100 sheets of whatever paper and then cuts them into equal squares it should be cool. Uhmm. OK. Do you really feel that confident that it is really all that unlikely that a person who gets a couple of squares from the middle of a sheet might get a light dose while a person who gets a couple of squares from the edge of a sheet might end up getting clobbered by 4-6 mg of DOI when they though they were getting 2? Because if you do, all I can say is that wow, these thumbprints really are unbelieveble. People don't even have to do one, they just read some romanticized post about someone else claiming to have done one and all of a sudden their IQ tanks to George Bush levels.
I mean seriously. WTF?
I feel pretty confident you need to know at least a little bit more than 1 gm/110 mL and the mysterious #14 to lay paper.
And I've also read the entire thumbprint thread at the shroomery, and honestly in my opinion at the very least a *lot* of it has been very heavily err, "romanticized" as well.
I did the Dead tours heavily througout the 80s. On any given tour there might be a few different patterns of paper, and you would see it everywhere, tons of it. Very consistent stuff too. I feel reasonably sure, for several reasons, that not all, but still by far most of the stuff you saw on tour was mass produced. I *really* have a hard time swallowing the idea that 100, no wait, read further, maybe as many as a 1000 that this guy "knew" people were printed and running around on tour and just laying this shit in hotel rooms, and wow, somehow on exactly the same few types of paper as the other 99 or 999 depending on how far into the tale you are, and doing a damn uniform job of it too.
Right. And after all the big boys were taken down in the 60s, do you honestly believe the people left that had the raw materials would say "Hey, lets thumbprint, oh a few thousand people. And while we're at it, let's make sure any random person who has been printed knows a 100, no wait, make it a 1000 other people who have also been printed. Then we will have this incredible super clandestine organization to move LSD because the brotherhood of the print will keep all the brothers strong against the feds. WTF? Oh yeah, that is definitely a solid master plan.
But that was all a long time ago. So whatever. Believe what you want to believe. But again, if you are gonna have this stuff here on a public forum, somebody needs to step up and tell the truth. I mean it is incomprehensible to me that so many otherwise intelligent people are saying how great this "crystal to paper" thread is. And given that a lot of the "how do I lay <RC>" threads I've seen on this board appeared to have come from some real dumbasses I don't doubt for a second that they would believe, "Oh cool, finally a tried and true recipe".
Fuckin' brilliant.