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Can you die from an LSD overdose?

ChemicallyEnhanced

ChemicallyEnhanced

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 29, 2018
Messages
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I can't get a clear answer online..
In the TV Show Oz a man is killed via a massive OD of LSD.
However, I am currently reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and a character seemingly survives ingesting almost an entire sheet (94 blotters) of LSD.
Which one of these is accurate?

P.S. Asking because I am very interested in all drugs and pharmaceuticals but don't have any personal experience with LSD and am very curious to learn more.
 
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Coma, Hyperthermia and Bleeding Associated with Massive LSD Overdose: A Report of Eight Cases

Eight patients were seen within 15 minutes of intranasal self-administration of large amounts of pure D-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) tartrate powder. Emesis and collapse occurred along with signs of sympathetic overactivity, hyperthermia, coma and ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Famous accidental overdose that resulted in no deaths. If each snorted 2 lines, we're talking 20-30 mg maybe? Anyway, that's hundreds of doses, and still not fatal.
 
There is one recorded human overdose resulting in death. A man injected (IV) about 300mg of LSD crystal, thinking it was speed (imagine what a life you must live tto have 300mg of LSD crystal laying around 8)). He died, I think from complications involving vasoconstriction. Of course that's intravenously injecting 3000 doses at once. Very few people ever even see LSD crystal, let alone mistakenly inject 300mg of it.

They also did a horrible, cruel experiment on an elephant where they injected it with like 800-ish mg of LSD. The elephant died.

But these are obscene dosages that would hard to even ever do, let alone do by accident even in the worst circumstances.
 
Thanks very much to both of you!

@Xorkoth - I actually have a book (I haven't read it yet) called Elephants on Acid all about bizarre experiments that scientists have conducted over the years.
 
No one has ever died. Even the IV of LSD is a very debatable story alot of drugs where present in their system. Same with the elephant it was loaded on barbiturates.

the largest known LSD ingestion occured during the 70s or 80s by a LSD chemist in italy who was decanting ten million doses and it slipped shattered all over him and soaked into him. He was fine within a day.

Ingesting to much LSD has led to many accidental deaths as people lose their mind to the trip and reality shatters at the sub atomic level they will either kill themselves to escape the trip or just totally removed from physical realm they end up jumping off a high space if they get psychosis.

People i know have ended up in hopstial for mental health for weeks on end after drinking a entire vial. Many lsd chemists before the introduction of moon suits during synthesis have accidentally consumed thousands of hits at once during the careless days of the 60s and 70s and came out fine.
 
TripSitterNZ said:
People i know have ended up in hopstial for mental health for weeks on end after drinking a entire vial. Many lsd chemists before the introduction of moon suits during synthesis have accidentally consumed thousands of hits at once during the careless days of the 60s and 70s and came out fine.
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Goodness, I'm just thinking about how intense the trip must have been at thousands of doses.

DMT is intense but this would haven't even been a comparison, On 200ug I was having outer body experiences and telepathy I can't imagine how thousands more doses would feel. Your connection to reality would be gone for at least 6-7 hours.
 
Xorkoth said:
They also did a horrible, cruel experiment on an elephant where they injected it with like 800-ish mg of LSD. The elephant died.
Click to expand...
IIRC they also shot it up with barbituates or some similar downers after, and that's when the elephant died. You bet your ass someone would die if they were IVing barbs.
 
TripSitterNZ said:
No one has ever died. Even the IV of LSD is a very debatable story alot of drugs where present in their system. Same with the elephant it was loaded on barbiturates.
Click to expand...

Really? I don't remember reading about other substances in that report. Considering Pickard's story, I can imagine 320mg LSD IV to be survivable, though with the normally insignificant level of impurities becoming the culprit.

I agree on the elephant story.

Edit: Also, whatever he's been on, it must have been compatible with the intended 320mg of IV amphetamine. What's lethal with acid that isn't with an exceedingly steep dose of stims? I find it really hard to exonerate LSD here.
 
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scatterday said:
Goodness, I'm just thinking about how intense the trip must have been at thousands of doses.

DMT is intense but this would haven't even been a comparison, On 200ug I was having outer body experiences and telepathy I can't imagine how thousands more doses would feel. Your connection to reality would be gone for at least 6-7 hours.
Click to expand...
Im thinking that at some point, there is a ceiling and the dose and effects do not scale and match up. If they did, then those people who have taken hundreds or thousands of hits by mishap would not have recovered to tell the tale.

So that 10'000 hits might not actually feel any different to 100 hits.

The problem is, who is going to volunteer to test this out hehe?
 
As far as I know there is no drug known that has a higher margin between effective dose and toxic overdose, than LSD.
The risk is pretty much all psychological and not physical. But even then, I've met someone who intentionally licked hundreds or thousands of doses in one go, and he was surprisingly mentally sound.

It's a really amazing molecule.
 
AutoTripper said:
Im thinking that at some point, there is a ceiling and the dose and effects do not scale and match up. If they did, then those people who have taken hundreds or thousands of hits by mishap would not have recovered to tell the tale.

So that 10'000 hits might not actually feel any different to 100 hits.

The problem is, who is going to volunteer to test this out hehe?
Click to expand...

I think that's basically true, LSD gets to a saturation point where increased dosage just increases the duration (because of increasing the number of half-lives to flush the drug out of your system, as @Xorkoth so succinctly put it yesterday). There are probably also some receptor targets that are only weakly agonized on low doses, that begin to become more perceptibly affected on extremely high doses too.

I remember a discussion on here a long time ago where it seemed like the consensus was that after about 1mg, it's definitely diminishing returns. I bet 5mg (50 hits) wouldn't feel any different from 20mg (200 hits)

but I definitely am not volunteering.
 
Apart from the part that you can scare yourself to death or get PTSD from a too-intense sesh, of course its possible to get LSD toxicity, but that requires doses that won't really happen to us pedestrians who dont have access to the pure compound, but to blots and dots. You got to remember, a sheet is only 0.01gr and a teaspoon is several grams. The deadly dose is likely between that.
 
LSD does whatever it wants to you even a massive dose could maybe end up quite a easier ride than 1000 ug if the LSD has mercy on them and makes them enlightened for the trip.
 
In some rare cases LSD can trigger certain mental illnesses. But the LSD itself cannot kill you.
 
I don't know about LSD but one of the founders of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love died from a psilocybin overdose.
 
Chris Timothy said:
Edit: Also, whatever he's been on, it must have been compatible with the intended 320mg of IV amphetamine. What's lethal with acid that isn't with an exceedingly steep dose of stims? I find it really hard to exonerate LSD here.
Click to expand...

Speed, as he was shooting up .32, and didn't realize it was LSD, it's not hard to believe that it wasn't the first of the sesh.
 
Cream Gravy? said:
IIRC they also shot it up with barbituates or some similar downers after, and that's when the elephant died. You bet your ass someone would die if they were IVing barbs.
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Yes that is exactly what happened. The elephant became so agitated from the massive dose of lsd they had to inject huge doses of phenobarbital. I'm pretty sure the cause of death was determined to be respiratory depression from the barbiturate and that experiment was thus seen as a failure to establish a lethal dose for LSD. It is probably possible to die from it by taking an insane amount in one shot but it still has a wider therapeutic range than common stuff like otc medication, minerals, sugars, spices. Hell even drinking too much water can kill you from hyponatremia in amounts probably lower relatively to a lsd overdose. That being said the risks posed by ingesting enormous amounts of a powerful psychoactive and ending dead or injured by another factor related to behavior/environement is very real and not te be taken lightly by any means.
 
It's possible to overdose on anything if you take more than your body can safely process including water.
You would need to take an insanely large amount of lsd to overdose on it...but its 100% possible to do so.

"The dose makes the poison"
-Paracelsus

The dose makes the poison - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
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