Use Your Brain on Drugs

A growing number of people are taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy to help them cope with a variety of conditions including anorexia nervosa, cluster headaches and chronic anxiety attacks.

The emergence of a community that passes the drugs between users on the basis of friendship, support and need – with money rarely involved – comes amid a resurgence of research into the possible therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. This is leading to a growing optimism among those using the drugs that soon they may be able to obtain medicines based on psychedelics from their doctor, rather than risk jail for taking illicit drugs.

Among those in Britain already using the drugs and hoping for a change in the way they are viewed is Anna Jones (not her real name), a 35-year-old university lecturer, who takes LSD once or twice a year. She fears that without an occasional dose she will go back to the drinking problem she left behind 14 years ago with the help of the banned drug.

The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The study, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, is the first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD-alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo.

A:

The primary catalysts for the decomposition of LSD are heat, light, oxygen, and moisture. LSD’s shelf life can be significantly extended if exposure to these are minimized.

Air & Light
Keeping LSD in an air and light proof container is the most important step. A good option is a dark amber glass container kept somewhere cool. Remember, most plastic (plastic bags) is not air tight, though it’s a lot better than nothing. Likewise, keeping blotter in foil isn’t going to stop air transfer, but it’s also better than nothing. If glass isn’t available, a combination of foil and plastic would be more effective than either one alone.

Temperature
LSD will degrade even at room temperature, but the hotter the temperature and the longer it is stored in a hot location, the more it will degrade. At room temperature, degredation is quite slow, so a cool room, out of the sun is generally enough to minimize break-down. Storing blotter in the refrigerator or freezer is fine, but is probably unnecessary.

Moisture
If blotter is stored somewhere cold (as opposed to cool), it should be allowed to return to room temperature before being opened as this will prevent condensation from forming. Also, if the weather is extremely humid, storing LSD with a little bit of dessicant (drying agent), can ensure that it stays dry.

If these storage methods are followed, blotter should last for many years. Foil in the freezer is a common storage method, and should be effective at keeping degradation to a minimumfor a few years.

BAM!

Patients suffering from the agony of cluster headaches will take anything to dull the pain, even LSD, it turns out. Results from a pilot study presented here on Saturday at the International Headache Congress reveal that six patients treated with 2-bromo-LSD, a nonhallucinogenic analog of LSD, showed a significant reduction in cluster headaches per day; some were free of the attacks for weeks or months.

“Some of these patients are still reporting significant relief more than a year after they were treated with the compound,” says John Halpern, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and one of the investigators involved in the study. “Nobody has ever reported these kinds of results.”