Wow, how awful. The only thing I can think to say right now is to offer my condolences for the loss of your friend and coworker.

Thanks. I went back to school for a second degree, so she was a classmate. We're a small department, and all of us know each other fairly well. A large lecture class for us will have 80 or so people in it. We're all contained in one small building and a clinic, so there's really no getting away from each other.

I'm in my late 30's and she was 22. More than once we joked about our age difference, and somehow that makes this even worse.

LSD-induced? Sounds more like psychopathic asshole-induced.

LSD doesn't create monsters, but it will release the ones kept caged inside...

Yeah...I'm kinda betting that the LSD was either not really LSD or cut with something else.

I didn't know her boyfriend, but other people in the department did...and this seemed pretty out of character.

It was probably L.

I have known someone on LSD to get naked and try to rip their penis off in front of a crowd of people at Six Flags Magic Mountain. True story. And yes, I can attest to the fact it was LSD. It passed the tryptamine marker test

lsd and self-harm, sure, but lsd and harming someone else seems off. unless it was cut, or he had something else on board.

and by something else on board i mean prescribed meds.
i've met two other people (besides myself) who were ok with lsd until lithium came on board, and then it all got ugly.

See, I'd think 'something else on board' would refer more to some latent or per-existing violent personality disorder. If you've got people taking acid who happened to also have lithium prescriptions- well, why the hell were they prescribed lithium?
I, for one, categorically reject the notion that drugs in themselves cause violent behavior. People don't kill because of drugs, they kill because they have some predisposition to violent, anti-social behavior. The drugs may just be a kind of catalyst.

'roids?

dont get me wrong, i think plain old lsd and harming others dont add up, and maybe the guy is a big asshole deep down inside.
given my little own n of 1, though, i can see how this could happen without having particularly violent tendencies: on lithium (which i was put on for depression and someone decided since my grandmother had bipolar disorder that maybe lithium was appropriate - dont get me started) i took acid three times (and i was pretty good by then at handling myself on trips). the first two times were really uncomfortable, edgy, maybe a little paranoid. that last time i was flat out paranoid, my friends tried to help me and just couldnt. i was terrified and crouched behind the toilet, later i crawled out a fifth story window and hung from the sill - all of this in blackout, interspersed with periods of relative lucidity - i distinctly remember climbing back in from the window and thinking oh, shit, this aint good. during the blackouts i was completely out of control and in flight mode. i'm a small female and have never fought, so flight makes sense.
i think it's entirely possible someone could go into fight mode and have something like this happen in an acid blackout if they knew how to fight. with my n of 3 it seems lithium has a tendency to make acid very bad.
or maybe the guy was an abusive, violent asshole, who knows?
there are a lot more meds now than when i was doing acid - i'd had tricyclics and acid with no problem. the resident at university health decided lithium was worth a shot since my depression seemed intractable (fwiw i ended up having seizures that night, and while i dont know for sure, i am pretty sure i had a toxic level of lithium with electrolyte imbalance). there's no telling what this guy might've been put on, and how it might interact with lsd. if i had to make a guess about one of the newer drugs i'd guess paxil, it's totally sketchy.

so dont do drugs, kids?

Ugh. Even without the naked penis ripping, LSD and large crowds of civilians do not mix.

LSD is freakishly powerful stuff - it can seriously destabilize some people. I don't think this type of episode would surprise anyone who has had experience of the stuff.

Can't find the quote, but I think is was leary who spoke about how everyone has some drugs they can handle just fine, while for other people the same drug will mess them up.

Acid made me giggle a bit and stare face to face with a hyper intelligent jellyfish pressed up against the omnimax screen, but even while I was tripping balls to the point of being unaware of my real surrounding I was simultaneously aware that it was just a hallucination caused by the drug.

For me, good drug, for this guy, bad one.

When trying something new, have a buddy monitor you and talk you through a bad reaction.

Also, acid is incredibly potent - it's not uncommon for two hits from different sources to be wildly different in strength. When you're talking micrograms, it's easy for two separate bits of paper to have soaked up dramatically different amounts of the stuff. The very same thing that gives you a giggly psychedelic trip can, in quadruple or tenfold dosage, readily transform into a black hole of an existential nightmare. And if you don't take the precaution of testing your supply before munching your usual fare, it can occasionally surprise you with a sucker punch far stronger than you might expect.

That's the terrible thing about LSD... it's just when you think you know it, when you start to get comfortable and give it some leeway, that it can turn on you - rear its ugly head and change gears on you in the most unforgiving ways. I think it's easier to keep your head if you go into it never expecting to have fun - with the mindset that every trip is a battle and that you have to fight the awful stuff right to the end. It's a bit like flying a rocket ship. You can have a great time, but you can't for a second fail to keep your hands on the controls. Buddy system is definitely a sensible approach, doubly so with stuff of unknown potency.

I'd quite like to meet a hyper intelligent jellyfish, but on the whole that assessment of how different drugs affect people doesn't really suggest wholesale experimentation or decriminalisation.

By that logic squirrel suits and bungee cables should be illegal.

Sorry, I don't follow.

If my DNA might (or might possibly not) cause my penis to be ripped off or murder my girlfriend the first time I bungie jump or wear a squirrel suit, I would tend to agree.

What about people who's DNA means they might murder their girlfriend because they have a stressful job?

They shouldn't wear squirrel suits either.

I have a fair amount of experience with acid, and have a lot of friends who have as much experience or more (sometimes a LOT more), and I've never known anyone to react this way.

Acid is actually one of the safest psychotropic drugs you can do, as long as you don't go overboard and you're not prone to a psychotic break.

That's the thing, though. You don't know you're prone to a psychotic break until you've had one. And the people that do often aren't around afterwards to pass on their stories - so there's quit strong survivor bias in the 'we've had lots of acid and it never went bad for us' stories.

It's not that you have to have known anyone who reacted this way, it's that you can understand how someone might. If you can't, then you've probably just played with acid, dabbling in the safe shallow end of the pool. The deep end will fuck you up, and if you've been there should be no doubt about how badly it can mess up a person. I've never known anyone to freak out bad like the guy in the article either, but I'll tell you it doesn't surprise me one bit that it happened.

But what would somebody cut LSD with?

Nothing. That's one of the nice things about acid, if you're going to make some it doesn't make much sense to cut it, because it's cheap to make if you have the means and know-how. Stories about strychnine etc are just urban legend.

Sad.