2005-03-18 17:34:41.157301+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
If you've ever read a newspaper report about the size and intended destination on a drug bust and thought "wait a minute, they're saying that Graysville Tennessee has an underground drug economy large enough to sink the GDP of Germany?" Slate has a rundown on an alleged "91 lbs of LSD" bust.
[ related topics: Drugs Politics Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Economics ]
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#Comment Re: made: 2005-03-21 14:02:37.242101+00 by: ebradway
"Back in the day" a friend of mine was busted carrying a couple sheets (100 hits of acid on paper squares, like the one pictured in the article, although not quite as colorful then). I got to see him get dragged through the ringer of police incompetency. They weighed the paper and declared he had about 100 grams of LSD, enough to warrant a felony conviction. LSD is measuged in micrograms. As the article mentioned, LSD is usually around 20 mikes a dose. So my friend had about 400 micrograms of LSD.
The cops were also afraid to touch anything in his posession as if he had some kind of contagious disease. They were told that contact, no matter how brief, with LSD, would cause a person to basically go insane. I guess you can't blame the cops though. If he had, say, a crystal of pure LSD and you brushed against it, you'd be on an instant vacation from reality.
And I used to think that maybe weighing the carrier for the drug was compensation for the fact that it's really, really had to detect LSD on anything. It's colorless, odorless, tasteless, and at quantities like 20 micrograms, hard to find even with a spectrometer. So the acidheads had an advantage over the cops. As long as they didn't actually sell to a cop, they were usually couldn't be traced.