r/todayilearned • u/Rick_killed_Shane • Jun 26 '12
TIL that 1991 to 2000, about 90% of the world's LSD was made by one man.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19357_6-people-who-single-handedly-screwed-entire-economies_p2.html111
u/schematix Jun 26 '12
Gordon Skinner will now forever remain on my top despised people list. Damn that man for infinite eternities!
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Jun 26 '12
Want an even more fucked up reason to hate Gordon Skinner? This is a long read, but it's INCREDIBLY fucked up.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ok-court-of-criminal-appeals/1251267.html
Brandon Green remembers that on July 4, 2003, he voluntarily ingested several of what Skinner described as “the Eucharist,” believing that the Catholic communion wafers that Skinner provided would be laced with LSD, as on previous occasions when Skinner had given them to Green. Green expected that the wafers would cause him to “trip,” but instead he was rendered completely unconscious.8 Green testified that his next memory was of waking up naked on the hotel bathroom floor, with his hands, legs, and mouth duct-taped, and with Skinner standing over him, kicking him in the groin area as hard as he could and saying, “You should never have touched my fiancée; you should never have touched my fiancée.”
and that's the tame part :\
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u/TheHumanMeteorite Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
According to the DEA, that is.
And it's not like they're dishonest and incompetent or anything.
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Jun 26 '12
This will probably get buried but I hope some people see this. I'm surprised cracked didn't mention Mansa Musa of Mali. This guy carried so much gold on him that when he traveled throughout the Middle East, he devastated the economies of major cities such as Cairo, Mecca, and Medina.
The above link is his wiki page but here's some pieces from it.
Musa made his pilgrimage in 1324, his procession reported to include 60,000 men, 12,000 slaves who all carried 4-lb. gold bars, heralds dressed in silks who bore gold staffs, organized horses and handled bags.
He gave away the gold to the poor he met along his route. Musa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, but also traded gold for souvenirs. Furthermore, it has been recorded that he built a mosque each and every Friday.
Musa's generous actions, however, inadvertently devastated the economy of the region. In the cities of Cairo, Medina and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares super inflated in an attempt to adjust to the newfound wealth that was spreading throughout local populations. To rectify the gold market, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest. This is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.
Given the time period, I'd say this one should be #1 on that list.
TL;DR- Mansa Musa had so much gold that when he gave it away, he destroyed economies.
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u/di3inaf1r3 Jun 26 '12
About the "got off scot-free" part, Skinner was recently arrested for kidnapping and torture and is likely to get a long prison sentence
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u/jtbeith Jun 26 '12
Anecdote here...
I started college in 1998. Acid was everywhere, and cheap, and fun! Somewhere between 2000 and 2001 it just went away overnight.
About ten years later out of boredom I wikied LSD and eventually read about William Pickard and then it all made sense.
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Jun 26 '12
Which explains why there was such a dry spell up until a couple years ago, and it's all but impossible to find clean doses now.
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Jun 26 '12
Leonard wrote a paper from prison called International LSD Prevalence - Factors Affecting Proliferation and Control.
Here are some relevant excerpts allowing the man to contribute to his own defense:
The MTF data for LSD and MDMA are most interesting to compare for the period 1996–2006. Although our concern here is LSD prevalence, we discover that the appearance of MDMA in the surveys, first re- corded in 1996, followed by an unprecedented and unusually steep rise—for any drug historically—sug- gests that this great influx of MDMA availability and use had a displacement or substitution effect on LSD use among the same cohort. LSD prevalence as observed by the MTF study, has undergone a steady decline each year since a peak in 1996. Drug policy analysts who consider these surveys also observed a remarkable and seemingly inexplicable drop in prevalence in 2001, to the lowest level of LSD availability and use seen in decades. This sudden decrease, due to then unknown factors, prompted written commen- tary on slate.com and other venues with articles entitled, e.g. “Where Has All the Acid Gone?”
The DEA’s reply to this question, then and now, is that DEA alone was wholly responsible for the decline in LSD availability due to a single enforcement action in Kansas in 2000 entitled “Operation White Rab- bit”, thereafter attempting to utilize the MTF and DAWN data in asserting a 74% decline in LSD avail- ability due to White Rabbit. Indeed, DEA’s annual appropriations requests to the U.S. Congress in 2005 and 2006 were based in part on this unopposed interpretation of the MTF and DAWN data and the sei- zure of one clandestine laboratory. But were they correct? The DEA website shows a simple chart reflect- ing the DAWN data and the steady decline since 1996, but with an arrow pointing at November, 2000, the month of the Kansas seizure. There is no mention of factors causing the decline since 1996. However, a more careful review of the MTF and DAWN data suggests that the DEA interpretation was inaccurate for—it is submitted—a single laboratory or even the several laboratories seized between 1996–2000, are unlikely to strongly influence national or international prevalence figures for LSD due to the redundancy of the many labs and distributors that cumulatively are responsible for LSD availability.
In support of this observation, and conflicting with the DEA interpretation, are the following facts: While LSD was experiencing a steady decline since 1996 and a marked decline in 2001, MDMA use had a strongly positive—almost epidemic—800% increase in the same period, thus suggesting a substitution effect. For when a new drug suddenly becomes widely available to a user population, particularly of a similar class of drugs, substitution effects are inevitable and promoted by the limits of time, cost, and interest of the user population, in this instance the 18–24 age cohort. Although the MTF explanation in its 2003 annual summary for the LSD decline in 2001 was based entirely on DEA’s claim of the Kansas seizure, the MTF report in 2005—after MTF received the author’s discussion of substitution effects and unpublished details of the Kansas case—began to include substitution in its theory of events in its annual report, although without attribution. In 2007, DEA continues to refer only to the earlier MTF report, neglecting to address the reality of substitution effects common to all drug use.
What were the unpublished details submitted to MTF supporting the observation that single laboratories do not significantly affect national survey results? According to government testimony, the Kansas lab was not operational in 2000 but simply stored, and was allegedly only periodically operational in Colo- rado and New Mexico from 1997 through July, 1999. Thus, the lab purportedly began production the year after the steady decline in availability began in 1996. Any DEA explanation based on the absence of this lab must also account for its presence. It does not. Put another way, if an agency attributes the 2001 drop to a single lab, there must also be a corresponding and significant increase in availability when the same lab begins production.
Nor, as we shall see, was there a significant rise or decline in availability from the presence or absence of any seized LSD lab between 1976 and 1996. We may begin to infer that LSD availability is not the out- come of the incapacitation of a single lab or the small cluster of loosely affiliated manufacturers—DEA suggests six—that allegedly are responsible for most LSD production, but rather the outcome of the re- dundancy of an unknown and much larger number of smaller, independent point sources that arise and disappear due to several factors—other than enforcement’s incapacitation and deterrent effects—that we will discuss. In sum, DEA asserts—in the case of LSD—one or a few labs can supply the international demand. It is here suggested that LSD is more similar to MDMA in that the ubiquity of such labs means the absence or presence of one or a few has no observable effect on surveys.
continued below...
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u/KDIZZLL Jun 26 '12
Always wondered why acid disappeared completely after the 90s. I thought it was more of an issue of demand, thinking maybe that generation preferred raves and MDMA over acid, boy was I wrong.
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u/Ober7 Jun 26 '12
Yep, and if you where "hip" after 2000, you didnt need an article to realize there was a problem.
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u/shryne Jun 26 '12
You know how sex offenders get all kinds of shit while they are in prison? This man had better be receiving the opposite.
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u/Esoteric_Guy Jun 26 '12
"Psychedelics are not illegal because a loving government is concerned you'll jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down modes of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."
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Terrence McKenna
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u/KimChongIllin Jun 26 '12
I ain't a professional, or a wook, but I am quite experienced with LSD, mushrooms and DMT
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If you buy LSD on blotter. It will just about always be completely fake or completely real. there are so few few drugs you can put onto blotter, remember the average hit is what 70-100 micrograms.
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If you ever eat some blotter and it has a nasty metallic taste to it, spit that shit out immediatly, its probably DOC, DOA, DOB, or one of the very few other drugs that can be administered through blotter. you do not want that.
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Many people will ingest multiple hits at once, you cannot really overdose from LSD, but you can from DOC and DOA and DOB, ive always worried at festivals that somebody will buy fake blotter, eat a bunch thinking its LSD, not think twice about their mouth tasting like aluminum, and then end up being hospitalized, or possibly worse.
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Yes you can ingest LSD through your asshole, and ive only heard stunning reviews.
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With mushrooms, weight is a ballpark estimate, or weight is kinda useless, ive had a half bag of shrooms knock me to the ground and show me whos boss at a festival, whereas i ate 7 grams of cubensis and still been partyin.
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NEVER trust a white dude wearing a Dashiki
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Jun 26 '12
I went to high school in Kansas in the late 90s. I will never forget the fourth of July 1998. Or was it 1999? Oh well, doesn't matter; had LSD25.
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u/zoot_allures Jun 26 '12
Life in prison? fucking hell, the world is a disgusting place. When was the last time anyone in the CIA was put into jail for all those plane loads full of cocaine?
Go back to bed America, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, the two drugs that your government allows you to have because they know they do absolutely nothing for you compared to stuff like LSD and other hallucinogens.
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u/Aswas Jun 26 '12
Nothing was like that Owsley acid. I did more than anyone else I knew,, that Orange Sunshine was an incredible trip,,woo woo!!!!
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u/Nethervex Jun 26 '12
This is the first TIL i legitimately liked and found interesting. Thanks op!