Apparent 'LSD overdose' not all it seems

I heard about this right before I split for the playa and didn't get a chance to do much digging; and now that I'm back, I'm too lazy to do much more digging, so I'll leave it to your capable hands to suss out what's happened here. The situation seems to be: dude gets hauled in kicking and screaming by the cops, dude later dies in police custody, toxicologist later claims that dude died of an LSD overdose.

In the immortal words of that lovable scamp Arnold Jackson, "Whatchootalkinbout, Willis?""

Fortunately, of all the news reports that eventually went by about this, at least one registered a reasonable amount of skepticism about the tale. This article breaks it down a few ways. For starters:

One of the few recorded cases of LSD overdose occurred in 1972, when four men and four women snorted powdered LSD at a dinner party, thinking it was cocaine. Some 15 minutes later, they were admitted to a San Francisco hospital. Five were already in a coma when they arrived. Three of them were experiencing depressed respiration, leading doctors to perform endotracheal intubation -- in which a tube is slid through the mouth into the trachea to assist breathing.

Tests found between a low of 2.1 to a high of 26 nanograms per milliliter of blood in the eight patients, all of whom survived.

Now you can laugh all you want about the perils of snorting a thing you thought was this one thing and it turned out to be this other thing; it's happened to me, although to be clear, it was just a different brand of drain cleaner than I was expecting, and frankly, I don't mind the off brands that much but I don't like to let my corporate sponsors know that. At any rate, moving on:

Cotton's blood had concentrations of 10.6 ng/ml at the time of his death, perhaps three to four hours after he took the drug, using his release to determine the time of ingestion. Since there have been so few deaths, the lethal dose of LSD has only been projected at .2 milligrams per kilogram to 1 mg/kg, or between 14 to 70 milligrams for a 155-pound person.

Jager was not immediately available for comment to give Cotton's exact weight.

While the analysis of LSD levels is tricky, a comparison to experiments in which a 35-year-old man was administered 600 micrograms of LSD -- and was found to have 1 ng/ml concentrated in his blood four hours after ingestion-- suggests that Cotton would have had to have taken more than 6,000 micrograms, or 6 mg, of LSD to produce his result.

At this point, any rational, sane human being would be all like, "Dude, quit bogarting the micrograms!!" Seriously, there are drug-starved kids in Ethiopia. But moving on:

That's between 60 and 200 hits of LSD, given the typical street dosage administered on blotter paper, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement. That much LSD could cost $120 to $2,000, according to values calculated by the DEA. LSD does come in liquid or powder form, although it's much more rare.

Either way, Cotton had to get his hands on a large amount of LSD. It's not impossible given time. But it is made far more unlikely by the fact that Cotton apparently acquired the drug within the two hours between his release after two weeks in jail, especially since it's not one of the more readily accessible drugs locally.

Oh come on, you can't just walk out of jail and score $2,000 worth of LSD in your neighborhood? (And then go home and snort it all... or something?) At any rate, the icing on the cake is this conclusion:

Dr. John Lamb, who works in Sacramento for Poison Action Line, said the general LSD-related death doesn't have to do with toxicology.

”The typical LSD death, if there is going to be one, is trauma,” Lamb said in a phone interview Monday. “It's not the drug itself, it's the trauma resulting from the hallucinations.”

Aha. The "typical LSD death" - now there's a conversation starter. I would wager that Cotton's family might suspect the "typical LSD death" results from hallucinations about, oh, say, police batons - but that would be leaping to conclusions. An alternate explanation: "At a town hall meeting held Aug. 16, Nielsen said Cotton's death might have been caused by his banging his head against the floor of his jail cell after booking. " Which is one of the classic LSD behaviors described by Leary / Alpert / Metzner in their classic work, Sucking Down 200 Hits of LSD: So You're a Bardo Badass. I get it, it all makes sense.