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Take a Little Trip

Ryan Grim posts at Slate saying that LSD use has dramatically declined among our young people in the last four years. Statistical evidence indicates it has gone from 6.6 percent in 2000 to 1.9 percent in 2003.

It begs the question, to what can we attribute this decline? The prohibitionists might suggest their anti-drug propaganda is working, but that seems unlikely. The market for other hallucinogenic drugs remains strong and what LSD is available has merely quadrupled in price. How to explain it?

The best explanation is a bust, a really big bust. The DEA claims it reduced the LSD supply by "95 percent" with two arrests in rural Kansas in November 2000... [T]he DEA seized the largest operable LSD laboratory in agency history, as well as 91 pounds of LSD and precursor compounds for the potential manufacture of nearly 27 pounds more. If you define a dose of LSD as 100 micrograms, Apperson and Pickard had around 400 million hits in stock. At the more common dosage level of 20 micrograms, the two were sitting on 2 billion hits.

It's not easy to make LSD and it could well be that these two were the last major suppliers left in the US. The practical effect of course is that consumers switched to other more readily available and often more harmful drugs. The prohibitionists will tell you this is progress. I disagree, I think it's a big step backwards in harm reduction.