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Why such a small blotter? LSD? (Plus nostalgic experience report)

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ohayoco

Rising Star
Senior Member
OG Pioneer
The "can you get proper LSD anymore" thread has reminded my friend Dreamer of the first time he took LSD, and brought up a question on something I've always wondered about. I'd be really grateful if someone could answer, purely to satisfy my own curiosity.

The question:
People always talk about LSD being on pictured blotters. In fact, I have never seen this in my entire life. The two times Dreamer did LSD, it was on a tiny sliver of unmarked thick white blotter paper which must have only measured about 10mm long x 3 mm wide x 1mm thick. His friend told him it was 'double dipped' or something. I later heard that when they make LSD, the blotters at the bottom of the pile get oversaturated and contain 'deadly' concentrations, which made me think that maybe what they were taking was this leftover overconcentrated blotter cut into suitably small pieces. Just out of interest, was I right or is there another explanation?

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There's often talk on here about how other things are passed off as LSD. I thought I'd post Dreamer's experience report too, so that people can judge whether or not what he took was really LSD, and so that those too young to have found any LSD yet can have a read of how it felt for him. I'm pretty sure it was LSD from all I've heard, but here's his tale anyway.

Ohayoco's Dreamer said:
School Daze

Boarding school was very boring, so C and I were excited to receive a certain letter one Saturday morning. We went to my room and opened it eagerly to examine its contents. There was nothing but a little folded piece of tinfoil inside, and inside that lay two thin white slivers of blotting paper. LSD! C took his, ripped it in half, and placed half under his tongue, and rushed off to shower and dress. I decided to take mine all at once, because I wanted a full experience. I went to the mirror, opened my mouth, and held my tongue up while I placed the blotter lengthways along a big dark vein within the fold at the bottom of my tongue. I then went about getting ready for the day, carefully ensuring that the magic blotter was not disturbed from its position.

We were seventeen and the year was 1996. Until that day the only drugs I had encountered were alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, poppers, and my daily use of topical antibiotics for teenage acne. I had little concept of the power of psychedelics, so I felt no fear in consuming LSD for the first time.

Coming Up

In an hour's time I was dressed and feeling the first effects. I felt positive and energised. My mouth tasted strangely metallic. I went outside to meet C, who was watching our schoolmates playing a game of rugby. As soon as I caught his eye, he beamed, and I beamed back. Words were unnecessary. It was as if we both knew what each other was experiencing, a big telepathic "Wow". "The colours, man" I said. Everything was so vivid, and the colours seemed to radiate into the cold autumn air as if the grass and trees and sky were too saturated to contain their pigments.

I went back inside to chill in the warm for a bit, then when darkness fell I met C in the street to go to the canteen for supper. It was a magical foggy night. He called my name, then lifted his arms to the sky slowly like wings. But they were wings, beautiful wings! When he had lifted his arms, they had left a trail of arms behind them to form his own angelic silver and blue wings. Each trail faded one after another until he was whole again, then he moved his arms back down and his plumes returned. Amazing! I did the same for him, then we walked through the fog gesturing wildly to each other as we spoke to enjoy the phenomena.

Dinner was strange but unremarkable. We concentrated on appearing 'normal' in the sickly yellow light of the canteen. I was anxious given the amount of teachers around and our degree of visibility to the rest of the school. I can't remember anymore if I ate or not. My trip grew stronger, and I returned to my room to chill out in private. C had taken the second half of his tab hours after the first one, which probably explained how I was now feeling the effects far more than he.

The Visionary Peak

I put some music on and sat on my bed in the flourescent yellow light. I could tell that something was about to happen, that visions were about to flow. Shadows that I had assumed to be cast by dents and irregularities in the wall came to life. Animated cave paintings! Primeval stick men danced around with their spears to the 4-4 beat of the music.

I looked down at the carpet, and suddenly the entire thing was overlaid with an incredible sight. Aztec lizard men dancing in concentric circles! These vivid 2D green and silver creatures inhabited a plane floated on the surface of the carpet, where they danced in rings that got larger and larger, the stout members of each ring holding hands and tails, with each ring rotating in the opposite direction to the neighbouring rings. Their plane was mapped perfectly to the carpet alone, such that they appeared to disappear under the wardobe, chairlegs, skirting boards, and reappear again once they had danced under the obstruction. I got on my hands and kness and rubbed the carpet, but could not feel them, and nothing I did would distract them from their perfect dance along their perfect paths.

I decided to lay back on the bed and close my eyes. My vision was filled entirely with colourful flowers that opened and closed continuously and randomly. In the foreground, a winding, silver path flowed from the distance towards me, then a mercury man in matching top hat and tails waltzed alone up and down the shining path. Beautiful!

I got up to make myself a glass of water, then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My facial features would not stay put! I was a living Picasso. I tried to rotate my eye by ninety degrees back to its usual position, and push my nose then lips back where they belong, but they were undeterred and continued to flow around my face as they wished. I was not sure how I felt about this happening, so I decided to avoid the mirror and sit on the bed again.

The Loop

Suddenly the mental effects took over. My mind was one big "Why?". I knew nothing. I doubted everything I had learnt and been taught prior to this moment. I was a newborn child. Why? What is this? What is existence? What am I? Am I? What? I don't understand? What's to understand? What is understanding? I am a newborn child. Why? I was stuck in this horrific loop for what could have been one minute or thirty, but judging time was impossible in a cyclical state of complete ignorance of anything but questions, questions, questions.

The Taper

Someone popped their head in the room, and I was released from the loop. I went into my friend S's room and talked to him. He asked me what it was like, so I told him my experiences so far. I then laughed at him, because while he spoke his neck grew and grew. I told him he had a neck as long as a giraffe's, and we laughed at the strange vision.

We then went to a small library in another room, knowing that it would be quiet there. People were like paper. They were completely flat. A teacher came into the room and asked me if I was alright. "Don't panic!", I thought. I told him I was fine, trying very hard to focus on his eyes and appear normal, while at the same time trying desperately to resist the temptation to take hold of the corner of his ear and peel this 2D paper nuisance off my vision to solve the problem!

After that, the effects slowly wore off, and by evening I was pretty much back to baseline. I had taken a mindblowing psychedelic drug at school, and somehow got away with it! I found C watching television with his girlfriend. He later told me that he hadn't really seen that much after dinner, so I told him that he should have taken it all in one go. I was not happy though. I felt really uneasy. The loop had shaken me up quite badly, and actually put me off high dose LSD for life. The set and setting was obviously poor, given that I was at school and had to worry about playing sober in front of the teachers. I had no idea of the power of LSD before this experience, and if I had known I would have taken it in a friendlier environment. I did take a quarter dose of LSD from the same source and supply a month or so later, which proved very pleasant and sociable with threshold visionary effects.

Despite the ordeal of the loop, I am grateful that I have experienced the beauty of LSD. Aesthetically, the precise visionary style painted by LSD surpasses all other psychedelics in my opinion. LSD: the molecule of beauty. However, I do not have any desire to take it again, and personally I agree with John Peel's opinion that "LSD is like visiting Stratford-Upon-Avon. It's nice once, but you wouldn't go back there again."
 
I have seen those tiny blotters as well..once at a rave..and my friend took some and felt next to nothing..and I took a blotter like that my second time with LSD and it didnt do anything.

THe first time I took LSD it was amazing and very powerful..2 normal sized blotteres with the quebec flag on them.
 
Yes when he first saw them he wondered if he'd been conned and they were just from one blotter cut into strips or something.
But sure enough one did the trick, which is why he thought the theory about how they were from bottom sheets could be it.
Alternatively, maybe ones that look like that are just DIY blotters made by someone with liquid LSD dipping bits of blotter paper into it. If that were the case, that would explain variations in strength. I doubt you and he had the same stuff though, being opposite ends of the world and the blotters being unmarked and all.
Anyway, whatever, it worked. I shouldn't waste all my geekiness on such trivial matters! :lol:
 
My friend used to get offcut strips from the sides of the sheets very cheaply back in the mid-nineties. He used to bash us these offcuts at 25 or 50p each and I believe he was paying something like 15 or 20p for them. They were as good as the rest of the sheets, but a lot cheaper than regular blotters (they were going for £2 to £4 at the time).

The reason they were so cheap is that they weren't very saleable due to the fact they looked a bit odd.

As a side note – as far as I know double-dipping is nothing more than a marketing ploy... I've yet to take a so-called double dipped trip that's any stronger other acid.
 
i wouldn't believe the double dipped thing unless he dropped 2 drops of liquid acid on a medium. I've seen both and had good experiences with both but recently my experience w/ the illustrated kind have been...well quite illustrated to say the least lol
 
d*l*b said:
As a side note – as far as I know double-dipping is nothing more than a marketing ploy...

If you dipped it twice in the same potency liquid, it would not become twice as potent because the paper already contains some LSD on it and has less space to absorb the liquid. Dipping it again would also cause some of the LSD on the blotter to go back into solution unless the solution was completely saturated with LSD. The LSD is happier being in solution than being on the paper if the solution is not too saturated. Besides, no one uses completely saturated liquid to dip blotter paper into. The resulting blotter would be too potent for the general public, and the saturated solution would tend to cause LSD to crystallize out. So they use diluted liquid to dip the paper in.

Most acid is about 100 micrograms per hit, while some blotter can hold up to 3000 micrograms of LSD per hit. If they used saturated liquid, getting 3000 micrograms of LSD per hit could be possible but that would be very bad for the general public to consume.
 
Much of the story sounds like it was real LSD.
Especialy the description of the 'animated cave paintings' and the telepathy at the beginning. The looping is also a typical LSD phenomenon, though it occurs on other substances as well.

The only two things that make it sound less then LSD are the visual tracers that are never that dramatic on LSD for me or most people i know and the absence of the colour red in the visuals. Green, red and blue are the predominant colours in LSD visuals for most people.

On the other hand, the intensity of visuals differs from each batch of LSD, due to chemical irregularities. There are also different types of LSD that slightly differ in quality.
The famous hofmann-aniversary blotter for instance, was said to contain ETH-LAD, a form of LSD that is three times as powerfull as LSD-25, but also slightly different in effects.
 
just one point, polytrip.. It might have happened that some hofmann aniversary blotter from some chemist had some other chemical like ETH-LAD or whatever, but one must remember that there have been MANY totally unrelated 'hofmann-aniversary' prints out there, of probably many different chemists and definitely of varying quality and effects.. It was one of those prints that became famous and it appeared everywhere.. In fact, I would say thats the blotter I came across the most in life, in different countries even..

When in a limited period of time suddenly a very specific different print starts appearing in different places, its a pretty good indication that its the same batch so with same chemical/quality (with differences in storage of different distrubitors, of course).. Otherwise its hard to say..


BTW, polytrip, have you really noticed that green red and blue (RGB) are specially common in acid trip? I havent thought about that, in fact I've never noticed a predominance of any colour, but now that you mention it could be true.. This reminds me of may trips seeing everything made of the primary pixels, or tiny rainbows, or what could be like the basic RGB of all colours.

Does anyone know something about the colour perceptive cells in the eyes? Would be interesting if there was some physiological correspondance of how it works with what one perceives in these trips
 
Well with bufotenine, the primary colors SWIM sees in visions are sharp neon red and neon blue, but all the colors can be seen, those are just more dominant.

For SWIM green and red are more common with LSD visuals.

Soft pastel colors are more common with DMT visuals.

Red green and blue are more common in Psilocybin visuals.

I think this is an individual thing which varies from person to person.

With LSD, the visual effects are never really the same. Very slight variations in the impurities present on the blotter can strongly effect the visual effects. Also as the LSD ages it loses a lot of its visual effects, becoming more of a stimulant with the "strychnine" effect sometimes increasing. At least that is SWIM’s experience.
 
d*l*b said:
My friend used to get offcut strips from the sides of the sheets very cheaply back in the mid-nineties. He used to bash us these offcuts at 25 or 50p each and I believe he was paying something like 15 or 20p for them. They were as good as the rest of the sheets, but a lot cheaper than regular blotters (they were going for £2 to £4 at the time).
No way, those tabs of acid cost him £5 each! He was meant to be the dreamer's friend, but he would sell him resin for what dreamer later found out was double the price. Grrr! Well... the experience was worth £5 anyway to be honest.

polytrip said:
The only two things that make it sound less then LSD are the visual tracers that are never that dramatic on LSD for me or most people i know and the absence of the colour red in the visuals.
The two dreamers both had these tracers at the same time, and both when out in the foggy night. No tracers were seen earlier in the night, nor when inside under artificial light, so the effect must have either been brought on by the darkness, even the fog, or alternatively was some kind of shared hallucination if that's even possible. I'd guess the former.

The tracers were stylistically like when smoked salvia did a repeating effect on his body once, but a little more elegant, and more vivid. He remembers silver and blue but really it was quite realistic. It actually looked reminiscent of the visuals of the guy waving his arms at 2mins17seconds of this video ('Walking on a Dream' by Empire of the Sun), but without the rays of light zooming out. Brings back memories!

polytrip said:
Green, red and blue are the predominant colours in LSD visuals for most people.
The Aztec lizardmen were bright green and silver with red tongues (by the way he didn't know much about Aztecs back then and always thought that this meant their art and religion was lysergically inspired). The flowers were an assortment of colours, he can't remember which but all bright ones that one would imagine gaudy flowers to be. Top-hat man and his path were plain silver.

Oh, when he took the small dose the next time, the feeling and vividness of colours and slight visual effects were very much like coming up on the first occassion. That time it was taken late at night, and he had insomnia until 7am the next morning and a metallic taste in the mouth the entire night.

It's funny that you describe the tribal people as the most LSD-like, because he always thinks of them as being the least LSD-like for some reason. The other hallucinations were so wonderfully precise and vivid that he has always thought of them as being what LSD is about. Only smoked salvia has come close to these stylistically, albeit a very crude rendition.
 
Red and green are for a majority of all people the most dominant colours in LSD visuals, followed by blue.

With other substances like DMT or shrooms, the visuals become more colourfull as the dose increases, but red green and blue are also dominant there at lower doses.

Red and green are the primary colours of the visual system, the inner eye's black and white.

When i tripped with people, we often started describing eachother what we where seeing, so that's why i am pretty sure that some things apply to most people and not just me.

There are a few open eye visual phenomena on classic hallucinogens. I find they fit in two categories.

The first categorie has to do with the eyelenses and focusing. Perspective distortions, stroboscoping and breathing of objects falls in this category of visual distortion. This type of visual effect is not specific for classic psychedelics but occurs also with cannabis at high doses and some other susbtances like XTC.

The second effect is very typical for classic hallucinogens like LSD and DMT and it's cause lies deeper in the visual system.
Here you see everything covered with something that can be described as 'mother of pearl' or 'electric shine'. Everything is seen as made up of tiny cells, or pixels. It's like a grid that's layed over the surface of everything you see. This pixelfield exists with LSD mainly of the colours red and green.

With shrooms, the colours increase when the dose increases and at higher doses you'l see every colour imaginable in between these pixels. Green and red become less dominant but they remain the colours of the 'grid-lines'.

With LSD, the tiny nuances of a surface (look at your jeans) also become outlined in red and green and they can become like cave-paintings, cartoons or signs of a strange language like chinese or ancient egyptian. They start dancing and forming animated, 2-dimensional patterns.
With shrooms and DMT, these patterns become 3-dimensional and they start moving and flowing through eachother.

It's my experience that these things aply to most people. But when you don't carefully analyse them, like when you're describing them to someone, you don't notice these 'rules' that seem to aply to the visuals.
 
From what swim has experienced if the blotter is from anyone worth while the ones with pictures are usually from better crystal. But if your just grabbing it off lot at a phish show its probally some asshole who got an rc and some blotter off ebay and is saying its hoffmans. Bottom sheets wouldnt be dangerous. If anything it just might be slightly more saturated then the other sheets so thats a good thing. Swim loves eating wash and has eaten more then 150 hits at one time (liquid) so that is way more then any paper could hold and all he did was puke rainbows. His friend once had to eat 4 sheets when pulled over and he was and still is in perfect health.
 
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