It really reminds me of the Scanner Darkly (By Philip K. Dick) scene where Charles Freck tries to kill himself with pills but bought bad pills and instead went into a hallucination where an alien reads all his sins to him, a process taking tens of thousands of years.
Interesting to me is that PKD claims he was not under the influence of drugs at all when writing Scanner Darkly, although he admitted to using amphetamines for 18 years of his life (I guess before writing that book).
PKD went off drugs in the early 1970s, after which he had a painful dry period. By the time he wrote Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, he had essentially transitioned to scotch, which probably hastened his early death in 1982. A Scanner Darkly was an autobiographical look back at his drug-abusing years.
The expression "horse capsule" is a turn of phrase for an unnecessarily large pill, at least throughout the United States. It's pretty obvious, he's knowingly inflating values, and nods to that fact when he specifically points out that they had no good estimate of an exact dose:
And I don’t know, there must’ve
been a whole milligram of it there.
It's like saying "we took enough to kill a horse" as a figurative statement. Pair that with must have been" which clearly indicates that they bought, and were told they had some stuff, and to trust that it's the real deal. The only firm facts are that there was enough to share among multiple people, and that they did receive an amount of the real thing, which they took. He specifically says they don't know how much was in it.
The fraction of impregnated powder that each person used was probably chopped with a razor, after emptying out the contents of the capsule onto a smooth surface, and eaten.
I don't know...even if it was one milligram of powder (a high but not unheard of dose), that wouldn't come close to filling even a tiny capsule!
The only way to get a capsule full with 1mg of L that could be split into even doses is if someone who had access to the raw powder managed to mix it relatively evenly with something inert at a ratio of like 100-500:1.
If that sounds challenging, it's because it is, and it's the exact reason why LSD is typically dissolved into liquid.
I'm not saying the "one milligram" number is to be believed. I'm saying they had a large pill, packed with a curious amount of powder, which a handful of people shared.
Sugar cubes are a commonly used substrate.
I could readily imagine someone in the 1960's, somewhere along the supply chain having a quantity of prepared sugar cubes looking dubious after changing hands too many times, and repackaging them one-by-one into capsules (maybe packing more than one cube into a single large capsule), with a pestle and mortar, and topping them off with regular powdered sugar.
I think you're expecting other people to operate with a degree of precision and mistrust, neither of which stacks up against the way people really operate on the ground.
You may explain it this way quite easily. But frankly, there’s a standard, which is a tab. It’s small, dry so can be stored for extended periods of time, and the chance it contains anything but acid is incredibly small, as anything comparable would require vastly larger volumes.
Point being: if you made a decision to take a dodgy-looking pill in the middle of nowhere, don’t go on talking about the fact that you’ve exprienced something worthy. You’ve got a bad taste and noone wants to listen about that.
I've been told the first time one tries acid can be a very "religious" or "spiritual" experience. I didn't really believe it but indeed that was my personal experience.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadThe fraction of impregnated powder that each person used was probably chopped with a razor, after emptying out the contents of the capsule onto a smooth surface, and eaten.
The only way to get a capsule full with 1mg of L that could be split into even doses is if someone who had access to the raw powder managed to mix it relatively evenly with something inert at a ratio of like 100-500:1.
If that sounds challenging, it's because it is, and it's the exact reason why LSD is typically dissolved into liquid.
Sugar cubes are a commonly used substrate.
I could readily imagine someone in the 1960's, somewhere along the supply chain having a quantity of prepared sugar cubes looking dubious after changing hands too many times, and repackaging them one-by-one into capsules (maybe packing more than one cube into a single large capsule), with a pestle and mortar, and topping them off with regular powdered sugar.
I think you're expecting other people to operate with a degree of precision and mistrust, neither of which stacks up against the way people really operate on the ground.
Point being: if you made a decision to take a dodgy-looking pill in the middle of nowhere, don’t go on talking about the fact that you’ve exprienced something worthy. You’ve got a bad taste and noone wants to listen about that.
I'm laying on the beach, captivated by the oceans rhythmic patterns and watching as the moon gradually expanded and drew closer.
Meanwhile, my mate is rolling around, flaying his hands and chewing sand.
Needless to say, not all experiences are the same.
Fun though.
Did you in fact mean 'flaying' or did you instead mean to write 'flailing'? If you did mean 'flaying' then... yikes.