The Legend: LSD can be made from Foster's Beer
Status: False
Variations:
- DMT (dimethyltriptamine, a hallucinogen) can be made from bar soap and balsamic vinegar.
Analysis:
There is a chain mail story going around that tells of a guy who was down on his luck and hounded by creditors. He managed to turn his life around by somehow turning a distillation of Foster's Beer into tens of thousands of dollars worth of LSD.
Let's look at this logically, shall we? First, if the guy was so poor, how was he buying Foster's Beer? If he did scrape some scratch together for the higher end beer, would he then waste it by doing beer experiments in his kitchen? And if he was dumb enough to do those two things, would he be smart enough to know that he had made LSD? And if you could turn beer into LSD, wouldn't everyone be doing it?
We love the idea of dumb luck, get rich quick stories and being victorious over The Man, in this case the creditors. But the reality is that LSD is a very complicated compound to make. Any suggestion that it can be synthesized from household products is not true.
This story was intended as humor. Read it here:
www.erowid.org/psychoactives/humor/humor_joke5.shtml
As for making DMT out of soap and vinegar, there will be people who will swear they tried it and it worked. Remember that smoking anything will change how you feel, but smoking soap? Good luck with that.
