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The Legend: Spreading toothpaste on orange peels and smoking it will create hallucinogenic effects.

Status:  False

Variations:

• Spreading toothpaste on cigarettes and smoking will make you high.

• Spreading toothpaste on orange peels, storing them until they mold (one source says to store them "under a rug"), then smoking or eating the mold will get you high.

• Taking some ABC gum (already been chewed) and wrapping it in an orange peel with some toothpaste until it molds, then smoking or eating the mold will get you high.
  

Analysis:

Here we go again with the oranges! Oranges and their peels have been appearing in drug-themed rumors for decades. Despite the rumors, there is nothing in oranges or their peels that will cause psychoactive effects.

Toothpaste is made from a mild abrasive, a foaming agent (generally sodium lauryl sulfate) and sodium flouride. There is nothing in toothpaste that is psychoactive. Flouride in high concentrations is toxic and can cause gastrointestinal symptoms, even death, but not hallucinations. It is doubtful that combining toothpaste with an orange would create a psychoactive compound.

There was a movie in 2002 called "Shuang Tong" in which a murderer is planting a hallucinogenic mold into the brains of victims. This is fiction people, fiction! Eating moldy organic material may make you feel different, but in an I-feel-like-I'm-gonna-puke sort of way.

The exception to this would be mold that grows from an already psychoactive host (mycillia) or the mold that grows on rye (ergot) from which LSD was synthesized.

The only trip a moldy orange will give you is to the bathroom.

Rise and Shine and Give God That Glory, Glory!

The Legend: You can get high eating Morning Glory seeds.

Status: True

Analysis:

The seeds of the Heavenly Blue, Pearly Gate and Flying Saucer Morning Glory plant contain a naturally occurring hallucinogen called lysergic acid amide (LSA) which, not surprisingly, is similar to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

LSA is currently a Schedule III substance in the United States, which means possessing LSA as a pure chemical, as extracted from the Morning Glory seeds, is illegal. However, the raw seeds are sold at most garden stores and purchase and possession of them is not illegal.

High on Visine

The Legend: Visine eye drops are a hallucinogen and drinking them will get you high.

Status: False

Example:

[Taken from the Internet]

"I've tasted it, and, so far as  know, I'm the only person to taste it at high levels. It gives an itchy, uncomfortable dizziness that I wouldn't characterize as a "high" and certainly not a psychedelic one. Effects were intense, and culminated in me retching the shit back up."

Variations:

• Putting a few drops of Visine into a drink will cause diarrhea.
  

Analysis:

Visine actually does contain some pretty interesting chemicals, oxymetazoline, and tetrahydrozoline among them. Neither is a psychoactive drug, neither will get you high, and both can make you pretty damn sick.

As for adding Visine to someone's drink, it's said that this is an age-old barmaid trick for dealing with difficult customers.  Most of us have heard this one and have been told about a friend of a friend that this happened to. Seems like a harmless enough prank, except that it isn't harmless.

Ingesting the active ingredient in Visine, tetrahydrozoline, can be quite dangerous, causing blurred vision, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, seizures, tremors , coma and respiratory arrest. Diarrhea is nowhere on this list. Pfizer, the manufacturer, warns that if this product is swallowed that emergency medical help or help from a poison control center is recommended. And it doesn't take much to bring on these deadly symptoms, (Tobias, 1996).

Unfortunately, revenge-seekers don't always research their methods before implementing their plan. In a highly publicized incident in 1995, a clerk at Whole Foods Market spiked a customer's drink with a bottle of Visine thinking she was playing a practical joke. The victim became violently ill and was hospitalized for days. He survived to bring a $1 million lawsuit against Whole Foods Market.

In January of 2009 a Missouri woman tried to kill her husband by putting Visine into his tea. A statement of probable cause said the husband had been having stomach problems for the past two months. He lived, she was arrested and charged with first degree assault.

Keep in mind that secretly putting something into someone else's food or drink with the intention of harming them is called poisoning, and it is a crime.

Adrenochrome

The Legend:  Adrenochrome, a powerfully psychedelic drug, can only be acquired from the adrenal glands of a live human donor. Once harvested, the donor dies.

Status: Somewhat true, but no one dies.

Analysis:

Adrenochrome, C9H9NO3, was represented as a recreational drug by author Hunter S. Thompson in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In this book, and subsequent film, it is presented as a powerful hallucinogen that is acquired from a living donor's adrenal gland. Removing this gland kills the donor, as a dead person's adrenal gland doesn't contain the right juice. The high is shown to be like a hallucinatory amphetamine rush. This is supported by a similar mention in The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, where adrenochrome is likened to LSD.

This is a case where the myth is far more interesting than the facts. Adrenochrome is real. It is synthesized by oxidation of adrenaline (epinephrine) in the adrenal glands. Medically, adrenochrome is used to reduce capillary bleeding. It may create mild euphoria, but there really are no psychoactive effects documented from this drug.

Dr. Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond (1954, 1959) first presented the adrenochrome model of schizophrenia, claiming that adrenolutin, one of the metabolites, combined with adrenochrome to create the hallucinatory symptoms we see in schizophrenia. This hypothesis was abandoned decades ago.

The true, boring nature of this chemical has not stopped popular culture from running with it. There are bands and songs by this name as well as mentions in many song lyrics and movies. This chemical is available for purchase in powdered form, something to remember before you cut the adrenal glands out of your neighbor.

Human Placenta Contains Hallucinogens

The Legend:  The human placenta contains the hallucinogen dimethyltriptamine (DMT).

Status:  False

Analysis:

What is most interesting about this particular rumor is how it most likely began. You can picture the eager high school student doing a search on DMT when he stumbles on all these articles about human placenta and DMT. Whoa!

You'll find the same thing if you do a search, hundreds of website and articles about placentas containing DMT. Imagine a young, drug-involved student skimming through these and seeing phrases like, "...DMT in the human placenta...". Could be an exciting discovery, and probably was. So exciting that the young internet surfer didn't bother to read further to find out that the DMT in these articles was not the DMT being sold by his local dealer.

The DMT being written about in relation to human placentas is divalent metal transporter-1 (DMT-1), not dimethyltriptamine. There haven't been rumors about drug users stealing, drying and smoking human placentas. At least not yet.

Again fact being more interesting than fiction - minute quantities of DMT are made by the pineal gland in the human brain. No one really knows what this is for. Perhaps it is tied to our sleep-wake cycle, or to some component of dreaming. What we do know is that it is made in quantities too small to cause hallucinations.

Hallucinogens in the Bible

The Legend:  The Samson tale in the Bible, of foxes running through the weeds with torches on their tails, is a veiled reference to hallucinogen use.

Status:  This one is up to you.

Analysis:

This passage can be found in Judges 15:4. Rather than 300 actual foxes tethered together with torches, it is believed, by some, to be a concealed reference to a battalion of 300 men made fearless after ingestion of amanita muscaria - hallucinogenic mushrooms that, when dried, are fox colored.

Divine Toad Sweat

The Legend:  You can get high by licking toads.

Status:  False

Analysis:

We've all heard the stories, seen the Simpson's episode and made the jokes. Toad-licking was just so bizarre that it was destined to become a contemporary legend. Never mind that it's not true, it's still a great story.

The toad in question is the Bufo alvarius or Cane Toad. Cane toads have sacs behind their head that will release highly poisonous venom and quickly kill animals that prey on them. They are so toxic that dogs, snakes and even crocodiles will only survive minutes after eating one.

Despite the stories and jokes, you can't get high licking the venom off of this toad. Besides, would you really want to try after watching it kill a crocodile?  There is a hallucinogen in the toad's venom, but the venom has to be processed to extract the hallucinogen into a form that is safe to use.

Some said that the hallucinogenic chemical was bufotinine, 5-OH-DMT, found in all Bufo toad venom. In 1967 the FDA even made bufotenine a Schedule I drug, which means it has no potential for medical use and is too dangerous for human consumption. They were wrong. Bufotenine is not the active hallucinogen in toad venom.

The psychoactive chemical in toad venom is actually 5-MeO-DMT. 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine is a powerful hallucinogen. This drug is present in only one of the more than 200 species of the Bufo toad; Bufo alvarius. 5-MeO-DMT is inactive when taken orally. To get high on toad, the venom must be collected, dried and then smoked or snorted, which will get you high for about 15 minutes.

Bufo toad venom shows up in the strangest places. Even though banned by the FDA, bufanolides are still imported and sold illegally as aphrodisiacs in products such as Love Stone, Chinese Rock and Black Stone. When ingested they can be uncomfortable, unpleasant and fatal.

The Bufo Toad has it's admirers and worshipers. LSD evangelist Art Kleps, founder of the psychedelic Neo-American church, has a newsletter called, "Divine Toad Sweat." And Bufo toad evangelist Albert Most founded the "Church of the Toad of Light." While many people have used hallucinogens to achieve spiritual insights, remember that this particular hallucinogen can kill a crocodile.