Acid Trips and Chemistry

This book although short provides an excellent summary of LSD's creation, history, medicinal and recreational use. Through out the text it makes reference to many pyschedelic icons, using quotes and excerpts from well known counter culture books(A few good book recomendations can be found in this book).

The body of the text provides little information unknown to someone well versed in psychedelia except for its interesting LSD manufacture chapters. In the last chapters there is an interesting breakdown of underground acid manufacture.

It starts by detailing how or where to find ergot fungus, ways to increase the fungus' ergot yields, ways to culture the fungus, a simple apparatus and technique to produce large quanitys of the ergotamine rich fungus.

Next it continues to outline a simplified LSD synthesis from the ergotamine extracted from the ergot fungus. The synthesis explains itself fairly clearly. It goes as far as to explain simple chemical apparatus and techniques making it comprehensible to those who are not well versed in chemistry.

Another point of interest in the synthesis is the way the other breaks down the precursors and describes how a good number of them can be found in common household products(not all of them, of course).

This book is a quick easy read and provides a general overview. I enjoyed reading it but saw little information that was foreign. The chemistry portion is written for the laymen and would likely be of little use to a skilled chemist although the simplified steps might be of interest.

If you have some extra cash and collect this sort of literature may be fun to have around but otherwise its likely that little is to be learned from this book other then some interesting culture references to common concepts.