I'd expect it to be many orders of magnitude easier to create "objective" LSD than mushrooms since we already have a pharmaceutical industry in place that does that for thousands of different kinds of medicine.
Mushrooms are a complex cocktail of stuff that affects the user in different ways, so there's no one scale on which mushroom A is a 3 and mushroom B is a 6 in such a way that two of A is roughly B. Rather, it's a multitude of scales with complex interplay.
Agreed, shrooms are indeed complex, but at least there are limits to the amount you can ingest.
This is what makes LSD dangerous, you could take a very large quantity without even realizing it; it's why I lean toward no, don't legalize it (but also don't prosecute), it should remain hard to find.
> you could take a very large quantity without even realizing it
And that would somehow be better if the stuff you take doesn't have high purity, known concentration and comes with a clearly defined recommended usage?
Plenty of OTC medicines will hurt you badly if you take too much of it or mix it in the wrong way, and while some people do hurt themselves, the vast majority of consumers are perfectly capable of reading the dosage recommendation on the box and adjusting their consumption accordingly.
Designing dosages and appropriate guidance and packaging to avoid accidental misuse isn't exactly rocket surgery.
1) Current situation: street acid could be anything, and even if it is LSD, quantity and quality are unknowns.
2) Proposed: legalized and regulated, quality and quantity are known.
Currently LSD is hard to find (I believe due to one of the primary producers in North America having been busted in the mid-2000s, not sure about Europe and rest of world), thus it is effectively hidden from the population at large.
Playing devil's advocate, were it legalized then one could presumably build up a stash over time and potentially use it against others, kind of a modern non-merry pranksters scenario. It's one thing to trip willingly, and quite another to just lose your mind out of the blue, no? ;-)
Saying that, if legalized LSD was delivered as some kind of bulky edible like shrooms, then above scenario could be avoided. Would be pro-legalization in that case. I guess my opposition is to the concentration, can pack many micrograms onto a tiny little piece of paper.
You seem to applaud mushrooms for their fairly static appearance that a piece of paper laced with an unknown quantity of LSD doesn't share.
First, a "prankster" (ie in your description, someone out to commit criminal poisoning) could easily lace a mushroom with anything from potato starch to rat poison if so inclined.
Second, the main defence mechanism is that your legal, regulated drug would come in sealed, tamper evident packaging, and never on a little piece of paper from a potential "prankster".
I think the idea was that it could be removed from the tamper evident packaging and used to dose food/drink/etc. It's true that greater availability does make this more possible, but 1) it's not exactly impossible at present, 2) there are plenty of other things that someone could be dosed with (I'd rather LSD than rat poison), and 3) someone trying to do so now is liable to cause greater harm (I'd rather be dosed with pure LSD than adulterated). Of course, I'd rather not be dosed with anything against my will in the first place, but that doesn't seem to be made substantially more likely by legalization of LSD.
I was thinking that a legal form of LSD would be distributed like blotter; i.e. you'd receive your dose as a tiny little piece of paper, which could then be combined (ground up) into a much larger dose.
More likely it would be packaged as an edible (cookie, brownie, whatever); then it couldn't be combined (trying to cook/boil down the bulk matter wouldn't work as light, heat, and moisture are the kryptonites of LSD potency), in which case, sure, why not, could be a viable non-addictive alternative to valium and friends that people across the world are hooked on.
Heh, I'm not applauding anything, just stating reality: the amount required to trip on LSD is orders of magnitude less than every other recreational drug.
Were a legalized form of LSD distributed in a such a way that it could not be combined to create a single powerful dose, sure, that sounds reasonable. However, if one were able to purchase liquid LSD to treat their chronic back pain, no, there should be limits in place to protect oneself and others, as again, LSD is no joke ;-)
Mushrooms are a complex cocktail of stuff that affects the user in different ways, so there's no one scale on which mushroom A is a 3 and mushroom B is a 6 in such a way that two of A is roughly B. Rather, it's a multitude of scales with complex interplay.