LSD: what the sources actually report, and what the law actually says

The number people argue about online is the dose. The number that decides how the night goes is the duration.

LSD is active from about 20 micrograms — a quantity you cannot see, cannot divide by eye, and cannot judge from a piece of paper. Typical doses today are around 20 to 80 micrograms; doses three to four times that were once ordinary. Two blotters that look identical can differ by a factor nobody in the room can measure.

Why the clock matters more than the microgram

Effects appear within about half an hour and run for 8 to 12 hours, sometimes longer. That is a working day. So the decision that matters is not "how much" but "when, and what do the next twelve hours of my life contain" — a shift, a journey, a person who needs looking after, a door that has to be answered.

Nobody plans for hour nine. Hour nine is where the difficult part usually lives.

The interaction that ends the argument

Deaths attributed to overdose alone are, in the EU agency's words, virtually unknown. That fact gets repeated as though it meant the substance is physically safe. It does not, because it describes the substance alone, and almost nobody takes a substance alone — they take it on top of the medication they are already on.

A published case describes three generalised seizures within thirty minutes of ingestion, in a patient with no personal or family history of seizure who had recently started lithium at a dose below the therapeutic range. The same patient had used LSD before, on other medication, without seizures. One case does not prove causation. It does something more useful: it shows the risk here is not the substance's own toxicity but the combination — and the combination is the thing nobody looks up.

What the law does and does not say

In Spain, consumption or unlawful possession in public places, roads, public establishments or public transport is a serious administrative offence, even when not intended for trafficking. Trafficking is a different, criminal matter. That is a narrow, specific statement, and it is the opposite of "it is basically legal": it means the state has a specific sanction for a specific act, and it says nothing about lawfulness anywhere else.

LSD sits in Schedule I of the 1971 UN Convention and is under international control. That is the floor, not the ceiling: the text that applies to you is your own country's current one, it changes, and looking it up is your job, not ours.

The honest summary

The number to fear is not the microgram. It is the twelve hours, and the pill bottle already in your cabinet.