PiHKAL Chapter 3 Burt
One morning, a couple of weeks later, I took a small, double-ended vial to Burt in his analytical lab down the hall, and asked him to please weigh out for me a small quantity of material into a separate container. The actual amount was not important, a few milligrams; what was important was that I wanted the weight accurate to four places. He disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared with the vial I had given him and also a weighing container holding a small amount of an almost white powder. "Here is 3.032 milligrams, exactly," he said, adding, "And it's slightly bitter." "How do you know?" asked I. "After I weighed out the psilocybin, there was a trace of dust on the spatula, so I licked it off. Slightly bitter." I asked him, "Did you read the label carefully?" "It's the vial of psilocybin you just received, isn't it?" he asked, looking at the funny-shaped tube still in his hand. He read the label. It said Lysergide. He said, "Oh." We spent the next several minutes trying to reconstruct just how much LSD might have been on the end of the spatula, and decided that it was probably not more than a few score micrograms. But a few score micrograms can be pretty effective, especially in a curious but conservative analytical chemist who is totally drug naive. "Well," I said to him, "This should damned well be a fascinating day." And indeed it was. The first effects were clearly noted in about twenty minutes, and during the transition stage that took place over the following minutes, we wandered outside and walked around the pilot plant behind the main laboratory building. It was a completely joyful day for Burt. Every trivial thing had a magical quality. The stainless steel Pfaudler reactors were giant ripe melons about to be harvested; the brightly colored steam and chemical pipes were avant-garde spaghetti with appropriate smells, and the engineers wandering about were chefs preparing a royal banquet. No threats anywhere, simply hilarious entertainment. We wandered everywhere else on the grounds, but the theme of food and its sensory rewards continued to be the leitmotif of the day. In the late afternoon, Burt said he was substantially back to the real world, but when I asked him if he thought he could drive, he admitted that it would probably be wise to wait a bit longer. By 5:00 PM, he seemed to be happily back together again, and after a trial run -- a sort of figure-eight in the almost empty parking lot -- he embarked on his short drive home. Burt never again, to my knowledge, participated in any form of personal drug investigation, but he maintained a close and intimate interest in my research and was always appreciative of the slowly evolving picture of the delicate balance between chemical structure and pharmacological action, which I continued to share with him while I remained at Dole. One periodically hears some lecturer holding forth on the subject of psychedelic drugs, and you may hear him give voice to that old rubric that LSD is an odorless, colorless and tasteless drug. Don't believe it. Odorless yes, and colorless when completely pure, yes, but tasteless, no. It is slightly bitter.
Shulgin;PIHKAL;chapter3

You are speculating that the "electric" feel of blotter LSD is a result of the LSD-tartrate salt comming into contact with foil?

An interesting idea, but in those links it's describing tartaric acid, not the tartrate salt of an amine...

To form a salt from the non-protonated form of an amine (freebase) you react your
freebase with an acid, they neutralize as they form the salt...

... so having the tartrate salt of a compound is different than having tartaric acid itself.

-eg

Separate iso-LSD from LSD. Dissolve the residue of the mixture of LSDs from the end of the formula in 120 ml of benzene and 40 ml of chloroform. Add tartaric or maleic acid to precipitate the LSD, filter off, add a little ether and put in refrigerator for several days to get a little more LSD, which is filtered off and added to the rest. Evaporate the filtrate in vacuo to get the iso-LSD and convert as above.

This free-base solid can be recrystallized from benzene to give white crystals with a melting point of 87-92 °C. IR (in cm-1): 750, 776, 850, 937 and 996, with the carbonyl at 1631. The mass spectrum of the free base has a strong parent peak at mass 323, with sizable fragments at masses of 181, 196, 207 and 221.

This base was dissolved in warm, dry MeOH, using 4 mL per g of product. There was then added dry d-tartaric acid (0.232 g per g of LSD base), and the clear warm solution treated with Et2O dropwise until the cloudiness did not dispel on continued stirring. This opaqueness set to a fine crystalline suspension (this is achieved more quickly with seeding) and the solution allowed to crystallize overnight in the refrigerator. Ambient light should be severely restricted during these procedures. The product was removed by filtration, washed sparingly with cold methanol, with a cold 1:1 MeOH/Et2O mixture, and then dried to constant weight. The white crystalline product was lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate with two molecules of methanol of crystallization, with a mp of about 200 °C with decomposition, and weighed 3.11 g (66%).

It is possible ALD-52 was the active chemical in the Orange Sunshine variety of LSD that was widely available in California through 1968 and 1969. The Sonoma County underground chemistry lab of Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand was Orange Sunshine's source. It was shut down by the police, and Scully was arrested and prosecuted. This resulted in the first drug analogue trial, where Scully claimed that he and his partners did nothing illegal, because they were producing ALD-52, which was not an illicit drug. However, as the prosecution claimed, there were problems with such a rationale—ALD-52 readily undergoes hydrolysis to LSD, and secondly, the synthesis of ALD-52 required LSD. (The second point was based on the methods available in the scientific literature at the time). Scully was convicted and served time in prison.
-Wikipedia

I wish modern LSD would have modern brand names, rather than recycling famous LSD titles from the past...

Orange sunshine was a product of Nick sand and Tim Scully, and may have actually been N-acetyl-lysergic acid diethylamide (ALD-52)



Regardless, the title "Orange sunshine" was meant to represent the product of sand and scully, and while recent LSD is named in tribute of it, the true orange sunshine only came from one source.

-eg

I can't say I've experienced electric tasting blotters, but I always have an electric, metallic taste when I'm actually on LSD. Even Hofmann noted this coppery taste during the first ever human trail with LSD. Even from the earliest studies with it on the brain, it was found to alter the electrical functioning of the brain. So I was under the impression that this electric metallic taste was actually occurring in my brain in the area governing my sense of taste, rather than on my tongue per se.

Funny thing about that. The whole "branding" by color thing originated with Owsley. He would split a gram of the same LSD into 5 different piles and mix a different FDA approved food dye into each pile. All the capsules were the same acid, but much to his amusement, when word came back from the streets the users were attributing different qualities to the different colors, red was super chill, green was really heavy, blue was well balanced, and so on. This was early on before the tableting presses and things like "White Lightning" and "Pink Owsley" came into play which would precursor the famous Orange Sunshine tablets.

I just thought that was a funny little anecdote demonstrating how much peoples expectations play a role in the experience.

Scully did indeed argue that Orange Sunshine was ALD-52, and since it was at the time a legal chemical (putting aside the need to make it from LSD) and having had a previous close encounter with a lab in Denver, it's very likely he was making ALD instead of LSD as a safety precaution. Shame it didn't save him when it came to trial. Of course, there are others who say he was pumping out good ol #25 and the whole ALD thing was just a clever ploy to get the charges dropped.

Tim Scully worked there as Owsley's apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.

Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Owsley and Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab. Later Owsley started to tablet the product in Orinda, California but was arrested before he completed that work. Owsley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic in Denver which they called STP. STP was initially distributed at the summer solstice festival in 1967: 5,000 tablets (20 milligrams each) which quickly acquired a bad reputation. Owsley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Owsley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities; Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after Owsley was arrested on Christmas Eve 1967 -Wikipedia

though these days any brand just gets slapped on any acid...

I've had the electricity taste/alkaline feel from liquid as well. I suspect Bancopuma is probably on the right track as to why this occurs.

They don't call it Electric Kool-Aid for nothin

Repeated recrystallizations [of LSD] from methanol produced a product that became progressively less soluble, and eventually virtually insoluble, as the purity increased. As a totally pure salt, when dry and when shaken in the dark, will emit small flashes of white light. -shulgin ; TIHKAL

^^^
Worse yet is the copycating and misrepresentation.

N-Bombs on Hofmann blotter

Talk about insult to injury

Timothy Leary, who realized that impurities were a threat to the spreading psychedelic revolution, uttered prophetic words of warning at a Senate committee hearing in 1966, in exchange with Teddy Kennedy:

Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts: "What is it in the quality that you are frightened about?"

Dr. Leary: "We do not want amateur or black-market sale or distribution of LSD."

Senator Kennedy: "Why not?"

Dr. Leary: "Or the barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor-"

Senator Kennedy: "This is not responsive. As to LSD, why do you not want it?"

Dr. Leary: "On possession?"

Senator Kennedy: "Why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and distribution? Is it because it is dangerous?"

Dr. Leary: "Because you do not know what you are getting..."

Despite Leary's warning, LSD was made illegal on October 16, 1966.

https://www.erowid.org/c.../lsd/lsd_writings1.shtml

-eg

The recent blottered LADs (AL-LAD, 1P-LSD, 1P-ETH-LAD) came in plastic baggies and I never tasted anything (~10 trips?). The MSDS claimed a 99.5% purity and a hemitartrate form. Also no metallic taste occurred during the trips. Never got LSD with a MSDS, so no data points here.