Urban Legends
My mum says that if you put one of them LSD transfers on your arm you'll put babies in microwaves before staring at the sun from the top of a high building from which you will then plummet to a messy death in the mistaken the belief you can fly. Or will you ...?
LSD has spawned a number of tales known as Urban Legends (UL). The definition of a UL is:
An apocryphal, secondhand story told as true, plausible enough to be believed, and likely to be framed as a cautionary tale, about some horrific, embarrassing, ironic, or exasperating series of events that supposedly happened to a real person.
Urban Legends date back to the Bible, and a trawl of the Internet will produce numerous pages devoted to them, www.snopes.com/ being one of the best sources.
LSD culture, and more specifically the non LSD user's view of the drug is, riven with fear, misunderstanding, half truth and rumour, making it an excellent breeding ground for all kinds of LSD UL.
Sometimes these ULs have been spread intentionally by anti-LSD campaigners with the intention of vilifying the substance further. Others have their origins in wishful thinking, bad journalism and, yes, truth itself.
These pages contain all the ULs referring to LSD which have been repeated in the media in Britain. If you know of any others, or of examples of the ones given here, please let me know via the Contact Form.