Engineer Accidentally Takes A Nine-Hour LSD Trip While Cleaning 1960s Synthesizer
KPIX5Eliot Curtis was cleaning some vintage sound equipment in the Bay Area of California when he was accidentally dosed with psychedelic drugs.
In May of this year, sound engineer Eliot Curtis accidentally dosed himself with LSD while cleaning a 50-year-old synthesizer — and proceeded to trip for nine straight hours.
After volunteering to fix a Buchla Model 100 synthesizer owned by a Bay Area university, Curtis first decided to clean it up.
“There was like a residue… a crust or a crystalline residue on it,” he recalled.
That residue was lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD. That the cold, dark closet the synthesizer was kept in since around 1968 was the perfect environment to preserve the drug.
Curtis had heard rumors that 1960’s radio operators would dip their fingers in liquid LSD and touch these synthesizer machines in order to “connect to the music,” but, like everyone else, assumed they were just rumors.
Until, that is, he started to feel a little strange. Though traditionally consumed orally or as a liquid, the layer that coated the synthesizer simply seeped through the skin on Curtis’s hand. “It was… felt like I was tripping on LSD,” he said.
After his nine-hour trip, Curtis continued to tinker with his machine – though this time wearing gloves. His wife even sees the mishap as a strange little connection to history.
Coincidentally, the man who first synthesized LSD accidentally dosed himself in the same way — though he wasn’t working on audio equipment.
He later recounted the first-ever LSD trip thusly: “In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”
