title: Gilded Age

text: The railroads invented the career path in the private sector for both blue- and white-collar workers. Railroading became a lifetime career for young men; women were almost never hired. A typical career path would see a young man hired at age 18 as a shop laborer, be promoted to skilled mechanic at age 24, brakemen at 25, freight conductor at 27, and passenger conductor at age 57. White-collar careers paths likewise were delineated. Educated young men started in clerical or statistical work and moved up to station agents or bureaucrats at the divisional or central headquarters.


title: Gilded Age

text: At each level they had more and more knowledge, experience, and human capital. They were very hard to replace, and were virtually guaranteed permanent jobs and provided with insurance and medical care. Hiring, firing, and wage rates were set not by foremen, but by central administrators, to minimize favoritism and personality conflicts. Everything was done by the book, whereby an increasingly complex set of rules dictated to everyone exactly what should be done in every circumstance, and exactly what their rank and pay would be. By the 1880s the career railroaders were retiring, and pension systems were invented to provide for them.


title: Gilded Age

text: America developed a love-hate relationship with railroads. Boosters in every city worked feverishly to make sure the railroad came through, knowing their urban dreams depended upon it. The mechanical size, scope, and efficiency of the railroads made a profound impression; people dressed in their Sunday best to go down to the terminal to watch the train come in. Travel became much easier, cheaper, and more common. Shoppers from small towns could make day trips to big city stores. Hotels, resorts, and tourist attractions were built to accommodate the demand. The realization that anyone could buy a ticket for a thousand-mile trip was empowering. Historians Gary Cross and Rick Szostak argue:


title: Gilded Age

text: The civil and mechanical engineers became model citizens, bringing their can-do spirit and their systematic work effort to all phases of the economy as well as local and national government. By 1910, major cities were building magnificent palatial railroad stations, such as the Pennsylvania Station in New York City, and the Union Station in Washington, D.C.


title: Gilded Age

text: But there was also a dark side. By the 1870s railroads were vilified by Western farmers who absorbed the Granger movement theme that monopolistic carriers controlled too much pricing power, and that the state legislatures had to regulate maximum prices. Local merchants and shippers supported the demand and got some "Granger Laws" passed. Anti-railroad complaints were loudly repeated in late 19th century political rhetoric.


title: Gilded Age

text: One of the most hated railroad men in the country was Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900), the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who dominated California's economy and politics. One textbook argues: "Huntington came to symbolize the greed and corruption of late-nineteenth-century business. Business rivals and political reformers accused him of every conceivable evil. Journalists and cartoonists made their reputations by pillorying him... Historians have cast Huntington as the state's most despicable villain." However Huntington defended himself: "The motives back of my actions have been honest ones and the results have redounded far more to the benefit of California than they have to my own."


title: Gilded Age

text: The growth of railroads from 1850s to 1880s made commercial farming much more feasible and profitable. Millions of acres were opened to settlement once the railroad was nearby, and provided a long-distance outlet for wheat, cattle and hogs that reached all the way to Europe. Rural America became one giant market, as wholesalers bought the consumer products produced by the factories in the East and shipped them to local merchants in small stores nationwide. Shipping live animals was slow and expensive. It was more efficient to slaughter them in major packing centers such as Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, and then ship dressed meat out in refrigerated freight cars. The cars were cooled by slabs of ice that had been harvested from the northern lakes in wintertime, and stored for summer and fall usage. Chicago, the main railroad center, benefited enormously, with Kansas City a distant second. Historian William Cronon concludes:


title: Gilded Age

text: During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly. For example, between 1865 and 1898, the output of wheat increased by 256%, corn by 222%, coal by 800%, and miles of railway track by 567%. Thick national networks for transportation and communication were created. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a scientific management revolution transformed business operations.


title: Gilded Age

text: By the beginning of the 20th century, gross domestic product and industrial production in the United States led the world. Kennedy reports that "U.S. national income, in absolute figures in per capita, was so far above everybody else's by 1914." Per capita income in the United States was $377 in 1914 compared to Britain in second place at $244, Germany at $184, France at $153, and Italy at $108, while Russia and Japan trailed far behind at $41 and $36.


title: Gilded Age

text: London remained the financial center of the world until 1914, yet the United States' growth caused foreigners to ask, as British author W. T. Stead wrote in 1901, "What is the secret of American success?" The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in the Northeast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe.


title: Gilded Age

text: Wealthy industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry Huttleston Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, Meyer Guggenheim, Jacob Schiff, Charles Crocker, and Cornelius Vanderbilt would sometimes be labeled "robber barons" by their critics, who argue their fortunes were made at the expense of the working class, by chicanery and a betrayal of democracy. Their admirers argued that they were "Captains of Industry" who built the core America industrial economy and also the non-profit sector through acts of philanthropy. For instance, Andrew Carnegie donated over 90% of his wealth and said that philanthropy was their duty—the "Gospel of Wealth". Private money endowed thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, and charities. John D. Rockefeller donated over $500 million to various charities, slightly over half his entire net worth. Reflecting this, many business leaders were influenced by Herbert Spencer's theory of social Darwinism, which justified "laissez-faire" capitalism, competition and social stratification.


title: Gilded Age

text: This emerging industrial economy quickly expanded to meet the new market demands. From 1869 to 1879, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for NNP (GDP minus capital depreciation) and 4.5% for NNP per capita. The economy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of 3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman states that for the 1880s, "The highest decadal rate [of growth of real reproducible, tangible wealth per head from 1805 to 1950] for periods of about ten years was apparently reached in the eighties with approximately 3.8 percent."


title: Gilded Age

text: The rapid expansion of industrialization led to real wage growth of 60% between 1860 and 1890, spread across the ever-increasing labor force. Real wages (adjusting for inflation) rose steadily, with the exact percentage increase depending on the dates and the specific work force. The Census Bureau reported in 1892 that the average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women, and children) rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890, a gain of 48%. Economic historian Clarence D. Long estimates that (in terms of constant 1914 dollars), the average annual incomes of all American non-farm employees rose from $375 in 1870 to $395 in 1880, $519 in 1890 and $573 in 1900, a gain of 53% in 30 years.


title: Gilded Age

text: Australian historian Peter Shergold found that the standard of living for industrial workers was higher than in Europe. He compared wages and the standard of living in Pittsburgh with Birmingham, England, one of the richest industrial cities of Europe. After taking account of the cost of living (which was 65% higher in the U.S.), he found the standard of living of unskilled workers was about the same in the two cities, while skilled workers in Pittsburgh had about 50% to 100% higher standard of living as those in Birmingham, England. Warren B. Catlin proposed that the natural resources and virgin lands that were available in America acted as a safety valve for poorer workers, hence, employers had to pay higher wages to hire labor. According to Shergold the American advantage grew over time from 1890 to 1914, and the perceived higher American wage led to a heavy steady flow of skilled workers from Britain to industrial America. According to historian Steve Fraser, workers generally earned less than $800 a year, which kept them mired in poverty. Workers had to put in roughly 60 hours a week to earn this much.


title: Gilded Age

text: Wage labor was widely condemned as 'wage slavery' in the working class press, and labor leaders almost always used the phrase in their speeches. As the shift towards wage labor gained momentum, working class organizations became more militant in their efforts to "strike down the whole system of wages for labor." In 1886, economist and New York Mayoral candidate Henry George, author of "Progress and Poverty", stated "Chattel slavery is dead, but industrial slavery remains."


title: Gilded Age

text: The unequal distribution of wealth remained high during this period. From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation's wealth, while the top 10% owned roughly three-quarters of it. The bottom 40% had no wealth at all. In terms of property, the wealthiest 1% owned 51%, while the bottom 44% claimed 1.1%.


title: Gilded Age

text: Historian Howard Zinn argues that this disparity along with precarious working and living conditions for the working classes prompted the rise of populist, anarchist, and socialist movements. French economist Thomas Piketty notes that economists during this time, such as Willford I. King, were concerned that the United States was becoming increasingly inegalitarian to the point of becoming like old Europe, and "further and further away from its original pioneering ideal."


title: Gilded Age

text: According to economist Richard Sutch in an alternative view of the era, the bottom 25% owned 0.32% of the wealth while the top 0.1% owned 9.4%, which would mean the period had the lowest wealth gap in recorded history. He attributes this to the lack of government interference.


title: Gilded Age

text: There was a significant human cost attached to this period of economic growth, as American industry had the highest rate of accidents in the world. In 1889, railroads employed 704,000 men, of whom 20,000 were injured and 1,972 were killed on the job. The U.S. was also the only industrial power to have no workman's compensation program in place to support injured workers.


title: Gilded Age

text: Craft-oriented labor unions, such as carpenters, printers, shoemakers and cigar makers, grew steadily in the industrial cities after 1870. These unions used frequent short strikes as a method to attain control over the labor market, and fight off competing unions. They generally blocked women, blacks and Chinese from union membership, but welcomed most European immigrants.


title: Gilded Age

text: The railroads had their own separate unions. An especially large episode of unrest (estimated at eighty thousand railroad workers and several hundred thousand other Americans, both employed and unemployed) broke out during the economic depression of the 1870s and became known as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which was, according to historian Jack Beatty, "the largest strike anywhere in the world in the 19th century." This strike did not involve labor unions, but rather uncoordinated outbursts in numerous cities. The strike and associated riots lasted 45 days and resulted in the deaths of several hundred participants (no police or soldiers were killed), several hundred more injuries, and millions in damages to railroad property. The unrest was deemed severe enough by the government that President Rutherford B. Hayes intervened with federal troops.


title: Gilded Age

text: Starting in the mid-1880s a new group, the Knights of Labor, grew too rapidly, and it spun out of control and failed to handle the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. The Knights avoided violence, but their reputation collapsed in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in 1886, when anarchists allegedly bombed the policemen dispersing a meeting. Police then randomly fired into the crowd, killing and wounding a number of people, including other police, and arbitrarily rounded up anarchists, including leaders of the movement. Seven anarchists went on trial; four were hanged even though no evidence directly linked them to the bombing. One had in his possession a Knights of Labor membership card. At its peak, the Knights claimed 700,000 members. By 1890, membership had plummeted to fewer than 100,000, then faded away.


title: Gilded Age

text: Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s as the gap between the rich and the poor widened. There were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905. By far the largest number were in the building trades, followed far behind by coal miners. The main goal was control of working conditions and settling which rival union was in control. Most were of very short duration. In times of depression strikes were more violent but less successful, because the company was losing money anyway. They were successful in times of prosperity when the company was losing profits and wanted to settle quickly.


title: Gilded Age

text: The largest and most dramatic strike was the 1894 Pullman Strike, a coordinated effort to shut down the national railroad system. The strike was led by the upstart American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs and was not supported by the established brotherhoods. The union defied federal court orders to stop blocking the mail trains, so President Cleveland used the U.S. Army to get the trains moving again. The ARU vanished and the traditional railroad brotherhoods survived, but avoided strikes.


title: Gilded Age

text: The new American Federation of Labor, headed by Samuel Gompers, found the solution. The AFL was a coalition of unions, each based on strong local chapters; the AFL coordinated their work in cities and prevented jurisdictional battles. Gompers repudiated socialism and abandoned the violent nature of the earlier unions. The AFL worked to control the local labor market, thereby empowering its locals to obtain higher wages and more control over hiring. As a result, the AFL unions spread to most cities, reaching a peak membership in 1919.


title: Gilded Age

text: This period saw several financial crises and economic recessions—called "panics", notably the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893. They lasted several years, with high urban unemployment, low incomes for farmers, low profits for business, slow overall growth, and reduced immigration. They generated political unrest.


title: Gilded Age

text: Gilded Age politics, called the Third Party System, featured intense competition between two major parties, with minor parties coming and going, especially on issues of concern to prohibitionists, to labor unions and to farmers. The Democrats and Republicans (the latter nicknamed the "Grand Old Party", GOP) fought over control of offices, which were the rewards for party activists, as well as over major economic issues. Very high voter turnout typically exceeded 80% or even 90% in some Northern states as the parties drilled their loyal members much as an army drills its soldiers. Turnout in the South was lower. Average presidential turnout 1872 to 1900 was 83% in the North and 62% in the South.


title: Gilded Age

text: Competition was intense and elections were very close. In the southern states, lingering resentment over the Civil War remained and meant that much of the South would vote Democrat. After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, competition in the South took place mainly inside the Democratic Party. Nationwide, turnout fell sharply after 1900.


title: Gilded Age

text: The major metropolitan centers underwent rapid population growth and as a result had many lucrative contracts and jobs to award. To take advantage of the new economic opportunity, both parties built so-called "political machines" to manage elections, to reward supporters and to pay off potential opponents. Financed by the "spoils system", the winning party distributed most local, state and national government jobs, and many government contracts, to its loyal supporters.


title: Gilded Age

text: Large cities became dominated by political machines in which constituents supported a candidate in exchange for anticipated patronage. These votes would be repaid with favors back from the government once the appropriate candidate was elected; and very often candidates were selected based on their willingness to play along with the spoils system. The largest and most notorious political machine was Tammany Hall in New York City, led by Boss Tweed.


title: Gilded Age

text: Political corruption was rampant, as business leaders spent significant amounts of money ensuring that government did not regulate the activities of big business—and they more often than not got what they wanted. Such corruption was so commonplace that in 1868 the New York state legislature legalized such bribery. Historian Howard Zinn argues that the U.S. government was acting exactly as Karl Marx described capitalist states: "pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich". Historian Mark Wahlgren Summers calls it, "The Era of Good Stealings," noting how machine politicians used "padded expenses, lucrative contracts, outright embezzlements, and illegal bond issues." He concludes:


title: Gilded Age

text: Numerous swindlers were active, especially before the Panic of 1873 exposed the falsifications and caused a wave of bankruptcies. Former President Ulysses S. Grant was the most famous victim of scoundrels and con-men, of whom he most trusted Ferdinand Ward. Grant was cheated out of all his money, although some genuine friends bought Grant's personal assets and allowed him to keep their use.


title: Gilded Age

text: Interpreting the phenomena, historian Allan Nevins deplored "The Moral Collapse in Government and Business: 1865–1873." He argued that at war's end society showed confusion and unsettlement as well as a hurried aggressive growth on the other. They:


title: Gilded Age

text: Major scandals reached into Congress with the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872, and disgraced the White House during the Grant Administration (1869–1877). This corruption divided the Republican party into two different factions: the Stalwarts led by Roscoe Conkling and the Half-Breeds led by James G. Blaine. There was a sense that government-enabled political machines intervened in the economy and that the resulting favoritism, bribery, inefficiency, waste, and corruption were having negative consequences. Accordingly, there were widespread calls for reform, such as Civil Service Reform led by the Bourbon Democrats and Republican Mugwumps. In 1884, their support elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House, and in doing so gave the Democrats their first national victory since 1856.


title: Gilded Age

text: The Bourbon Democrats supported a free market policy, with low tariffs, low taxes, less spending and, in general, a "laissez-faire" (hands-off) government. They argued that tariffs made most goods more expensive for the consumer and subsidized "the trusts" (monopolies). They also denounced imperialism and overseas expansion. By contrast, Republicans insisted that national prosperity depended on industry that paid high wages, and warned that lowering the tariff would bring disaster because goods from low-wage European factories would flood American markets.


title: Gilded Age

text: Presidential elections between the two major parties were so closely contested that a slight nudge could tip the election in the advantage of either party, and Congress was marked by political stalemate. With support from Union veterans, businessmen, professionals, craftsmen, and larger farmers, the Republicans consistently carried the North in presidential elections. The Democrats, often led by Irish Catholics, had a base among Catholics, poorer farmers, and traditional party-members.


title: Gilded Age

text: The nation elected a string of relatively weak presidents collectively referred to as the "forgettable presidents" (Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison, with the exception of Cleveland) who served in the White House during this period. "What little political vitality existed in Gilded Age America was to be found in local settings or in Congress, which overshadowed the White House for most of this period."


title: Gilded Age

text: Overall, Republican and Democratic political platforms remained remarkably constant during the years before 1900. Both favored business interests. Republicans called for high tariffs, while Democrats wanted hard money and free trade. Regulation was rarely an issue.


title: Gilded Age

text: From 1860 to the early 20th century, the Republicans took advantage of the association of the Democrats with "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion". "Rum" stood for the liquor interests and the tavern keepers, in contrast to the GOP, which had a strong dry element. "Romanism" meant Roman Catholics, especially Irish Americans, who ran the Democratic Party in most cities, and whom the reformers denounced for political corruption and their separate parochial school system. "Rebellion" harked back to the Democrats of the Confederacy, who had tried to break the Union in 1861, as well as to their northern allies, called "Copperheads".


title: Gilded Age

text: Demographic trends boosted the Democratic totals, as the German and Irish Catholic immigrants became Democrats and outnumbered the English and Scandinavian Republicans. The new immigrants who arrived after 1890 seldom voted at this time. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Republicans struggled against the Democrats' efforts, winning several close elections and losing two to Grover Cleveland (in 1884 and 1892).


title: Gilded Age

text: Religious lines were sharply drawn. In the North, about 50% of the voters were pietistic Protestants (especially Methodists, Scandinavian Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Disciples of Christ) who believed in using the government to reduce social sins, such as drinking. They strongly supported the GOP, as the table shows. In sharp contrast, liturgical groups, especially the Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans, voted for the Democrats. They saw the Democratic party as their best protection from the moralism of the pietists, and especially from the threat of prohibition. Both parties cut across the class structure, with the Democrats more bottom-heavy and the GOP better represented among businessmen and professionals in the North.


title: Gilded Age

text: Many cultural issues, especially prohibition and foreign-language schools, became hard-fought political issues because of the deep religious divisions in the electorate. For example, in Wisconsin the Republicans tried to close down German language Catholic and Lutheran parochial schools, and were defeated in 1890 when the Bennett Law was put to the test.


title: Gilded Age

text: Prohibition debates and referendums heated up politics in most states over a period of decades, as national prohibition was finally passed in 1919 (and repealed in 1933), serving as a major issue between the wet Democrats and the dry GOP.


title: Gilded Age

text: Prior to the Gilded Age, the time commonly referred to as the old immigration saw the first real boom of new arrivals to the United States. During the Gilded Age, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States in what is known as the new immigration. Some of them were prosperous farmers who had the cash to buy land and tools in the Plains states especially. Many were poor peasants looking for the American Dream in unskilled manual labor in mills, mines, and factories. Few immigrants went to the poverty-stricken South, though. To accommodate the heavy influx, the federal government in 1892 opened a reception center at Ellis Island near the Statue of Liberty; new arrivals needed to pass a medical inspection.


title: Gilded Age

text: These immigrants consisted of two groups: The last big waves of the "Old Immigration" from Germany, Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia, and the rising waves of the "New Immigration", which peaked about 1910. Some men moved back and forth across the Atlantic, but most were permanent settlers. They moved into well-established communities, both urban and rural. The German American communities spoke German, but their younger generation was bilingual. The Scandinavian groups generally assimilated quickly; they were noted for their support of reform programs, such as prohibition.


title: Gilded Age

text: In terms of immigration after 1880, the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened off. The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came number from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece, and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as French Canada. The older immigrants by the 1870s had formed highly stable communities, especially the German Americans. The British immigrants tended to blend into the general population.


title: Gilded Age

text: Irish Catholics had arrived in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s in the wake of the great famine in Ireland when starvation killed millions. Their first few decades were characterized by extreme poverty, social dislocation, crime, and violence in their slums. By the late 19th century, the Irish communities had largely stabilized, with a strong new "lace curtain" middle class of local businessmen, professionals, and political leaders typified by P. J. Kennedy (1858–1929) in Boston. In economic terms, Irish Catholics were nearly at the bottom in the 1850s. They reached the national average by 1900, and by the late 20th century they far surpassed the national average.


title: Gilded Age

text: In political terms, the Irish Catholics comprised a major element in the leadership of the urban Democratic machines across the country. Although they were only a third of the total Catholic population, the Irish also dominated the Catholic Church, producing most of the bishops, college presidents, and leaders of charitable organizations. The network of Catholic institutions provided high status, but low-paying lifetime careers to sisters and nuns in parochial schools, hospitals, orphanages and convents. They were part of an international Catholic network, with considerable movement back and forth from Ireland, England, France, Germany, and Canada.


title: Gilded Age

text: The "New Immigration" were much poorer peasants and rural folk from southern and eastern Europe, including mostly Italians, Poles, and Jews. Some men, especially the Italians and Greeks, saw themselves as temporary migrants who planned to return to their home villages with a nest egg of cash earned in long hours of unskilled labor. Others, especially the Jews, had been driven out of Eastern Europe and had no intention of returning.


title: Gilded Age

text: Historians analyze the causes of immigration in terms of push factors (pushing people out of the homeland) and pull factors (pulling them to America). The push factors included economic dislocation, shortages of land, and antisemitism. Pull factors were the economic opportunity of good inexpensive farmland or jobs in factories, mills and mines.


title: Gilded Age

text: The first generation typically lived in ethnic enclaves with a common language, food, religion, and connections through the old village. The sheer numbers caused overcrowding in tenements in the larger cities. In the small mill towns, however, management usually built company housing with cheap rents.


title: Gilded Age

text: Chinese immigrants were hired by California construction companies for temporary railroad work. European Americans strongly disliked the Chinese for their alien lifestyles and the threat of low wages. The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad from California to Utah was handled largely by Chinese laborers. In the 1870 census, there were 63,000 Chinese men, with a few women in the entire U.S.; this number grew to 106,000 in 1880. Labor unions, led by Samuel Gompers strongly opposed the presence of Chinese labor. Immigrants from China were not allowed to become citizens until 1950; however, as a result of the Supreme Court decision in "United States v. Wong Kim Ark", their children born in the U.S. were full citizens.


title: Gilded Age

text: Congress further banned Chinese immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882; the act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States, but some students and businessmen were allowed in on a temporary basis. The Chinese population declined to only 37,000 in 1940. Although many returned to China (a greater proportion than most other immigrant groups), most of them stayed in the United States. Chinese people were unwelcome in urban neighborhoods, so they resettled in the "Chinatown" districts of large cities. The exclusion policy lasted until the 1940s.


title: Gilded Age

text: A dramatic expansion in farming took place during the Gilded Age, with the number of farms tripling from 2.0 million in 1860 to 6.0 million in 1905. The number of people living on farms grew from about 10 million in 1860 to 22 million in 1880 to 31 million in 1905. The value of farms soared from $8.0 billion in 1860 to $30 billion in 1906.


title: Gilded Age

text: The federal government issued tracts virtually free to settlers under the Homestead Act of 1862. Even larger numbers purchased lands at very low interest from the new railroads, which were trying to create markets. The railroads advertised heavily in Europe and brought over, at low fares, hundreds of thousands of farmers from Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.


title: Gilded Age

text: Despite their remarkable progress and general prosperity, 19th century U.S. farmers experienced recurring cycles of hardship, caused primarily by falling world prices for cotton and wheat.


title: Gilded Age

text: Along with the mechanical improvements which greatly increased yield per unit area, the amount of land under cultivation grew rapidly throughout the second half of the century, as the railroads opened up new areas of the West for settlement. The wheat farmers enjoyed abundant output and good years from 1876 to 1881 when bad European harvests kept the world price high. They then suffered from a slump in the 1880s when conditions in Europe improved. The farther west the settlers went, the more dependent they became on the monopolistic railroads to move their goods to market, and the more inclined they were to protest, as in the Populist movement of the 1890s. Wheat farmers blamed local grain elevator owners (who purchased their crop), railroads and eastern bankers for the low prices. This protest has now been attributed to the far increased uncertainty in farming due to its commercialisation, with monopolies, the gold standard and loans being simply visualisations of this risk.


title: Gilded Age

text: The first organized effort to address general agricultural problems was the Grange movement. Launched in 1867, by employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Granges focused initially on social activities to counter the isolation most farm families experienced. Women's participation was actively encouraged. Spurred by the Panic of 1873, the Grange soon grew to 20,000 chapters and 1.5 million members. The Granges set up their own marketing systems, stores, processing plants, factories and cooperatives. Most went bankrupt. The movement also enjoyed some political success during the 1870s. A few Midwestern states passed "Granger Laws", limiting railroad and warehouse fees. The agricultural problems gained mass political attention in the Populist movement, which won 44 votes in the Electoral College in 1892. Its high point came in 1896 with the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats, who was sympathetic to populist concerns such as the silver standard.


title: Gilded Age

text: American society experienced significant changes in the period following the Civil War, most notably the rapid urbanization of the North. Due to the increasing demand for unskilled workers, most European immigrants went to mill towns, mining camps, and industrial cities. New York, Philadelphia, and especially Chicago saw rapid growth. Louis Sullivan became a noted architect using steel frames to construct skyscrapers for the first time while pioneering the idea of "form follows function". Chicago became the center of the skyscraper craze, starting with the ten-story Home Insurance Building in 1884–1885 by William Le Baron Jenney.


title: Gilded Age

text: As immigration increased in cities, poverty rose as well. The poorest crowded into low-cost housing such as the Five Points and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods in Manhattan. These areas were quickly overridden with notorious criminal gangs such as the Five Points Gang and the Bowery Boys. Overcrowding spread germs; the death rates in big city tenements vastly exceeded those in the countryside.


title: Gilded Age

text: Rapid outward expansion required longer journeys to work and shopping for the middle class office workers and housewives. The working-class generally did not own automobiles until after 1945; they typically walked to nearby factories and patronized small neighborhood stores. The middle class demanded a better transportation system. Slow horse-drawn streetcars and faster electric trolleys were the rage in the 1880s.


title: Gilded Age

text: In the horse-drawn era, streets were unpaved and covered with dirt or gravel. However, this produced uneven wear, opened new hazards for pedestrians, and made for dangerous potholes for bicycles and for motor vehicles. Manhattan alone had 130,000 horses in 1900, pulling streetcars, delivery wagons, and private carriages, and leaving their waste behind. They were not fast, and pedestrians could dodge and scramble their way across the crowded streets.


title: Gilded Age

text: In small towns people mostly walked to their destination so they continued to rely on dirt and gravel into the 1920s. Larger cities had much more complex transportation needs. They wanted better streets, so they paved them with wood or granite blocks. In 1890, a third of Chicago's 2000 miles of streets were paved, chiefly with wooden blocks, which gave better traction than mud. Brick surfacing was a good compromise, but even better was asphalt paving. With London and Paris as models, Washington laid 400,000 square yards of asphalt paving by 1882, and served as a model for Buffalo, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.


title: Gilded Age

text: By the end of the century, American cities boasted 30 million square yards of asphalt paving, followed by brick construction. Street-level electric trolleys moved at 12 miles per hour, and became the main transportation service for middle class shoppers and office workers. Big-city streets became paths for faster and larger and more dangerous vehicles, the pedestrians beware. In the largest cities, street railways were elevated, which increased their speed and lessened their dangers. Boston built the first subway in the 1890s followed by New York a decade later.


title: Gilded Age

text: The South remained heavily rural and was much poorer than the North or West. In the South, Reconstruction brought major changes in agricultural practices. The most significant of these was sharecropping, where tenant farmers "shared" up to half of their crop with the landowners, in exchange for seed and essential supplies. About 80% of the Black farmers and 40% of White ones lived under this system after the Civil War. Most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt, from which the only hope of escape was increased planting. This led to the over-production of cotton and tobacco (and thus to declining prices and income), soil exhaustion, and poverty among both landowners and tenants.


title: Gilded Age

text: There were only a few scattered cities – small courthouse towns serviced the farm population. Local politics revolved around the politicians and lawyers based at the courthouse. Mill towns, narrowly focused on textile production or cigarette manufacture, began opening in the Piedmont region especially in the Carolinas. Racial segregation and outward signs of inequality were everywhere, and rarely were challenged. Black people who violated the color line were liable to expulsion or lynching. Cotton became even more important than before, as poor White people needed the cash that cotton would bring. Cotton prices were much lower than before the war, so everyone was poor. White southerners showed a reluctance to move north, or to move to cities, so the number of small farms proliferated, and they became smaller as the population grew.


title: Gilded Age

text: Many of the White farmers, and most of the Black farmers, were tenant farmers who owned their work animals and tools, and rented the land. Others were day laborers or very poor sharecroppers, who worked under the supervision of the landowner. There was little cash in circulation, because most farmers operated on credit accounts from local merchants, and paid off their debts at cotton harvest time in the fall. Although there were small country churches everywhere, there were only a few dilapidated elementary schools. Apart from private academies, there were very few high schools until the 1920s. Conditions were marginally better in newer areas, especially in Texas and central Florida, with the deepest poverty in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas.


title: Gilded Age

text: The vast majority of African Americans lived in the South, and as the promises of emancipation and reconstruction faded, they entered the nadir of race relations. Every Southern state and city passed Jim Crow laws that were in effect between the late 19th century and 1964, when they were abolished by Congress. They mandated "de jure" (legal) segregation in all public facilities, such as stores and street cars, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for Black people. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were dramatically inferior to those provided for White Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. Schools for Black people were far fewer and poorly supported by taxpayers, although Northern philanthropies and churches kept open dozens of academies and small colleges.


title: Gilded Age

text: In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at Black people during Reconstruction, the federal government was unable to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen. In the Compromise of 1877 President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South; "Redeemers" (White Democrats) acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction. Black political power was eliminated in the 1880s, and in the 1890s new laws effectively blocked over 90% of the Black people from voting (with some exceptions in Tennessee; Black people did vote in the border states).


title: Gilded Age

text: In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad—a combination of the Union Pacific from Omaha to Utah and the Central Pacific from Utah to California—opened up the far west mining and ranching regions. Travel from New York to San Francisco now took six days instead of six months.


title: Gilded Age

text: After the Civil War, many from the East Coast and Europe were lured west by reports from relatives and by extensive advertising campaigns promising "the Best Prairie Lands", "Low Prices", "Large Discounts For Cash", and "Better Terms Than Ever!". The new railroads provided the opportunity for migrants to go out and take a look, with special family tickets, the cost of which could be applied to land purchases offered by the railroads. Farming the plains was indeed more difficult than back east.


title: Gilded Age

text: Water management was more critical, lightning fires were more prevalent, the weather was more extreme, rainfall was less predictable. The fearful stayed home, while migrants were mainly motivated by a search to improve their economic life. Farmers sought larger, cheaper and more fertile land; merchants and tradesman sought new customers and new leadership opportunities. Laborers wanted higher paying work and better conditions. With the Homestead Act providing free land to citizens and the railroads selling cheap lands to European farmers, the settlement of the Great Plains was swiftly accomplished, and the frontier had virtually ended by 1890.


title: Gilded Age

text: In the Gilded Age West, few single men attempted to operate a farm. Farmers clearly understood the need for a hard-working wife, and numerous children, to handle the many chores, including child-rearing, feeding and clothing the family, managing the housework, and feeding the hired hands. During the early years of settlement, farm women played an integral role in assuring family survival by working outdoors. After a generation or so, women increasingly left the fields, thus redefining their roles within the family. New conveniences such as sewing and washing machines encouraged women to turn to domestic roles. The scientific housekeeping movement was promoted across the land by the media and government extension agents, as well as county fairs which featured achievements in home cookery and canning, advice columns for women in the farm papers, and home economics courses in schools.


title: Gilded Age

text: Although the eastern image of farm life on the prairies emphasizes the isolation of the lonely farmer and the bleakness of farm life, in reality rural folk created a rich social life for themselves. For example, many joined a local branch of the Grange; a majority had ties to local churches. It was popular to organize activities that combined practical work, abundant food, and simple entertainment such as barn raisings, corn huskings, and quilting bees. One could keep busy with scheduled Grange meetings, church services, and school functions. Women organized shared meals and potluck events, as well as extended visits between families.


title: Gilded Age

text: Childhood on western farms is contested territory. One group of scholars argues the rural environment was salubrious because it allowed children to break loose from urban hierarchies of age and gender, promoted family interdependence, and produced children who were more self-reliant, mobile, adaptable, responsible, independent and more in touch with nature than their urban or eastern counterparts. However other historians offer a grim portrait of loneliness, privation, abuse, and demanding physical labor from an early age.


title: Gilded Age

text: Native American policy was set by the national government (the states had very little role), and after 1865 the national policy was that Native Americans either had to assimilate into the larger community or remain on reservations, where the government provided subsidies. Reservation natives were no longer allowed to roam or fight their traditional enemies. The U.S. Army was to enforce the laws. Natives of the West came in conflict with expansion by miners, ranchers and settlers. By 1880, the buffalo herds, a foundation for the hunting economy had disappeared. Violence petered out in the 1880s and practically ceased after 1890.


title: Gilded Age

text: Native Americans individually had the choice of living on reservations, with food, supplies, education and medical care provided by the federal government, or living on their own in the larger society and earning wages, typically as a cowboy on a ranch, or manual worker in town. Reformers wanted to give as many Native Americans as possible the opportunity to own and operate their own farms and ranches, so the issue was how to give individual natives land owned by the tribe. To assimilate the natives into American society, reformers set up training programs and schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that produced many prominent Native American leaders. However, anti-assimilation traditionalists on the reservations resisted integration and the resulting loss of their traditional life.


title: Gilded Age

text: In 1887, the Dawes Act proposed to divide tribal land and parcel out 160 acres (0.65 km) of land to each head of family. Such allotments were to be held in trust by the government for 25 years, then given to owners with full title, so they could sell it or mortgage it. As individual natives sold their land, the total held by the native community shrank by almost half. The individualized system undermined the traditional communal tribal organization. Furthermore, a majority of natives responded to intense missionary activity by converting to Christianity. The long-term goal of Dawes Act was to integrate natives into the mainstream. Those who refused to assimilate remained in poverty on reservations, supported until now by Federal food, medicine and schooling. In 1934, national policy was reversed again by the Indian Reorganization Act which tried to protect tribal and communal life on reservations.


title: Gilded Age

text: Some well-known painters of the Gilded Age include: Jules Breton, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, and Maurice Prendergast.


title: Gilded Age

text: The New York art world took a major turn during the Gilded Age, seeing an outgrowth of exhibitions and the establishment of major auction houses with a focus on American art. The Gilded Age was pivotal in establishing the New York art world in the international art market.


title: Gilded Age

text: During the Gilded Age, many new social movements took hold in the United States. Many women abolitionists who were disappointed that the Fifteenth Amendment did not extend voting rights to them, remained active in politics, this time focusing on issues important to them. Reviving the temperance movement from the Second Great Awakening, many women joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in an attempt to bring morality back to America. Its chief leader was Frances Willard (1839–1898), who had a national and international outreach from her base in Evanston, Illinois. Often the WCTU women took up the issue of women's suffrage which had lain dormant since the Seneca Falls Convention. With leaders like Susan B. Anthony, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was formed to secure the right of women to vote.


title: Gilded Age

text: Many young women worked as servants or in shops and factories until marriage, then typically became full-time housewives. However, black, Irish and Swedish adult women often worked as servants. In most large Northern cities, the Irish Catholic women dominated the market for servants. Heavy industry was a male domain, but in light industries such as textiles and food processing, large numbers of young women were hired. Thousands of young unmarried Irish and French Canadian women worked in Northeastern textile mills. Coming from poor families these jobs meant upward social mobility, more money, and more social prestige in their community that made them more attractive marriage partners. In Cohoes, New York, mill women went on strike in 1882 to gain union recognition. They fought off Swedish strike breakers to protect the status they had achieved.


title: Gilded Age

text: After 1860, as the larger cities opened department stores, middle-class women did most of the shopping; increasingly they were served by young middle-class women clerks. Typically, most young women quit their jobs when they married. In some ethnic groups, however, married women were encouraged to work, especially among African Americans, and Irish Catholics. When the husband operated a small shop or restaurant, wives and other family members could find employment there. Widows and deserted wives often operated boarding houses.


title: Gilded Age

text: Career women were few. The teaching profession had once been heavily male, but as schooling expanded many women took on teaching careers. If they remained unmarried they could have a prestigious but poorly paid lifetime career in the middle class. At the end of the period nursing schools opened up new opportunities for women, but medical schools remained nearly all male.


title: Gilded Age

text: Business opportunities were rare, unless it was a matter of a widow taking over her late husband's small business. However, the rapid acceptance of the sewing machine made housewives more productive and opened up new careers for women running their own small millinery and dressmaking shops. When her husband died, Lydia Moss Bradley (1816–1908) inherited $500,000; shrewd investments doubled that sum and she later became president of his old bank in Peoria, Illinois. She worked from home to handle banking business. In an age when philanthropists such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Purdue, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rice and Duke were perpetuating their names by founding universities, she lifted her aspirations from the original idea of an orphanage to the loftier goal and in 1897 founded Bradley University in Peoria.


title: Gilded Age

text: A leading magazine, "The Nation", espoused classical liberalism in every week's issue starting in 1865, under the influential editor E. L. Godkin (1831–1902).


title: Gilded Age

text: Science played an important part in social thought as the work of Charles Darwin became known among intellectuals. Following Darwin's idea of natural selection, English philosopher Herbert Spencer proposed the idea of social Darwinism. This new concept justified the stratification of the wealthy and poor, and it was in this proposal that Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest".


title: Gilded Age

text: Joining Spencer was Yale professor William Graham Sumner whose book "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other" (1884) argued that assistance to the poor actually weakens their ability to survive in society. Sumner argued for a laissez-faire and free-market economy. Few people, however, agreed with the social Darwinists, because they ridiculed religion and denounced philanthropy.


title: Gilded Age

text: Henry George proposed a "single tax" in his book "Progress and Poverty". The tax would be leveled on the rich and poor alike, with the excess money collected used to equalize wealth and level out society.


title: Gilded Age

text: Economist Thorstein Veblen argued in "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899) that the "conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure" of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America.


title: Gilded Age

text: In "Looking Backward" (1887), the reformer Edward Bellamy envisioned a future America set in the year 2000 in which a socialist paradise has been established. The works of authors such as George and Bellamy became popular, and soon clubs were created across America to discuss their ideas, although these organizations rarely made any real social change.


title: Gilded Age

text: The Third Great Awakening which began before the Civil War returned and made a significant change in religious attitudes toward social progress. Followers of the new Awakening promoted the idea of the Social Gospel which gave rise to organizations such as the YMCA, the American branch of the Salvation Army, and settlement houses such as Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889.


title: Gilded Age

text: The Third Great Awakening was a period of religious activism in American history from the late 1850s to the 20th century. It affected pietistic Protestant denominations and had a strong sense of social activism. It gathered strength from the postmillennial theology that the Second Coming of Christ would come after mankind had reformed the entire earth. The Social Gospel movement gained its force from the Awakening, as did the worldwide missionary movement. New groupings emerged, such as the Holiness movement and Nazarene movements, Theosophy and Christian Science.


title: Gilded Age

text: The Protestant mainline denominations (especially the Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches) grew rapidly in numbers, wealth and educational levels, throwing off their frontier beginnings and becoming centered in towns and cities. Leaders such as Josiah Strong advocated a muscular Christianity with systematic outreach to the unchurched in America and around the globe. Others built colleges and universities to train the next generation. Each denomination supported active missionary societies, and made the role of missionary one of high prestige. The great majority of pietistic mainline Protestants (in the North) supported the Republican Party, and urged it to endorse prohibition and social reforms. (see Third Party System)


title: Gilded Age

text: The Awakening in numerous cities in 1858 was interrupted by the American Civil War. In the South, on the other hand, the Civil War stimulated revivals and strengthened the Baptists, especially. After the war, Dwight L. Moody made revivalism the centerpiece of his activities in Chicago by founding the Moody Bible Institute. The hymns of Ira Sankey were especially influential.


title: Gilded Age

text: Across the nation, "drys" crusaded in the name of religion for the prohibition of alcohol. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union mobilized Protestant women for social crusades against not only liquor, but also pornography and prostitution, and sparked the demand for women's suffrage.


title: Gilded Age

text: The Gilded Age plutocracy came under harsh attack from the Social Gospel preachers and reformers in the Progressive Era who became involved with issues of child labor, compulsory elementary education and the protection of women from exploitation in factories.


title: Gilded Age

text: All the major denominations sponsored growing missionary activities inside the United States and around the world.


title: Gilded Age

text: Colleges associated with churches rapidly expanded in number, size and quality of curriculum. The promotion of muscular Christianity became popular among young men on campus and in urban YMCAs, as well as such denominational youth groups such as the Epworth League for Methodists and the Walther League for Lutherans.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, visual, as well as auditory, hallucinations. Dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, and increased body temperature are typical. Effects typically begin within half an hour and can last for up to 20 hours. LSD is also capable of causing mystical experiences and ego dissolution. It is used mainly as a recreational drug or for spiritual reasons. LSD is both the prototypical psychedelic and one of the "classical" psychedelics, being the psychedelics with the greatest scientific and cultural significance. LSD is typically either swallowed or held under the tongue. It is most often sold on blotter paper and less commonly as tablets, in a watery solution or in gelatin squares called panes.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is considered to be non-addictive with low potential for abuse. Frequent use rapidly builds tolerance, requiring exponentially larger doses to feel an effect. Adverse psychological reactions are possible, such as anxiety, paranoia, and delusions. LSD is active in small amounts relative to other psychoactive compounds with doses measured in micrograms. It is possible for LSD to induce either intermittent or chronic visual hallucinations, in spite of no further use. Common effects include visual snow and palinopsia. In cases where this causes distress or impairment it is diagnosed as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). While overdose from LSD is unknown, LSD can cause injury and death as a result of accidents stemming from psychological impairment. The effects of LSD are thought to stem primarily from it being an agonist at the 5-HT (serotonin) receptor, and while exactly how LSD exerts its effects by agonism at this receptor is still not fully known, corresponding increased glutamatergic neurotransmission and reduced default mode network activity are thought to be key mechanisms of action. In addition to serotonin, LSD also binds to dopamine D and D receptors, which is why LSD tends to be more stimulating than compounds such as psilocybin. In pure form, LSD is clear or white in color, has no smell, and is crystalline. It breaks down with exposure to ultraviolet light.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 from lysergic acid, a chemical derived from the hydrolysis of ergotamine, an alkaloid found in ergot, a fungus that infects grain. LSD was the 25th of various lysergamides Hofmann synthesized from lysergic acid while trying to develop a new analeptic, hence the alternate name LSD-25. Hofmann discovered its effects in humans in 1943, after unintentionally ingesting an unknown amount, possibly absorbing it through his skin. LSD was subject to exceptional interest within the field of psychiatry in the 1950s and early 1960s, with Sandoz distributing LSD to researchers under the trademark name Delysid in an attempt to find a marketable use for it.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD-assisted psychotherapy was used in the 1950s and early 1960s by psychiatrists such as Humphry Osmond, who pioneered the application of LSD to the treatment of alcoholism, with promising results. Osmond coined the term "psychedelic" (lit. "mind manifesting") as a term for LSD and related hallucinogens, superseding the previously held "psychotomimetic" model in which LSD was believed to mimic schizophrenia. In contrast to schizophrenia, LSD induces transcendental experiences with lasting psychological benefit. During this time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began using LSD in the research project Project MKUltra, which used psychoactive substances to aid interrogation. The CIA administered LSD to unwitting test subjects in order to observe how they would react, and the most well-known example of this is Operation Midnight Climax. LSD was one of several psychoactive substances evaluated by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps as possible non-lethal incapacitants in the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In the 1960s, LSD and other psychedelics were adopted by, and became synonymous with, the counterculture movement due to their perceived ability to expand consciousness. This resulted in LSD being viewed as a cultural threat to American values and the Vietnam war effort, and it was designated as a Schedule I (illegal for medical as well as recreational use) substance in 1968. It was listed as a Schedule 1 controlled substance by the United Nations in 1971 and currently has no approved medical uses. , about 10% of people in the United States have used LSD at some point in their lives, while 0.7% have used it in the last year. It was most popular in the 1960s to 1980s. The use of LSD among US adults increased 56.4% from 2015 to 2018.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is commonly used as a recreational drug in the company of friends, in large crowds, or by oneself.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD can catalyze intense spiritual experiences and is thus considered an entheogen. Some users have reported out of body experiences. In 1966, Timothy Leary established the League for Spiritual Discovery with LSD as its sacrament. Stanislav Grof has written that religious and mystical experiences observed during LSD sessions appear to be phenomenologically indistinguishable from similar descriptions in the sacred scriptures of the great religions of the world and the texts of ancient civilizations.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD currently has no approved uses in medicine. A meta analysis concluded that a single dose was effective at reducing alcohol consumption in alcoholism. LSD has also been studied in depression, anxiety, and drug dependence, with positive preliminary results.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD can cause pupil dilation, reduced appetite, profuse sweating, and wakefulness. Other physical reactions to LSD are highly variable and nonspecific, some of which may be secondary to the psychological effects of LSD. Among the reported symptoms are elevated body temperature, blood sugar, and heart rate, alongside goose bumps, jaw clenching, mouth dryness, and hyperreflexia. In negative experiences, numbness, weakness, nausea, and tremors have also been exhibited.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The most common immediate psychological effects of LSD are visual hallucinations and illusions (colloquially known as "trips"), which vary depending on how much is used and how the dosage interacts with the brain. Trips usually start within 20–30 minutes of taking LSD orally (less if snorted or taken intravenously), peak three to four hours after ingestion, and can last up to 20 hours in high doses. Users may also experience an "afterglow" of improved mood or perceived mental state for days or even weeks after ingestion in some experiences. Good trips are reportedly deeply stimulating and pleasurable, and typically involve intense joy or euphoria, a greater appreciation for life, reduced anxiety, a sense of spiritual enlightenment, and a sense of belonging or interconnectedness with the universe. Negative experiences, colloquially known as "bad trips," evoke an array of dark emotions, such as irrational fear, anxiety, panic, paranoia, dread, distrustfulness, hopelessness, and even suicidal ideation. While it is impossible to predict when a bad trip will occur, one's mood, surroundings, sleep, hydration, social setting, and other factors can be controlled (colloquially referred to as "set and setting") to minimize the risk of a bad trip.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD causes an animated sensory experience of senses, emotions, memories, time, and awareness for 6 to 20 hours, depending on dosage and tolerance. Generally beginning within 30 to 90 minutes after ingestion, the user may experience anything from subtle changes in perception to overwhelming cognitive shifts. Changes in auditory and visual perception are also typical.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Some sensory effects may include an experience of radiant or more vibrant colors, objects and surfaces appearing to ripple, "breathe," or otherwise move, spinning fractals superimposed on one's vision, colored patterns behind closed eyelids, an altered sense of time, geometric patterns emerging on walls and other textured objects, and morphing objects. Some users also report a strong metallic taste for the duration of the effects. Food's texture or taste may be different, and users may also have an aversion to foods that they would normally enjoy. Similar effects have also been found in rats.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Some report that the inanimate world appears to animate in an inexplicable way; for instance, objects that are static in three dimensions can seem to be moving relative to one or more additional spatial dimensions. Many of the basic visual effects resemble the phosphenes seen after applying pressure to the eye and have also been studied as form constants. Sometimes these effects and patterns can be changed when concentrated on, or can change based on thoughts, emotions or music. The auditory effects of LSD may include echo-like distortions of sounds, changes in ability to discern concurrent auditory and visual stimuli, and a general intensification of the experience of music. Higher doses often cause intense and fundamental distortions of sensory perception such as synesthesia, the experience of additional spatial or temporal dimensions, and temporary dissociation.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Out of the 20 drugs ranked in order of individual and societal harm by David Nutt, LSD was third to last, or approximately 1/10th as harmful as alcohol. The most significant adverse effect of LSD was impairment of mental functioning while intoxicated.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD may trigger panic attacks or feelings of extreme anxiety, known colloquially as a "bad trip". LSD is capable of exacerbating mental illnesses and precipitating the early onset of schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals. Although population studies have not found an increased incidence of mental illness in psychedelic drug users overall, with psychedelic users actually having lower rates of depression and substance abuse than the control group, there is evidence that people with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia have a higher likelihood of experiencing adverse effects from taking LSD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: While publicly available documents indicate that the CIA and Department of Defense have discontinued research into the use of LSD as a means of mind control, research from the 1960s suggests that both mentally ill and healthy people are more suggestible while under its influence.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: "Flashbacks" are a reported psychological phenomenon in which an individual experiences an episode of some of LSD's subjective effects after the drug has worn off, persisting for days or months after hallucinogen use. Individuals with hallucinogen persisting perception disorder experience intermittent or chronic flashbacks that cause distress or impairment in life and work.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The etiology of the "flashback" phenomenon appears to be varied. Some researchers such as Krebs and Johansen (2015) attribute at least some of the cases to be related to somatic symptom disorder, when people fixate on normal somatic experiences and perceptions that they weren't aware of before consuming the drug. Other researchers relate it to an associative reaction to a contextual cue akin to what people that have faced trauma or strongly emotional experiences face when receiving a triggering stimulus (Holland and Passie 2011). There is no consensus on what are the risk factors but some researchers theorize that pre-existing psychopathologies may be a significant contributor (Abraham and Duffy 1996)


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The prevalence of HPPD is difficult to estimate but appears to be very rare (Halpern et al 2016), with estimates ranging from 1 in 20 users for the transitory and less serious type 1 HPPD, to 1 in 50,000 users for the more concerning type 2 HPPD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Contrary to rumors circulating the internet that LSD is stored in the spinal cord or other parts of your body long-term, the pharmacological evidence (Passie et all 2008) shows LSD has a short half-life of 175 minutes, undergoing enzymatic metabolism into more polar and therefore water-soluble compounds such as 2-oxo-3-hydroxy-LSD that are eliminated through the urine. No evidence of long term storage of LSD in the body exists.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The mutagenic potential of LSD is unclear. Overall, the evidence seems to point to limited or no effect at commonly used doses. Studies showed no evidence of teratogenic or mutagenic effects.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Tolerance to LSD builds up with consistent use and cross-tolerance has been demonstrated between LSD, mescaline,


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The NIH states that LSD is addictive, while most other sources state it is not. A 2009 textbook states that it "rarely produce[s] compulsive use." A 2006 review states it is readily abused, but does not result in addiction. There are no recorded successful attempts to train animals to self-administer LSD in laboratory settings.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: A report in 2008 stated that, though there was no "comprehensive review since the 1950s" and "almost no legal clinical research" since the 1970s, there had been "no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose". Eight individuals who accidentally consumed very high amounts by mistaking LSD for cocaine developed comatose states, hyperthermia, vomiting, gastric bleeding, and respiratory problems—all survived, however, with hospital treatment and without residual effects. According to more recent reports, several behavioral-related fatalities and suicides have occurred due to LSD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Reassurance in a calm, safe environment is beneficial. Agitation can be safely addressed with benzodiazepines such as lorazepam or diazepam. Neuroleptics such as haloperidol are not recommended because they may have adverse effects. LSD is rapidly absorbed, so activated charcoal and emptying of the stomach is of little benefit, unless done within 30–60 minutes of ingesting an overdose of LSD. Sedation or physical restraint is rarely required, and excessive restraint may cause complications such as hyperthermia (over-heating) or rhabdomyolysis.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Massive doses "should be treated with supportive care, including respiratory support and endotracheal intubation if needed. Hypertension [high blood pressure], tachycardia [rapid heart-beat], and hyperthermia should be treated symptomatically. Hypotension [low blood pressure] should be treated initially with fluids and subsequently with pressors if required." "Intravenous administration of anticoagulants, vasodilators, and sympatholytics may be useful" when treating ergotism.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Most serotonergic psychedelics are not significantly dopaminergic, and LSD is therefore atypical in this regard. The agonism of the D receptor by LSD may contribute to its psychoactive effects in humans.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD binds to most serotonin receptor subtypes except for the 5-HT and 5-HT receptors. However, most of these receptors are affected at too low affinity to be sufficiently activated by the brain concentration of approximately 10–20 nM. In humans, recreational doses of LSD can affect 5-HT (K=1.1nM), 5-HT (K=2.9nM), 5-HT (K=4.9nM), 5-HT (K=23nM), 5-HT (K=9nM [in cloned rat tissues]), and 5-HT receptors (K=2.3nM). Although not present in humans, 5-HT receptors found in rodents also have a high affinity for LSD. The psychedelic effects of LSD are attributed to cross-activation of 5-HT receptor heteromers. Many but not all 5-HT agonists are psychedelics and 5-HT antagonists block the psychedelic activity of LSD. LSD exhibits functional selectivity at the 5-HT and 5HT receptors in that it activates the signal transduction enzyme phospholipase A2 instead of activating the enzyme phospholipase C as the endogenous ligand serotonin does.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Exactly how LSD produces its effects is unknown, but it is thought that it works by increasing glutamate release in the cerebral cortex and therefore excitation in this area, specifically in layers IV and V. LSD, like many other drugs of recreational use, has been shown to activate DARPP-32-related pathways. The drug enhances dopamine D receptor protomer recognition and signaling of D–5-HT receptor complexes, which may contribute to its psychotropic effects. LSD has been shown to have low affinity for H1 receptors, displaying antihistamine effects.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is a biased agonist that induces a conformation in serotonin receptors that preferentially recruits β-arrestin over activating G proteins. LSD also has an exceptionally long residence time when bound to serotonin receptors lasting hours, consistent with the long lasting effects of LSD despite its relatively rapid clearance. A crystal structure of 5-HT bound to LSD reveals an extracellular loop that forms a lid over the diethylamide end of the binding cavity which explains the slow rate of LSD unbinding from serotonin receptors. The related lysergamide lysergic acid amide (LSA) that lacks the diethylamide moiety is far less hallucinogenic in comparison.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The effects of LSD normally last between 6 and 12 hours depending on dosage, tolerance, and age. The Sandoz prospectus for "Delysid" warned: "intermittent disturbances of affect may occasionally persist for several days." Aghajanian and Bing (1964) found LSD had an elimination half-life of only 175 minutes (about 3 hours). However, using more accurate techniques, Papac and Foltz (1990) reported that 1 µg/kg oral LSD given to a single male volunteer had an apparent plasma half-life of 5.1 hours, with a peak plasma concentration of 5 ng/mL at 3 hours post-dose.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The pharmacokinetics of LSD were not properly determined until 2015, which is not surprising for a drug with the kind of low-μg potency that LSD possesses. In a sample of 16 healthy subjects, a single mid-range 200 μg oral dose of LSD was found to produce mean maximal concentrations of 4.5 ng/mL at a median of 1.5 hours (range 0.5–4 hours) post-administration. Concentrations of LSD decreased following first-order kinetics with a half-life of 3.6±0.9 hours and a terminal half-life of 8.9±5.9 hours.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The effects of the dose of LSD given lasted for up to 12 hours and were closely correlated with the concentrations of LSD present in circulation over time, with no acute tolerance observed. Only 1% of the drug was eliminated in urine unchanged, whereas 13% was eliminated as the major metabolite 2-oxo-3-hydroxy-LSD (O-H-LSD) within 24 hours. O-H-LSD is formed by cytochrome P450 enzymes, although the specific enzymes involved are unknown, and it does not appear to be known whether O-H-LSD is pharmacologically active or not. The oral bioavailability of LSD was crudely estimated as approximately 71% using previous data on intravenous administration of LSD. The sample was equally divided between male and female subjects and there were no significant sex differences observed in the pharmacokinetics of LSD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is a chiral compound with two stereocenters at the carbon atoms C-5 and C-8, so that theoretically four different optical isomers of LSD could exist. LSD, also called (+)--LSD, has the absolute configuration (5"R",8"R"). The C-5 isomers of lysergamides do not exist in nature and are not formed during the synthesis from "d"-lysergic acid. Retrosynthetically, the C-5 stereocenter could be analysed as having the same configuration of the alpha carbon of the naturally occurring amino acid L-tryptophan, the precursor to all biosynthetic ergoline compounds.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: However, LSD and iso-LSD, the two C-8 isomers, rapidly interconvert in the presence of bases, as the alpha proton is acidic and can be deprotonated and reprotonated. Non-psychoactive iso-LSD which has formed during the synthesis can be separated by chromatography and can be isomerized to LSD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Pure salts of LSD are triboluminescent, emitting small flashes of white light when shaken in the dark. LSD is strongly fluorescent and will glow bluish-white under UV light.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is an ergoline derivative. It is commonly synthesized by reacting diethylamine with an activated form of lysergic acid. Activating reagents include phosphoryl chloride and peptide coupling reagents. Lysergic acid is made by alkaline hydrolysis of lysergamides like ergotamine, a substance usually derived from the ergot fungus on agar plate; or, theoretically possible, but impractical and uncommon, from ergine (lysergic acid amide, LSA) extracted from morning glory seeds. Lysergic acid can also be produced synthetically, although these processes are not used in clandestine manufacture due to their low yields and high complexity.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: A single dose of LSD may be between 40 and 500 micrograms—an amount roughly equal to one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. Threshold effects can be felt with as little as 25 micrograms of LSD. The practice of using sub-threshold doses is called microdosing. Dosages of LSD are measured in micrograms (µg), or millionths of a gram. By comparison, dosages of most drugs, both recreational and medicinal, are measured in milligrams (mg), or thousandths of a gram. For example, an active dose of mescaline, roughly , has effects comparable to 100 µg (0.0001 g) or less of LSD.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In the mid-1960s, the most important black market LSD manufacturer (Owsley Stanley) distributed LSD at a standard concentration of 270 µg, while street samples of the 1970s contained 30 to 300 µg. By the 1980s, the amount had reduced to between 100 and 125 µg, dropping more in the 1990s to the 20–80 µg range, and even more in the 2000s (decade).


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: "LSD," writes the chemist Alexander Shulgin, "is an unusually fragile molecule ... As a salt, in water, cold, and free from air and light exposure, it is stable indefinitely."


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD has two labile protons at the tertiary stereogenic C5 and C8 positions, rendering these centers prone to epimerisation. The C8 proton is more labile due to the electron-withdrawing carboxamide attachment, but removal of the chiral proton at the C5 position (which was once also an alpha proton of the parent molecule tryptophan) is assisted by the inductively withdrawing nitrogen and pi electron delocalisation with the indole ring.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD also has enamine-type reactivity because of the electron-donating effects of the indole ring. Because of this, chlorine destroys LSD molecules on contact; even though chlorinated tap water contains only a slight amount of chlorine, the small quantity of compound typical to an LSD solution will likely be eliminated when dissolved in tap water. The double bond between the 8-position and the aromatic ring, being conjugated with the indole ring, is susceptible to nucleophilic attacks by water or alcohol, especially in the presence of UV or other kinds of light. LSD often converts to "lumi-LSD," which is inactive in human beings.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The concentrations of LSD in urine samples were followed over time at various temperatures, in different types of storage containers, at various exposures to different wavelengths of light, and at varying pH values. These studies demonstrated no significant loss in LSD concentration at 25 °C for up to four weeks. After four weeks of incubation, a 30% loss in LSD concentration at 37 °C and up to a 40% at 45 °C were observed. Urine fortified with LSD and stored in amber glass or nontransparent polyethylene containers showed no change in concentration under any light conditions. Stability of LSD in transparent containers under light was dependent on the distance between the light source and the samples, the wavelength of light, exposure time, and the intensity of light. After prolonged exposure to heat in alkaline pH conditions, 10 to 15% of the parent LSD epimerized to iso-LSD. Under acidic conditions, less than 5% of the LSD was converted to iso-LSD. It was also demonstrated that trace amounts of metal ions in buffer or urine could catalyze the decomposition of LSD and that this process can be avoided by the addition of EDTA.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD may be quantified in urine as part of a drug abuse testing program, in plasma or serum to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized victims or in whole blood to assist in a forensic investigation of a traffic or other criminal violation or a case of sudden death. Both the parent drug and its major metabolite are unstable in biofluids when exposed to light, heat or alkaline conditions and therefore specimens are protected from light, stored at the lowest possible temperature and analyzed quickly to minimize losses.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Maximum plasma concentrations were found to be 1.4 and 1.5 hours after oral administration of 100µg and 200µg respectively with a plasma half-life of 2.6 hours (ranging from 2.2–3.4 hours among 40 human test subjects).


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. The abbreviation "LSD" is from the German "Lysergsäurediethylamid".


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD's psychedelic properties were discovered 5 years later when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical. The first intentional ingestion of LSD occurred on April 19, 1943, when Hofmann ingested 250 µg of LSD. He said this would be a threshold dose based on the dosages of other ergot alkaloids. Hofmann found the effects to be much stronger than he anticipated. Sandoz Laboratories introduced LSD as a psychiatric drug in 1947 and marketed LSD as a psychiatric panacea, hailing it "as a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, 'sexual perversions', and alcoholism." Sandoz would send the drug for free to researchers investigating its effects.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Beginning in the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a research program code named Project MKUltra. The CIA introduced LSD to the United States, purchasing the entire world's supply for $240,000 and propagating the LSD through CIA front organizations to American hospitals, clinics, prisons and research centers. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subjects' knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report in 1975.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In 1963, the Sandoz patents on LSD expired and the Czech company Spofa began to produce the substance. Sandoz stopped the production and distribution in 1965.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Several figures, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Al Hubbard, had begun to advocate the consumption of LSD. LSD became central to the counterculture of the 1960s. In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Leary, Huxley, Alan Watts and Arthur Koestler, and according to L. R. Veysey they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: On October 24, 1968, possession of LSD was made illegal in the United States. The last FDA approved study of LSD in patients ended in 1980, while a study in healthy volunteers was made in the late 1980s. Legally approved and regulated psychiatric use of LSD continued in Switzerland until 1993.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In November 2020, Oregon became the first US state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of LSD after voters approved Ballot Measure 110.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: By the mid-1960s, the youth countercultures in California, particularly in San Francisco, had adopted the use of hallucinogenic drugs, with the first major underground LSD factory established by Owsley Stanley. From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events primarily staged in or near San Francisco, involving the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the "psychedelic symphony". The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968).


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened the Psychedelic Shop in January 1966. The Thelins opened the store to promote safe use of LSD, which was then still legal in California. The Psychedelic Shop helped to further popularize LSD in the Haight and to make the neighborhood the unofficial capital of the hippie counterculture in the United States. Ron Thelin was also involved in organizing the Love Pageant rally, a protest held in Golden Gate park to protest California's newly adopted ban on LSD in October 1966. At the rally, hundreds of attendees took acid in unison. Although the Psychedelic Shop closed after barely a year-and-a-half in business, its role in popularizing LSD was considerable.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: A similar and connected nexus of LSD use in the creative arts developed around the same time in London. A key figure in this phenomenon in the UK was British academic Michael Hollingshead, who first tried LSD in America in 1961 while he was the Executive Secretary for the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange. After being given a large quantity of pure Sandoz LSD (which was still legal at the time) and experiencing his first "trip," Hollingshead contacted Aldous Huxley, who suggested that he get in touch with Harvard academic Timothy Leary, and over the next few years, in concert with Leary and Richard Alpert, Hollingshead played a major role in their famous LSD research at Millbrook before moving to New York City, where he conducted his own LSD experiments. In 1965 Hollingshead returned to the UK and founded the World Psychedelic Center in Chelsea, London.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In both music and art, the influence of LSD was soon being more widely seen and heard thanks to the bands that participated in the Acid Tests and related events, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and through the inventive poster and album art of San Francisco-based artists like Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson, meant to evoke the visual experience of an LSD trip. LSD had a strong influence on the Grateful Dead and the culture of "Deadheads."


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Among the many famous people in the UK that Michael Hollingshead is reputed to have introduced to LSD are artist and Hipgnosis founder Storm Thorgerson, and musicians Donovan, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison. Although establishment concern about the new drug led to it being declared an illegal drug by the Home Secretary in 1966, LSD was soon being used widely in the upper echelons of the British art and music scene, including members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, the Small Faces, Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix and others, and the products of these experiences were soon being both heard and seen by the public with singles like the Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park" and LPs like the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Cream's "Disraeli Gears", which featured music that showed the obvious influence of the musicians' recent psychedelic excursions, and which were packaged in elaborately-designed album covers that featured vividly-coloured psychedelic artwork by artists like Peter Blake, Martin Sharp, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Nigel Waymouth and Michael English) and art/music collective The Fool.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In the 1960s, musicians from psychedelic music and psychedelic rock bands began to refer (at first indirectly, and later explicitly) to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music. A number of features are often included in psychedelic music. Exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla are common. Electric guitars are used to create feedback, and are played through wah wah and fuzzbox effect pedals. Elaborate studio effects are often used, such as backwards tapes, panning, phasing, long delay loops, and extreme reverb. In the 1960s there was a use of primitive electronic instruments such as early synthesizers and the theremin. Later forms of electronic psychedelia also employed repetitive computer-generated beats. Songs allegedly referring to LSD include John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," although the authors of the latter song repeatedly denied this claim.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In modern times, LSD has had a prominent influence on artists such as Keith Haring, electronic dance music, and the jam band Phish.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (adopted in 1971) requires the signing parties to prohibit LSD. Hence, it is illegal in all countries that were parties to the convention, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. However, enforcement of those laws varies from country to country. Medical and scientific research with LSD in humans is permitted under the 1971 UN Convention.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is a Schedule 9 prohibited substance in Australia under the Poisons Standard (February 2017). A Schedule 9 substance is defined as a substance which may be abused or misused, the manufacture, possession, sale or use of which should be prohibited by law except when required for medical or scientific research, or for analytical, teaching or training purposes with approval of Commonwealth and/or State or Territory Health Authorities.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In Western Australia section 9 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1981 provides for summary trial before a magistrate for possession of less than 0.004g; section 11 provides rebuttable presumptions of intent to sell or supply if the quantity is 0.002g or more, or of possession for the purpose of trafficking if 0.01g.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In Canada, LSD is a controlled substance under Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Every person who seeks to obtain the substance, without disclosing authorization to obtain such substances 30 days before obtaining another prescription from a practitioner, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years. Possession for purpose of trafficking is an indictable offence punishable by imprisonment for 10 years.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In the United Kingdom, LSD is a Schedule 1 Class "A" drug. This means it has no recognized legitimate uses and possession of the drug without a licence is punishable with 7 years' imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine, and trafficking is punishable with life imprisonment and an unlimited fine ("see main article on drug punishments Misuse of Drugs Act 1971)."


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In 2000, after consultation with members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Substance Misuse, the UK Police Foundation issued the Runciman Report which recommended "the transfer of LSD from Class A to Class B."


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In November 2009, the UK Transform Drug Policy Foundation released in the House of Commons a guidebook to the legal regulation of drugs, "After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation", which details options for regulated distribution and sale of LSD and other psychedelics.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: LSD is Schedule I in the United States, according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This means LSD is illegal to manufacture, buy, possess, process, or distribute without a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). By classifying LSD as a Schedule I substance, the DEA holds that LSD meets the following three criteria: it is deemed to have a high potential for abuse; it has no legitimate medical use in treatment; and there is a lack of accepted safety for its use under medical supervision. There are no documented deaths from chemical toxicity; most LSD deaths are a result of behavioral toxicity.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: There can also be substantial discrepancies between the amount of chemical LSD that one possesses and the amount of possession with which one can be charged in the US. This is because LSD is almost always present in a medium (e.g. blotter or neutral liquid), and in some contexts, the amount that can be considered with respect to sentencing is the total mass of the drug and its medium. This discrepancy was the subject of 1995 United States Supreme Court case, "Neal v. United States", which determined that for finding minimum sentence lengths, the total medium weight is used, while for determining the severity of the offense, an estimation of the chemical mass is used.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Lysergic acid and lysergic acid amide, LSD precursors, are both classified in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Ergotamine tartrate, a precursor to lysergic acid, is regulated under the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Personal possession of small amounts of drugs including LSD (40 units or less) was decriminalized in the U.S. state of Oregon on February 1, 2021. This came as a result of the passing of 2020 Oregon Ballot Measure 110. The movement to decriminalize psychedelics in the United States includes LSD in the ongoing effort in California. In November 2020, California Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill to decriminalize psychedelics such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and LSD. In April 2021, the bill has been approved by the Senates Public Safety Committee and the Health Committee, in May 2021, it was cleared by the Senate Appropriations Committee and approved by the California Senate, and in June 2021, advanced by the Assembly Public Safety Committee. In mid 2022, the bill was gutted by committee and limited to organizing a study. Wiener announced that he is planning to reintroduce the bill in 2023.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In April 2009, the Mexican Congress approved changes in the General Health Law that decriminalized the possession of illegal drugs for immediate consumption and personal use, allowing a person to possess a moderate amount of LSD. The only restriction is that people in possession of drugs should not be within a 300-meter radius of schools, police departments, or correctional facilities. Marijuana, along with cocaine, opium, heroin, and other drugs were also decriminalized; their possession is not considered a crime as long as the dose does not exceed the limit established in the General Health Law. Many question this, as cocaine is as synthesised as heroin, and both are produced as extracts from plants. The law establishes very low amount thresholds and strictly defines personal dosage. For those arrested with more than the threshold allowed by the law this can result in heavy prison sentences, as they will be assumed to be small traffickers even if there are no other indications that the amount was meant for selling.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: In the Czech Republic, until 31 December 1998, only drug possession "for other person" (i.e. intent to sell) was criminal (apart from production, importation, exportation, offering or mediation, which was and remains criminal) while possession for personal use remained legal.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: On 1 January 1999, an amendment of the Criminal Code, which was necessitated in order to align the Czech drug rules with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, became effective, criminalizing possession of "amount larger than small" also for personal use (Art. 187a of the Criminal Code) while possession of small amounts for personal use became a misdemeanor.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The judicial practice came to the conclusion that the "amount larger than small" must be five to ten times larger (depending on drug) than a usual single dose of an average consumer.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: Under the Regulation No. 467/2009 Coll, possession of less than 5 doses of LSD was to be considered smaller than large for the purposes of the Criminal Code and was to be treated as a misdemeanor subject to a fine equal to a parking ticket.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: According to the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, in its Article 364, the Ecuadorian state does not see drug consumption as a crime but only as a health concern. Since June 2013 the State drugs regulatory office CONSEP has published a table which establishes maximum quantities carried by persons so as to be considered in legal possession and that person as not a seller of drugs. The "CONSEP established, at their latest general meeting, that the 0.020 milligrams of LSD shall be considered the maximum consumer amount.


title: Lysergic acid diethylamide

text: The street price of a single dose of LSD can be anywhere from $2 to $50. In Europe, as of 2011, the typical cost of a dose was between 4.50 and 25.