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A number of urban legends exist about LSD. The aura of mystique popularly associated with the drug, and a great deal of misinformation issued and propagated by well-meaning anti-drug groups, particularly in United States anti-drug education programs in schools, provide fertile ground for misconceptions to take hold. Such misinformation may be propagated due to simple ignorance, or through deliberate attempts to frighten students away from LSD usage through scare tactic s.
One popular meme is the blue star tattoo legend. This meme frequently surfaces in American elementary and middle schools in the form of a flyer that has been photocopied through many generations, which is distributed to parents by concerned school officials. It has also become popular on Internet mailing lists and websites. This legend states that a temporary lick-and-stick tattoo soaked in LSD and made in the form of a blue star, or of popular children's cartoon characters, is being distributed to children in the area in order to get them addicted to LSD [sic]. The flyer lists an inaccurate description of the effects of LSD, some attribution (typically to a well-regarded hospital or a vaguely specified "adviser to the president"), and instructs parents to contact police if they come across the blue star tattoos. No actual cases of LSD distribution to children in this manner have ever been documented.
A meme with particular appeal to anti-drug educators who wish to instill a healthy fear of the potential long-term effects of LSD in their pupils, and also among casual high school age LSD users, is that the body stores crystallized LSD in spinal fluid or in fat cells, which at some point dislodges and causes horrific flashbacks, perhaps years later. The scientific evidence provides no support whatsoever for this theory, and rather indicates that LSD has a very short half-life in the body, and that most of the drug's already minuscule dose is eliminated from the system before the trip is even over. (see LSD#Flashbacks).
This legend may be derived from the fact that an inert, metabolized form of THC, the main active constituent of marijuana, is in fact stored by the body in fat cells for about a month after use.
A popular meme with high school and college age users is that there are different "types" of LSD, which produce different types of trips. The types are usually associated with a particular blotter paper design or other dosage form (e.g. sugarcube or geltab), and the resultant trips associated with each dosage form are typically described in terms such as that "blue pyramids [a blotter paper design] give body trips" (a trip of mainly physical sensations with not much mental effect) or a "head trip" (the reverse, mainly mental effects with little physical sensations) or "great visuals" (hallucinations).
While there is no actual physical variation in the LSD molecules carried on different substrates, this meme is self-reinforcing insofar as a user taking LSD who strongly expects to have a particular type of experience due to ingesting a particular substrate is thus much more likely to actually have that particular kind of experience.
Another popular theme among naïve LSD users is that it is possible to synthesize LSD from banana peels or other common household foods and chemicals, or that the synthesis of LSD can be easily accomplished in a bathtub. Variants of this legend often circulate on the Internet, and were popular on 'underground' BBSes run by high schoolers before the advent of widespread home Internet access. This myth is sometimes related in a way so as to bolster social standing within a drug-using social group through association with the purported chemist, e.g. "My boyfriend/cousin/friend/roommate makes LSD in the bathtub from banana peels". The actual synthesis requires university training in organic chemistry and requires both expensive laboratory equipment and expensive, carefully controlled precursor chemicals.