A repairman who had taken it upon himself to fix a vintage Buchla Model 100 modular synthesiser reportedly got high on leftover LSD found on the instrument.
The synthesiser had been left in a room at Cal State University East Bay since the 1960s, and so Eliot Curtis, the Broadcast Operations Manager for KPIX Television, decided to take it home to work on, according to San Francisco KPIX 5.
There has been a dramatic rise in the sale of a fake LSD drug which is proving deadly:While in the middle of restoring the instrument to its former glory, Curtis discovered a "crust or a crystalline residue" underneath a knob on the instrument. So, the engineer sprayed the residue with a cleaning solvent and used his finger to remove the residue from where it had been hiding.
Within an hour, Curtis began to notice a "weird, tingling sensation" - little did he know at the time, though, that this was the first sign of a resulting nine-hour acid trip.
"I think it’s super wild. I think this whole situation is a nice chapter in the history of the counter culture," his wife Holly later explained.
Apparently, LSD's effectiveness as a stimulant can persist for decades if kept in the same cold, dark conditions the synthesiser had been left in. And sometimes, (such as in Curtis' case) it can be ingested through the skin.
Three separate tests were conducted on the substance and all three determined that it was indeed LSD. So how did LSD get inside the instrument in the first place? Well, no one knows for certain but there are a number of theories.
Some even believe it may have had something to do with the instrument's inventor, Don Buchla.
Buchla became known as one of the members of the '60s counterculture - particularly through his work with rock band The Grateful Dead and their audio engineer Owsley Stanley who was one of the first to privately mass-produce LSD.
Well, in any case, we hope Curtis' inadvertent drug trip was fun while it lasted!
