> An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.
What behavior could be prosecuted here except for giving someone LSD without supervision?
The trope of people jumping out of windows on LSD is entirely Art Linkletter's fault for not being able to accept his daughter's suicide, but instead blaming in on the fact that she had mentioned that she had done LSD before.
Since, if you're on LSD (or pretending to be) and acting out, the first thing you're expected to do is talk about how you can fly and threatening to jump out of the window. It's silly. No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic, and the trope has proved longer lasting than the memory of Art or Diane Linkletter.
> Diane’s death helped spread a widespread urban legend that lives on to this day, although it was around well before her fatal plunge. According to a popular story that warns young people about the dangers of drug use, “some girl” jumps from a window while on an acid trip because the drug fools her into thinking she can fly. The claims immediately made after Diane’s death that she had been on LSD, coupled with her method of suicide, seemed to some to fit this existing cautionary tale, and afterwards her demise was pointed to as an example of this legend’s coming true.
> No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic
Salvinorin-a on the other hand has (slightly?) more potential for this scenario. Users can experience what they call “salvia gravity,” a sensation of being pulled in some particular direction, which they follow with their body. I saw someone curl into and begin to lean against a 2nd-floor window screen. His friends kept him safe for the ~7 minutes the trip lasted. If he had been alone though, he could have fallen out.
I don’t know how common that effect is, and it’s quite different from the folklore of people thinking they can fly on acid. This is just a PSA for the few people who are interested in trying that particular drug.
We should prosecute the US institute of traffic engineers since it’s literally in their model policy that streets must be designed so you can go fast enough to kill yourself, and the correct number of pedestrian deaths before considering any mitigations is significantly more than none.
So if you go faster than kill-yourself speed a missile gets fired and evaporates you? Or how are you supposed to make a street that doesn't allow you to go fast enough to kill yourself?
