That's a lot of high people

Two California men were convicted today of producing "a third of the country's LSD" in a decommissioned nuclear missle silo in Kansas. That's something to write home about right there. But it gets better:

Before producing the LSD out of the silo, according to the DEA, the men ran their operations out of Santa Fe, N.M., and produced 10 million doses every five weeks.

Ten million doses every five weeks. Do the math. Accounting for a very few people who do LSD with great frequency -- say, a few times a week even -- most people who ever do LSD probably do it once every month or two, at the most. And yet somebody's consuming ten million doses every five weeks -- and that's only a third of the LSD produced in the U.S., according to the story.

So really there are thirty million doses being produced and, presumably, consumed every five weeks. Say that means between five and ten million people on LSD every week or so. That's a lot of seriously high people. And yet I haven't even talked to anybody who admits to taking LSD in more than five years.

Either there are a lot of people still fooling around with LSD or the DEA's estimates are way off. It reminds me of a late-80s movie I saw about a couple of laid-back drug dealers. The movie opens with the two guys watching a TV news report about a drug bust "with a street value of six million dollars." The two guys break up laughing, knowing the estimate is seriously exaggerated. One of them exclaims, "Six million dollars! Man, I want to live on that street!"