Safety being both a major problem with illicit drugs and a major concern of rationalists, this raised an eyebrow. The simplest explanation is that the people concerned with safety aren't the people using psychedelics and that I underestimated the availability of psychedelics through whatever the normal drug-buying channels are (and perhaps self-experimenters overstate the precision of the doses?), but I'm curious about other possible explanations. Assuming commonality, which I do not take for granted, the two most plausible explanations I came up with were:
Is there a rationalist Bear (preferred name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another early psychedelicist who started weird and became extremely weird) out there? As I understand it, synthesizing LSD requires serious know-how and equipment, but there are surely rationalist synthetic chemists and perhaps one is willing and capable.
Dark-web sales and purity testing labs? That meshes with the techno-libertarian side of things, but I have no idea how those labs operate and I'm guessing buying drugs online practically requires you to commit a federal crime in the US, which is a pretty big hazard.
I'm guessing the simplest explanation is the correct one, to the extent that there's a connection between rationalists and psychedelics, in the first place, but if someone actually knows, I'd rather know than guess.
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Synthesizing the psychedelics themselves, or having a chemist they know do it. TiHKAL was the classic reference on this.
For many of the psychedelics active in the μg range, cheap affordable lab tests (low end spectroscopy) will not be sufficient to even detect the compounds of interest. They would just say that the drug is on blotter paper, for example. Expensive analysis defies the point, and it also much more closely monitored, unless you have a friend at a university research center.
Many psychedelics have unclear scheduling around the world, and can be "legally" sold "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION". The US has the Federal Analogue Act that catches a lot of the {1V,1P,1cP,1D}-LSD prodrugs that need to be explicitly scheduled in many other countries. So for LSD (or LSD prodrugs), in the US, I will guess that people with genuinely accurate information on doses are synthesizing it themselves. This carries much higher penalties than simple possession and could be construed as manufacturing or possession with intent to distribute. I personally would not risk the ire of the famously fickle US govermental agencies just to a slightly more accurate read on the dosage of drugs.
Addenddum: Alexander Shulgin, the author of TiHKAL, obtained a DEA Schedule I license to perform his experiments.
So people do go indeed go around shipping samples to chemists in the US for testing, though I'm guessing for purity/lack of contaminants, not concentration.
Laws are shifting fast though, and I'd expect within a decade, you might be able, under clinical contexts, to access certain psychedelics.
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