Dr. Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Laboratories was researching ergot derivatives in 1938 while looking to develop a drug to enhance uterine contractions. His twenty-fifth compound, d-lysergic acid diethelamide tartrate, initially showed no promise.
But five years later, Dr. Hofmann was perplexed by LSD-25 and set out to resynthesize it. Upon doing this, he absorbed a drop through his fingers and soon experienced the first LSD trip.
LSD is not a "byproduct" of anything, but is, instead, a marvelously complex molecule that requires the work of a person with a graduate school education in chemstry to produce. No LSD was ever made by a so-called "bathtub chemist." It's very, very difficult to produce, and once produced, it is very, very fragile.
Well, all my dogs (and me too, it seems) had kennel cough symptoms appear over the weekend. That's about it luckily. LCD would make us all forget the kennel cough but I think they'll get a spoonful of honey 3x a day and I'll have cough drops.
This would potentially appear to be a case of crossing seed grain with edible grain. Seed grain is sometimes treated with rat poison or fungicide to keep it in good shape prior to planting. The amount of toxins per plant ends up diluted to an acceptable level. There was a case like this in France a decade ago when lots of people were poisoned after seed grain got into the food supply.
The company making the stuff for everyone is located in Canada. It'll be interesting to see if they ran QC both in the lab and on animals being fed the stuff. One possibility as to why it might've been missed is that the preshipments and initial shipments did not show up any problems at which point QC may've been relaxed according to established protocols. I'm puzzled why there haven't been far more cases of animals getting sick and dying though. Could the material have been distributed non-homogenously?
There is no regulation of the pet food industry, so testing requirements seem voluntary. The same is true in a lot of other segments of the food and supplements market. Today's recall was botulism in canned olives. Our food supply is pretty risky, especially when driven by market forces to maintain low prices.
I was discussing Fort MacMurray, one of the booming oil towns in Canada, and it is cheaper to ship supplies in from China than to drive it in from Edmonton, just a few hours away. Figure that one out.
One of the things that concerns me about this is that the rat poison detected is a substance banned in the US but not in China.
What is the point of banning substances in the US and then importing food from countries that don't have the same controls. What about banned pesticides that can cause cancer, etc. in later life.
Only a matter of time before something like this happens in the human food supply.
It seems feasible to me that if someone was looking to do harm to the U.S. food supply that they might attempt a "dry run" by testing a plan on pet food first. I'd like to think that the federal and state governments keep a lot tighter watch on the food chain for the human populace, but in reality I don't have a lot of faith in them.