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 Dog Days |
 Does LSD Kill? Big in Redway |
Martin Cotton, the 26-year-old man who died in police custody on Aug. 9 in Eureka, may find himself a permanent resting place in the annals of a medical journal somewhere.
Martin Cotton and family. Photo by Yulia Weeks.
Ken Falconer, the doctor who performed Cotton's autopsy, said on Monday that he and Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager have not quite worked out the exact wording of the cause of death in the Cotton case, but Falconer is certain it was an overdose of LSD. As certain as one can be, that is. "In this business, you do the best you can," he said.
But experts in the fields of hallucinogens and forensic toxicology are doubtful that LSD could be the sole cause of someone's death. The scientific literature on the subject is just too scant.
However, if Falconer is right, that would make Cotton the second person ever to have died from a pharmacologic overdose of LSD. There is only one other known case, published in Forensic Science International in 1985. LSD does sometimes kill people, but usually they die from trauma experienced during hallucinations, according to the chapter on hallucinogens in Principles of Forensic Toxicology (2003).
Asked how he determined that it was the LSD in Cotton's system that killed him, Falconer said, "You don't see anything that's causing death grossly so you rely on the toxicology report." Cotton also had a subdural hematoma, bleeding in the brain, and multiple abrasions on his head, but the hematoma was not acute and was therefore not the cause of Cotton's death, Falconer said.
The toxicology report, which was released late last week, indicated that Cotton had 10.6 nanograms per milliliter of LSD in his blood, a level which Jager said was twice the lethal dose.
Alexander Shulgin, co-author with his wife Ann of the books PiHKAL and TiKHAL, both about psychoactive drugs, was surprised to hear that someone had died from an overdose of LSD when reached by phone at his house in Lafayette, Calif. last week. "It's never been proven," the octogenarian said after reviewing old notebooks on the subject. "According to the overdosage reports in the literature, this overdose need not be the cause of death."
Shulgin pointed out that in 1972 eight individuals ranging in age from 19-39 were admitted to the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital for what turned out to be an overdose of LSD. The levels of LSD in their blood ranged from 2.1 nanograms per milliliter to 26 nanograms per milliliter (significantly higher than Cotton's) and not one of them died.
Dr. Nachman Brautbar, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Southern California School of Medicine specializing in forensic toxicology, was also surprised when told about an LSD overdose. "It is very unusual for me to hear of LSD as the sole cause of death," he said during a phone interview on Monday.
What can happen, he explained, is that ingesting a large dose of LSD can cause someone to develop seizures. In turn, they may bang their head against something, but that means the cause of death would not be LSD alone, rather the trauma caused by the effects of LSD.
Last Friday Eureka Police Chief Garr Nielsen made a revision to the department's use-of-force policy so that in the future, people like Martin Cotton, who had a "protracted physical encounter with multiple officers," will receive medical care. Still, Nielsen said, "Given the level of drugs in his [Cotton's] system, it might not have saved his life." Science seems to indicate otherwise.
— Japhet Weeks
Who knew that a back-to-the-lander gentleman hunkered down in hippy little Redway for the past 30 years would end up as a feature profile in a major business magazine headquartered at 7 World Trade Center, New York, N.Y.? For being among the top 5,000 U.S.-based entrepreneurs raking in the dough the fastest?
The September 2007 issue ofInc. Magazine names David Katz as No. 312 in the magazine's "Inc. 5,000," its list of businesses at "the top of the entrepreneurial economy." The profile on Katz notes that his business, Alternative Energy Engineering (AEE) Solar, grew 846 percent between 2003 and 2006, from $3 million in revenue in 2003 to $28.2 million in 2006.
You likely know of Katz. He's the electrical engineer/former VW auto parts dealer who moved to the Southern Humboldt hills from Alameda in the late 1970s, along with lots of other city refugees, ditching his day job with the Defense Department for the simpler life. Yes, he was "a lefty protester kinda guy," he told the Journal in an article in 2001 ("Humboldt Unplugged," Feb. 22, 2001), "definitely anti-government, anti-corporation." But he said his venture into solar power was less conscience-driven — at least at the time — and more a business-minded instinct to meet a demand in his adopted community. Many were living off the grid, and they started asking Katz for help hooking extra batteries to their cars that could then be charged and used to supply electricity to their homes. And even as of 2001, Katz noted in the article, there were probably "about 5,000 people off the grid in Southern Humboldt" and that "it has a lot to do with marijuana."
That last bit didn't make it into the Inc. article, actually. Some publications rise above.
Katz told Inc. that he got into selling solar panels after attending a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas in 1980. "I bought 100 and went back to northern California and sold them all in a couple of days," he said. "Now you didn't have to have your car. For a couple thousand dollars, you could have lights and music in your house."
In 1981, he started putting out a catalog. (It's up to 192 pages now.) And over the next 20 years he developed a sales department; hired a team of experienced solar panel and other alternative energy troubleshooters and installers; hooked up with numerous manufacturers, partners and dealers; sold the business; bought back the business; and then, in 2005, sold 80 percent of AEE to an investor, Mainstream Energy.
"That helped with money, of course," Katz told Inc., "but we've also benefited from their influence with vendors. They had a good view of the big picture, and that's given me the freedom and the idea that we had to grow."
Now AEE is strictly a wholesale distributor, with 36 employees — many living off the grid — spread among a Canadian division and offices in California, Utah and Colorado, and customers all over the globe. Katz mentioned in the 2001 Journal article that much of his business comes from Third World countries. The Inc. article attributes much of AEE's explosive growth to a rising demand for solar energy, fueled by incentives — "especially in California, where net-metering laws and rebates have created a huge market for equipment that connects residential solar electric systems to the municipal grid."
—Heidi Walters
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