Does LSD Kill?
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
