Possible candidate for paint-based drugs

Question

I have a painting-themed drug cartel that sells psychoactive drugs that resemble and act like paint. Their usual customers are eccentric artists looking to heighten their creative process.

• The paint drugs have similar properties(appearance and consistency) to paint, enough that they can be painted on an actual canvas.
• They are not meant to be ingested(possible but dangerous) but to be used as paint.
• Their psychoactive properties are delivered through smell and skin contact. The longer you interact with them or the more you use, the more potent the effects become.
• When stored or in a 'still' state, their effects are kept at a minimum. Only when the substances are in an agitated state(such as being painted on something) would the effects be maximized.
• They can be any color. Each color can have a different psychoactive effect.

I'm imagining the scene of a mad painter increasingly trapped in a delirious state as they frantically paint and paint until they finish their piece or die trying. That's what I'm trying to go for.

Is there a substance that can fit my criteria?

Answer 1

LSD would be interesting but seems like an awful lot of work to make paint. It also has a relatively low shelf life, even in optimal conditions it seems to degrade.

How about something a little more exotic and easier to manufacture such as DOx.

DOx has around 31 variants of it with varying effects. That's a lot of colors to play with. DOB for green, DOM for red, DOI for yellow etc.

Now, you mention skin contact, unfortunately most molecules as complex as psychedelics can't absorb through skin. However, you might be able to help them absorb through skin using chemicals known as "Chemical permeation enhancers". This could just happen to be a random additive in the paint that coincidentally is a CPE.

If there was some sort of solvent in the paint, the substance could be carried by the vapor and absorbed in the nasal membrane.

But why DOx over LSD? LSD requires a miniscule dose, 100mcg, whereas DOx requires around 1-3mg. LSD is a bit too potent I think.

There is one small snag in your idea, psychedelic's build up tolerance extremely fast. If you were continuously exposed to 1mcg of LSD all day painting, the effects would actually end up being quite mute because as your absorbing the drug, your building tolerance as well.

If you wanted to get a full dose before your tolerance gets too high, you'd have to do a lot of "painting" in a short time span. Which could encourage a more manic/abstract style of artwork as they're just rushing to get an appropriate dose.

Oh I also forgot, you mentioned that the paint is dangerous to eat. If you take too much LSD, you go to hell for the next 10-14 hours. If you take too much DOx, you die. So no eating it.

Answer 2

LSD

Most of your requirements could be filled with LSD or a family-adjacent "research chemical" which are very similar in molecular structure.

The paint drugs have similar properties(appearance and consistency) to paint, enough that they can be painted on an actual canvas.

Should be possible with a skilled chemist to make a paint that can contain LSD without it decomposing. Since dosages of LSD for recreational use are usually counted in hundreds of micrograms, the paint could easily retain psychoactive effects while still being over 99.9% simple paint with only a very small fraction of the contents being "drugs".

They are not meant to be ingested(possible but dangerous) but to be used as paint.

Their psychoactive properties are delivered through smell and skin contact. The longer you interact with them or the more you use, the more potent the effects become.

When stored or in a 'still' state, their effects are kept at a minimum. Only when the substances are in an agitated state(such as being painted on something) would the effects be maximized.

LSD is fastest absorbed through any mucus membrane. Recreational users typically let the dose be absorbed in their mouth or eyes (or they simply eat it). That said, in high enough dosages, it can be absorbed directly through skin contact. With a high-enough concentration of LSD in the paint, you could have it so that artists who get it on their hands slowly experience the effects as it is absorbed through their pores, and this would also mean that if they accidentally ate it, the dosage would be extremely high and debilitating.

Unfortunately for you, LSD is not really directly "dangerous" even in extremely large doses. Nobody has ever overdosed on it, however scientists have identified a theoretical lethal dosage of 100mg in humans through animal testing (such a dose is roughly 1000x as much as a normal dose).

Getting the drug to work with smell as a transmission path too will probably be difficult though. You don't need a lot of LSD to experience the effects, which works in favor of somehow transferring it through the vapors, and perhaps your best bet would be making these paints into aerosol spray cans so that tiny droplets get breathed in when being used.

They can be any color. Each color can have a different psychoactive effect.

This is the most difficult part of your question I think. Drugs are very hard to engineer, in the sense that even modern medicine can't exactly explain how they work in many cases, and the effects they cause in different users are also unpredictable due to the unique biochemistry and neurology of every single user. Most are discovered on accident (LSD included) and setting out to create a drug that reliably induces a specific effect in people is something that pharma companies spend literal billions and billions of dollars on.

Creating or even randomly discovering a single drug is totally plausible, but creating/discovering a whole family of similar drugs yet that have very different effects like your paint colors stretches my credulity a bit.

Summary

Put LSD into aerosol spray-paint cans, and have the artist work without a mask in a poorly ventilated area. Breathing in the droplets will thoroughly dose them over time, and in terms of LSD's effects, it could definitely drive someone to pursue some creative pursuit to the point of ignoring external factors such as personal safety.

Answer 3

Related to the LSD answer:

Lets say that the paint was originally designed to be 100% natural, environmentally friendly, and vegan. The kind of paint you could pretty much eat, or pour into a river with no ill effects.

Unfortunately, the chemical composition of the paint base became breeding ground for ergot group of fungi. The pigment components encouraged the ergot in the paint to overproduce 6,8 dimethylergoline and lysergic acid derivatives, far beyond of their normal levels in ergot-infested grain.

Painters that would touch the pain, or worse, lick the brush (the paint was supposed to be harmless and edible) would load themselves with hallucinogenic alkaloids. Painters who inhaled the paint fumes would additionally fill their lungs with ergot spores riding on solvent droplets.

Over time, frequent users would become manic, hallucinate, and other, much worse symptoms of ergotism. Those who inhaled the spores would develop fungal pneumonia atop of that.

their creative process would skyrocket into incredible heights, but their health would quickly deteriorate. Of course, the demand for the "Magic Paint" would skyrocket as well, making the Paint Cartel briefly very rich (that is until the authorities become interested in thousands of mad artists dying of severe ergotism.)

This can work in tandem with the LSD idea, because the ergot alkaloids are essentially precursors for LSD, or with the same psychoactive properties but orders of magnitude worse side effects to one's health.

Answer 4

Paint

From American Addiction Centers:

Huffing Paint

The process of “huffing” typically involves putting the substance (e.g., paint) in some type of container, such as a bag, and then rapidly breathing in the fumes to achieve their psychoactive effects. Because these psychoactive effects are often very short-lived, individuals will continue to “huff” the fumes in order to extend the effects. The data from SAMHSA also suggests that younger individuals (under the age of 17) are more likely to inhale products like paint, paint thinner, etc., and older individuals are more likely to inhale products with nitrous oxide in them.

(...)

As individuals inhale the fumes for longer periods of time, they may begin to become very drowsy, (...) become extremely confused, experience hallucinations (...)

Paint usually already contains:

• Toluene
• Xylene
• Benzene
• Formaldehyde
• Trichloroethylene
• Propylene glycol
• Glycol ethers
• Styrene
• Acetone
• Pesticides

Which, if my chemistry doesn't fail me (and I think the article above is enough evidence) can all help you get a trip.

Just change the mix to have more ethers and benzene, add a bit of chloroform, and you've got an actual, very powerful recreative drug laced on the paint.

In Brazil there is a drug that is extremely popular and part of our culture. It's mostly used during Carnival and New Year's Eve parties, and we call it "lança perfume" (kinda means perfume launcher). There are popular songs about it (and by popular I mean the kind sold in albums, not the folk kind) going back all the way to the 70's. It's basically a solution with a mix of ether, chloroform and sometimes benzene that you use to wet a piece of cloth, then you huff it.

It gives you a few minutes of euphory and artists (specially musicians, it seems to me) love it. And as you see, ethers are already present in paint, and people already inhale paint for a high.

The only reason this is not a cartel-controlled drug these days is because gangs can make a lot more profit with things ranging from crack to fentanyl, which are more addictive. They also don't compete with pharmacies and paint stores when selling those kinds of narcotics.