A Florida Family All Got High On Walmart LSD Steak

In 2014, a family of four in Florida ate some steak that contained LSD. We do not know how the drug entered the meat, which the family had bought at Walmart. But not long after eating the beef fajitas, the two daughters Elyana and Rayna, ages 6 and 7, were hallucinating and throwing up. Dad Ronnie was seeing multiple hands sprouting from his arm. And that was after they'd taken mom Jessica to the hospital for her own reaction—taken her to the hospital because she was nine months pregnant.

Doctors performed an emergency cesarean. Mothers normally stay conscious during cesareans, which means she delivered while tripping. The baby boy might also have been tripping, but being born is pretty trippy even under normal circumstances.

The hospital thought the family had been poisoned. None of the usual tests turned up anything, so they investigated the leftover beef from that day's dinner, using the same techniques they use to test the flesh of cadavers. That's how they discovered LSD was the culprit, and follow-up tests on the family confirmed it.

If the family really had bought drug-tainted beef from Walmart, that was a pretty big deal, so the feds came in, sending agents from the FDA and the USDA to investigate. They traced the meat from its farm origin to a Georgia slaughterhouse to a Winter Haven distribution center to a Tampa Walmart. Investigating the complete supply chain, they came upon surveillance footage of a father and son looking suspicious near the meat at one point, and they interviewed the pair but released them.

The most obvious solution is that the Ronnie or Jessica dosed the meat themselves and then just played dumb afterward when things went a little too far. LSD isn't a terribly stable compound, and you wouldn't expect it to last long in meat, especially not cooked meat. Police interviewed the couple, who agreed to take polygraph tests and passed them. A bunch of different agencies had good reason to want to prosecute if this couple had been leading the whole government on a wild goose chase, but they concluded they had no evidence against Ronnie or Jessica. Eight months after the incident, they closed the unsolved case.

Incidentally, the family had moved to Florida from Connecticut just two days before fajita night. They'd been planning to move back once the baby was born, but thanks to the experience, they realized Florida's actually a pretty cool place.

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