It is a place where young people go to expand their minds and explore new horizons, but authorities say for one University of Houston student, that didn’t necessarily involve textbooks or lectures.

“It’s sad,” defense attorney Candelario Elizondo said. “It’s sad that he’s in jail, because no matter what happens now, even if he’s completely exonerated on this offense, he’s still going to have straight F’s for this semester because he couldn’t take his final exams.”

He is first-year chemical engineering student Clarke Denton, and he’s currently in the Harris County jail in lieu of $1.5 million bond. Police said $1.5 million is the street value of the LSD he sold an HPD operative last week on campus.

“I’ve been in narcotics for 15 years, and I’ve only run across it two or three times,” HPD Narcotics Officer Mark Boyle said.

Officer Boyle works in HPD’S undercover unit. He said it makes him wonder if there’s a resurgence of the drug.

“It definitely brings us back kind of retro,” Harris County Assistant District Attorney Marcy McCorvey said. “It’s something we have not seen in this area of late.”

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HPD said the droplets would then be put on Altoids or Sweet Tarts.

The mere mention of LSD conjures a flashback, if you will, to the times of former Harvard professor turned drug guru, Timothy Leary.

“In the future, it’s not going to be what book you read, but which chemical you use to open your mind to accelerate learning,” Leary once said.

In its heyday back in the ‘60s, LSD was often distributed on blotter paper and divided into small squares decorated with cartoon characters.  But Denton was allegedly selling it in liquid form – 155,000 doses of it.

“I’ve been a prosecutor for 16 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever had an LSD case this large,” McCovey said.

That many doses may sound like a truckload of LSD, but in reality it can be contained in a few Visine bottles, like the ones police said they took from Denton. Droplets from those bottles would then be placed on Altoids or Sweet Tarts and sold for $10 a piece, police said.

“You could have it in your pocket without people really noticing,”  Dr. Edward Poa said. Dr. Poa is a psychiatrist with Baylor’s Menninger Clinic. He said despite HPD’s bust, LSD use is on the decline.

“The last study is from 2007,” he said. “About 3 to 4 percent of young adults coming out of high school have tried it, so it’s been cut down to about a fourth of what it was just in the last few years.”

“The ones using it now are the kids: 16, 17 years old; college kids, gothic kids, Officer Boyle said.  “I’m told by my informant they’re starting to use it at clubs.”

“As the rates of use have gone down in the last 10 or 15 years, the one piece of data that is concerning, the public perception of the dangers of LSD has gone down in the last 10 years,” Dr. Poa said.

As for Denton, police said he wasn’t involved in the making of the drug and that he was the middleman for an out-of-town supplier.  

The reason he started selling, according to police: He wanted to be able to buy a laptop computer.

“An extremely intelligent kid — chemical engineering student,” Officer Boyle said. “Once I interviewed him, he was just a normal kid.”

A normal kid facing a minimum of 20 years in prison if convicted