The article mentions the ban in 2006 of over-the-counter sales of Sudafed (pseudoephedrine). One of my favorite satirical articles is "A simple and convenient synthesis of pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine". (The joke being that Sudafed is now hard to purchase while meth is readily available.)
In the below podcast an author of a book about recent meth developments talks about the ban of Sudafed entirely in Mexico lead to a change in the market toward fentanyl.
Author and journalist Sam Quinones talks about his book, The Least of Us, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Quinones focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The conversation includes an exploration of the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll.
Good article. A similar thing happened here when the Australian Federal Police enacted an operation in Cambodia and similar areas to shut down the production of safrole, extracted from the root of the Sassafras tree (also the flavouring in root beer and sarsparilla). Ecstasy became much harder to get on the street and pushed users towards harder drugs like meth and heroin (resulting in a large number of addictions and increase in overall crime).
The ironic thing is the sheer drop in price is probably due in part to the P2P route taking over. It's a more involved process than Sudafed meth, but it's easier to scale, since you aren't bottlenecked by the pharmaceutical supply.
Once you establish the facility and pipeline, you can crank out industrial amounts of crank. The precursors are cheap and used in huge quantities by legitimate labs.
If they did that, the consumption would only go up, resulting in even more overdoses. That’s what happened in Portugal, after drug decriminalization — drug consumption there went up significantly (with exception of heroin, which went down, but it also went down in other European countries at the same time which did not decriminalize it). Full on legalization will increase consumption even higher.
Of course, one might argue that it’s fine, because it’s the drug users themselves who would suffer from this. But, considering the current push to get people vaccinated against their will, for their own good, I don’t expect this argument to work for drugs either… who am I kidding, of course people should have a right to use as much drugs as they want, but should have no right to get a job if they are not vaccinated, it’s 2021 after all.
> That’s what happened in Portugal, after drug decriminalization — drug consumption there went up significantly (with exception of heroin, which went down, but it also went down in other European countries at the same time which did not decriminalize it). Full on legalization will increase consumption even higher.
...Do you have sources on this? My awareness of Portugal's situation is basically the opposite of that, ascertained via [1][2][3] et al. I'm interested in dissenting information if it's available. I also wonder why it is that the assumption is "more drug use" == "bad" when the range of things that constitute 'drugs' is so wide - from alcohol to cannabis to lsd to cocaine, there's a ton of delta between the effects (sociological and personal) of use.
> In the first five years after drug policy reform, use of illegal drugs rose slightly among the general population but fell again in the following five years.
I remember looking at the actual figures, and what happened was that use of heroin in Portugal went down significantly, and use of all other drugs went up significantly, giving slight rise in total drug use on net.
> Use among 15-24 year olds fell throughout the decade,
This implies that use among other groups than 15-24 year old had not fell throughout the decade.
> and among the general population was lower in 2012 than in 2001.
The reason they pick year 2012 is because it's convenient to their argument, and they give out the game later:
> However, consumption trends in Portugal have been keenly disputed and often misrepresented. While drug use during individual lifetimes among the general population appeared to increase in the decade following reform, use within the past 12 months fell between 2001 and 2012. Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime consider use in the past 12 months (recent drug use) or within the past month (current drug use) as better indicators of trends among the general population.18
> Since 2012, past-year use appears to have risen, particularly among those over the age of 25.20 This is, however, based on relatively limited data from SICAD (the Portuguese drug dependence agency) and only one further dataset — in 2016.
The lesson here is that there has been a lot of very dishonest reporting about the results of drug decriminalization in Portugal. You are just another victim of it. Omission of critical facts, cherry-picking groups and dates, and flip-flopping between different ways to measure as needed, are all very common techniques in crafting narratives, misleading people into believing falsehoods, without actually stating them outright, so that they can't easily be caught with blatant lying -- the blatant falsehoods then are repeated by people who were tricked into believing false narratives, which facilitates spreading it, while allowing the authors to wash their hands.
Of course, you don't need to trust some random guy on the internet who's too lazy to dig up relevant statistics, you can keep believing the non-profit industrial complex. You might spend some time looking up these figures yourself, but why bother, after all these non-profits would never lie to you, would they?
I'm not sure it's all that cut-and-dry. The story seems to be a general increase in the consumption statistics, but a decrease in criminal statistics. Maybe not a silver bullet for ending drug abuse, but a net benefit for Portugese society.
Alas, I don't live in Portugal... maybe someone who does can chime in?
> It has been proposed that this effect may have been related to the candor of interviewees, who may have been inclined to answer more truthfully due to a reduction in the stigma associated with drug use.
If you can't trust the data, just ask whether citizens are happy with the change. Considering that Portugal hasn't rolled back their decriminalisation, I'd say that either things have pretty much improved, or at least stayed the same.
You know what I hear when a product is touted as being "in the top 10"? That it's definitely somewhere between #6 and #10. Because if it was 3rd, it'd be "top 3", and if it was 5th, it would be "in the top 5".
If a pull quote or headline shows a good statistic for one cohort, it's a fair bet that other cohorts didn't show such a positive result, or else the touting would have been something like "overall" rather than "15–24".
Within the context of logic, you cannot imply anything about other cohorts from this one statement alone. However, if general population use remained steady or rose, it would definitely imply that fall is attributable to said cohort.
Does the article have anything to say about general population?
> "While drug use during individual lifetimes among the general population appeared to increase in the decade following reform,"
No, but it is within context of narrative crafting practices. If it fell across all age groups, they would have said so, instead of restricting their claim to narrow group of youths. To misunderstand it is either sign of extreme naivety, or willful ignorance.
> By your same logic, if it rose, they would have said so. They didn't.
No, because they aren’t uninterested, unbiased observers just reporting the facts. The entire linked article is pushing very specific policy, and it is only expected that they will only raise arguments in favor of the policy they are proposing.
> Perhaps it was unchanged meaningfully / statistically significant enough to comment?
No. I looked at the data, and reported it accurately. Drug use went up overall, and if you disregard drop in heroin use (though only among young people, it also went up among those 35+), use increased significantly. Drop in heroin use among youth has offset the growth in use of other drugs.
> No. I looked at the data, and reported it accurately.
You were asked for sources. Instead, you pointed to the article someone else linked, and asserted that it’s biased reporting so the data that they didn’t show backs up what you say.
You still haven’t provided any sources for your ongoing assertions.
They don't provide solid sources because they don't exist. Their claims are untrue in the spirit in which they were posted: That the results of the policy were uniformly harmful.
Will you apologize to me for implying that I’m lying here about the ground data facts on drug use in Portugal, if I do provide the sources? Or are you just performatively asking me for sources, refusing to extend even a modicum of charity, just to disappear after I spend half an hour digging back up the government documents I remember seeing a few years ago, when I looked into this?
I have done this research already, which is why I can in good faith say that you are wrong and reality doesn't support what you say. I'll charitably offer that it is possible that I was wrong, and if you prove that I will absolutely apologise.
Meth is definitely one of the drugs that becomes a public nuisance, since people do become erratic and violent while using. Meth users are the only people that worry me when walking through our city since it can make people who are already unstable become unpredictably violent. I wonder if other drugs were legal would people still do meth?
According to period newspapers, it very much was a problem almost immediately after public introduction in the late 40s and early 50s. Here's an example from Australia, which banned it by 1955:
This is very much false, and completely contrary to the actual history. War on drugs only happened because of greatly increased social dysfunction due to drugs, not the other way around. It enjoyed wide social support at the time it was started, precisely because people saw how damaging the drugs are to their communities. The idea that drug-related social dysfunction is an effect of war on drugs is yet another of those "wet streets cause rain" ideas.
No. The war on drugs was an acknowledged political act to disenfranchise black people and the anti (Vietnam) war movement. Lopez, German (March 22, 2016). "Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies". Vox. Archived from the original on May 30, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
Which is why when the War on Drugs started, the Congressional Black Caucus met with Nixon to urge him to stop it.
…no, they didnt, in fact they urged him to do the opposite: to ramp it up as fast as possible, precisely to stop the damage the drugs were causing to black communities.
The linked material came out on NPR in 2013, before it was decided that the history needs to be revised. I recommend taking a look at it before it is also revised, to remove all references to what had actually happened, to how black leaders were main force behind the War on Drugs.
Did you finish reading it?
>The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a longtime pastor in New York, once was addicted to heroin and served time. He's convinced that black leaders who embraced the drug war did serious harm to the community, but says a lot of African-Americans were desperate for ways to make their neighborhoods safe again. "If you're the victim, then you don't want to hear anything about treatment, just, 'Get this guy off the street.' "
Yes, I did. The quote you gave supports what I said: that the black leaders pushed for War on Drugs, precisely to counteract the destructive effects of drugs on their communities. Rev. Herbert Daughtry might believe today that they were wrong to do so, and he might well be correct. This is not what I’m arguing against. I’m arguing against a blatant falsehood, that War on Drugs was purely a mean to disenfranchise black Americans, and that social decay related to drug use was an effect, not a cause of the War on Drugs. These claims are very much false, and this is obvious to anyone who lived through these times, or who spends even minimal amount of effort to look at primary sources.
How do you explain this quote then, surely the war would cause a decrease no? Odd usage spiked decades _after_ they banned it
>Use of crystal meth in the United States exploded in the early 1990s. Between 1994 and 2004, methamphetamine use rose from just under two percent of the U.S. adult population to approximately five percent.
Society functions while people have access to guns too, yet there are still consequences to that choice. I am pro legalization of most drugs, but meth does give me pause. No one smoking a joint or tripped out on opioids has ever attacked me while screaming at ghosts in the street, I don't know enough about the role of meth in those kinds of instabilities but anecdotally meth, and alcohol too, sure seem to cause a whole lot of trouble in my city.
Angry people can turn violent and put you in the ICU, too. To be fair, the list of things that can put you in the ICU is very very long, and many of us avoid it for the majority of our lives.
Like angry people, the vast majority of folks don't turn to violent crime, especially if other avenues exist. Society can provide this if necessary and we already have laws concerning violent crime that we can use.
I'll note that most of us pass addicted people every day when we leave the house. Most of them, you simply won't know they are addicted and if you are normal, you'll probably assume a person or two is addicted, yet they are not.
People trying to steal to get drugs could. People high on drugs certainly could. A lot of Breaking and Entering, for example, is to obtain money to feed a drug habit. For the person doing the stealing, all they care about is the cost of the drug, so plans to regulate and tax meth, well, don't necessarily improve that situation.
But we aren't talking about plans to regulate meth; it's already very heavily regulated. We're talking about plans to partly deregulate meth, which we can expect to significantly reduce the cost of the drug, from the US$50 or more per gram described in this article down to US$1 per gram or less like other synthetic drugs with similarly simple synthesis routes. The US$50 a gram isn't the cost of operating the reactors or measuring the purity of the result; it's the cost of hiring an army of foot soldiers to keep drug addicts or the police from stealing the stuff, because you can't trust the police, because it's illegal.
Yeah, people high on meth do crimes. But at least if the stuff is legal they won't do crimes to buy meth.
So the way it worked out with marijuana is the legal stuff is a lot more expensive than the street stuff. Maybe it would be different with meth, but I'm not sure why.
Basically the whole legal drug movement is targeted at non-addicts to let them pay a premium for a sanitary, legal, controlled experience. The political justifications for the movement are all about harm reduction. But the reality is that if you are an apothecary in SF, you don't really want junkies hanging out in your lobby, for the same reason that communities don't want junkies in their streets. Mental problems, theft, possible violence, behavioral issues -- it would chase away paying customers, and impose security and liability costs on them.
Those unwilling to pay for that more civilized experience go to the street. One important thing to remember is that legalization did not destroy the illegal market. They are different markets, although there is certainly overlap.
> Based on a number of California stores they investigated, the cost for an eighth will now range from around $50 to $65.
> told The New York Times in September that the black market price for an eighth of an ounce is around $20.
Just to share some Canadian numbers, in Ontario, CAD$3.57/gram at the low end through the government store. Of course you could purchase $10/gram or $15/gram if you wanted.
On the black market (clearnet) side, you're looking at around CAD$250 for 2 ounces, or CAD$4.45/g for some mix and match specials. I suspect you can sometimes find $99 ounces which is still $3.53/gram.
Can't really speak to quality of course. Not sure why California black market is going for $5.71/gram
The biggest difference between the black market and regulated market in Canada is the potency of edibles, or so I hear. Government wants to make sure nobody can get high if they mistakenly eat a box thinking its candy, which is kinda a problem if you want to get high.
I didn't know this about Canada -- it's interesting.
It's not clear to me how the black market should go for more if you can just go into a legal place and buy there. What am I missing? Perhaps you need a prescription or something, and people can't get that, so they pay a premium on the black market? Or maybe the legal market limits how much you can buy? Something has to support a higher black market price, since after all it is more legal risk for the participants, and possibly things like risk of buying something unknown.
Or maybe the black market operates in places where there is no legal vendor and so can just charge more? Or they offer home delivery?
Massive over-investment in grow facilities on the regulated side. Think dotcom on IPOs starting ~5 years ago promising massive profits and owning the market.
Retail shops usually charge more than government website. We're flooded with those too.
Licensed Producers are literally sitting on tons of unsold inventory that will likely never sell and never export, and now racing to the bottom on price to get some revenue.
There will be a shakeout.
Because of the above inventory problems, it's possible what you're buying from the legal market has been sitting on a shelf for a while, but under controlled atmosphere, that's not the end of the world. Some places also gamma irradiate their product, which some people have an issue with, but it does keep down microbiological risk and extend shelf life.
Each province has different pricing, so its possible some are just charging a lot more and the black market websites sell for the same price everywhere.
This is a very CA specific problem cause by the fact that legalization is done at the state level and not federal.
Illegal CA cannabis production supplied a huge fraction of total US demand.
Legalization worked in that it is now harder to smuggle illegal cannabis to surrounding states legalizing (and there might be a stronger push to actually find and catch smugglers now).
Also in a high tax state such as CA a lot of 'black market' prices might be skewed by individual growers selling to their immediate friends, etc. This would not translate to other drugs because they don't grow on uh weeds.
In Canada at least in two provinces I've been to recently the price of mj has approximately neared par with the black market, more or less. You can still find some thats more expensive but you can also find some that isn't. The catch is that you have to buy an oz at a time to get that price - if you buy smaller amounts you will probably pay more than the black market.
Yes. That requires another specific decision to commit a crime. Respiratory viral infection requires no additional decision on part of the viral vector.
I agree there shouldn't be a blanket decriminalization of drug use because it does alter judgement/motivation and make a theft or even violent crime more likely.
Drugs destroy your ability to make good decisions. They are essentially hot wiring the brain's reward circuits which directly feed back into the brain's decision making processes. Most obviously, it's almost never the case that addicts consciously choose to become addicted.
"Drugs destroy your ability to make good decisions. They are essentially hot wiring the brain's reward circuits which directly feed back into the brain's decision making processes."
This reeks or propaganda based on a little bit of truth. Sure, being addicted to something warps your brain. It doesn't have to be drugs to do this, though. Gambling addiction is a menace for a subset of population too.
Sure, actually being on drugs will affect the way you think for a short time until it wears off. Some drugs might change your perspective on life (LSD and MDMA are common here).
But seriously: It also isn't as bad as you say.
Caffeine and nicotine aren't going to destroy your ability to make good decisions. Drinking moderately won't do that. You probably have worked with folks that were daily pot smokers your whole life without knowing. Some of them were alcoholics (admittedly, it'll warp some things, but a functional alcoholic tends to make good decisions to a point). A smaller number did heavier drugs occasionally: LSD a few times a year, cocaine 2-4 times a year.
And they've pretty much all retained the ability to make good decisions, even if they've made some you don't agree with.
Does anyone 100% consciously choose anything? If you make a decision after drinking a strong cup of coffee, how much of that decision came from the caffeine, and how much came from your “consciousness”?
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you—addiction is a disease of forces and circumstances, for sure—but the level of “free will” present in any choice (or sequence of choices) is a certainly not amenable to a binary classification.
Yes, the degree "free will"/willpower factors into a decision is much more of a spectrum than a binary. I'm just pointing out that drug addiction shifts your decisions away from the free will end of the spectrum.
"Drug addiction" is not a singular problem with a singular solution. Every drug has unique effects, even between different people (two people take the same drug and don't have the same result). It does not serve public health to shoehorn everything into a square hole.
But the harm or benefit of a policy is not measured by how many specific decisions are performed, but rather by the overall effect of the policy on the community, no? So let's just talk about that rather than counting steps between A and B.
The overall harm or benefit to the community is certainly related to how many and likely those bad decisions are that result in a specific harm/benefit.
Well yeah. I'm all for locking up drunk drivers, offering rehab and then permanently revoking their drivers licenses if they do it again. That goes to the second decision to adversely affect others.
I personally am for this totally legalization but also giving it out for free. or better yet just have a blanket small minimum universal income so no one can decry that we're paying for someone's addiction.
I've personally had 3 full doses, and I can't be sure of my own protection. I'm on medicine that moderately suppresses my immune system, and it is likely that I am not protected.
And I'm one of the lucky ones: Some folks simply can't be vaccinated or simply won't get any protection.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that the folks not getting vaccinated means there are more chances for the virus to change in ways that make the vaccine worthless.
Me - and others - depend on everyone that can get vaccinated to, well, get the freaking vaccine. Not getting the vaccine is putting others at risk. And this is with vaccines working as designed.
The Alpha variant of COVID-19 was strongly suppressed by the vaccines that were approved in the US, and also the others globally.
Since around early Summer Delta has been the dominant variant, which is extremely more transmissible.
Even if vaccinated, Delta still retains effective transmutability, though (maybe?) to a reduced degree even for fully vaccinated individuals.
Since we still don't have sufficient tests to do blanket systematic tests of the entire population on a regular basis, it's extremely difficult to find asymptomatic cases. I've never been notified of an exposure, and have not had symptoms that I could attribute to COVID, thus haven't ever been tested during the entire pandemic.
For all I know, the vaccines could be effective and I might have had an asymptomatic case from someone who's not using WA notify (Washington state's notification app system) and would never know it.
I worry about the risk of spreading the disease to those who are not yet able to be vaccinated, which will soon thankfully include ages 5+ in the US; but that still doesn't allow for providing strong resistance and immune system training to the youngest children.
> Even if vaccinated, Delta still retains effective transmutability, though (maybe?) to a reduced degree even for fully vaccinated individuals.
If vaccine works to protect people who are vaccinated, but does not significantly reduce transmissibility, why force it on people who don't care about being protected? Do they not have a right to make their own choices when it comes to their own bodies? If not, why do we want to give people right to choose taking drugs, given their highly detrimental effects on their bodies and on their lives, in addition to high risk of overdose and death? This all seems completely incoherent to me.
The vaccines still do seem to reduce infection among those who are exposed, and contribute to reducing (even if no longer eliminating) how contagious someone is when they are infected.
Combined with mask use while in public situations...
* Strangle out and eradicate the disease, or at least make very rare.
* Vastly decrease the load on our EMS and hospitals, which they could DIRELY use after almost 2 years of this BS and several waves of "beyond really bad" a year.
* Protect those who are not YET eligible for a vaccination, and who's parents hold views that prevent these innocents for receiving the most protection for disease possible.
* Reduction of spread, even if it doesn't eliminate the disease, will deprive it of chances to mutate which is better for everyone overall. Successful mutations will be like Delta vs Alpha, anything that we consider worse, relative to existing strains.
I would like the pandemic to END sometime, and we aren't getting there until as many as possible GET the vaccine and we finish the job of arming everyone to win the war.
last i read kids (~7 and under) didn't have "fully developed ACE2 receptors" which lead to the spike RBD not fully binding in young children. this allowed their immune system to fight the invader and gave them very strong protection against SARS-CoV-2.
mutations could bring about a spanish-flu style pandemic in the young so i agree it's not a good time to get comfortable yet.. but i'm not sure i agree with mRNA vaccines being forced on all (especially kids) without long term study data. especially when subunit and inactivated vaccines for the S1 protein now exist
I think https://hyper-traditionalist.tumblr.com/ would agree, advocating against the multidimensionality and expansion from the Big Bang (and yet, would also object to being described as being for or against any position, because a position would imply dimensions.)
Return to gravitational singularity, and all that.
> If they did that, the consumption would only go up, resulting in even more overdoses.
I believe the former. People like taking drugs after all.
But what makes you think the latter is likely?
(Anecdotally, from what I can tell American teenagers seems more likely to bing drink hard spirits than German teenagers who can legally enjoy a pint at the local pub.)
Only if they are over sixteen. Same for buying at the supermarket, gas station, or such. No sale without verification of legal ID. Of course there are ways around that, but it isn't that easy anymore.
In Germany, you are legally allowed to buy beer and wine at age 16. The result is that most teenagers tend to stick for lower-percentage alcohol and don't go all-in for the hard stuff.
In Canada you can still buy that over the counter. You get id-ed and they keep a record of your purchases, but since it's now generic pills it is now much cheaper than it was before
I grew up in Germany in a household that never used nasal decongestants, probably out of some fear that they might be dangerous.
When in Canada a doctor told me to buy some pseudoephedrine pills to treat a clotted ear and I found the experience so nice, that when back in Germany I walked into a pharmacy to get some.
It is the same in the US, but the FDA calls it "behind the counter". OTC means you grab it off a shelf yourself, BTC means the pharmacy checks your ID, and gives it to you, but still no prescription required.
OTC just means "Over the counter" or "without a prescription". A good way to test this is to see if your health insurance in the US will pay for it - most won't pay for OTC drugs.
Behind the counter just means there is less chance of folks stealing it and more control over who buys it and the amounts they buy.
There is generally a good amount of things you can get at the pharmacy that are like this: Most of the time, they are simply ordered if someone wants them because there isn't enough demand to keep it on the shelf. Most require no ID either: Sweet almond oil (for ears) is the example I can think of.
Related: In some states, they require a prescription for it because their laws are stricter than the federal guidelines.
There's also an age minimum. My freshman year of college I had the sniffles and a bad cough. I went to the pharmacy to get some Sudafed but couldn't purchase since I was still 17. Went to the school's health center where the doctor happily prescribed me opioids (the infamous purple drank).
It’s not a myth so much as it’s not particularly effective: large doses of it (dangerously so, I might add, people should not do this) are quite effective in getting rid of opioid withdrawals — and not just the peripheral effects.
In extremely large doses it has a distinctly weird feeling. I wouldn’t call it getting high, so I’d suppose that is indeed a myth, but gosh it feels hard on your heart at those doses.
Typically it’s addicts trying to avoid withdrawals (and who felt they did not have access to other opioid replacement therapies for various reasons) that tried that. Some died.
Problem: taking massive amounts of loperamide to get an opiate effect is a myth.
A decade or so ago I was reading a drug forum where an addict-chemist reported that acylating loperamide extracted from OTC pills allowed it to pass the blood brain barrier and deliver a true opiate high. His only reported test subject was himself, so I don't know if it was a genuine effect or not. And I haven't kept up with drug forums in recent years to see if this idea/technique spread. If so, it could explain the pill quantity restrictions; pseudoephedrine went through many years of changes in packaging/formulation as manufacturers tried to keep their products OTC while placating governments that didn't want those pills used as illicit drug precursors.
Tell me who needs 200-ct bottles of imodium. People who observe proper hygiene have food poisoning maybe once in 10 years (and whether a motility agent is a good idea in such cases is another question).
I have chronic gastrointestinal issues and the best "treatment" for them has been taking one every morning (on the recommendation of my GI doctor). This change has made it a lot more expensive and inconvenient to deal with.
That's exactly what I mean (and the sibling posting is more of the same). If you need more than six doses in a row then you should see a physician for a thorough workup because loperamide is just for the symptoms. The package will say as much. It's really hard to find fault with the FDA coming down on the extended-family size packaging.
That really surprised me once. I was traveling in the states and wanted to buy pseudoephedrine, and the guy asked me for my id, asked me to sign a log book, and then proceeded to unlock a giant safe behind him.
New Zealand banned it some years ago and I'm still pissed off. The supposed replacement is clinically useless, and I resent suffering through massive head pain from clogged sinuses every winter, while professional gangs still make money hand over fist from meth.
I was in Vegas some years back and got some under the laxer US rules, and have enjoyed a few years of having it available, but alas my supply has run dry.
I didn’t get IDed either of the times I’ve bought a box.
First time was in 2019: I went to Walmart for something for my ears on flights, after some back and forth the pharmacist recommended me pseudoephedrine.
Second time was in Sobeys last month (can fly again, yaaay) and I asked for it directly. The pharmacist had some trouble finding it, but sold it to me with no further issue.
Chances are that you bought the useless Sudafed PE. The (original) Sudafed is pseudoephedrine. Sudafed PE is phenylephrine. The molecules are similar, but the latter cannot be easily converted to methamphetamine so it is not regulated like the former. Sudafed is an effective nasal decongestant, while Sudafed PE is equivalent to a placebo. [1]
Keep an eye out if you purchased Sudafed PE or Sudafed original. PE is a new product that has old fashion Acetaminophen and is sold just like any other painkiller since that's all it is. It doesn't work well at all compared to the pseudoephedrine found in the behind the counter product.
Sudafed PE is phenylephrine. It is not a pain killer, and it does not have the same safety profile as acetaminophen (Paracetamol for some of you). Not saying either is actually unsafe, but the drug interactions will most definitely differ and you might find yourself suffering.
A bit of a change was that it became pharmacy-only in many (most?all?) provinces. But pharmacies are everywhere, so not a huge deal.
Sad thing is many products were reformulated with phenylephrine, an uncontrolled similarly structured molecule that's completely junk as a decongestant.
The theory is that new meth is based on a synthesis using a chemical called P2P rather than the old synthesis that used ephedrine. There are claims that this new form of meth is chemically different in some what that started creating schizophrenia around 2017.
However, when I looked into it, there doesn't seem to be much support for this idea. Current meth is more pure than ever before. Some people suggest that the use of lead could be responsible, but not all P2P syntheses use that, and it wasn't common in 2017. Instead, it seems like the explanation is just the obvious one: P2P synthesis has resulted in people doing much, much more meth than ever before.
Much of the effects of any intoxicant are culturally constructed. Alcohol is widely known for causing aggression, but this effect doesn’t seem to exist in cultures without that association. Nor does it exist in double-blind studies, yet the placebo group becomes more aggressive.
You can start with two chemically identical intoxicants, and either by marketing or random path dependencies one gains a reputation in the subculture for making people go crazy. You can bet that large number of people are going to act wild on it.
This is no different than the reputation different types of alcohol have garnered. Gin makes people mean. Whisky makes people emotional. Tequila makes people party like crazy. It’s all ethanol, but those cultural preconceptions become self-fulfilling prophecies.
In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible. The stories themselves create the cultural preconditions around encouraging more self-destructive behavior among users. This isn’t even just drugs. Look at the moral panic over Four Loko. The same cocktail of ethanol and caffeine has been consumed as amaro and coffee by rich women since time immemorial. Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
I agree that the gin->mean, whisky->emotional, etc, is all bunk. But I'm still convinced there's a link between alcohol and violence. If nothing else, the lowered cognitive function and reduced inhibition would mean more opportunity to be angry, and less self control.
Like, a drunk person might misinterpret someone accidentally bumping into them as aggression. And would be less likely to suppress the urge to respond in kind.
You're describing the stereotype of a mean drunk. In reality, there's also the happy or the sentimental drunk. They might just laugh it off or smile big and hug the person bumping into them.
For sure, alcohol reduces inhibitions. If you're a naturally chip-on-the-shoulder kind of person, alcohol will turn you into a certified jerk. Alcohol can turn other kinds of people into lovable fools as well though.
I didn't think the bar was to describe something that was true for everyone. I suspect what I described is true for many, across many cultures. I've also seen people I would have characterized as mild-mannered act much differently with alcohol in them. I don't think it's just strictly amplifying existing traits.
Reduced inhibition does not support the thesis of increased agression, unless you define aggression to refer to "aggression shown".
But I'd overall turn the 'cultural' aspect a little further even. I think I have observed a couple of times people to consume alcohol in order to be able to transgress cultural norms because the cultural norms themselves are 'parametrised' for the sober-drunk states.
I.e. get into a fight sober? Could be unacceptable even to someone who wants to get into a fight. After 4 beers? May be perfectly fine for your peer group. Same goes to other things, like dancing, approaching strangers, etc.
What I really found interesting for example is, in my abroad term in Canada. The sober Canadian society was overall friendly and polite, definitely friendlier than in my German home. People held up doors for me (a 20 something man, felt really weird and unexpected), you got compliments for what you wore (never happened to me in Germany), etc. pp. But this radically changed in the 'drunken space' where people were a lot more aggressive and fights were much more the norm.
>Reduced inhibition does not support the thesis of increased agression, unless you define aggression to refer to "aggression shown".
I mean overall increased opportunity for violence. Less inhibition might mean I'm more likely to say "fuck off" to someone rather than just think it. Which could lead somewhere.
I don't hear about drunken street fights in the US either, probably because I don't consume the local media and street fights don't make it to the international news section.
Where in canada were you? I've lived here my whole life and never experienced anything like this. And I've been to Germany, out drinking with Germans, a handful of times and never felt any material difference in demeanor between partying with those folks and with canadians.
I’m just a sample of one, but I’m way more likely to flip my shit when sober — all my fights or verbal altercations I have in fact been sober.
Granted, I’ve been diagnosed with various mental health disorders related to emotional regulation, so perhaps this is dependent on individual brain function.
Of course. Not everybody is going to get violent. And it won’t affect everybody the same. But it does feel like it really brings out the violence in people who maybe are already prone to that type of behavior. In your case it may do the opposite.
I think you're still describing a cultural cause here.
Responding to perceived aggression with your own aggression is not a given. It's a culturally decided response, not an instinctive one.
A good christian is supposed to respond to aggression by "turning the other cheek" and not responding at all. A strict, honor based society might say the only way to respond to aggression is by killing that person.
Western culture falls in between these two. Reduced inhibition simply makes your judgement of the consequences worse so people usually make the choice they want to make (shaped by their culture) and just don't think though what it could mean.
You are probably right in your assertion regarding alcohol, however I suspect it may be possible that there are other compounds unique to various flavors of liquor which may influence the overall effects in various ways. These compounds may not be perceptably psychoactive on their own.
The same goes for strains of marijuana, beyond THC and CBD other psychoactive compounds are inconsistently present with uncertain psychoactive effects (if any). Further there may be complex nonlinear interactions (e.g. two compounds produce no effect but adding a third can change the experience, particularly if you consider reaction products from combustion).
In any case the uncertainty is good for marketing.
> One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks.
These are the theories mentioned in the article referenced in the comment you replied to. It might be the meth itself. Gin, whiskey, and tequila are different colors, and it's not because they are compositionally identical.
> Look at the moral panic over Four Loko. The same cocktail of ethanol and caffeine has been consumed as amaro and coffee by rich women since time immemorial. Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
You’re not entirely wrong, but a splash of liqueur into a small cup of coffee is pretty different from dissolving caffeine pills in tall boys of malt liquor.
PBR hard coffee (and similar products) are comically expensive for what they are which means the wrong people don't buy them which means the avoid the stigma.
> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible. The stories themselves create the cultural preconditions around encouraging more self-destructive behavior among users. <
Desomorphine is not any more inherently dangerous than other opioids (so, still quite dangerous of course).
The synthesis pathway that Krokodil producers used are quite bad and unrefined, but quite surprisingly do work and does appear to produce desomorphine.
The problem was the producers were usually addicts who then injected the reactions solvent mixture, rather than extracting their product.
Did they separate the culture link from a potential genetic link? Maybe the association exists in a culture because it is a real effect, it just differs between groups.
NK has a lot of meth because the government started producing it for export in the 90s, and in the 2000s it became a sort of cottage industry and culturally normalized.
Imperial Japan was heavily dependent on amphetamines for wartime production and military stamina, and even gave the drug a patriotic-sounding name. It is definitely a useful tool for a totalitarian regime.
I used to believe that. It seemed obvious to me and a phd chemist friend of mine that - as you say - the different reputations were a cultural/social creation. The drink itself was just different amounts of ethanol.
Then one day that chemist friend of mine decided to get a bottle of Hornitos Reposado. We usually preferred a good bourbon or weird herbal stuff[1]. We drank most of the bottle, but that wasn't unusual for us at the time[2]. We were intending on a normal evening of video games. MTG, and/or VtES. Instead... we ended up spending the evening having the stupidest, most aggressive, pointless, childish, "macho" argument of our lives. It was shockingly out of character for us. The amount of ethanol consumption wasn't large, and we drank it at a normal rate. Both of us had been a LOT drunker in the past. The only significant difference was our unusual choice of tequila.
While I agree that the cultural preconceptions are probably responsible for most of the effect, there is at least some truth behind the reputations of different types of alcoholic beverages, because the actual drink isn't just ethanol. The different brewing/distilling/aging processes produce different amounts congeners[3][4]; their psychological effects might be small, but small effects amplified through social mechanisms are how "culture" is created.
> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible.
Hear, hear!
> moral panic over Four Loko ... amaro and coffee
Yah, people have probably started putting whisky (Irish or otherwise) in their coffee the morning after they invented the whisky. Also, you probably have to drink the entire giant can of Four Loko to get the same caffeine in a typical cup of coffee.
> Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
It's disturbing how often this kind of bs ends up just being a fancy form of racism/sexism/${targeted_group}ism
[1] e.g. Pernod, Herbsaint, Chartreuse
[2] Yes, we were regularly drinking WAY too much. 375ml/day/person minimum. WAY WAY WAY too much...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congener_%28beverages%29 "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)."
[4] Also, the different amounts of sugars means different effects on bloodsugar/insulin/etc. The resulting effects are probably complicated and difficult to explain, but their contribution to the different reputations might be larger than we expect.
I saw a similar post that claimed the new meth caused psychosis and hallucinations, etc. I don’t know much about meth itself but I do know about Adderall. When you take the normal dose (10-30mg) it can cause some euphoria but for the most part it helps you focus, gives energy (makes you more happy, talkative.) But when it is abused (60+mg) it can cause serious psychosis with all kinds of mental side effects. I image than the new meth is just extremely strong and so for people who are used to doing (or seeing others do) a weaker type it would seem to be a completely different drug. At least this is my theory, since as you said there isn’t any evidence there is a new type of meth, just a stronger type.
Yeah it's all very straightforward when you look at usage patterns. Often meth abusers will smoke multiple points across a day (a point = 100mg). As a result they stay awake for days straight, don't eat, and often will engage in enormously risky sexual behavior (this is the dirty secret of AIDS btw...it arose in the context of the "party and play" gay subculture where people would smoke meth or other drugs and have sex for hours and hours and hours straight with many, many different partners...but I digress)
The infamous "meth mouth"? That's caused by not sleeping and by just overall letting one's life go to shit. Amphetamines do suppress saliva production, so they aren't great for teeth, but it's 95% the lack of sleep and other associated behavior patterns.
I've taken pharmaceutical adderall (which is 75% d-amp and 25% l-amp btw), and pharmaceutical dextroamphetamine (100% d-amp), and illicit, presumably cartel-sourced, and presumably very pure d-methamphetamine. When taken orally, d-meth is, in my opinion, simply a superior ADHD drug (it is much more dopaminergic than amphetamine, yet causes less peripheral stimulation, so you get a much more favorable ratio of positive cognitive effects to negative peripheral effects).
However, the moment someone starts taking (especially smoking, since the RoA of any drug makes a massive difference in addiction, doubly so for meth) hundreds of milligrams, it becomes a completely different drug. It becomes super deleterious to health through the sleep deprivation and risky behaviors alone. Furthermore meth has a unique property that amphetamine apparently doesn't, which is that it can become directly neurotoxic in large doses (meth has some serotonin release, like a much, much weaker form of MDMA, whereas amphetamine has virtually none, so it's possible that that's the mechanism). This is why in the research literature there's a lot about methamphetamine "neurotoxicity", but the papers conveniently omit that if taking oral doses comparable to what's given for ADHD, it's not neurotoxic whatsoever (and frankly may be neuroprotective, especially against traumatic brain injury).
So yeah, your analogy to Adderall is spot on. I've often seen people derisively refer to Adderall or other amphetamines by saying "we're basically giving kids meth!". Which is true in a sense, except it's really the other way around: meth is really not very different from Adderall. If someone were to smoke 100mg+ of amphetamine, their body would break down the same way it does in a meth user, except possibly for the direct neurotoxicity effect I mentioned.
Just adding on: Other key differentiator between recreational and therapeutic amphetamine usage is the pharmacokinetics: Vyvanse is the best in this regard - it’s actually an amphetamine prodrug that gets converted to amphetamine in the bloodstream over the course of ~2 hours, giving a very smooth release. Adderall achieves a similar end (to a lesser degree) by combining equal ratios of four different amphetamine salts with various absorption rates to smooth out the serum concentration curve. Dexedrine and Desoxyn I believe are both single salt compounds, and thus have a slightly higher risk of dependency due to their sharper peaks. Of course, other RoAs like smoking or injecting amphetamines recreationally take the effect to a whole new level with even sharper curves, dramatically raising the chances of addiction and negative side effects.
Totally agreed. Expanding a bit on some of the stuff you mentioned:
Vyvanse hits C_max around 3 to 3.5 hours. But you'll hit the maximum "acceleration" (as opposed to "velocity") around 1-2 hours like you said.
Fun fact: Vyvanse was basically designed to have more meth-like pharmacokinetics, since meth also takes about 3-3.5 hours to peak in the blood. Having done both lisdexamfetamine and d-methamphetamine orally, the C_max numbers in the literature are definitely correct because those numbers line up perfectly with when I subjectively peak.
> Adderall achieves a similar end (to a lesser degree) by combining equal ratios of four different amphetamine salts with various absorption rates to smooth out the serum concentration curve.
Yup, and I forget the exact mechanism but I have seen a paper arguing that the 75:25 ratio actually does improve the efficacy. Although I can't remember what the mechanism actually was...
> Dexedrine and Desoxyn I believe are both single salt compounds, and thus have a slightly higher risk of dependency due to their sharper peaks
Correct, both are 100% d-enantiomer, and both due have somewhat sharper peaks as a result. Although to elaborate AFAIK Vyvanse is really the only super unique one. Adderral does/should have a slightly smoother peak but largely the levoamphetamine seems to serve to up the norepinephrine-y effects (that is to say, the "I need to be doing something right now" effects, whereas dopamine is moreso the "once I start something I can keep doing it" effects).
Also methamphetamine in particular when taken orally is very vyvanse-like, as I mentioned above. So it's really exclusively with the fast RoAs like smoking or injecting it where you get the really crazy instant spike. (That last sentence is just from my general understanding, I've never taken meth in a non-oral RoA so I can't speak from experience)
Adding on: the problem with vyvanse is that there's no way to mess around with the dosage to get it "just right."
It's like a more strict version of extended release (EX) and timed release formulations (there's a difference!).
Vyvanse is metabolized to d-amphetamine in your blood cells (the specific mechanism escapes me right now), unlike the regular non-prodrug versions which get "metabolized" first in your stomach and intestinal tract, and then your liver.
However, there is a set speed that vyvanse gets converted into free-circulating d-amphetamine, determined by how quickly (or slowly) your blood cells metabolize it. Unlike regular d-amphetamine, where the speed, and effect, can be "messed" with (or rather "tuned") on a variety of factors, such as:
0. Carbohydrate intake (regular, non-fructan and non-galactin, carbs get released into the bloodstream and trigger an insulin release response, which also happens to dull the effect of excitory neurotransmitters)
1. Stomach pH (acidicity == lesser effect, basicity == higher effect. E.g. drinking orange juice with d-amphetamine will lessen its effect, while taking tums will increase its effect, many times TOO much)
2. Certain liver enzyme inhibitors (mainly those in black pepper and grapefruit/pomegranate) will decrease the rate of amphetamine clearance, thereby intensify its effects
3. Caffeine (will potentiate amphetamine)
4. Personal physiology (not much you can do except play around with dosage and the aforementioned 4 factors)
Now, with the regular IR version, you can take more or less (1-5mg here and there) depending on your specific circumstances to get into the "right" spot where you're not overly or under stimulated, but just enough to be in that Goldilocks zone of flow.
However, with the ER version you lose the ability to get your "Goldilocks Dosage." You can still play around with the aforementioned factors, but this time you're restricted to a specific dosage now (say 5mg) and a specific dosage in some set amount of time later (say another 5mg, about 4-6 hours later).
Yet, with vyvanse you get even less of an ability to play around with the dosage. Take 60mg, and your body will slowly metabolize it to a set amount per hour, regardless of almost anything you can control. If that amount/hour rate doesn't coincide with your Goldilocks zone, you're shit out of luck -- and Vyvanse will not "work" for you.
There's so much more that goes into this, but I've frankly written way too much of an essay at this point.
Thank you for in-depth explanation. Is there a book or some website where all this knowledge of ADHD medication usage nuances is collected in one place? Like a missing ADHD manual?
Ironically, erowid and other "drug" related forums contain the best "practical" knowledge and nuances of actually having to take the medication. They're not scientific or robust, but they are empirical. That's why most pharmacists and prescription-writing physicians will look at you funny (or get combative) if you tell them generic brand X isn't as effective/good as generic brand Z for you.
On paper, each generic must pass some bio-equivalency test with the FDA. Most of the time all that means is "we at generic brand X ran our own experiments and concluded that we show similar blood concentrations of drug A, to Brand-Name Z." And then every professional involved in that supply chain writes it off as "basically the same," excluding all the little implementation/manufacturing details that go into each specific producer, much less factory (quality control is frankly disturbing in many of these plants).
You won't find a lot of practical information written within scientific literature, aside from basic chemistry/biology (the low-level details). Most of the time the researchers running these experiments have done less research and have less hands on experience than the people who have to use this medication on a daily basis. Many times reading the scientific literature is just a rabbit hole that leads to nowhere, except feeling like "you're on to something."
I remember reading a very big thread about MDMA on Bluelight [1]. They were trying to figure out why the MDMA manufactured today is very different empirically compared to the MDMA manufactured in the 80s. Lots of very interesting chemistry discussion
One thing I particularly remember is somebody bringing up the example of their cat. Their cat had some digestive issue and couldn't poop so it was prescribed medicine. One brand of medicine worked wonders for the cat, while a generic brand didn't work at all. Both were supposed to be the same exact molecule!
Not that I know of. One of the side effects of amphetamine usage is compulsively researching details about amphetamine, so that’s where my knowledge comes from :)
Certainly need to read some of the research literature and places like /r/DrugNerds (that community is super legit). The public health/doctor-y type websites are the worst for actually getting info since they never go into details and often give bad advice, so I’d stay away from the “traditional” resources if you’re trying to go deep
Yep. It's why I switched from Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine - basically just d-amp bound to lysine which is then metabolized into d-amp during digestion) to IR generic Adderall (a mix of d-amp and l-amp).
Any unwanted effects (insomnia if I take it too late, etc) are almost entirely due to the l-amp, but the slow release of Vyvanse made it essentially impossible to titrate and my options were either to take a dose so low it wasn't effective or deal with regular insomnia due to lingering amphetamine effects into the evening.
I guess ideally I'd have IR d-amp but I assume it's considered too "abusable" so it's rarely prescribed. Meanwhile, my whole goal is to get useful effects without taking enough to feel like I'm tweaked out or high.
I had the same experience with vyvanse. Insomnia and ADHD medication are a dangerous combo -- one that's hardly recognizable until it's too late.
In my experience, I've had to run the gamut on all the "other" ADHD drugs (ritalin, adderall, d-amphetamine ER, etc.) and then prove they weren't effective, for my insurance to finally approve it. I've heard of some people even going so far as to get prescription meth (desoxyn) because nothing else would work! Strange world.
I've stopped taking meds entirely. I don't know if it's because I'm getting old, and even a "low" dosage (5-10mg) makes me feel very uncomfortable, or if it's because I've used a lot of different slavic nootropics and neuro-regenerative peptides (e.g. semax/NASA, BPC-500, etc.), but I just do not have any tolerance for it anymore.
Fortunately, this loss of tolerance coincided with the ability for me to function very well on simple caffeine alone.
> Insomnia and ADHD medication are a dangerous combo
A few months ago I started taking 15mg diphenhydramine every night just to make damn sure I always get enough sleep. I had taken it occasionally in the past, but didn't like the lingering effect it had the next morning. Then I had a conversation with my sister, who said that she takes it every night for the antihistamine effects after a doctor told her it's fine. The morning after effects seemed to fade (or I got used to them) pretty quickly once I started regular dosing.
Of course I have mixed feelings about ratcheting up the number of medications I'm taking daily, but to be fair OTC allergy medicine is a far cry from using something like Ambien or benzos to manage insomnia.
Apologies; I confused BPC-157 with TB-500, and made a horrible amalgamation.
What do you want to know? Do you have some specific goal you want achieved or curiosity that you would like satisfied?
It's been a bit since I've been involved with these things. Most of it is underground, but I can give you a quick rundown.
BPC-157 and TB-500 are regenerative peptides. BPC-157 seems to be more "global" and neuro-involved throughout the body, while TB-500 is more local and structural (joints, tendons, etc.). BPC-157 also has a (prolonged) effect in some that negates the effects of amphetamines. Subcutaneous injections of BPC-157 have helped get rid of my recurring ganglion cysts and golfer's elbow.
Semax would fall under "slavic nootropics," along with Selank, and if I remember correctly Epithalon. All have "sub-versions" of varying efficacy. F.e. all have "N-Acetyl" and "N-Acetyl Amidate" versions. NASA would be the shortened version of "N-Acetyl Semax Amidate" -- which in my experience is the "strongest." With NASA, while I was injecting it subcutaneously it brought a sort of structure to my mind I hadn't had since I was a child. It's like feeling everything is falling into place, and a loss of the feeling of helplessness.
If you've ever used noopept, it's like that except with more real and long-lasting effects. I would liken it to bromantane, too.
If not, it's difficult to explain what they are, because they're such a different class of drugs that there's no reference point to base their effects off of. Imagine that you have a drug, but instead of giving you a few hours of a noticeable "high" or "low," instead you get a small, but perceptible shift in how you view the world, and how you filter all the information coming in. Like a micro-micro-micro dose of LSD. No high, no impairment, just a beneficial "shift" in your perception that lasts for an indeterminate, but long time.
A few of my friends were career-researchers and likened these effects to be genomic (subtly altering the expression of genes all around the body) rather than physical (that is, simple physical reactions like consuming more electrolytes would cause you to hold more water, and become bloated, because electrolytes attract and "hold" water; or how drunkenness is simply a temporary shift in the delicate GABA/glutamate balance in your brain). The purely "physical" drugs require constant re-dosing to be effective, while the more genomic ones (such as peptides) can have long-lasting effects even after they've been ceased.
I guess I'm a little confused by your answer - are peptides nootropics or sensation-type experiences? I guess I perceive nootropics as like "become smarter" or "having better recall" but this answer makes it seem like a recreational time bound physical experience? I also could see how the mental and physical have blurred boundaries.
I'm nodding off right now, so my verbal fluency is off. I think I was trying to make an analogy on how their effects differ, not on how their effects are.
For example, with eating weed, you get bodily sensations, and so its effects are more on your body, i.e. physical; while with smoking weed, the "sensations" are more in your head, and mental.
Likewise, with injecting NASA, the effects seem to be spread around your body and more "physical"; while administering NASA intranasaly, the effects are more mental, and focused "in your head."
The route of administration changes the expression of the drug on your body and mind. Dependent on that, it can either be a nootropic (nasal route) or akin to a mild and sensationless (compared to painkillers like opiates) muscle relaxant (subcutaneous).
It's difficult to explain, because the effects are so mild and without the normal "Oh, I'm on drugs. I can feel it" sensations, that you can only see them in hindsight (in my case, by perusing old journal entries).
Only thing in the vein has been a better ability to plan, reason about in my head, and make use of visualization to reason about problems (and their solutions).
I’ve been on Vyvanse for a couple years now, and while I was titrating up the dosage I got into the habit of “spreading out” the capsule by opening it up and taking half about three hours apart. The idea was to make sure that the peak effect occurred at the right time. I recently discovered that this probably served no purpose whatsoever, and taking the entire pill at once produces pretty much the exact same overall effect profile.
> Vyvanse is metabolized to d-amphetamine in your blood cells
Do you have any more information about this? Can't find it on google - would be very interesting if its true but I'm a bit skeptical - I've never heard about blood cells being a primary site of drug metabolism.
A search turned up:
> "Lisdexamfetamine dimesylate is converted to dextoamphetamine and L- lysine, which is believed to occur by first-pass intestinal and/or hepatic metabolism."
> Metabolism
Lisdexamfetamine is converted to dextroamphetamine and l-lysine primarily in blood due to the
hydrolytic activity of red blood cells after oral administration of lisdexamfetamine dimesylate.
In vitro data demonstrated that red blood cells have a high capacity for metabolism of
lisdexamfetamine; substantial hydrolysis occurred even at low hematocrit levels (33% of
normal). Lisdexamfetamine is not metabolized by cytochrome P450 enzymes.
Basically, RBCs have lots of enzyme systems that serve (in part) to protect the important parts (e.g. haemoglobin) from oxidation. Put a bunch of lisdexamfetamine in the blood, and the RBCs will gradually hydrolyze it to cleave off the l-lysine and leave d-amph.
It's a myth. I have met hundreds, maybe thousands of long term addicts of meth, crack, and heroin... Lifestyle addicts suffer from massive tooth decay & dental problems, in similar proportions, regardless of which drug they were using.
Whatever the pharmacological impact of meth usage on oral health, it's pretty clear to me that it's a much smaller factor than the general gone-to-hell life of a full time addict.
The 'dirty secret' you refer to (1) is mostly wrong because partying with LSD was popular in the early 80s, not meth, and (2) the gay community is and always has been very up front about risky behaviors and how to minimize the risks. Just because you're unaware of something doesn't make it a secret.
In the American urban gay community, neither LSD nor meth were nearly as popular as prescription amphetamines (pills) until the 1990s, when bathtub meth (crank) manufacturing really took off. They were all always available, but the pills were so cheap & easily obtainable that they were a natural favorite.
All other literature have told me exactly the contrary in terms of attitudes concerning risk. So, do you have a non politicized source for your statements?
Pharmacologically, amphetamines are no worse on your mouth than regular nicotine or caffeine usage. And while cigs & coffee aren't necessarily good for your oral health, they also don't generally cause major gum disease and tooth loss.
"Meth mouth" is mostly caused by neglect, not the biological effects of amphetamines. Long-term heroin & crack users suffer the same kind of severe tooth decay as meth addicts. If you smoke meth every day, but still somehow manage to brush & floss your teeth every day, your oral health won't be any worse than the average American.
That's incorrect, at least in the case of cigarettes. According to the CDC, you have twice the risk of gum disease if you smoke versus nonsmokers. They also state that the more you smoke and the longer you smoke, the greater your risk. That doesn't directly imply a causal link, but it sure winks really obviously in the direction of one.
For some perspective, "Twice the risk of gum disease" is pretty tame. Try losing 90% of your adult teeth... That's the level of dental prohlem that lomg-term addicts have to deal with, after 5-10 years of street life. Smoking cigarettes doesn't even come close.
This "new meth" thing seems like a PR push by government contractors. It's redolent of the UK "skunk" scare (it's not the pot you used to smoke, mommies and daddies - it's special pot that will definitely make your children think they can fly and jump out of windows, and become prostitutes to pay for more.)
I'm not 100% sold on it yet, but my city has always been "welcoming" to homeless folks and it has never been a huge problem. Now it looks like an actual zombie apocalypse out there in some parts, and there are periodically meth busts of hundreds of pounds in just random apartments, not even kingpin types.
Combined with the anecdotal evidence from social workers, there's a whole lot of smoke out there that the "new meth" theory might explain.
As the article points out, the big change is in the production levels and the price. If meth is cheap and every dealer is flooded with it, more people are going to be using it and in higher quantities that will produce more visible (and negative) effects.
The random apartments are probably stash houses used for storage of bulk quantities that would be broken down and distributed to dealers.
I’m not sure I follow? I know drug fear-mongering is a favorite tactic of politicians but I’m not sure I understand what government contractors have to do with it. Are you alluding to private prisons? Or perhaps some other piggy-back industry that I’m unaware of?
More that breaking bad was picking up the story that was taking place at the time when sourcing their material. There's been a lot written about the superlabs in Mexico that produce hundreds of pounds of pure product a batch. There are probably thousands of facilities like this now making this P2P cook at industrial scales.
> When you take the normal dose (10-30mg) it can cause some euphoria but for the most part it helps you focus, gives energy (makes you more happy, talkative.) But when it is abused (60+mg) it can cause serious psychosis with all kinds of mental side effects.
Background: I'm prescribed 20mg/day of extended release Adderall, via a legitimate ADHD diagnosis. If we take the article's "meth is 2x as potent as Adderall" statement at face value, that would mean I'm taking 10mg equivalent of meth per day.
Now, since part of the reason I take this medication is to remember to take my medication (a joke, yes, but not without its kernel of truth!), I've accidentally double dosed myself before. I've also done the same previously when I was prescribed instant release Adderall. In either case, I've never experienced anything like a euphoric high, but I have experienced the kind of "uselessly driven"/tweaker sort of side of it. And, let me tell you, I do not like it when that happens. Although I'm in no hurry to find out, I honestly find it hard to imagine what the high must actually be like in order for people to voluntarily subject themselves to the negative effects of this drug. And, I don't even exceed the therapeutic range when this happens!
I wish there was some way to actually understand why people abuse meth without actually smoking meth myself, which I'm unwilling to do, for obvious reasons.
This is off the top of my head, so no citations, but d-methamphetamine is something like 30% more potent than d-amphetamine. The fact you're taking Adderall makes the comparison more complicated though because you're not taking d-amp. In general d-amp is 3-4x more cognitively powerful than l-amp. So we can consider l-amp to be about 25% the potency of d-amp, except IIRC the 75:25 d-amp:l-amp ratio of adderall synergizes a bit, so let's say that d-amp is ultimately 2.5-3x as strong as l-amp.
Your 20mg of XR addy is equivalent to 10mg IR and another 10mg taken roughly 4 hours after, but let's forget the XR part and just assume it's a 20 IR for convenience (it doesn't change the math anyway, just the pharmacokinetics).
20mg IR Adderall is 15mg dextroamphetamine and 5mg amphetamine. That's about 17mg dextroamphetamine equivalent. Given my estimate of d-meth being 30% more potent than amphetamine, you're taking an equivalent of about 13mg of d-methamphetamine a day.
> In either case, I've never experienced anything like a euphoric high, but I have experienced the kind of "uselessly driven"/tweaker sort of side of it. And, let me tell you, I do not like it when that happens.
See you're amphetamine tolerant. Give your 20mg dose to an amphetamine naive individual, and they will get the euphoria for the first couple days at least of taking it. The euphoria quickly fades, though.
You are correct that when you overdose and aren't stimulant naive, you often end up with mostly the downsides with little upside. There's not too much value in pushing the body past its "equilibrium" level of stimulation (in your case 20mg XR).
> Although I'm in no hurry to find out, I honestly find it hard to imagine what the high must actually be like in order for people to voluntarily subject themselves to the negative effects of this drug. And, I don't even exceed the therapeutic range when this happens!
> I wish there was some way to actually understand why people abuse meth without actually smoking meth myself, which I'm unwilling to do, for obvious reasons.
Have you ever done MDMA? That makes it easy if you have, because MDMA is like a way gnarlier version of methamphetamine: it's shorter lasting and releases WAY more serotonin while still being very dopaminergic. Methamphetamine, taken in oral doses enough to get you slightly tweaking but not at a crazy level, is kind of like 10% of the sensation of "rolling" (rolling means being quite high on mdma) while feeling like a smoother, less physically tweaky version of Vyvanse, which itself is a smoother, less physically tweaky version of adderall.
(For context, when comparing adderall to dexedrine to vyvanse, adderall is by far the tweakiest due to the l-amp. Personally, I'm a dextrorotatory supremacist so I won't touch the l enantiomer with a 10-foot pole)
If you've never done methylynedioxy-methamphetamine, and you clearly haven't done regular methamphetamine, you likely don't "know" what serotonin feels like, unfortunately. But the TLDR is methamphetamine is a smoother and somewhat more dopaminergic version of amphetamine, with the added bonus of some minor (significant when you're smoking it though) serotonin release as well, whereas amphetamine has almost no interaction with serotonin to the best of my knowledge.
I hadn't expected anyone would answer my comment, much less that anyone would provide a concrete reference point that was actually within my experience. I have used MDMA and experienced the high you're describing. For reference, I was high enough that I felt it certainly would not have been a good idea to try driving my car anywhere, but not so high that I felt taking my dog for a walk around the block would have been at all risky.
I found it pleasant, and wished it would last longer, but I don't think it's anything I'd go for if i were only 10% as intense and came with all the twitchy/tweaker effects. The jaw clenching I got from MDMA was more than enough of that.
But, as far as this:
> See you're amphetamine tolerant. Give your 20mg dose to an amphetamine naive individual, and they will get the euphoria for the first couple days at least of taking it. The euphoria quickly fades, though.
When I said "never," I meant "never." I didn't experience it the first time I took amphetamine, the second time, or this morning.
I have experienced some mild euphoria from prescribed dosages of opioids in the past, and, as I mentioned, I've experienced the high of MDMA, so, I think I have some sort of reference point here, although I'm sure they're very different highs.
Maybe it's because the starting dosages my doctors had me trying out initially were very small. Maybe it's because that initial dosage was 10-15 years ago, and I don't really remember it well (which would imply it wasn't very memorable). Or, maybe I did experience some euphoria, but just couldn't classify it as such because of my limited drug experience thus far.
In any case, as you said, I am not amphetamine-naive anymore and certainly don't get high off my medication at prescribed dosages, or even somewhat higher than prescribed dosages.
Again, thank you for helping me understand a bit of the appeal of smoking meth, without actually smoking meth. :-)
> but I don't think it's anything I'd go for if i were only 10% as intense and came with all the twitchy/tweaker effects. The jaw clenching I got from MDMA was more than enough of that.
While we don't know the exact MoA of the jaw clenching, it's likely a form of excitoxicity, presumably a result of excess glutamate firing. This is why high-bioavailability magnesium, such as a chelated magnesium glycinate, helps a lot with the jaw clenching while rolling.
In other words, it's not the serotonin itself that causes the jaw clenching, AFAIK. The "10% of rolling" was me describing just the serotonin dimension of the mdma vs meth experience, not that it would be 10% of the rolly feeling with 100% of the clenching etc :P
> When I said "never," I meant "never." I didn't experience it the first time I took amphetamine, the second time, or this morning.
Very interesting! I definitely have experienced the euphoric high before, but only when starting prescription amphetamines. Yeah, it may have been that you started with a low enough dose, or just that your neurochemistry is pretty resistant to it.
The reason I mentioned the tolerance thing is because there's a common ADHD myth that if someone has ADHD that amps won't get them a euphoric high, and rather will just "calm them down". But in truth anyone can get the euphoria, and most of the "difference in how ADHD people respond to stims" is just an artifact of them having tolerance. It is of course true that ADHD medication can and often does make ADHD people feel more "calm" due to the greater cognitive control etc, but it's not necessarily true that they/we can't actually get "high" off it.
> Again, thank you for helping me understand a bit of the appeal of smoking meth, without actually smoking meth. :-)
Any time :P I've never smoked it myself but having taken it orally for years, as well as having vaporized DMT many a time, I think I have a pretty good imagination for what it would feel like :P
Another factor is just sleep deprivation. It's been shown that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of mania, hallucinations and psychosis. You force someone to stay awake long enough, they will inevitably act crazy. Amphetamine users tend to go on binges and stay awake for days. Keep taking drugs until they pass out from exhaustion.
It's even more silly a claim because P2P based syntheses have been in common use for many decades. They were especially popular amongst the Hells Angels' chemists. I'm not sure what their final reductive amination step was, but I'd guess Al-Hg amalgam & methylamine.
From what I've read of schizophrenia[1] it is highly inherited and unlikely that any drug would cause it. A sufficient amount of stress is known to trigger or quicken the emergence of schizophrenia in people already predisposed to it.
When it comes to studying this, you have to separate out:
* The high rates of drug abuse by people with mental illness.
* The correlation drug use with other sources of stress. Drug use may not be the source, but a result of the source. (But I think we can all agree drugs probably aren't happening matters.)
* Misdiagnosis of temporary drug-induced psychosis as a permanent, incurable mental health illness.
* Race, sex, age, and location, since this all affect the normal rates of schizophrenia for each population group.
OR:
* Show a significant increases in rates that can't be explained by the above. (If this rate tripled, it's pretty clear something bad is happening.)
Very few studies do this, because it is very difficult and there is little incentive to do high quality research.
1: I'm bipolar which is sometimes considered to be on the same spectrum
Really interesting read. Thank you for sharing. For some reason this sort of information about street drugs and science/culture surround it fascinates me.
The author does bring up l-meth. I'm taking them at their word that l-meth is an isomer of d-meth and is created in P2P synthesis, but that seems at least plausible.
It doesn't seem to be common in the legal markets, and especially not at the kind of doses addicts would be exposed to.
From Wikipedia on Levomethamphetamine:
> In larger doses (more than 20 mg/day), it loses its specificity for MAO-B and also inhibits MAO-A, which increases serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain.
So there is a difference in response at higher doses. I would expect that addicts could be exposed to much more than 20mg/day, which begs the question of whether we even know what several hundred milligrams a day could do.
That's without getting into method of consumption. I'm not a chemist, but would we expect both isomers to break down under heat the same way? Or is the l-meth potentially being converted to something different than d-meth when smoked?
If the issue is the quantity, I would have expected schizophrenia to be constantly present. There's a fixed upper limit on how much people can do in a day, and overdoses have always existed, so there have always been people teetering on the edge. The amount heavy users use hasn't changed, there's just more heavy users and more users in general.
There doesn't seem to be debate that P2P processes create l-meth and d-meth, and that l-meth was less common in earlier versions.
I also don't think there's a debate that l-meth and d-meth have different effects. They're both used in prescription drugs, and those drugs are not interchangeable. You can't treat ADHD with l-meth, and you can't use d-meth in segiline.
None of that is conclusive. It could still be the quantity, or even something we haven't though of like an interaction between meth and fentanyl (which started its rise around 2015). I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
> I'm not a chemist, but would we expect both isomers to break down under heat the same way? Or is the l-meth potentially being converted to something different than d-meth when smoked?
Methamphetamine is very, very stable. It stays as methamphetamine when it's vaporized, regardless of whether we're talking d-meth or l-meth.
> There doesn't seem to be debate that P2P processes create l-meth and d-meth, and that l-meth was less common in earlier versions.
Not quite. p2p done naively creates racemic meth, yes, but the modern methods, which have been used for years, purify that to enantiopure d-methamphetamine. They do this by bubbling d-tartaric acid through the racemic mixture, which separates the two enantiomers thus yielding the desired pure d-meth.
Furthermore, historically racemic meth was much more common. AFAIK the infamous "shake and bake" technique creates racemic meth. I do know that there is a pseudofed route that yields d-meth, but I think it's different than shake and bake. So don't quote me on this paragraph, but at a minimum we know that in the last several years, almost all meth seized in the US is highly pure/potent d-methamphetamine. There is less l-meth than ever.
> I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
On the contrary, the evidence is so weak that we literally can discard that l-meth is involved. First of all l-meth is better studied than you say. I would bet to approve the l-methamphetamine-based vics vapo inhaler they had to at least do animal models with large amounts of pure l-meth.
Second of all, and this is what blows the giant hole in your argument, there is no surge of l-meth. There is less l-meth than there has ever been in the history of methamphetamine.
Thirdly - this ties into the second point - you seem to thikn that getting racemic methamphetamine is something particular to the p2p method. It's not. As a general rule, synthesis of any compound yields the racemic version (if we're talking a compound with two enantiomers). This is definitely true for meth, where almost every method yields racemic meth. AFAIK there's a pseudoephedrine route that yields straight d-meth, but like I mentioned above the current state of the art is just to do a big p2p synth route and then separate out the d enantiomer specifically.
> AFAIK the infamous "shake and bake" technique creates racemic meth
the shake and bake method uses "sudafed"/pseudoephedrine. therefore, it will produce d meth
> This is definitely true for meth, where almost every method yields racemic meth
not quite true, because the main precursor pseudoephedrine already had the correct stereochemistry in place. you would actually have to do effort to racemize that asymmetric carbon. But it is true that if your precursors are racemates or not asymmetric and you are not using some fancy asymmetric catalysis or tedious resoltuion your product will be racemic. An example of a racemic meth synthesis that does not involve P2P is direct amination of allylbenzene.
It seems to me that the Elephant in the room is not the racemic composition of meth, or purity, but composition and nature of the remaining impurities.
Do you know if these are well understood and tracked over time?
I can't rule it out, but it's unlikely. Unless the meth cooks are doing something really bizarre, it's unlikely anything in the synthesis route produced as a side product is going to be as biologically potent as the meth itself. (This is not true for other street drugs, see MPTP). P2P Meth synthesis is pretty simple and straightforward if you have the reagents, it's Organic Chem 2xx-3xx level stuff. And it is really easy to crystallize to high purity.
I think it's actually the opposite of impurities. The tech and supply chains have gotten so good, the purity had gone way up and the cost down, that people are just using way more of it.
It’s also possible that the impurities themselves were making it easier on the body(for whatever reason they could signal liver to produce more enzymes that were the ones to break down meth or clear it’s harmful metabolites etc)
P2P synthesis was the standard until it became hard to get (controlled) and that's when ephedrine and pseudoephedrine reduction became popular, despite much higher precursor cost. The reduction pathway is also easier, but because it's so much easier, It's likely much dirtier, since so little care is needed to "succeed." Now that Sudafed and ephedrine Diet pills are controlled, and can't be bought retail by the 1,000 lot, the balance has tilted back to the original precursor.
The reason Meth use is going up is not due to Meth itself. It counter balances the effects of Fentanyl. I regularly go to Fentanyl overdoses where the bystanders tell me they ran out of "G" or "Glass" and simply overdid it with the "M30's"... Its a fucking nightmare.
It used to be "meth" users would say..."At least I am not a dope junky using H." Heroin users would say... "At least I am not a tweaker." Now they are one in the same when I see them, which is generally cyanotic, apneic, and have been down for a while. We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
while I genuinely agree with your intent, I don't think abstinence has been very good at achieving the outcome we're hoping for.
Education, not fear is what allows people to decide for themselves if they want to try/use something and it seems more likely that if/when they try these substances they'll at least be prepared for the consequences and be more likely to be responsible with their use.
Anecdotally I have many friends who were taught abstinence. Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs, but not responsibly, because they had no idea how these other drugs worked. They had no idea what an OD might look like or what the risk of getting poor quality drugs might do. e.g. look at cocaine - how many people have any clue what that is cut with? I'd imagine almost every single one of my friends couldn't tell you what north american cocaine is predominantly cut with and they couldn't tell you what to do in the event of an OD, or what the exact symptoms of a cocaine OD even are! The lack of education is terrifying, really.
I don't think abstinence has been very good at achieving the outcome we're hoping for.
Not all abstinence is the same. Just because one is free to try anything, it doesn't mean people have to try everything.
Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs
The problem isn't abstinence. The problem is the lie. Give people the proper, accurate information, and many will simply decide to abstain themselves. I think you and I would agree on this point about information.
The lack of education is terrifying, really.
That's ultimately the result of lies, deliberate obscurity, and attempts at thought control. It's far better to trust people with accurate information and let them decide for themselves.
It depends on person. We are (de)motivated by different things.
I was growing up in a neighborhood where most part of people above 14 were using something. Most adults were using something heavy and awful, like heroin or desomorphine or whatever. I grew up watching them every day, and I grew up with insane fear of what chemicals do to human body and brain.
I am 35 today, I have never in my life tried anything, even a cigarette. For me fear works perfectly as a reason to stay away from drugs.
But to be fair, it is self-induced fear, from life lessons and not from school lessons.
Sorry, for someone who knows next to nothing about drugs can you clarify? I’m assuming “glass” is the meth and the “M30” pills are fentanyl? Or maybe the other way around? And, if you don’t mind, can you explain what you mean by “counterbalance”? I’m assuming it’s like drinking a red bull with vodka? Does it actually “counterbalance” chemically so someone could “safely” (for lack of a better word) take more fentanyl without overdosing if they took meth along side it? Or does it create the sensation of counterbalancing to make users take less fentanyl in the first place?
I guess what I’m asking is, is taking meth + fentanyl marginally safer than taking just fentanyl? I know neither is safe. I’m just curious how the two interact and what you mean by counterbalance.
I’m also curious if, somewhat counter-intuitively, fentanyl addicts could be “treated“ with adderall to make their drug use safer? At the very least adderall has to be safer than street meth?
The entirety of my knowledge of street drugs came from D.A.R.E. and Breaking Bad so apologies if these are ridiculous questions.
The short answer is that opiates kill by suppressing the breathing reflex. Anything that stimulates breathing can be used to counter act the effect of opiates. In the 70's people would force people to go on walks until their lips weren't blue from 02 deprivation, even if they had to support them while they walked.
I looked it up in case others are curious: genuine Percocet contains acetaminophen in addition to the oxycodone. The genuine Mylan pills do not contain acetaminophen, so are much better for abuse.
This all sounds like high octane speed-ball (used to be just mixing some basic speed with something like Vicodin, or an Adderral/Ritalin + Vicodin/Percocet), but mixing Meth/Fentanly sounds beyond risky.
For duration of effect, at least meth might more closely match an opioid than cocaine (classic speedball). Part of the high danger of speedballs is that the stimulant (coke) wears off much faster than the depressant. Amphetamines have a longer duration of effect than cocaine, I think.
The come down on speed is awful. The come down on high dosage Adderral is awful, you’ll be jittery and and unable to sleep. Imagine Meth or Coke now. The combination is to create the perfect drug, you speed up, hit the half life, and then instead of the awful come down, you ease in to a landing with the calmness of an Opiod that will rockabye baby you away from intense anxiety and hopefully relax you into sleep.
Certainly not something to make a habit of, you’ll be dead in the long run (but I suppose no one gets out alive in this life anyway). Cheers.
I honestly can’t tell what’s worse, a speedball or using Alcohol to blackout after 18 hours of being on speed.
Oh I know what’s worse, Meth + Fentanyl. How the wicked live.
We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
Because kids do what their parents say? I mean, it might be the cynic in me from the years of DARE lies, but I don't think this is enough. Most parents won't have an honest conversation about it: You know, talk about the effects and the good parts alongside the risks you take when you get it.
They won't drive you to safer things.
And an amount of them are going to try it nonetheless: An amount aren't going to be kids, either.
And this is the real reason I support full legalisation and controlled production - even of a lot of drugs that I wouldn't do. We can more reasonably assure there aren't bad batches of pills. We can more easily realize when folks are using regularly and offer (free) help. We can more easily try to sway folks to things that harm less. And we can research ways to do this more easily. It isn't perfect, but the war on drugs definitely isn't either.
Meth doesn't have to be smoked, you can just eat the crystals orally, but meth abusers uusally don't do that because it's not nearly as fun.
The pills they're referring to, 30 M (https://www.drugs.com/imprints/30-m-8232.html), are oxycodone pills (a powerful opioid), but he's likely actually specifically referring to pressed fent (or fent analogue) pills that are made to look like real oxycodone pills. Or perhaps a mixture of meth and fentanyl, such as what George Floyd was taking the day he died (see https://interactive.kare11.com/pdfs/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.... as well as the other evidence around the case)
There's a big problem where, now that the government has really cracked down on so-called "pill mills" - which like all of the war on drugs was the worst thing they could have done, because now the demand is being filled by fentanyl and fentanyl analogues that are pressed to look like oxy pills, but aren't. Oxy alone can be dangerous, but fent is another beast (particularly illicit).
As one anecdote I just had a friend-of-a-friend (I didn't know them personally) die of an overdose earlier this year. They took "oxys" orally which were actually pure fent analogue, and now they're dead. They are yet another fatality of the war on drugs (and also the war on COVID since the lockdowns were the proximate cause of them picking up their opioid habit again)
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Oh, and to elaborate on the GP's point about overdoses being the result of running out of meth, methamphetamine increases respiration rate, which will theoretically counteract the respiratory depression induced by opioids (which are how opioids always kill, with the one exception that fent and related analogues can possibly kill by an addition mechanism of action known as wooden chest syndrome)
Yeah that and the general inclusion of fent hotspots in Heroin and the like is why overdoes have skyrocketed over the last 5+ years. And then COVID [lockdowns] in my opinion cranked the growth in ODs even higher. It was growing at something like 11% in 2019 and then in 2020 it spiked like 30% to something like 70,000 overdose deaths in the US
From the context I assume he is talking about counterfeit pain pills (a M30 is an oxycodone pill) that are made with fentanyl (often in very high or uneven doses). Though counterfeit Adderall pills made with meth are now starting to show up.
Bit of a tangential rant: meth is actually truly really bad, and I wish our drug education growing up hadn’t painted this nebulous concept of “drugs”, because there’s gradations of harm.
I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly.
I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.”
Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)
D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure. Couple that with knowledge of which groups were most heavily impacted by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and you can see an esoteric goal for D.A.R.E.
"D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure."
I don't think it did this. I'm in my early 40's and grew up with DARE. When we were younger, they really leaned into the danger factor and pretty much said you'll hurt everyone you know.
And then, you realize they are liars. I didn't have to actually do drugs to see that. Why would you learn that is a moral failure from lies? I didn't even worry about those sorts of things when I was a preteen/young teen, honestly.
That's like saying "I did a lot of drugs, except the ones that _really_ fuck you up". 100K people will die in the US this year from hard drug overdoses. 93K died last year. This also ignores the fact that several times the number are circling down the societal shitter due to their addiction.
That's not to disagree that e.g. MJ is less dangerous than alcohol when consumed in moderation (although it doesn't have the same effect, so realistically people will just consume both, hopefully not simultaneously).
But don't forget the audience: there's a number of folks on this site who think that heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
> heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
Why? Do you think somehow things would be worse with legal, controlled drugs?
What should happen when someone violates the legal protocols in which they're controlled?
Meth is already legal, in actuality. It's just controlled in production and distribution and only available by prescription. There are millions in America taking legal meth right now.
Adderall is not meth. It's close - but it's not meth. And meth isn't that bad unless you smoke it, especially in huge dosages - and the vast, vast majority of Adderall users are not smoking it - or taking massive doses.
AFAIK, meth actually is produced as a legal drug called Desoxyn, but I'm not sure its very commonly prescribed. I think its kind of used as a last resort for ADHD or obesity.
A substantial portion of Adderral users won’t admit they are dependent because they need it for their job (tautology). Who would want to admit this? You might as well call up people during the 2016 election and ask them who they are voting for (they all said not Trump).
Can’t fool serious drug users, takes one to know one.
This article seems to be fundamentally mistaken/misrepresenting Sam Quinones's Theory. P2P Meth started after Ephedrine was banned in Mexico in 2008 not 2017.
> He suggests that new meth might be chemically different in a way that caused people to go crazy, starting around 2017
2017 is not a significant year, it's just the year of one of his anecdotes. A small town in West Virginia didn't have a meth problem and then in 2017 it had a meth problem and a mental health problem.
"Southwest Virginia hadn’t seen much meth for almost a decade when suddenly, in about 2017, “we started to see people go into the state mental-hospital system who were just grossly psychotic” [1]
He has other anecdotes from much earlier.
"Susan Partovi has been a physician for homeless people in Los Angeles since 2003. She noticed increasing mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—at her clinics around the city starting in about 2012" [1]
The Mental Health Parity and a Addiction Equity Act increased access to this kind of treatment. The first interim rules under the Act went into effect for new plan years starting on or after July 2010. Many insurance plans (particularly Medicare and Medicaid plans in certain states) dragged their feet in implementing the required changes. This was problematic because, despite being a federal law, state insurance regulators are the primary enforcers.
In 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid finally started to crack down with their investigations and enforcement and issued compliance guidance and toolkits to help states fully implement the required coverage.
Is it possible the upticks don’t represent a new group of addicts so much as they represent a new group of people who are eligible for affordable treatment? It doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched to me that CA would have implemented the required coverage in their Medicare & Medicaid plans fairly quickly while West Virginia’s plans would have waited as long as possible to comply.
RE: Quantity section. I wonder if the pharmaceutical amphetamines and/or novel 'research chemical' amphetamines metabolize into the same compounds that are being quantified in sewage. Are they detecting 'meth' specifically or amphetamines generally?
> only $1k per pound now.
Wow that's crazy. An equivalent quantity of generic adderall would cost ~$20k. Meth is effectively at commodity-level prices, if true - the drug war premium seems gone.
I'm skeptical about overdose rates being attributed to meth. Meth is fairly hard to OD on - it'll ruin your life and brain, but rarely kills acutely. I suspect meth being used as an adulterant mixed with other drugs (esp opioids), or novel non-meth psychostimulants, play a significant role in the increase of psychostimulant ODs by ~9x over the last 10 years.
I think a lot of this data is getting mixed up with the (at the time quasi-legal) pyrovalerones and cathinones that were widely available through the clearnet over the past 5 years. Those have much greater acute risks and were highly accessible to people without drug connections.
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However, I'm skeptical of the initial premise of the article:
> Ephedrine meth was like a party drug. […] You could normally kind of more or less hang onto your life. You had a house, you had a job. […] P2P meth was nothing like that. It was a very sinister drug.
Tweakers have been around for decades, I suspect this is just misleading anecdata.
Anecdotal tidbit: father in law was a casual meth user for decades until life stress pushed him to start shooting it up around 1996. That's when the real breakdown started (paranoid hallucinations and fantastical delusions). There's something to be said for dosages and delivery mechanisms, which to some degree are driven by culture, pricing and availability.
Can anyone comment on how producers could be isolating the the 'd' enantiomer? Are they using enzymes?
Steve Mould has a great video [1] on homochirality in nature and says, "Why are all the sugar molecules that you buy from the shops right-handed? ... If you were to make some sugar for yourself in a chemistry lab by mixing some chemicals together, you would get a 50/50 mix of left-handed sugar and right-handed sugar." He goes on to describe how enzymes in nature exclusively make homochiral molecules, and since all our sugar is made by enzymes, all our sugar is homochiral.
Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way?
They are most likely using resolution via the Pope–Peachey Method. There was supporting evidence found in a laboratory in Guadalajara[0].
It is possible to do asymmetric reductive amination using enzymes but this is out of the scope of clandestine producers. Likewise a chemical and not enzymatic asymmetric reductive amination would be easy in a bench lab, probably to expensive and impractical in a clandestine setting.
[0] Joseph S. Bozenko, "Clandestine Enantiomeric Enrichment of d–Methamphetamine via Tartaric Acid Resolution", JCLIC, 2008, vol.3 (not publicly accessible but you can find this if you know where to look)
I will back the Tartaric Acid hypothesis. If it's being done, this is the only way it makes sense. It requires nearly nothing but the D-Tartaric Acid and Ethanol/Methanol + basic glassware.
I do not believe this practice is in use in illicit drug manufacture. There's no economic incentive and it requires some braincells.
From "Selective Crystallization of Methamphetamine with d-Tartaric Acid:"
Phenylisopropylmethylamine was resolved by treatment with 0.4-6 moles of dextro tartaric acid in water or aqueous ethanol containing 0.4-6 moles hydrogen chloride.
A mixture of phenylisopropylmethylamine 150, d-tartaric acid 82.5, and H2O 330 g was treated with HCl to pH 4 to deposit 120 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine-d-tartrate salt, which gave 88 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine. The D-enantiomer (58 g as the HCl salt) was isolated from the filtrate.
Aside from the often amateurish reduction of (pseudo)ephedrine to methamphetamine, the most popular precursor to amphetamine and methamphetamine is phenyl-2-propanone (also called P2P, BMK, Benzyl Methyl Ketone or Phenylacetone). There is an astounding array of synthetic routes to this compound, both due to the relative simple structure of the compound, and also because of its popularity. [...] Here is a collection of some of the possible methods of synthesizing phenyl-2-propanone, ranging from simple one-step methods to elaborate multi-step variants, and from the very easy to the very complicated. Welcome to the world of P2P.
Once you've got P2P, the end product isn't too far behind:
One very strong reason to doubt that heavy metals, such as lead or mercury, play a large role in the meth crisis, is that heavy metal poisoning has telltale signs and symptoms that would not go unnoticed. Furthermore, we have excellent methods for the determination of Pb and Hg in the bloodstream, and there simply isn't any corresponding epidemic of heavy metal poisoning.
Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog.
The other thing to keep in mind is that higher production volumes mean longer supply chains, and with illegal drugs longer supply chains mean more cuts (usually sugars, rarely toxic per se), and more cuts means an increased variance in the potency of the retail product, and variance in potency leads to users accidentally taking more than they intended to. The toxic effects of most drugs have a supralinear dose-response relationship, so these unexpectedly high doses can lead to problems that don't "average out". Often we over-focus on toxic fillers, but forget the risks created even by nontoxic fillers.
> Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog.
Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong here, and how it might be fixed? Are all mentions to nitrostyrene/NTS incorrect? This is used repeatedly in the cited papers, so I'm confused if they are also wrong, or the post has mangled usage, or what.
"Nitrostyrene" is sometimes used to refer to the whole class of chemicals featuring the phenyl-ethylene-nitro linkage. So it's not wrong to call it "the nitrostyrene method". But the specific nitrostyrene that is a precursor to methamphetamine is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-propene, while the parent compound "nitrostyrene" is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-ethene.
I know Vince Gilligan did his research prior to Breaking Bad but st strikes me how on the nose it was. BB came out in 2008 and must have been in production a few years earlier but the increase in actual purity pretty much matches the show coming out.
I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
> I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
> Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
Meth has always, always, always been known to cause those behaviors/effects since it first became widespread. Breaking bad shows those behaviors because they're classic tweaker behaviors. The scene where Jesse distracts the guy by digging is super spot on. Brilliant scene.
So yep, the paranoia, hallucinations etc have nothing to do with "new meth", they're just what happens when someone abuses sufficient amounts of meth. And the more potent the meth, the easier it is to get to that threshold. But note that you still need to be smoking or injecting quite a bit. The people exhibiting psychosis and the like are using hundreds of milligrams per session.
I happen to be re-watching this right now, and it blew my mind to see those graphs and not see the show lagging a few years behind the reality. How is this possible? It borderline seems like the background research for the show must have actually talked to the mass manufacturers of the stuff...
The transition to super labs, and away from small time Sudafed based meth production, happened prior to the release of Breaking Bad. They based their show on what was occurring in the real world.
Oh wow. I saw the title and was ready to explain how the cartels had perfected p2p synths such that they yield almost exclusively pure d-methamphetamine, but before explaining that I was going to need to explain the general concept of chirality and enantiomers, and the fact that for amphetamines (especially meth) the d-entantiomer is always the "one you want" and the l-entantiomer is always the less desirable, less powerful form that causes peripheral stimulation but no cerebral effects, and as an anecdote I was going to mention that vics vapo inhaler (commonly used at raves, although people don't actually know what they're inhaling) is levomethamphetamine, and I was even going to mention the humorous fact that they label it "levmetamfetamine" to make the spelling as distinct as possible.
Then imagine my surprise when I open the article and it literally covers every one of those points, section by section. Brilliant.
I guess the only minor thing I'd add is that the way the cartels (and others) are getting pure d-meth is by bubbling through d-tartaric acid or the like at the end of the process, which separates the racemic meth into its l and d enantiomers respectively.
I'm glad this article debunked the fallacious "new meth" article that cropped up here the other day.
---
EDIT:
Oh and one more thing. There's a common myth among tweakers about "n-iso", which is structurally very similar to methamphetamine - similar enough that it will join the crystal lattice - but it is at best inert, but might actually cause undesirable side effects. The fact that n-iso exists is real, but if you look online you'll see tons of tweakers convinced that they've been smoking n-iso and that it's why they smoke meth and just get a headache and other bad physical side effects but don't get the stimulation or the pleasurable rush. What's actually happening is that they've spiked their tolerance so high that they're getting almost exclusively the bad effects. It's analogous to how if someone takes MDMA for 4 days straight, by the end of it they're not going to "roll" at all because they've acutely downregulated their serotonin (and dopamine) receptors, and furthermore that they've literally (almost) exhausted their current pool of neurotransmitters, which need to be re-synthesized by the body.
When looking at the DEA seizure data it's clear that meth is one of the most pure and potent (wrt methamphetamine, the dea defines purity as what % of the compound is meth, meaning either levo or dextro methamphetamine, whereas potency only factors in the d-meth content, since d-meth is the enantiomer that actually gets you cerebrally high) street drugs out there. By comparison, cocaine is one of the most disgusting, cut at the source level with stuff like levamisole (which is thought to be disastrous to health, ie it's not just inert), and then further cut every step down the chain, albeit usually with inert cuts (baby powder, baking soda, glucose, creatine, that kinda stuff) the lower down the chain you get. Seriously kids, don't do cocaine. It's overhyped and a waste of money.
So anyway, as I said two paragraphs above, n-iso is real but the idea that there's tons of n-iso crystal floating around is just an urban legend promulgated by tweakers who spiked their tolerance the moon and refuse to see that fact.
Sorry for the confusing terminology. "Peripheral stimulation" means unwanted stimulation of the body itself, such as suppressed appetite, general jitteriness, and the like. Whereas the cerebral effects are the actual cognitive effects of improved attention/focus/alertness/scanning behavior, euphoria, and that kind of thing.
In general when taking amphetamines for ADHD-type symptoms, you want to maximize the cerebral stimulation while minimizing the peripheral stimulation, because the latter causes [most of] the unpleasant side effects like inability to eat/sleep. Note that some degree of peripheral stimulation is unavoidable regardless of whether one is taking pure d-methamphetamine or not, and also probably some amount of peripheral stimulation is desirable because ADHD is not just difficulty in maintaining focus/attention but also getting the kick in the ass to start tasks in the first place. But in my experience relying on the peripheral stimulation (which, for example, Adderall produces more of than Vyvanse) simply doesn't work long-term, and just makes appetite regulation and the like get totally out of whack.
If some of the illicit processing has reached a level of sufficient sophistication to enable removal of the l-enantiomer then I wonder how they go about it. Anyone know?
As this article shows, there's any number of ways of making MA but separating out it's racemic mixtures has always been considered hard for backyard-ers.
If this is now commonplace then it does seem to represent a somewhat of a seismic shift in the illicit drugs business model.
I don't know precisely but I remember it's something like bubbling d-tartaric acid through the racemic methamphetamine mixture to separate out the d-methamphetamine.
The overwhelming majority of US meth is cartel-sourced. They have massive superlabs and then transport kilos upon kilos across the border. That's how they have the sophistication to synthesize their own p2p, separate out the enantiomer, etc.
It's the inevitable result of the war on drugs. You make it near impossible to be a small time cook - due to the difficulty in acquiring precursors, acquiring space to work in where you won't get asked questions, etc - and soon the whole market is ran by mega cartels that operate as de-facto states.
Yeah, perhaps I should have thought about that solution before I asked the question it's sort of obvious when you think about it. Anyway, from yours and various comments from others, the consensus is that the d-tartaric acid method is the most likely approach. (That got me thinking, I've some supermarket tartaric in my kitchen with the herb containers. Until now I've not given much thought to its stereochemistry, but this story has almost got me enthusiastic enough to check whether it's chiral or meso. Polarizing filters off my camera ought to do the trick.)
Until this article, I suppose I'd had a rather naive view about such matters which I gleaned years ago (can't remember from where), that was that with any drug (or any other chemical for that matter) that had 100% 'd' or 'l' enantiomers then it had to be manufactured in (come from) a controlled industrial process due to the complexities of separation.
The trouble is I've only had a peripheral interest in the matter so I'm not up to date. Until this story I've been stuck with the old orthodoxy, which was that if law enforcement found 50/50% racemic mixtures then they had to come from illegal sources. Clearly, that's no longer the case, and it seems that it's been so for sometime, especially so with drugs made from pharmacy-grade precursors, pseudoephedrine, etc. - the pharmaceutical industry having done the hard work.
It also hadn't really dawned on me that mega cartels were employing professional chemists but it actually makes much sense given the mega dollars involved
(I'd always assumed there were maverick and eccentric chemists around but never envisioned an illicit lab with a corporate structure run like a normal commercial chemical company).
Also, one could be forgiven for having missed the fact because for decades, news reports have painted a constant image about the dangers of street drugs due to their variable nature (not to mention their adulteration - being mixed and cut with dangerous substances in the midstream distribution chain). Coupled with the all-too-frequent TV images of makeshift labs in jungles with buckets of chemicals littered about everywhere one wonders how they produced drugs with any reasonable degree of purity at all. The last thing on my mind would have been that they'd have had the expertise or facilities to separate racemic mixtures. Clearly this preconceived notion is now outdated.
HN comments here have updated my thinking, they're very helpful and informative at times.
The short answer is "yes". The long answer is "that's a philosophical question".
Downregulation is a natural homeostatic mechanism that happens with almost everything. Any time a certain receptor gets stimulated above baseline, over the long-term it's going to get downregulated. The actual neurobiology of how this works is enormously complicated and beyond my (and probably almost anyone's) understanding. I do recall that NMDA receptors have a critical role to play, given that NMDA receptor antagonists can attenuate some (presumably not all) of the down or up regulation
From what I read, the P2P method isn't new.
"Preisler, who works at an electroplating factory and has been arrested twice in the U.S. for his work with methamphetamine, says he isn't surprised traffickers have turned to P2P.
"P2P is old school," he said. "Hell, I used to cook by that route circa 1980."
The fight has come full circle. In the 1980s, the U.S. government severely restricted access to P2P seeking to curtail methamphetamine production. Meth makers shifted to ephedrine, which could be found in common cold remedies. When authorities cracked down on ephedrine, they switched to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed and other decongestants."
https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/12/old_school_meth_meth...
Priesler goes by "Uncle Fester", and wrote "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture" - he's effectively the expert on clandestine meth manufacturing. He writes some interesting, and kind of terrifying, books.
Just taken a brief look at that link. It's no wonder Wikileaks doesn't endear itself to many.
That said, I suppose in reality it's just a more in-your-face presentation of what's already in many organic chemistry textbook in any number of libraries.
Frankly, I reckon there's little that can be done to stop the illicit manufacture of these drugs for the logical reason that they're such simple molecules. Many are just minor variations on the basic d-enantiomer (dexamphetamine) which essentially is only a benzene ring with a single branch containing a CH3 methyl and a NH2 amine group. So it stands to reason that there are many comparatively simple ways to synthesize them and that more are likely to be found. Moreover, the more precursors there are, the harder it becomes to ban them all, as eventually we'll hit the point where certain precursors are too ubiquitous and or important to ban.
It seems to me that if we're to take harm minimization seriously then we need to take a more sophisticated approach. For staters, we need much more efficient public health measures to detect and separate out genuine self-medicatiors from the partygoers who take illicit drugs.
As we know, these sympathomimetic amines have been prescribed by the medical profession for decades for certain depressive illnesses, ADHD, etc., but because of their their potential for abuse - not to mention certain moralistic attitudes among many politicians - these drugs have a horrible stigma attached to them and that has stopped many undiagnosed people from being prescribed them legally. The consequence is that many of them self-medicate with illegal drugs and the outcomes are often dire.
I think that taking a serious approach to medicalizing the problem would help very significantly. This would also include distinguishing the amines from the opiates. Whilst the medical profession understands fundamental difference between these two classes of drugs, public policy often doesn't and the drug problem ends up as an amorphous mess that becomes even harder to sort out than it otherwise would have been.
Therefore, there needs to be a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding amongst the general community to the effect that someone who turns to illicit amines is likely doing so for fundamentally different reasons to another who has turned to opiates. A more sophisticated approach to the drug problem would lead to better outcomes for not only those addicted to drugs but also for society in general.
I’d guess from the ads in Priesler’s book there’s more of his writings where this one came from. Since my initial look at the book I’ve now had time to spent a few more minutes examining Uncle Fester’s Secrets and I’ve concerns that I reckon need to be said before posts to this story time out.
Despite its controversial title, the book is pretty boring unless you’re actually following/putting into action his various ‘recipes’. I suppose having read certain information therein that concerns me I’m obliged to say something about it if it might save someone from coming to harm.
Anyone who’s read various other posts of mine would know that I neither hold conservative establishment views nor am I an anarchist—except in the sense that I believe democracy needs urgent reform but not through violence. Thus, essentially, I’m against censorship, and usually it’s not my style to criticize anyone who puts an alternative view. So why am I acting as if I want to censor parts of Priesler’s book? It’s simply because some of the actions he advises are outright irresponsible.
First, my position is that [as stated] it doesn’t make sense to try to censor any of the chemical processes for any of the sympathomimetic amines whether they be legal-OTC, legal-on script or illegal, but it’s my opinion that they should be confined to a chemistry text or an adjunct to one—one which describes the chemistry at a commensurate level to the actual processes involved and that appropriate chemical nomenclature is used to do so.
Priesler’s cookbook approach is irresponsible for these reasons:
1. Whilst he states in very fine print on the ISBN/copyright page “Neither the author nor the publisher intends for any of the information in this book to be used for criminal purposes...”, as an attempt to cover himself legally, he does not emphatically state that the drug manufacturing processes he describes are covered by international treaty—in that the production of such drugs and possession of many of their precursors are illegal in almost every jurisdiction worldwide—that is, unless one is in some way ‘licensed’ to possess or manufacture them. Yes, those tempted to undertake such manufacture will almost certainly know this already, but the exact ramifications ought to spelt out in considerably more detail. More about this in a moment.
2. Priesler’s cookbook approach means that he’s written the text down to a level where he expects those who’ve either no theoretical or practical knowledge of chemistry or who have only novice-level chemistry skills to undertake what is essentially sophisticated chemical engineering/synthesis. In a practical sense, there’s much here that can go wrong for both the manufacturer and the drug consumer. Normally, such manufacturing processes would be undertaken by experienced chemists in a pharmaceutical company or research institutes, etc. where much of chemical engineering involved is specifically aimed at QA—ensuring that the manufacturing process proceeds safely and that the end product complies with proper purity and quantitative tolerances/standards, etc. Backyard manufacturing is usually not conducive to high standards or being highly consistent.
3. Despite Priesler’s warning that the "book is sold for informational purposes only, etc." it’s very difficult to conclude that he actually means it, for if he had done so, then he’d have written up the information in the manner that I've suggested above. Clearly, Priesler is deliberately goading authority to provoke a response and all indications are that he’s been very successful in doing so, especially given that he’s suggesting that chemistry neophytes take up the dangerous challenge.
4. One doesn’t have to look any further than Chapter One—Chemicals and Equipment to illustrate the issues. First, anyone experienced in organic synthesis of this caliber doesn’t need lessons in how to handle their glassware (thus my assertion he’s deliberately pitching at neophytes); second, the purchasing of almost any quantity of just about every one of the 32 precursor chemicals listed on pages 6 and 7 will draw the attention of the powers that be; and so will most of the Listed Essential Chemicals on page 7.
5. Moreover, the quantities of chemicals that Priesler is suggesting that one obtains are quite staggering. For example, under Imports and Exports we find 500 gal or 1 ,500 kg of acetone; 500 gal or 1 ,364 kg of ethyl ether; 500 kg of potassium permanganate; 500 gal or 1 ,591 kg of toluene just to mention a few of the more dangerous ones.
I understand his logic by suggesting that one’s likely to be less ‘exposed’ if one makes one large batch instead of lots of little ones but my mind simply boggles beyond belief that any neophyte drugmaker/chemist would be handling the mentioned quantities of those dangerous chemicals in ‘backyard’, less-than-ideal conditions—as three of those I’ve mentioned are highly volatile and their vapors dangerously explosive. Playing with such quantities in suboptimal conditions is living dangerously in the extreme not to mention that by purchasing such huge quantities one would be waving red flags to the world.
Any reasonable person would never recommend such a risky and dangerous undertaking.
I've looked into the logistics of "cooking" meth and it is a complex process that, were I not an expert, wouldn't create something I would be comfortable putting into my body.
How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories? Is it clever people in their garages? Is it done over the border?
> The chemist, a burly man with a master’s degree in
biochemical engineering described the industry’s transformation, as the pair worked at an outside table.
The thing with cooking meth is that you don't have to be comfortable putting it in your body. You just have to be comfortable selling it to someone else who will put it in their body! Unfortunately, for many meth producers/dealers that bar is not very high.
LSD is probably even more naughty. As far as I'm aware it's not a trivial synthesis by any means, so exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told. Buddhist Walter White's around the world, perhaps.
"exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told."
Where it's made is one matter but I'd imagine its only significant precursor would be ergotamine tartrate (a la Hoffman), as ergotamine is a commonly available drug for migraine (although somewhat less so than some years back, as it's been largely superceded by sumatriptan).
The next alternative I'd imagine would be to get 'raw' ergot and process it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot although I'd guess that gathering and refining the fungus would be no mean feat for any backyard manufacturer.
It's hard to imagine there being any other major human-manufactured precursor due to the complexity of the molecule. Moreover, refined ergotamine for medical use is a mixture of various ergot
alkaloids. Presumably, this would complicate the synthesis but I've never bothered to think about how it would or to what extent.
With the rise of online shopping, the big suppliers are a lot more visible than they were before. I like to read stories on forums sometimes.
It turns out there are more than a couple LSD labs, some having a bigger internet presence than others.
Suppliers will not sell directly to random people, but as it turns out their approved resellers are happy to offer spoonfuls of LSD in powder form to anyone who asks!
"How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories?"
I've never produced it and as you'd be aware it'd be stupid of me to offer advice based on chemical knowledge as it's manufacture is illegal - despite the fact that the various methods are widely known.
From time to time, I've seen busts of clandestine labs on TV and it's easily doable in a garage or shed. Seems the smell of volatiles often gives them away (e.g.: propan-2-one or similar reagents), or they catch fire (seeming a common occurrence) which burns the place down thus attracts attention.
As an expert, you'd know that a racemic mixture results. As backyard-ers don't have the means to separate the enantiomers, law enforcement uses the fact to determine whether stuff they've collected originated in a backyard lab of from a pharmaceutical complex. Nevertheless, I gather from the article that's narrowed. It seems, that when one's made enough money manufacturing gets reasonably sophisticated.
So the meth is cheaper, more abundant, more physically dangerous, and more socially destructive than it was before they banned ephedrine. Can we get our good decongestants back now please?
You probably don't have to (unless you live in the US), as xylometazoline HCl works exceptionality well and is readily available OTC sans script: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylometazoline
P.S.: If you live in the US, then it's readily available from Canada.
A curious footnote: Sam Quinones argues that P2P meth is part of the explanation for the proliferation of tents in homeless encampments, because it causes users withdraw socially in ways that earlier meth didn't. This is what he means by it "brought you inside". Users want to be alone (i.e. in a tent) with their paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations.
I think he means that when you're tweaking on the "old meth," you'd be more likely to go outside and interact with people (many times, with hostility and aggression), while the "new meth" is more likely to make you want to stay inside, and withdraw from society.
What's cheaper than a tent? 1/2 or 1/3rd of a tent. That's enough if shelter is the only issue. If there is a need for the poorest to have solitude, there's going to be a proliferation in the number of tents.
I mean, given the choice of two explanatory models:
1.) Even in cases of extreme poverty, people will put in significant effort and sacrifice to secure some degree of privacy, because it's a basic human desire (a desire I've seen in nearly every person I've ever met.)
2.) ULTRA-METH PSYCHOSIS
I'm strongly inclined to favor 1 over 2 until I see some very, very compelling evidence otherwise.
1.) Even in cases of extreme poverty, people will put in significant effort and sacrifice to secure some degree of privacy, because it's a basic human desire
And yet, if you look at our actual history, the levels of privacy available to average and poor people were far, far less. In the middle ages, entire families shared the same bed, if they had a bed, or otherwise slept all huddled together. Even complete strangers in inns and other public accommodation would sleep huddled together at times.
Not to say that there was zero privacy. However, there was far less. Much of this was probably motivated by availability/economics.
Many modern claims of "basic human desire" turn out to be a "Flinstones" view of history. Many things are constant across time and cultures. However, there are also some factors which are vastly different.
2.) ULTRA-METH PSYCHOSIS
That's kind of straw-mann-ish there. No one is saying everyone homeless is in ultra-meth psychosis. But the large numbers of people so affected in varying degrees are going to skew the statistics of how many take the extra effort and expense to have their own tent.
From a societal POV, we need a Government-regulated drug harder than Alcohol or Tobacco. Similar in function to Soma. Maybe marijuana can fit the bill.
It doesn't make sense to 'outsource' production of narcotics to antagonistic nations or criminal enterprises.
i have had a theory for years if you sold any drug like meth or cocaine in an advil bottle with a label on the side saying “take at most 1 tablet every 4 hours, do not exceed 6 tablets in one day. do not use for more than 2 days in a row” etc then the vast majority of people would not have any issue with it. the people who are already abusing it would continue to abuse it. most people can be around hard addictive drugs ingrained in society like alcohol and do just fine
No, it's not. Please stop spreading this age-old myth*. You can literally buy prescription meth in a bottle, and it's called Desoxyn.
Adderall is extremely similar, because amphetamine is quite similar to meth (just an inferior version IME). D-meth is probably 20-30% more potent than d-amp dose for dose, but with somewhat reduced unwanted peripheral (body) side effects. The other main differences are meth releases some serotonin (not nearly as much as MDMA) while amp releases almost none, and that for whatever reason methamphetamine takes 3-3.5 hours to reach peak blood concentration when taken orally, whereas amphetamine peaks much sooner.
* I get it, the point isn't literally that it's meth, just that it's similar. But it's silly thing to say rhetorically when you can literally get prescription d-methamphetamine in the US under the brand name Desoxyn.
I think the answer is in the middle. I don’t want to propagate a myth, but I do want to shed light on the fact that this isn’t a benign drug. It’s an amphetamine, many people want to sugar coat it like it’s this particularly saint-like medication (I mean the damn thing let’s you get a high salary job - don’t you disparage my Addy). Adderral and Vyvanse do have added ingredients that thwart abuse (mostly slows it down, can never truly stop abuse on such an addictive substance).
In any case, high dosage of Adderral (or consistent use) has very similar effects to Meth use (obviously not methhead no-teeth level stuff, but definitely euphoria, delusions of grandeur, paranoia, insomnia, drastic appetite suppression, irritability). Psychosis can also occur on Adderral.
A nicer version of Adderral without all the anti-abuse stuff is Dexedrine, you get a more pure amphetamine and is generally smoother since it doesn’t have the Levoamphetamine that creates the characteristic ‘lethargic’ feeling after the initially speedy-rush.
The funny thing about all of this is that it’s legal, and I shit you not, me and my doctor would speak about finding ‘smoother’ meds (imagine two crackheads discussing what would be a nicer high), all totally legal and not frowned upon.
One hell of a PR job by team ‘legal speed’ :) Glad I’m off that shit because I really did feel and act like a Meth-head by the end of it.
You're right on most of that but off on some details.
Only Vyvanse is anti-abuse, because the dextroamphatamine is bound to a lysine molecule. The body must cleave the lysine before it becomes active so snorting it doesn't give the instant rush.
Adderall has no such countermeasures. You're probably getting confused by the fact that it comes in both IR and XR formulations (instant release vs extended release). So if someone has XR adderall, it's not as snortable as IR. But it's still more snortable than Vyvanse is, and you can just get IR adderall which is totally abusable. (BTW X milligrams of XR is really just X/2 mg instant release and X/2 mg delayed release beads that take on average 4 hours to activate. So it's roughly equivalent to two X/2 mg IR doses split 4 hours apart) And finally the XR can be countered by crushing the beads up, although it's a bit laborious.
Amphetamine obviously has its risks, and particularly when prescribing to children doctors seem to write some ridiculously high dosage prescriptions without fully understanding what the drug is like. But you can just say that rather than doing the juvenile "it's really just meth in a bottle" shtick when there is literally already actual meth in a bottle that you can (with great difficulty) get prescribed. And that fact - that methamphetamine exists as a drug that can be prescribed - is much more interesting and surprising to people, given that the lay public is completely unaware that methamphetamine has any pharmaceutical uses.
Most Adderall formulations have no anti-abuse precautions, unless you could extended release mechanisms. Vyvanse also doesn't generally have any ingredients added to it, it's a prodrug that is inactive until it is metabolized (which happens in the blood, not the liver so you can still snort it).
People with ADHD (like myself) don’t get the same effects from amphetamines as those without it. When someone with ADHD takes adderal it just makes them focused with a little euphoria when they initially begin taking it.
Feel free to read through all the experiences and try your best to not lie that you are different. You have the same blood and organs like all of us, the same brain, the same nervous system. It doesn’t ‘affect’ you differently, it affects us all the same. The same way I don’t have cancer and if I were to take chemo, my hair would fall out still.
You are free to Google Blulight forums for more testimonials. Reddit is also there. I get it, it makes it so you have a high paying job and let’s you do good in school. But just be honest about it, you’re taking a amphetamines and that shit affects everyone the same.
Excerpt:
T + 02:00 – T + 04:00
Pretty steady effects through here. The best of which was absolutely intense ability to focus. I mean locked the fuck in. The translation from eyes to mind was mindbogglingly fast. Unfortunately, these awesome effects were accompanied by consistently unpleasant effects. I was often sweating, but plagued by chills. My breathing sometimes became erratic as I would encounter a wave of stronger effects. This wasn’t extreme enough to become a true cause for concern, but it would break my concentration and make me a bit uncomfortable.
Yeah, that’s everyone on this thing, labeled adhd or not, we are just humans.
Have you ever taken Ritalin? I’ve taken it along with XR version of Concerta. I can paste the wiki stuff about how it’s essentially similar to Meth, but I get it, it hurts peoples feelings.
Look, you can’t bullshit someone that’s been on this stuff, it’s a serious drug.
>I can paste the wiki stuff about how it’s essentially similar to Meth
Yes, drugs that get classified as stimulants due to their physiological effects will have some similar effects. Different mechanism of action though, and not derived from amphetamine.
>it’s a serious drug.
Yes, as opposed to all the light and fluffy drugs.
It's difficult to say what an equivalent dose might be and this is just my experience, but...
Definitely cognitive tasks would be considered more impaired by weed than beer, at "roughly equivalent to a pint" level. Likely neither would be a big deal.
Weed is neither upper, nor downer really, it an hallucinogen.
That means less ordered thinking. Quite possibly an increase in creativity and lateral concept matching (say, making or appreciating witty comments) but also an impairment to short term memory and direct logical reasoning.
For motor skills and reaction times, beer definitely hits harder.
Oh, and on dosage, I'm from the UK. In my experience in the US a single joint is rolled to a potency I'd consider equivalent to "a mug full of whisky", not a pint of beer!
Depends on a few factors like what task, innate ability, etc. Which is not a non-answer - it is THE answer: in my experience, some things are easier on one than the other and vice versa.
In my experience I can code on alcohol (unless I get completely shit faced.) Weed makes me more creative and I want to code more, but I also make a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t normally. This is why I quit cannabis, in math classes I would mess up simple things like forgetting to multiply by -1
In case you're interested, in my reply I've mentioned why the UK is an exception and is able to prescribe diamophine. Apologies if you're already aware.
They've been devastating for good reason, which is that with oxycodone the long proven, well established administration and monitoring protocols for narcotic opioids were not observed.
Essentially, every narcotic opioid ever discovered or used has addictive properties and thus they all have the potential to addict users. Opiate addition takes a very pernicious form because withdrawal makes the addict feel so absolutely rotten which is instantly fixed by restoring the level of drug to its normal 'maintenance' levels.
Opiates come in a huge range of types and strengths. Some are considered sufficienty mild or innocuous to sell OTC without a script, others are considered too powerful and dangerous to ever sell legally even though they do have legitimate medical uses, heroin (diacetyl morphine) falls into this category in most countries as it's considered too 'hot' to handle/administer - although the UK is one exception where it's used for intractable pain (as in terminal cancer).
(The UK struck out/did not sign the section that covered the complete prohibition of heroin in the international treaty on banned narcotic drugs because its
doctors used the rationale that heroin is actually a more effective painkiller in terminal cancer cases over morphine (which in fact it is by a reasonable margin) - thus addiction was a secondary consideration in such dire circumstances. Whilst the UK, didn't ban heroin for medical use, it agreed to the other provisions of the treaty - those concerning its illegal trade, and possession, etc.)
As I said, ALL opioids that induce narcotic and pain-reducing effects have the potential to be addictive - even mild OTC ones. I'll use myself as an example here. Years ago, I used to take OTC painkillers for the occasional headache of the type that included both codeine and paracetamol (acetaminophen) and whilst they cured the pain I found the headaches becoming more frequent which then led me to take more tablets. Eventually, it dawned on me that the codeine was the reason for the increase in frequency of the headaches - not what caused them in the first instance. I then switched to the paracetamol-only tablets and the frequency of my headaches subsided to the frequency that they were originally.
Of course, in my case, withdrawing from the codeine was was trivial - just a simple matter of switching to codeine-free tablets, but it's anything but simple for a heroin addict - in most cases it's a fucking painful 'nightmare' of the worst kind.
Right, I've taken a long time to get to the point which is this: simply introducing a new opioid drug, especially so a powerful one such oxycodone, without keeping in place all the existing protocols that cover the medical administration of opoids which have existed for well over 100 years is a recipe for an unmitigated disaster - and that's exactly what happened.
We know that Purdue Pharmaceuticals and its owners - that ragbag mob the Sacklers - were the irresponsible pushers of oxycodone, but in many ways it's how we'd gotten to the point where oxycodone was so widespread that it's had such a devastating impact on the population that is so damning and it still must be explained in detail.
What's never been explained to me or, for that matter any other member of the public, why the FDA didn't nip this potential problem in the bud at the outset when it originally approved oxycodone. Moreover, why did the second line of defense fail so catastrophically - that is, why didn't the medical profession - all those doctors prescribing oxycodone - use their knowledge of opiate addiction (which is basic 101 pharmacy knowledge required for them to pass their medial exams), stop the opioid crisis before it took hold?
The opioid/oxycondone crisis is one of the greatest failings in public health administration in modern times. Purdue and the Sacklers started the crisis but why public health administration failed so catastrophically has never been answered.
Good question. If you were to go by relative effects on consciousness, alcohol is a far harder drug than cannabis. Lots of illegal drugs are, alcohol is much worse than we believe.
it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.
But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.
I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.
A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.
When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.
In the article, "P2P" is an abbreviation for Phenylacetone, a precursor to meth (the drug). It's not "peer to peer" so that solved a lot of puzzling over what the headline could mean.
I don’t think that would be a bad description of the state of meth manufacturing in the Midwest during the 2000s and early 2010s. Users would source together (one person buys the Sudafed, another the chemicals, etc) to make meth and then they would trade with each other, etc. The rise of super labs and purity levels the average meth head couldn’t achieve basically killed the peer-to-peer meth business. At least this was my experience with my addicted cousins back home (in the Midwest.)
On MacOS I use an app called Amphetamine to prevent my computer from sleeping. I got a real kick out of that. I got a further kick when I learned that Amphetamine was the successor to the earlier version, which was called Caffeine.
I think the same analogy can be made for social media. We had Myspace and Friendster, but social networks didn't become a problem until we had so much of it - always internet connected little computers with us every waking hour.
https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume19/v19i3...