I took a drug once called 3-MMC that I really enjoyed. I haven't been able to find it since and I don't even know a street name. But by all accounts it was a pleasant high somewhere between cocaine and MDMA with a moderate duration and minimal comedown. But for all I know it could cause irreparable brain damage.
I guess it's not too likely, since most recreational drugs have been around a long time and are well-studied, and most derivatives aren't radically different than their mainstream counterparts. And most street drugs are either prescribed medically or being studied for medical use. The real problem is purity, which is a problem caused by the ineffective and insanely expensive US "ban" on drugs.
Solve the purity and regulation issue and you end most overdose deaths, most black market violent crime, and, apparently, accidental brain damage.
Careful! Analogs can be very different in toxicity and other properties: some people drink ethanol on a daily basis, and damage is relatively low. Methanol is similar, but is very toxic and can damage and kill you easily. R-Thalidomide is used as anti-inflamatory and sedative, L-Thalidomide is teratogenic; and what is worse, one form can switch into the other form.
The difference between Morphine and Codeine is minimal: a H is changed to a CH3. But one is 10x stronger than the other. In fact, morphine is more similar to codeine than to heroin. There is another opioid called Oripavine, similar to morphine (and can be transformed easily into), that is known to also have analgesic effects, but can't be used because it's highly toxic. It can itself be derived to M320, which is around 10000x more potent than morphine. In the opioid large family we could do this all day, with analogs and very similar molecules having a wild range of potency and toxicity.
Don't use similarity between derivatives as a guide or a scale of their potential toxicity. I agree that the easiest and safest way to deal with this is to just legalize all drugs. IMO that will have at least two desirable effects: you will know exactly what you are consuming instead of betting on a derivative, and the race after analogs will stop: people will just consume what is known to be safe and effective, as it happens with alcohol.
> I agree that the easiest and safest way to deal with this is to just legalize all drugs. IMO that will have at least two desirable effects: you will know exactly what you are consuming instead of betting on a derivative, and the race after analogs will stop: people will just consume what is known to be safe and effective, as it happens with alcohol.
Amen. I'll be happy once I can pick up, say, LSD, from a pharmacy, and know that it's dosed accurately and unadulterated. Right now one would kinda have to buy it from either some guy or some darknet vendor and the only way to know it's safe is to test it with reagents. Those who don't test it run the risk of dying or suffering permanent damage from overdosing on some adulterant or substitute.
It would probably also help with the current opioid crisis where people are dying because their doses are adulterated with fentanyl. Just offer doses that don't have fentanyl in it! Let people buy it from a safe regulated source.
> and the only way to know it's safe is to test it with reagents
The reagent tests will give you an idea of whether what you’re looking for is there (maybe), but generally won’t tell you much about what else might be in there too.
If you have access to a reliable mail system, sending it away to a lab is your best test (but probably at a cost).
And even then, they may not be able to detect or identify things not in their library.
What's the legality like on this? I know there's a comprehensive testing lab in Spain, but I feel like shipping LSD across the US via the postal system alone is a multiple felony, not to mention overseas travel? Is there a legal exception to this or is it just done on faith?
Ehrlich's reagent on its own can only tell you that LSD is present, but usually it's recommended to use multiple reagents to confirm that nothing else is present as well.
>Amen. I'll be happy once I can pick up, say, LSD, from a pharmacy, and know that it's dosed accurately and unadulterated.
You can go to a pharmacy right now and look through aisle upon aisle of "medications" that rarely have the ingredients they say in them, and that's not illegal as long as they note "not approved by the FDA to treat any disease"
People act like legal products don't get adulterated
Prescription medication is heavily regulated and required to have a certain amount of the active ingredient. Some prescription medication is also available OTC. What you're describing is not prescription medication, even though it is often found in pharmacies.
If LSD were a prescription medication, either it would be available OTC or I would have a prescription for it; in both cases it wouldn't be subject to the same crap that you'd find on, say, Amazon.
Is this really a risk with LSD though? LSD in particular seems to have a sub-culture of people that are out there making it for the good of humanity (in their eyes). At <$4/tab and being a drug you -- or at least I -- wouldn't want to take more than a few times per year, it doesn't seem to have the profit motive that your typical club drugs have. I guess you could accidentally get an NBOMe from a dealer that didn't know any better, but you're not going to overdose on it. I'd be more concerned with getting something nasty when buying MDMA or ketamine.
But yeah ultimately I agree, I'd like to buy LSD at a pharmacy which I know is pure and 150ug per dose, full stop.
I get it for $1.90 per 100μg tab and take a couple tabs every single day at this point. I guess it's similar to how some people microdose every few days; I just use (a lot) more.
> LSD in particular seems to have a sub-culture of people that are out there making it for the good of humanity (in their eyes). At <$4/tab and being a drug you -- or at least I -- wouldn't want to take more than a few times per year, it doesn't seem to have the profit motive that your typical club drugs have.
I agree, and I've always tried my best to source it from a responsible dealer who cares about the quality of their product. I just wish I didn't have to do that; while I don't expect to ever receive NBOMe myself, there is a vast landscape out there and many people have died due to failing to source the correct substance.
> I guess you could accidentally get an NBOMe from a dealer that didn't know any better, but you're not going to overdose on it.
> One study found that 25I‐NBOMe and 25C‐NBOMe blotter papers contained 'hotspots' with higher quantities of the drug, implying an inherent risk of overdosing.
Funny thing with codine is that it's metabolized into morphine, and this happens at vastly different rates, from "not effective as a treatment" to "somewhat high risk of abuse due to euphoria"
Chirality is a fun one too. "Same" molecule but in the left/right hand version can have effects from nothing at all to super deadly cancer causing agent. Your buddies in their bathtub lab would have no idea if they are making them or not.
Taking mephedrone analogues bought off the internet in the 2010s was a real wild west and gamble. There's nothing like reading a review from another buyer about how what they ordered has destroyed their brain beyond repair and becoming paranoid its too late, you've done the same to yourself. Thankfully, for me at least, it was probably some drug induced psychosis on their end.
Edit: Does anyone remember a Sky News (or other UK) clip where the journalist bought a kilo of mephedrone online from China and received it? I'd love to find it again. It was definitely the moment when the whole scene jumped the shark into absurdity.
Not to be fear mongering but I knew someone who's boyfriend ordered drugs online like this frequently. They lived together and one morning my girlfriend got a call from a friend, saying the guy killed his girlfriend, walked up and down his apartment building for hours during the night while shouting, and finally killed himself at dawn. No history of any mental illness, completely out of the blue.
Surprise pills can definitely be a surprise I guess.
> Surprise pills can definitely be a surprise I guess.
Back when I was into that scene there were basic risk-reduction methods people would use to try to minimise the surprise.
Buy pure powders from sites that listed the IUPAC chemical names and structures of what they were selling. Even better if they listed results from GCMS assay on their supply. Make sure they could actually spell the name of the drugs they were selling. So look at listings for (e.g.) 4-MMC from a site the community trysted rather than a bag of "Plant food!" or "gogaine blend!" from a page that popped up yesterday and spelled 'methiopropamine' in three different ways.
Preferably get it tested yourself too. Basic mandelin, ehrlich, marquis chemical tests could give you some info on what you had but in the UK there was a service where you could send in anonymous samples for GCMS.
Always do an allergy test first, starting with a dilution of the substance down into the low micrograms.
It wouldn't protect you from an MPPP/MPTP type scenario, but nothing will (including buying mainstream drugs) and at least at that point you can be fairly confident of what you're taking. Depending how novel the substance is of course, you may not have the first clue as to what it'll do to you...
Minuscule indeed. In the late 2000s I ordered a gram of desoxypipradrol [1] from a sketchy Chinese chemical company. A gram was the smallest unit they'd sell.
When it arrived we dissolved it in water at 1mg/mL so we could volumetrically measure 2mg doses accurately. Our first test doses were 500ug.
It took us so long to get though the jar that some mold started to grow on the solution, even though we kept it in the fridge! Not wanting to throw hundreds of doses down the drain we scooped off the mold, added Everclear (ethanol), redid our concentration math, and moved the jar to the freezer. Wild, innocent times.
Sadly, one of my friends in on the desoxypipradrol jar died from fentanyl contaminated dark web drugs a couple years ago.
Definitely a "take it in the morning and maybe skip the coffee" kind of thing. The effects feel like methylphenidate. I wish it was further explored commercially, but the duration is a very obvious reason not to.
Be careful with 3-MMC. It’s rampant in The Netherlands, everyone and their mom is using it as a party drug. 16 year old kids are getting addicted and I have multiple friends that went to rehab for it. Pretty sure I damaged my kidney with it as well.
The part about the experimental surgery with transplanted brain cells helping restore motor function is quite something. Nothing more to add than a wow that worked, huh.
How does it work, actually? Literally carve a hole, grab a chunk with your hand from the source brain, and chunk it inside the hole and pray? I mean, how does the "wiring" work?
I was surprised with the lengths that doctors went to for the named patients in this article. for the first guy a new drug was synthesised specifically for him and for the others they had experimental surgery in Sweden. do we have the same level of care for the negative effects of drug addiction nowadays or were these just rich people?
It could also be the doctors seeing an opportunity to write a paper, learn or to get renown. If this is shown to work on more cases then their name will be forever attached to the "first to use X to treat Y".
Moreover, a druggie with fucked up brain will agree to any experimental treatment, and even if something goes horribly wrong, nobody will investigate, because it's impossible to prove that the side effects came from your treatment, not from the patient's drug habit
This is the problem with the war on drugs and any sort of drug control or prohibition.
Synthetic drugs came about because they fell outside legislation designed to control the different classes of drugs.
The police could not prosecute because there was no law to cover synthetic drugs in the early days.
I saw the slow increase in the damage caused by synthetic drugs as I worked in Substance misuse as a methadome dispenser. Rather than woking predominantly with heroin addiction, clients were presenting more and more with synthetic substance addictions.
For me I would like to see all drugs legalised so that the consumer has a safe way to use drugs of their choice.
I used to smoke hash in the 80's from as far away places as Pakistan, Afganistan, lebanon and morocco.
Now it is all genetically modified skunk which is 10 times stronger than the proper hash I used to smoke.
> Synthetic drugs came about because they fell outside legislation designed to control the different classes of drugs.
Or just as illegal, but far easier to smuggle (that’s the expensive part), so the weak stuff disappears from the market while potent stuff becomes the only available option.
The weirdest thing to me is that drug use is cracked down on so hard that we even have international treaties against them, but something like obesity in some cases is even celebrated (healthy at every size).
The steelmanned version of this is that morbidly obese people rarely run up and down the street mugging and robbing people to get their next fix. (And that in aggregate people's tolerance to petty crimes is much less than their tolerance against controlling innocent people's lives.)
... and during the 20th century "performative law and order" was -- how should I put it -- big, as in the 1937 Nazi rally was attended by about a million people, and the 1939 one was called Rally for Peace (but cancelled a few days before and instead of the Rally the Nazis attacked Poland)
... fast-forward a few decades later, still September, but spin the globe a bit, and dear Nancy and Ronald are concerned about drugs! oh my ... while they supplied arms to Iraq ... and Iran at the same time, directly violating a law he personally signed.
I think this is basically right, but I would add the suffering of the family as well.
Obesity will not lead you to abuse your spouse or children. Obese people can hold down a job. Obese people don't lose custody of their children.
The closest analogue, I think, is smoking. It will demonstrably take years of your lifespan and healthspan. It does lead to minor harm of people in your immediate vicinity (2nd hand smoke, those kids probably get fat too).
I think smoking is bang on as a comparison. Massive lifetime average costs to the health system, spending on which is by definition zero sum. Both smoking and morbid obesity are enormously damaging life paths. I say this as someone who struggles with their weight.
I want to acknowledge that weight isn't a simple calories in, calories out situation. That other illnesses, medications, childbirth and gut health have enormous impacts on the capacity to maintain or lose weight. And that many people (particularly in the US) live in food deserts. What I'd criticise is the valorisation or excusing of obesity as equivalent to healthy living.
'Healthy at any size' social messaging is enormously damaging on a social and personal level. I've personally known a few people who became politicised in this direction (as a subset of radical queer politics) and went from being highly functional to disabled due to overeating and other health consequences of inactivity and overeating. Life is difficult, aging is terrifying. Making it worse by pretending that these conditions aren't awful is extremely irresponsible.
Maybe not abuse of children per se, but most obese parents have obese children, so the self-caused sickness is passed down. I see it very often in such cases.
It boils down the lifestyle, 2 generations ago their grandparents were most probably skinny due to simple food they ate and physical labor they went through every day. If kids see lazy tired parents, chances of them being athletic and eating healthily are very low, and its a baggage that gets heavier to shed off with each passing year.
I grew up in a relatively high tax country with universal healthcare. My government in particular didn't publish everything I'd need to figure this out, but if they were comparable to similar countries with similar budgets and similar obesity rates, then I'd be paying 100% of my income for about two weeks every year in taxes to pay for the additional healthcare costs caused by obesity.
So if I didn't have to pay for obese people's additional healthcare costs, I could have either gotten myself a rather sizeable tax break, or a couple week of extra holiday free every year.
I tried to look for some overview, and ... found this study .. and even more interestingly in the Netherlands obesity seems to be cheaper than the alternative (probably because living longer leads to having more cancers, and those are fucking expensive)
This one is much easier to interpret as the result is just "In per capita terms, costs of obesity in 2019 ranged from US$17 in India to US$940 in Australia." ... and yeah a thousands bucks could have been spent on something nice. Drugs for example!
A study in my home country (which aligned with my own back of the napkin estimation) put the additional cost of obesity at around 8% of government expenditure. Which given I was giving up over half my salary in taxes (well over half once you count sales taxes), comes out to over two weeks of work exclusively for obese people’s additional medical costs. That’s not too far off the study you linked, which states an average of 1.8% GDP (though I’m not sure that sample of 8 countries is representative of much), which again would be somewhere between 4.5-6% of government expenditure depending on their expenditure to GDP ratios (assuming 30-40% is pretty normal).
Perhaps one week of work dedicated exclusively to subsidising obese people excess medical costs every year would be more reasonable for a more typical tax payer. But that’s still a lot.
I’m not sure I buy the increased mortality bringing that number down story very much either. Obesity tends to only take about 5-10 years off your life expectancy (depending on how obese…), but it’s going to drive your medical care costs up for your whole life. Obesity kills you a lot slower than cancer does.
I was surprised too, and for the other countries in the sample the result is the way you would expect. (But it seems that the Netherlands is an outlier exactly because the cost of end of life care is very expensive compared to "obesity care". But it would probably be much less surprising if we would see the data on graphs, as health problems - so associated costs too - tend to spike waaay up above 80, so in this model it seems that ~5 year difference makes up for a lot of money...)
Obesity in and of itself is not an indicator of health. It can be a symptom of underlying health issues, and can cause other health issues (specifically if sedentary like joint pain and injury, insulin resistance, etc.), but it is not unhealthy to be obese if all other health indicators are fine.
I'm 220 pounds, I can run a 10 minute mile (not the 5:45 I ran in high school, but I'm also 20 years older and don't have the 5-hours per day dedicated to training I did back then). I just completed a 5-day, 125 mile hike through the Scotish highlands with a torn MCL. I'm probably the "healthiest" I've ever been, even though every one of my doctors tells me I need to lose 75 pounds.
One of the biggest drivers towards higher potency is ease of smuggling, which is a lot less of a concern for legal manufacturers. They’re also ripe targets for wrongful death lawsuits so there’s an incentive to keep the potency within reasonable limits unless the drug is relatively harmless. They can also accurately dose their drugs and make large pills, making it harder to accidentally overdose on doses that are measured in milligrams
I know "designer drugs" primarily through psychedelic analogues (e.g. 1V-LSD); also, through psychedelic fakes (e.g. NBOMe in place of LSD), which can be fatal. I don't think either one of these are designed to avoid drug tests, but rather to avoid being technically illegal, so that they can be sold over the clearnet to average people. The fakes are designed to be cheaper to manufacture than the real thing, though not designed to be safe. People have died from overdoses of these analogues (and even from regular doses). You are not supposed to be able to overdose on LSD (at the very least, it should not be able to kill you), so this is pretty bad and unexpected when it happens. It's one of the major reasons why reagent testing is so encouraged by harm reduction communities: if you really want to take some substance, it's very important to make sure you know that you're taking the correct substance in the first place; otherwise, even what very limited bets you would've had are already off.
The reagent to test for LSD is usually Ehrlich's reagent, but many reagent kits come with multiple reagents so you can not only verify the presence of LSD but also the absence of other adulterants. One can never really be too safe; the wrong drug can have all sorts of undesired effects, all the way up to potential death (or Parkinson's as in the linked article).
I've heard of the "technically illegal" thing and find it odd, is that actually true? Over here in Australia I think they just decided it was easier to make them all illegal too, with the schedule saying things like "TETRAHYDROCANNABINOLS and their alkyl homologues" as a catch-all.
Yes, it's true that LSD analogues such as 1cP-LSD have been technically legal to sell in the United States in the past (and in some parts of Europe, I think). Every time a new analogue gains traction, it gets separately banned by new legislation, but there is no catch-all that bans "all substances that are analogous to LSD or that metabolize into LSD". I believe there is a catch-all that attempts to classify substances by their effects regardless of formula (i.e. any hallucinogenic drug is automatically illegal), but sellers get around that by saying the substance is for research purposes only and not for human consumption; then you simply consume it anyway.
That is indeed the catch-all to which I refer, yes. From my comment:
> [...] but sellers get around that by saying the substance is for research purposes only and not for human consumption; then you simply consume it anyway.
> You are not supposed to be able to overdose on LSD (at the very least, it should not be able to kill you)
Not true. LSD raises your body temperature, which can be fatal, especially in the summer. "Just take a cold shower" yeah I was too high to come up with this idea, so I was just lying in my bed being miserably hot. I'm not taking a full tab ever again because it fucks my brain to the point I cannot do basic things to ensure my own survival.
Interesting. I'm sure I've experienced this effect, but I hadn't noticed that it happens to a greater degree than normal; even without LSD, I've always had a problem with overheating: I have a 12,000 BTU air conditioner pointed directly at me at all times, but still somehow manage to sometimes overheat, usually because the thing automatically turns itself off around 61°F. I had modified my last unit to ignore the temperature completely, but as of yet I can't seem to locate the thermistor in this one. (I found at least one of them, but it's somehow the wrong one. Why are there multiple?!)
With that said, it would indeed be a problem for you not to be able to think well enough to perform basic self-care. At the very least, LSD is dehydrating as the body attempts to filter it out as urine, so you'd need to get that out and then drink water (or gatorade or something hydrating). I'm sure dehydration would contribute at least partially to the additional body heat.
Anyway, you totally don't need LSD to suffer heat stroke in the summer. All I'd need to do is walk outside and stand there for a while.
With that said, it's not exactly like generating additional body heat necessarily kills you as long as you can keep yourself cool somehow. Even if you can't, I wouldn't consider the LSD to have been the source of the death, just the overheating, which is a general failure regardless of how the overheating happened (e.g. panic attack, overexertion, etc.).
If the overheating happened as a side effect of the acid, and the person had generally never had issues with overheating, it’s a very small jump to say that acid caused it.
That said, I’m less convinced that it raises your core body temp enough to kill you.
Acid caused the overheating, sure; overheating caused the death. At this point I'm nitpicking, but it's a relatively important semantic difference. Some substances can outright kill you but LSD generally will not.
If you jump off a bridge to your death nothing can save you. If you take something that raises your body temperature it is still possible to compensate.
But yes in that case blunt trauma is the cause of death and the blunt trauma occurred because they jumped off the bridge.
Driving fast is not safe, because there is the risk of sudden deceleration and death. But you indeed don't get killed by driving fast, you just end up killed.
I'm autistic. Terms like 'designer drug' remind me of existing knowledge that I have regarding that subject. I figured I would share some of that knowledge.
Generally, people who aren't autistic may not understand how autistics associate information with other information, and may get confused when they see me talking about a seemingly unrelated or irrelevant subject in response to seeing a particular piece of information. As far as I could tell that seemed likely to have been the case here, which is why I mentioned my being autistic, because that may help one understand how I happened upon this train of thought under a submission that speaks nothing of psychedelics or LSD whatsoever. (The triggering phrase was 'designer drug', a term which I've also seen used in the context of psychedelics.)
I don't think mentioning you're autistic actually clears that up. Would probably be better to mention the association thought process without leading with the diagnosis.
It's cleared up separately, immediately after that mention. The thought process appears obvious because it makes logical sense once explained, but people don't always intuitively infer it, if that makes any sense; it's difficult to explain, but I think my comment was perfectly sufficient. I suppose the mention of autism was meant as a qualifier for the information that follows; sort of a "here is why my brain works this way" before the actual "here is how that comment happened the way that it did".
While I hear what you’re saying and I agree in general, I think what you’re reading is that in this case the logical jump was fairly obvious with or without the mention of your diagnosis. I have ADHD, and it seemed very obvious to me.
That said, you can be as open as you want about your diagnosis. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your comment.
Animals love to get drunk. Ever see those funny National Geographic videos of monkeys and elephants eating over-ripe fruit and then staggering around, clearly wasted? There's a plausible hypothesis that humans invented agriculture so we could have a more stable source of beer. I drank a boatload of caffeine today. I saw a neighbor vape.
We have a long history of using naturally occurring and manufactured drugs. The wide majority of living humans consume psychoactive substances regularly. What's objectively different about our drugs versus theirs? Theirs might be more potent, but in my younger days I made up for that in volume of things like alcohol.
Abstinence-only education is an abysmal failure regardless of the subject. "Don't get high" is right up there with "don't have sex" on the list of recommendations that almost no one's going to follow.
It's worth noting that sex causes the release of endorphins, which are basically endogenous morphine (i.e. opioids). So telling people not to get high would technically imply they shouldn't have sex either, since that "afterglow" is technically analogous to an opioid high... (albeit, a minor one)
> Animals love to get drunk.
Dolphins. I love dolphins. Getting high is a social activity for them, much like nearly everything else. They will pass a pufferfish around the group and take turns huffing the toxin in order to get high. It's adorable~
The human has opioid[1] and cannabinoid[2] receptors. This is a reason we cultivate plants which contain these substances which have an effect. Plant (nature/naturally grown) derived substances are generally better received by the body than the in laboratory synthesised equivalent.
In case of these designer drugs we changing and appending the original naturally occurring molecules. It’s similar to what the pharma industry does to be able to sell with exorbitant prices, changing and appending the working molecule to get fresh patents.
> The human has opioid[1] and cannabinoid[2] receptors.
Yes, much of the reason drugs even have an effect is because receptors for them already exist in the body. That's also the reason why they can be so dangerous; normally endogenous signals are regulated by the body, but externally administered substances are often not. Physical dependence is the body's self-regulation trying to compensate for the presence of external substances that it can't downregulate; a sudden lack of the substance may cause withdrawal symptoms as the body takes time to adjust back to normal. These withdrawal symptoms can be fatal (such as in the case of benzodiazepine withdrawal, or indeed opioid withdrawal). Also, external substances can trigger receptors or permutations of receptors that don't naturally occur as frequently, as strongly, or at all, resulting in undesirable or even potentially fatal effects. Small changes even to substances that are normally unproblematic can nonetheless change their effects significantly enough to cause a problem, as illustrated by the submission.
Oh, right; I forgot that's also a thing. I try to advocate for the reduction of SSRI use for that reason. It's a known side effect that they can permanently destroy or desensitize serotonin receptors when used for periods that exceed around a year or two (this varies by individual). I wouldn't even go that far, personally, but some people's doctors do not know about that effect of SSRIs and keep prescribing them for five years or more, in which case I usually take it upon myself to educate the person directly if their doctor does not know. I don't tell them to stop taking it immediately or anything, just that they might want to watch how long they stay on it.
(Side note: I don't know what's so special about prescribers when most of them don't even fully understand the substances they're prescribing. It's possible that fully educating myself about what I'm doing might actually have been better than having blindly accepted a prescription for it, at least in some hypothetical future where this stuff can even be prescribed at all. I guess some people associate illegality automatically with immorality/irresponsibility.)
I don't need to prove myself to anyone, but just for the record, I don't get high off this stuff. I use it to treat my ADHD.
If you don't know what I'm talking about or how that is possible, please don't accuse me of chasing a high and not valuing my own life. You don't know what I am chasing (it is executive function).
The fact that there's relatively little professional research into the substance should mean that you can't know how dangerous it is or isn't; you should know not to jump to conclusions.
Academic papers about the effects of psilocybin are slowly starting to trickle out of clinical trials, but there's still much as of yet unexplored.
I heard that argument before. Legitimizing one‘s own drug abuse for „medical reasons“ to make it socially acceptable.
Everyone is on some kind of spectrum and both people I had arguments with about your point of view - are both dead now thanks to overdosing.
I think the medical profession has a reason to exist and I‘d rather see people using professionals to treat their conditions than self-experimenting with possible fatal substances.
You don't know the definition of drug abuse if that's what you think this is. I do agree that the medical profession has a reason to exist, and I would very much prefer to receive this treatment from a doctor, but doctors are not currently allowed to prescribe it; even psilocybin (where legal) can only be administered under professional supervision, and is currently approved only for psychedelic therapy, not for ADHD treatment.
There's a lot we don't understand about these substances, but I have overwhelming evidence from experience that what it does for me is something that helps. I'm sorry to hear about the overdoses.
Yeah, you're wrong. There's a huge difference between psychedelics and "party drugs". Stop fearmongering with undifferentiated "I know someone who knows someone" arguments
It's understandable if you've never tried psychedelics yourself, and probably not hanging out with people who have.
But that safety promise goes for the ones we have plenty of experience with, especially the naturals; once you start putting random substances in your body, all bets are off.
What safety promise? There is no promise of safety here. Part of being a responsible user is understanding that safety cannot be guaranteed; one can only attempt to minimize risk. That's the guiding principle behind the concept of harm reduction.
Making sure you're actually taking what you intend to take is indeed very important, because if it's something else, that indeed would be random and you might not only apply the wrong strategy, but take an incorrect dose as well; the correct dose may be "none" if it is a toxic or lethal substance.
But even when you know exactly what you're taking and what are the risks involved, you can't guarantee safety; no one can. This is important to understand. An incorrect understanding can lead to reckless behavior that will get you killed.
You're typically not going to kill yourself with weed or shrooms, or a lot of other well researched psychedelics. It may well get uncomfortable, but not dangerous.
Under psilocybin, certain smells can make me suddenly lose consciousness. Due to this, while trying some out at the start of this year, I fainted while exiting the bathroom and woke up with a head injury that required staples in order to close.
Sure, it wasn't the drug itself's fault; all it did was make me sensitive to smell, and then the smell made me faint. I had been fine for something like 8 hours since having taken it. But stuff like this is a risk with psychedelics. If I had fallen slightly differently I probably could've died.
I took the other half of the psilocybin about a week later in order to process the trauma; I figured out the reason for the fainting when I walked past the bathroom again and felt like it was about to happen again. Pretty crazy if you ask me.
I guess the moral of the story is that you really can't expect anything to be perfectly safe even if it won't kill you on its own.
Wild, thanks for sharing. One theory would be that it increased your sensitivity to something in that area. I have a hard time seeing that just a memory would make you faint again.
Look, nothing in this world is guaranteed to be completely safe. We take risks all the time, otherwise we wouldn't get out of bed.
Never heard of anything like it though, so I'm going to assume it's not very common.
> I have a hard time seeing that just a memory would make you faint again.
It wasn't a memory; I had to physically be near the source of the smell in order for it to happen, so it indeed seems like what changed was the body's sensitivity to some component of the scent. Maybe something like ammonia since it was cat pee.
> Look, nothing in this world is guaranteed to be completely safe. We take risks all the time, otherwise we wouldn't get out of bed.
Of course. I accept risks all the time.
> Never heard of anything like it though, so I'm going to assume it's not very common.
I've never heard of it happening to anyone else. I've heard of death by overdose of course, and I had certainly taken quite a lot, but I have never heard of someone being completely fine until a mere scent knocks them unconscious (especially when they wouldn't even perceive the scent normally).
LSD is also a party drug. You may be referring instead to hard drugs, which are so called because they create physical dependence, psychological addiction, or brain damage (or all of the above).
LSD is technically legally considered a hard drug, because it has the potential to trigger schizophrenia and psychosis in individuals who are in any way predisposed to such; it also is legally classified as a hallucinogen, and all of which are classified as hard drugs, legally speaking.
However, non-legally speaking, I don't consider it a hard drug because it doesn't cause dependence, addiction, or brain damage that is detectable; despite the relative lack of professional research into the substance, there is at least decent evidence that it is not literally neurotoxic. With that said, the potential psychological effects are not to be underestimated, and the experience of a bad trip can cause significant damage purely through the emotional trauma of it.
Practically speaking, there's little difference between being prescribed the substance by a doctor and administering the substance myself, other than that the responsibility of managing my regimen would fall to the doctor rather than myself; however, I'd technically prefer to get this stuff from the pharmacy because then I'd know it's not adulterated, but I can just do reagent tests at home for now.
I would be happy to move to a prescribed treatment if ever this treatment is able to be offered by prescription; that aside, however, my own due diligence is sufficient for my needs and is not likely to result in a fatal overdose. I can't be entirely confident that it's impossible of course, but I can have a high degree of confidence that I'm not putting myself in significant danger right now.
The slippery slope argument doesn't entirely apply here, as I've actually tried other hard drugs (benzos, opioids, dissociatives, etc.) and could never really get into them (with the exception of benzos which I had to stop filling). I understand how they become addictive for others, but I don't really think I'm personally interested in them. What's more addictive for me isn't a body high but the ability to fully utilize my mind, which is what LSD does for me. It makes me feel as if I'm not limited like I am normally, which is incredibly refreshing.
The big differentiator for me is possible harm and addiction. Psychedelics don't typically bring both (I am under the impression, that we actually don't really know how schizophrenia and psychosis relates or is triggered by psychedelics, that was my impression of recent research). Using crack, heroin etc. and "designer drugs" etc. is a whole other thing. Safety of consumption is just on another level for both classes. Even with "designer" psychedelics that are just added molecules. Tbh I don't know about any totally and weird synthetic psychedelics, I'm assuming shrooms, LSD/AL-LAD (which are both of course synthetic as well), mescaline, ibogaine, and DMT essentially. I hope everyone reading get's the distinction I'm trying to make.
Yes, I understand. Serotonergic psychedelics are typically not big sources of addiction, and they typically only cause great harm if taken incorrectly or by someone with a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia or psychosis; though even then, the harm is only really psychological (but it can be permanent).
Please do note, however, that there are psychedelics which are not serotonergic psychedelics, such as psychedelic amphetamines. These are not typically nearly as safe, just as amphetamines in general typically are not particularly safe when used incorrectly.
As someone with ADHD and a cardiovascular system that does not like stimulants (I don't have any health issues, it's just that low doses don't do much to my brain and even medium doses make my HR/BP excessively high)... Mind sharing any resources to learn more about this? Or details on what you take yourself?
I found out this week that I apparently have the exact same reaction to stimulants to you lol (or to Elvanse anyway). Do you know if you respond better to other kinds of ADHD medication? I recognise that drugs that are generally less legal can be beneficial for some people but I would personally not like to go down that route if possible
Dextroamphetamine (or lisdexamfetamine as in Elvanse/Vyvanse) isn't the only stimulant medication; there is also Ritalin (methylphenidate). You may also want to look into generic non-prodrug dextroamphetamine, typically called dexedrine - different brands, too; in my area there are Actavis/Teva capsules as well as Mallinckrodt capsules, and only the Mallinckrodt capsules work well for me.
There are also non-stimulant medications, such as Wellbutrin (bupropion; an atypical antidepressant that is known to help in certain cases of ADHD). I've also heard of SSRIs potentially helping, but I would not recommend them because of their long-term effects (they can damage serotonin receptors permanently).
Plenty of legal options if you haven't already tried them yet. Obviously, please discuss them with a real doctor if you intend to look into them.
Thank you, I will of course discuss them with a medical professional. I was given a few Elvanse from a family member who found it wasn't working for them, just to see if it affected me in a positive way, but I've found after taking a couple of doses (20mg, 40 then 20 again over three days) that it hasn't really affected me much mentally (apart from me writing really long paragraphs now and obsessively fixing capitalisation?), and I've been feeling a worrying amount of heart palpitations. I recognise that it probably wasn't incredibly bright to do this, but I'm starting to get really impatient at how long it's taking to get professional help (it's like I've got ADHD or something lol). I'm also not honestly that surprised that it didn't work so well, given how genetic ADHD is
I'm still waiting on actually getting to talk to a doctor about a prescription, because supply issues and the speed of the NHS, and I also have to take an ECG, which I didn't think I needed but after this experience, I absolutely think I need lol. I think they're going to trial me on methylphenidate first, assuming the ECG lets me, but I'll bring up the other options you recommended as well. Thanks!
I would like to let you know that typical starting dosages of dextroamphetamine are usually in the 2.5–15mg/day range, so taking 20mg and 40mg could have way overshot your therapeutic window. Taking too much will end up not helping.
> I'm also not honestly that surprised that it didn't work so well, given how genetic ADHD is
It's not necessarily just that ADHD is genetic as much as it is that ADHD is pathological. It affects your whole brain. Sometimes stimulants really do help, because dopamine and/or norepinephrine can absolutely be possible culprits for entire brain dysfunction, but if you happen to have another root cause for the disorder then they might not particularly help.
Still, you can't necessarily rule it out just by taking 20mg and then 40mg; it may be possible that a lower dose could still help you.
That's weird... I was given the remains of a prescription which only had 20, 30 and 40 pills, nothing any lower. Would taking too much also have no effect? It feels like it should have too much effect, however that would manifest.
Having a quick look at wikipedia, the source of all correct knowledge, it looks like 50mg of lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (elvanse used in oral capsules) is roughly equivalent to 20mg of dextroamphetamine sulfate or 15mg of free base dextroamphetamine, which is backed up by its citation at medicines.org.uk, so 20 lis would be like 6 dex
I meant the genetic stuff because the person that gave them to me was close family, and I suspect another close family member has it too, so I'd guess it would present and potentially be helped in similar ways between us, as well as having similar side effects
I take Focalin (dexmethylphenidate). A low dose of it is enough for me to do the needful. I also track my blood pressure regularly and it’s still well in the healthy range while taking it.
I can't in good conscience recommend this treatment to anyone else because my limited understanding is that I am a very rare exception to the general rule that LSD is a very risky thing to take, especially on a regular basis.
Since taking it results in a psychedelic trip, it can be extremely easy for that to backfire and result in a very negative and potentially traumatic experience, commonly referred to as a bad trip.
It's also typically intoxicating; not quite to the level of alcohol, but enough to mess with your sense of balance and ability to speak coherently.
I know this from personal experience - this did not start out as an ADHD treatment for me; it started out as a recreational activity, and required the same amount of investment as psychedelic use typically does. I used to hallucinate (mildly) and be at risk of having a bad trip if anxiety took over. The first time I took this, I had HPPD for the following two weeks; the experience was actually quite comforting for me, but it's important to note that risk as well.
However, over time, even only using it every two to three weeks, my brain gradually became tolerant to its effects. I believe there's some sort of permanent tolerance that isn't documented on PsychonautWiki, which was my primary source of info about the substance; on a couple occasions, I've gone over a month between doses, and it's never quite been as intense as the first time I ever took it, even if I were to take more than before.
I don't know if this happens for everyone. I really do not. I cannot guarantee or even suggest that it would happen to you or anyone if one were to reproduce these steps. There is a lack of study-backed research that exists in this area; this substance really is not especially well understood except by recreational users, and even then, they are only aware of and able to share anecdotes about its effects on themselves individually. Anyone who claims to know whether or not LSD would be safe for you is lying.
But, I will tell you what I am doing, for the express purpose of academic curiosity. Perform your own research into anything that you are ever curious about trying, and please do not take my comment as a suggestion that this will work for you; it would likely not.
I take dextroamphetamine (dexedrine), which I am prescribed for ADHD by my doctor.
I take LSD while this drug is still in my body; that is, I mix them. I started the dexedrine before I ever started taking LSD, but I have always been on dexedrine even while dosing LSD. I find that, on its own, dexedrine does not fully help with the ADHD anymore, at least not like it once did; however, combined with LSD, my brain seems to just work, and I finally feel in full control of my actions.
My doctor is aware that I use LSD in this way. He professionally recommends against it because he cannot guarantee that it is safe, but he understands that I find it helpful. Obviously, you should generally not tell medical professionals that you regularly do illegal drugs; I trust my doctor to a great degree, and he seems to trust me, too.
This more frequent usage (i.e. more frequent than a couple times a month) started slightly over a week ago, when I took this stuff to help myself process the resultant trauma from being hit by a truck and nearly dying about a week prior. It felt incredible to me how much it helped, not only with processing the trauma, but even just with general cognition, language, and executive function; I started taking it about every other day for a couple times, then switched to taking a small non-microdose (100–200μg) every morning. I take my dexedrine in the evening, right before I go to sleep; my dose is 30mg per day.
By the way, without getting into LSD or even alternative medicine in general, it's important to note that different drug manufacturers produce different products even when it's supposed to be the same drug. Actavis/Teva produces dexedrine that I can't take because it immediately puts me into a hypertensive crisis, but Mallinckrodt makes stuff that I can take 30mg/day of and nonetheless maintain a completely normal blood pressure. (My doctor takes it every visit, so he would have told me a long time ago if it were abnormal.)
I would always recommend the prescription route if possible, just because it does lessen the burden on you and it also somewhat lessens your responsibility. I am responsible for my own self, and involving non-prescription drugs means that I need to pay a lot closer attention to their effects in order to ensure that I'm not harming my health. Sometimes this is not worth the effort, especially if the responsibility can't be properly handled for whatever reason.
Hopefully you also warn them about the opiates that their doctor will cheerfully prescribe.
Frankly, if the opiate epidemic taught us anything it's that there's probably lower risk in your teenagers taking an edible at a party than getting an overly aggressive codeine prescription from their doc after breaking their arm.
I'm not really arguing with you, education of kids is key. But legality is such a poor yardstick. See: opiates, tobacco, and alcohol - super damaging, extremely habit forming, yet completely legal and even culturally acceptable.
Meanwhile, LSD is treated like fentanyl (literally the same Control Substances Act schedule - the highest #1) and is pushed underground where it's adulterated by god knows what, even though a small gov-sanctioned lab could easily produce the entire country's supply of entirely pure substance in a few weeks.
I don't know what the answer is, but surely it's more nuanced than drugs=bad, legal=fine, doctor-perscribed=no-risk. (I'm not saying you're arguing these points, I'm just channelling the zeitgeist as I see it).
I agree with you, and fixing the issues of drugs in society is very complex and difficult. That's why my statement was more of a: I don't use them and teach my kids not to use them. That is what is basically under my control.
It's so hard to get painkillers nowadays that people with chronic pain can't acquire them. The govt listened to this kind of argument and decided to just make everything regulated rather than making everything legal. Not a big surprise honestly
That's why it's illegal, no? If it was up to me, smoking would also be phased out.
Edit: What bothers me most on these HN discussions is how casual some commenters act of taking drugs. Like it's somehow great. Let's not act as if taking drugs is normal or something everyone should try.
Using psychoactive drugs is incredibly normal and has been practiced for thousands of years by humans. In fact it is one of the most human things you can do because many other species don't exhibit this behavior. We should be working in the interest of reducing stigma of drug use to reduce harms associated with it. Drugs are illegal because politicians wanted a way to crack down on communities that didn't agree with their policies, it is simply a form of control. Have you never asked why alcohol is legal and cannabis or LSD are illegal? Fear and control.
The US forced their system of controlling psychoactive substances on the rest of the world through treaties primarily. Perhaps you should learn about the history of drug use and control.
You also didn't answer my question about alcohol. Why is it legal and not cannabis?
Because alcohol is more interwoven into our society than cannabis.
If I had a magic wand and had to pick 1 legal one, I would go for cannabis. I think it has less negative effect on society than alcohol. But here we are, and my standpoint is to no approve new drugs and try to phase out the current ones.
I like my beer, wine and tequila, but I also see youth doesn't flock to it as much as my and previous generations. If properly done, it can be phased out.
Then your argument is moot, as you engage in drug use. Just because it's a liquid in a glass bottle doesn't mean it isn't a drug.
Furthermore, the simple fact is that not everyone agrees with your take on personal freedom.
You have quite a lot of work ahead of you to prove that an adult from consuming a substance in their own home should be arrested and fined/jailed under threat of State violence.
This argument is so hard to make, that Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst, two of the leading forces behind the criminalization of cannabis in the US a century ago, opted instead to rest their argument atop racism, political fearmongering and subterfuge (calling it marijuana instead of cannabis).
I, for one, am glad that you don't have a magic wand to wave around and create law without due legislative process. That sounds like an incredibly autocratic method of governance. It would be good to consider that yours isn't the only valid opinion on this matter, and to reflect upon the arguments others are making.
Whose society? Western society? What about Mexican society? South america? The native Americans used psychedelic cactus and mushrooms. You seem to be drawing relatively arbitrary lines based on your own biased upbringing
And we don't have to choose only one, that's arbitrary too. We can easily dismantle the current prohibitory system to allow for a system of regulated production and access which would improve safety and reduce overdose deaths. Most overdoses happen because of the nature of the black market. There is no regulation or testing so substances, particularly opioids, can get cut to unknown potencies depending on the person handling it. This makes it a gamble every time a person were to use rather than consuming a measured amount of a pure substance. Prohibition objectively increases harm to individuals, society, and the economy.
You're using a lot of hyperbole. Nobody said anything about building societies on drug addicts. Overdoses primarily happen due to users not knowing how strong their mixture is, they also happen frequently in new settings and after a period of abstinence. These are all things that have been shown in the literature.
I love how you also ignored the rest of my points about whose society you're referencing.
By most definitions of the term, yeah, using drugs is "normal", and ancient practice. Strict persecution seems to me to be a recent invention
> everyone should try
Absolutely: not everyone should try all recreational drugs. As radical as saying that no one should try any recreational drug, right?
The discussion here is about meeting in a healthy middle and you seemed to have taken the latter position, which you must agree is radical and out of the question
It is extremely difficult to agree on a healthy middle. If you look at something I think most people consider much safer, we see how hard it is. What is a safe level of high fructose corn syrup that should be allowed as an ingredient of hamburger buns?
At some level, everything we put into our bodies has consequences, but it seems terrifying to me to have discussions about a healthy middle ground of how much meth is ok in a serving of mozzarella. Then again, I have no idea if the fancy chemical names currently listed as ingredients on the labels of food I eat are preservatves or what, and what their actual consequences are to my health.
Nobody is talking about adding recreational drugs to food.
Corn syrup, as bad as it may be to consume in great quantities with a modern lifestyle, is food with calories even if it may lack other more healthy nutrients.
Should be banned? I don't think so. But regulated so companies don't abuse it as a cheap ingredient.
For how legal recreational drugs would work just look at nicotine regulation.
And it already improved since I was young. People would smoke in cafees and parties. The non-smokers just had to live with all the crap. I'm happy my kids can go out now without the terrible smell in their hair, clothes and passive smoke in their lungs. It's getting prohibitted in more and more places, so I'm on the winning side :D.
I don't really have a horse in this race, but it seems to me that making something illegal doesn't always work as expected and stop people from consuming it. See: prohibition in the US.
So, if the actual goal is harm-reduction for the population at large (and not for what seems to be a small sample who wouldn't care either way since they're not into that), maybe instead of outlawing substances, we should make sure that people don't take random crap that will mess them up even worse than what they were originally looking for. Because it seems that people will continue taking drugs.
So maybe, as a society, we should finally accept reality instead of insisting that wishful thinking will somehow work after it has failed miserably for ages.
I think it starts with educating youth, with proper campaigns. Make it clear living as an addict is not something you want.
The legal aspect is a very difficult discussion, and it's more based on opinions than facts.
But at start we need to decide if we want these drugs in our society or not. And I'm always surprised at how the HN crowd is: taking drugs are awesome, we want it in our society.
I think the HN stance is a bit more nuanced: it may depend on the drug. It's pretty clear that not all drugs have the same health risks and addiction potential, so I'm not surprised people don't treat them all the same way.
As an easy example: I don't consider myself an alcoholic and even hate being drunk, yet I would be bummed to never be able to have a drink again.
> I think it starts with educating youth, with proper campaigns. Make it clear living as an addict is not something you want.
Indeed. But I'm not convinced that banning the substances in addition to this education is actually useful.
> But at start we need to decide if we want these drugs in our society or not.
That's a good question. But, like it or not, these drugs are in our society today. I don't see any practical means of getting rid of them. Outlawing them clearly not only doesn't work, but actually has some pretty terrible side-effects of its own: health-related (via adulterants) as well as social (drug-related gang crime).
I'm the same with alcohol. But I've also seen the worst in families where one is an alcoholic, and then you start wondering if it's all worth it.
After the discussion here, I wonder if there would be some middle ground. Make it legal to buy, but very controlled and individual. That way people who want to stop might get the help they need. Or the strict control would be able to prevent excesses. It's for sure a very complex problem, with lots of different opinions.
It would be nice, but it's probably foolish to assume children's compliance.
Roughly 50% of US adults have dabbled in drugs, and that number goes way up if you include legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol.
Education is important, but so are structural protections. It's the C vs Rust debate, you can have safety by being super-duper diligent all the time, or you can have safety by design.
Even then it takes a good bit of luck. Identities change, and kids (and some adults) are rebellious by nature.
My parents did a great job. Sobriety was a core part of my identity throughout high-school and I'd proudly express that I had no desire to use drugs or alcohol. That lasted to the ripe old age of 20, which to be fair was longer than most of my peers.
My parents taught me to stay away from smoking and drugs. It didn't really work. The facade collapsed when I realised that actually a lot of people use all sorts of drugs recreationally with very limited adverse effect. And that they can be extremely, life alteringly fun in a way no prohibition lecture captures.
Obviously there's plenty of downsides too - but the idea that a stern lecture or twenty will stop kids taking drugs is kind of laughable.
I don't lecture my kids. What I do is probably not acceptable by many, but hey, it works.
When we go to hospitals, and those cancer patients are outside smoking, I point out "see, these are the smokers". Every opportunity when marginaal people are smoking, I point out how stupid and marginaal they look. My kids are disgusted by it, the same way I was.
So it's not a "you are not allowed to smoke" or "smoke is bad for you", it's a "you want to be a loser who thinks he's cool? Go ahead and smoke"
This is basically true wrt the 1-sub lysergamide series (1p-lsd 1cp-lsd 1d-lsd 1v-lsd ald-52 etc) but many other lysergamides are quite distinct: AL-LAD ETH-LAD MiPLA etc. And then of course there are the lysergamides that are used to treat migraine, which are completely different.
Illegal drugs have all sorts of terminology problems.
I'm not sure these should be called "designer drugs" because that makes it sound like people are making and taking them to have specific, desirable effects. That's not the case: in most cases, people don't want to be taking these drugs, they want to be taking the illegal drugs that have "better" effects, but are taking legal or grey-legality drugs because drug prohibition keeps them from taking the drugs they actually want to take, which are better-understood and generally safer.
I'd prefer to call these grey-market substances "research chemicals" because it's a neutral term without the fearmongering associated with "bath salts" or the romanticizing of "designer drugs". And it's honest: these are chemicals that we are researching and should continue to research, to understand both the positive and negative effects these substances have.
It's a dangerous world out there. If you're going to use drugs, please use a test kit. And everyone should obtain and learn how to administer Narcan if you can.
IMO the name "research chemicals" is kind of ruined for me after listening to a bunch of college aged self-proclaimed psychonaughts/shamans ramble on about the science and research they're doing into the essence of humanity or whatever with them. Just call them what they are, grey-market drugs for getting high. There are varnishingly few real researchers actually handling them.
I think the term "research chemicals" came out of the necessity to call these substances anything but drugs.
They can't legally be sold as drugs, that would require some kind of approval from a regulatory agency, which they obviously don't have. So they call it by a name that don't suggest human consumption. "research chemicals", as if they were reagents, "bath salts", "plant food", etc... often with a "not for human consumption" label. Certainly not "designer drugs", that's a term I generally only see in articles with an "anti drug" stance.
The DEA popularized the term designer drugs in the 80s to refer to drugs designed to evade legal restrictions. That's what it commonly refers to, similarity of effects is secondary to demand.
Organic chemistry is amazingly complex. A slight difference in temperature or pH and a chemical turns from a pain killer to a brain tissue destroyer. Not a place for amateurs.
It was clear even then that synthetic opioids were going to be significant.
Fentanyl (compound 52, Figure 17) is an analgesic of high potency, approximately 300 times that of morphine, which was developed by Janssen in 1962 (Janssen 1962b) and is N-[(2-phenylethyl)-4-piperidyl]-N-phenyl-propanamide. The first CsA (controlled substance analog) of fentanyl came to the attention of law enforcement in late 1979 but was not identified until 1981 (Allen et al. 1981). In the next three years a procession of new fentanyl CsA's appeared in the illicit drug market. The abuse of fentanyl CsA's peaked in 1985 and has since decreased dramatically (Henderson 1987), a phenomena which was the result of DEA successfully terminating the operation of the responsible laboratories. However, the ripple effect is still being felt as international and national meetings have been held to discuss the problems presented by CsA's.
Wow. The next paragraph is interesting to read from the future:
It is the author's opinion that fentanyl CsA's will be back as the future analgesic drugs of abuse. The thoughts behind this statement are that the published synthesis schemes for the fentanyl compounds allow for the use of wide variety of precursors as discovered by the confiscated notes from an anonymous clandestine laboratory that synthesized a drug, based on information presented in two separate volumes of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (...). Also, several fentanyl derivatives have such high potencies that the quantities required to be synthesized are trivial. For instance, carfentanil (...) is approximately 4000 times as potent as heroin and has an extremely favorable therapeutic index (Janssen 1985). Hence, an easy week's work for two chemists could provide 10 kilograms of carfentanil which would be equivalent to 40 metric tons of pure heroin.
Especially now since Afghanistan is back in Taliban hands. According to this statistics[1] Afghanistan was producing the lion share of the world's opium but that must have changed significantly now after the US left the country.
Indeed, they're producing a bunch of meth now. Ephedra grows abundantly way up in the mountains, and the trade routes to Pakistan and Iran are already established.
To my understanding the whole US being there and basically allowing the opium trade thing was what made heroin so fucking cheap the recent years, which it isn't anymore.
This is roughly what Molly used to poison Riviera (a meperidine addict) in Neuromancer. Gibson mentions N-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) which is mentioned (as 1-methyl...) in the article, as well as the whole substantia nigra thing. I just re-read it last week and was wondering if that drug was a real thing or not.
Kidston was only four years dead when Neuromancer came out, and the vibe I get from Gibson is he was in those days part of some circles where it would have remained a somewhat active topic.
Not sure why they call it "first" and why they call it "disaster". Some drug addict, coincidentally a hard drug maker, ended his life in a vegetable state - isn't that worth a Darwin Award?
If we're going to look at the real tragedies of early times, it's probably best to consider thalidomide. Unlike people who took hard drugs in those days, knowing the consequences, thalidomide users consumed the pills for anxiety, trouble sleeping, "tension" (whatever that means), resulting in more than 10000 children over the same decade born with deformities.
Hamilton Morris podcast 96 on Barry Kidston talks all about one of the (slightly) well known deaths from the MPTP by-product of botched MPPP synthesis. Barry tried to synthesize MPPP and got Parkinson's-like symptoms.
I took a drug once called 3-MMC that I really enjoyed. I haven't been able to find it since and I don't even know a street name. But by all accounts it was a pleasant high somewhere between cocaine and MDMA with a moderate duration and minimal comedown. But for all I know it could cause irreparable brain damage.
I guess it's not too likely, since most recreational drugs have been around a long time and are well-studied, and most derivatives aren't radically different than their mainstream counterparts. And most street drugs are either prescribed medically or being studied for medical use. The real problem is purity, which is a problem caused by the ineffective and insanely expensive US "ban" on drugs.
Solve the purity and regulation issue and you end most overdose deaths, most black market violent crime, and, apparently, accidental brain damage.