Drug users use a lot of drugs
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
> The average crystal meth addict uses about 500 mg a day. And they snort it, which probably produces about double the peak plasma level as taking it orally. So they're getting the equivalent of 1000 mg oral amphetamine daily...
500mg sounds about right, but from my experience the most common route of administration (in the western United States at least) is smoking, not snorting.
Because so many people smoke meth rather than snort it, a lot of meth is sold as methamphetamine base rather than methamphetamine hydrochloride.
This means that it’s often not particularly water soluble, which makes it a poor choice for snorting since it doesn’t get through your nasal mucosa and actually kicks in after it drips down into your stomach. It’s not actually much different from eating it in many cases.
I like this article overall but I get irritated when I read stuff about drug users that is clearly written by somebody who hasn’t done a lot of drugs.
Edited for spelling. Also if anybody has any questions for me, I’m pretty knowledgeable on this topic (though no expert), so feel free to ask away!
How does someone stop doing drugs?
As for a general answer to your question, there isn’t one that I’m aware of. Everyone I know that’s gotten clean has wildly different stories.
Aside from that, there was no shaming and very little drama. Essentially, my previous situation was that I was surrounded by extremely abusive family and dangerously messed up friends. I more or less made friends with “normal” people, got away from a really bad situation and it all just sort of… worked out.
There’s absolutely no secret sauce or trick in my getting clean. I can’t count the number of my old friends that tried stuff like I did and it didn’t work out.
It was literally just luck.
About a year after I quit, I made a new friend. He was a nice guy, seemed normal, but one day he casually mentioned that he occasionally used stimulants including amphetamines. I cut off all contact with him immediately (as did all of my close friends. It’s a good example of support in this case.)
I guess I was able to recognize and decisively take action to avoid temptation about a year in. This was likely also luck. I was in a pretty good place with my life in general, had that occurred six months earlier or six months later it could have had a different outcome.
So the answer is either a day or a year or never. It’s been ten years and I’ve only known where to get meth for about one day of it. I still get cravings to this day, I’m just no longer in the habit of indulging them.
I say this as someone who abused drugs when I was younger and came from an extremely abusive family environment.
And thanks for sharing and giving some great answers.
Addicts can't just stop and never do drugs again like a normal person. If it's there, they'll take it. It's not about strength and being able to walk away. It never goes away for an addict and the best they can do is avoid situations where drugs will be presented. Isolation from users is the best course of action.
Also, many people abuse drugs and even become addicted, but are not addicts. An addict is wired differently.
A safe, clean, and comfortable living environment.
Enough food.
The confidence in oneself, or their support network, to truly believe without fear, that they won’t end up back out on the streets.
A well paying job that isn’t dehumanizing, traumatizing, exploitative, or abusive.
I had friends, housing, food, a stable day to day routine and _nobody_ looked down on me for my problems. I was able to talk openly about what I was going through and the circumstances that led to my addiction in the first place.
Normally (at least as Americans) we think of addicts as getting all of those things in rehab facilities and getting “fixed” by that few weeks or months. I’ve been in rehabs and mental hospitals and genuinely gotten some necessary help from them, but in my case I only started getting really better after I found myself in a situation where I had all of that support without feeling like it had an expiration date.
It feels like drugs made him dumb and also he is living in some kind of parallel reality. It's becoming harder and harder to connect.
Also, in his reality it's perfectly ok to consume drugs, he's also constantly offering to share the experience with all people he meets.
It's sad situation and looks desperate because he's aggressively against any help, he consider himself better than others because of the drugs (he is sure they allow him to "see" more than we see), and he doesn't listen to anyone.
Also, he's unable to function in the society. He's becoming obnoxious, so all his friends and even relatives are starting to avoid him.
He doesn't look healthy, he doesn't look happy, and I know he is unable to achieve any of his goals (the goals I've heard from him that he wants to achieve).
The first requires a presence of mind to enter the void left behind by the thing, that people doing drugs probably lack, since they are, in essence, stimulation addicts. Drugs fill a void they avoid facing. Stopping doing drugs would cause them to face that void.
The second is more amenable, because you can taper off with replacement therapy. Switch to using less bad drugs, or indeed anything stimulating. Continuously replace the thing you're getting stimulation from with another, slightly less stimulating thing, until the thing that is left is sufficiently nonstimulating that stopping and accepting the void feels manageable.
I went from putting speed in my morning coffee to eating a pound of chocolate a day.
In fact, all amphetamines contain a PEA base - they are substitutes phenylethylamines, for example Alpha-MethylPHenEThylAMINE.
For example, off the top of my head, mescaline is also in the phenylethylamine family but is a wildly different drug with different receptor bonding affinity and subjective effects. I doubt anyone would want to mix up the two.
You stop doing drugs the same way you stop eating badly, by trying to find substitutes, and by putting distance between you and it (i.e. if I don't want to eat snacks, I avoid buying it at the store, so it's more work for me to eat poorly)
To be fair, though, medical doctors with personal experience using meth are probably a very small group, and it's unlikely they're in a big hurry to write an article talking about their experience. But who knows...
The few that do lose their rationality lose it because they don’t sleep for weeks. They likely also live in an unsafe environment which keeps them in a perpetual state of survival stress.
Survival stress + not sleeping + stimulants —> psychosis. Very rarely any of these alone, unless the individual is predisposed.
Asking because THAT fucks up people and makes them use drugs to escape their situation.
Survival stress, as in PTSD, causes cortical thinning, and explains everything in the scenario without the need to arbitrarily assign blame to methamphetamine.
I would agree with you in general, but there are situations where prescribed methamphetamines also lead to cortical thinning when not used as recreationally. This seems to suggest that stress may not be the entire player here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870784/
It was likely decided because of the dose of meth found in the persons systems that correlates with various findings on dose-dependence https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
If you would like to read more about PTSD findings as it relates to stress and liver function, I would be happy to expound upon the way that corticosteroids impact gut bacteria that directly affect FXR metabolism and bile acids and further lead to cortical thinning. https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/30/2/575/5521088
Its really fascinating how a drug like methamphetamine impact neuroactive steroids that impact the same pathways tha stress does. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6862925/ We've been able to reverse it in rats https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131007093739.h...
I suppose I agree that environmental stress, survival stress, and PTSD are all common in the addict community. That’s true.
In my experience though, meth-induced psychosis is a thing. For example, if you understand the following sentence you either have seen or done it!
I once snapped/ghosted 3 points in one draw in order to scare off some gangsters, then the shadow people came.
After that I thought I could talk to programming libraries out loud. Not in a fun way. Meth induced psychosis is absolutely a thing.
Now, if those symptoms persist after you (would) pass a piss test, then we are talking about meth-induced psychosis.
How many uses during a normal day? e.g. 125 mg 4x daily or all at once or something else?
Does it keep you from sleeping?
Yes, it keeps you from sleeping. At my peak I didn’t really have much use for the concept of separate days since I was normally awake for ~72hrs at a time.
I wonder how much the lack of sleep is what causes the problems, versus other effects of the drug.
I’m not aware of meth (or its metabolites) being particularly toxic to the cells in the human body (as opposed to cocaine for example, which is directly cardiotoxic if I remember correctly), my understanding is that the bad stuff tends to be the result of behavior that it induces.
A lot of people on this board have experience with prescription stimulants. How would you say the experience of "doing meth" differs from taking amphetamine orally? Was a typical experience for you "smoke meth, study or write code all night"?
I like prescription stimulants, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to take overdose-levels of stimulants for fun, so I'm probably missing something. If I take too much (~40mg), I feel pretty terrible, physically and mentally. I can't imagine how 500mg/day could produce any desirable effects.
If the supply chain for meth wasn't so poor, I'd probably try it once to see what all the hype is about.
Amphetamine smoked would be the same too, nearly. Maybe slightly slower onset. Negligible difference compared to that provided by smoking versus oral. It's the speed of the come up. The most euphoric part when one takes stimulants orally is usually the first few hours. When rapidly administered, that hits instantly and with full effect and then fades pretty quickly. (So you are very inclined to take another dose an hour or two later.)
My advice? You probably don't want to experience it. I've missed it since the first and second and only times I smoked. Realizing I was strongly craving a drug I had used twice is why I got out of that game. Some experiences cannot be unexperienced. There's nothing much interesting about that state, psychologically or intellectually. It's about what you think it might be if you have some experience with stimulants. Just all at once and very hard and you will be awake for two days after.
Meth is simply dirty. More neurotoxic than amphetamine and lasts too long. In a perfect world, we'd probably move all the meth addicts onto a supply of Dexedrine. Even if they're high as kites at least their brains will rot more slowly.
As a former smoker and user of various drugs (mostly legal at the time), I highly recommend against usage of highly addictive drugs such as tobacco, heroin, cocaine, and also (meth)amphetamine (there's a difference between physically and mentally addiction here, and there's a good comparison of about 20 different drugs and their differences in dependency).
I recommend against recreational drug usage, too, but that's because I have come to the understanding they're not necessary, and it being dangerous not using drugs without supervision. You don't want those ups and downs (such as 'taking too much', or 'forgetting a dose'), you want stability. Seek help instead, get a diagnosis, and get prescription under supervision.
FWIW, I used amphetamine once, and have been prescribed on Ritalin. That one time I used amphetamine I felt like the biggest asshole in the world. I could finally understand macho men because I felt like one. However, unlike my first time MDMA, I can't say I missed out on it (and that is with only the first time MDMA). Whereas Ritalin, while spikey (no SR such as Concerta, sadly) provides stability if administered on regular intervals. Which can be solved nowadays with alarms on smartphone and such (back when I used it, smartphones were not yet widely in use).
This made me laugh! I don’t remember where I heard it but a phrase I’m a fan of is “amphetamines cause intense feelings of competency.”
In my experience, there were two factors that got me up to 500mg+/day: tolerance and price breaks.
When I first started meth it was incredibly affordable. I could get high all day off 1/10th of my $10-20 bag. Then it became 1/8th of my bag and then 1/4 etc. At some point it became (in my mind) uneconomical to buy little amounts because the $/dose got lower when I went from buying .1g to 1g, and then steeply went down again when I went from buying 1g to 3.5g. (As an aside I never really figured out the economics of meth at scale but the margins must be astronomical considering how big of discounts that street dealers are able to give for relatively small purchases and still make money)
I thought I was being smart, saving money! It turns out that when I had more, I used more. Tolerance built up rapidly and I found that I had to smoke 50-100mg to feel anything.
I also agree that it’s really not worth trying. Your concerns about the supply chain are valid. The difference between “good shit” and “bad shit” is enormous and can be the difference between having a nice day trying (pointlessly) to teach yourself Ruby and a day in the ER.
Not everyone has to do the 12 step thing. My experience with NA was very limited but I quickly figured out that I didn’t fit in there. If you’re feeling out of options, it’s probably worth checking out because it does seem to work for a lot of people. However if it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to give up. At the end of the day the goal is to not do a thing, whatever way you get there is fine.
In my defense I haven’t really been involved with any of this in a decade and it’s entirely possible I mixed up cocaine and meth and their respective likelihoods of pyrolyzation in this case.
For some reason I remember a DEA Microgram bulletin showing crystalline dextromethamphetamine base in brick form, but it’s not available anymore and I can’t find it at the moment. I have had very few conversations with meth chemists over the years but I do distinctly remember the mention of the oily liquid in the latter stages when talking to them.
That being said, snorting meth (even HCl) is incredibly excruciating compared to other drugs and as a result most users that I’ve been around prefer to use it in a different manner.
Thank you!
Particularly with drugs like meth, which can be manufactured clandestinely by people who don't understand chemistry well, there are a lot of intermediates or potential reaction byproducts which are orders of magnitude more cardiotoxic or otherwise more harmful than pure methamphetamine. And that's before you get into the potential toxicity of any intentionally-added cutting agents.
I think ketamine synthesis is more involved, so it's likely that illegally manufactured ketamine is comparatively cleaner than illegally manufactured meth, but illicit ketamine is still probably harder on your body than pharmaceutical grade for the same reasons.
Illegal drug manufacturers have a moderate economic pressure to increase purity, but - short of not immediately killing users and losing your customer base - they have little economic incentive to ensure that the impurities that remain in the final product are safe or inert.
Yes, 500mgs of meth a day is almost certainly not good for your health. But these studies are usually not able to control for purity of the meth that is consumed, so I expect for these studies finding adverse effects of chronic use - at least some portion of this effect size is a result of purity issues rather than purely based on dosage.
From the time of alcohol prohibition, it was the government that was introducing contaminated batches that killed people. It was done for propaganda, to solidify the message "drugs are bad".
When I read articles about another teenager died of bad Ecstasy batch, this always comes to my mind. It always accompanies PSA saying that bad batches are circulating in the area etc. but somehow nobody else dies. Then when you read article almost always it turns out the drug wasn't actually Ecstasy, but that information is hidden deep in the article. It's disgusting how such tragedies are used for propaganda purposes and it is never investigated if it was actually government involvement in the killings.
Watching Vice documentaries about clandestine manufacturing and the conditions they work in, it is not hard for me to believe that the most frequent cause is just lack of will and chemistry talent in order to purify a substance.
Cleaning inert cutting agents out of drugs is fairly easy because the molecules are often dissimilar. But when manufacturing drugs, there are often steps that have probabilistic products that are very similar.
Hypothetical example: you end up with 99% MDMA but 1% something that is very structurally similar but has no recreational value and is cardiotoxic. These molecules are so similar that the only way to separate them are challenging and expensive: such as multiple rounds of recrystalization and chromatography. Only a tiny portion drug buyers will notice the 1% cardiotoxic byproduct (access to GCMS testing?), so there is no economic incentive to do these final expensive cleaning steps.
The liver's effects on drugs is really fascinating. Grapefruit has a chemical that can inactive liver enzymes, so some drug addicts regularly drink grapefruit juice to 'get more bang for their buck'. Plain old black pepper (in large doses) inactivates a different enzyme IIRC.
There are also some interesting anecdotal cases of people who claim to have found regimens of essential oils, which when consumed at the right schedule saturate liver enzymes to the extent that otherwise inert substances can produce recreationally psychoactive effects.
Source: i have a morbid fascination with the 'frontier non-medical drug use' communities and follow their subreddits (/r/researchchemicals and /r/peptides being among the most interesting). There a lot of people who choose to make themselves guinea pigs quite recklessly and, thankfully for scientific advancement and future harm reduction, post in-depth reports of how these novel chemicals or preparations effected them. Recently, broad cheap availability of novel benzos have led many posters to deep addictions of such great magnitude that they struggle to convince doctors assisting with detox that they've actually been consuming equivalents of 1000x typical prescribed doses... until the doctor gives them massive doses of valium to detox and they still have severe seizures.
Are essential oils literally oils? Because I doubt they can have a metabolic effect due to their size and lipophilicity. My main concern is adsorption. But if they're small and greasy, then they may be promiscuous binders.
Or do the essential oils carry other molecules along?
Edit: I see now that individual oils carry many diverse constituents, including some small-to-medium sized lads. That's a pretty interesting shotgun strategy for controlling your metabolism, lol.
I've actually steam-distilled essential oils before: essentially you push a bunch of steam through plant material and condense it into a funnel that drains from the bottom, so water can flow out and be discarded while the oil remains in the funnel. (It's a pretty fun process IMO, and about as safe as boiling a pot of water).
I don't think the human body can process most essential oils for caloric energy: molecularly they look much more like drugs - no long carbon chains.
I share this interest. I've very little interest in using drugs recreationally myself, but find reading about it oddly fascinating, particularly the novel agents. Taking a chemical when you only have the vaguest idea of what it _may_ do crosses a line I would never want to, but I sympathise with the feeling of wanting to know the effects and being willing to take that risk.
> broad cheap availability of novel benzos
The RC benzos have always concerned me. I'm prescribed a benzodiazepine (20mg temazepam), and it usually induces a mild feeling of wanting more, even though there are no noticeable recreational effects at that dose (at least for me). None of the opiates I've ever been prescribed have done the same, for comparison. It felt obvious to me that using the novel benzos without medical oversight could easily lead to a rapidly escalating problem. A while ago I saw a poster seeking a synthesis for a benzo they claimed did not cause tolerance, and my first thought was this can only end poorly. I don't believe there was ever a follow-up post, but I sincerely hope they avoided any problems.
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Melanotan is a peptide that increases skin pigmentation. Some people have tested it to the extreme, and the pictures are some combination of funny, terrifying and "at what point is this racially offensive blackface?". Also supposedly causes erections similarly to sildenafil .
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3gxjem/before_and_afte...
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The etizolam not wokrign meme https://www.google.com/search?q=etizolam+not+working+reddit
Unfortunately can't find the original post, but when this benzo was easy to buy, there were frequent threads for a while from different users who were complaining that they weren't feeling the effects... often with many spelling errors that led many commenters to be pretty sure that it was working just fine and the posters are just not aware of how intoxicated they are. Became a bit of a meme.
Kind of like the 'roofie circle' Gob story arc from arrested development, it seems very common that people will take some, forget they took it once it kicks in, take more, forget, and so on. When you can order 1000 doses for the price of a paycheck, it leads to very bad outcomes. Often these stories end up with people blacking out for weeks or months at a time, destroying personal relationships, property and their careers, and only regain awareness after weeks in jail or a hospital. Pretty scary stuff.
Also, several stories from people buying time locked safes so they don't redose, blacking out, and finding their timelocked safe destroyed and empty.
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Cops arrest guy with RCs, etizolam and a mescaline derivative. Cop "accidentally" gets some on his lips (probably thought it was heroin and had a dip?) and gets sent to the infirmary tripping. Suspect is released when the substances turn out to be legal (but not for long - possibly in part because of this incident)
https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/comments/fpery3/c...
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The stories about "bath salts" pyrovalerones like aPVP and MDPV are quite insane. Extremely potent and addictive. These are like the fentanyls of the stimulant class and propel users into psychosis with relative ease. Like, compressing the effects of a 2-week meth binge into a single weekend, with all of the negatives that come along with that. I believe the report of the florida man who ate someone's face off was under the influence of one of these.
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=101129
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2011/05/man-high-on-bath-salt...
"i'm not high, i can do perfecly things functionally" pretty much sums that up - https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/comments/67g4a7/e... ("my memory is semi crystal clear" is also a great claim)
I took it a few times and honestly enjoyed it, my world started to glitter basically, however I dosed carefully and never took a second hit.
I think it would be a very interesting (and horribly unethical) hypothetical test to lock individuals in a their own rooms with sustenance, entertainment, and a baggies of moreish substances, force them to dose a few times, and then leave them for several days and see how much remains at a the end. Maybe offer a cash prize based on weight remaining.
I think this could likely measure executive control, long-term thinking and willpower pretty effectively. That you were able to dabble without sliding down the slippery slope probably indicates something positive about your mental fortitude.
So to me the sudden easy availability of (say) variations on the MDMA molecule to skirt past the UK misuse of drugs act (at the time) that resulted in the aminopropylbenzofuran family were an amazing thing, a little because of the legal status but mainly because it was appealing in itself. I wouldn't know where to find MDA, or MDEA or such things, but suddenly APB, MAPB, EAPB and other variants were there. I was able to try some of the novel tryptamines that came out of that without having the in-depth illicit-chemist hookups usually needed to source these things, even a novel lysergamide or two.
You're right to be concerned about the novel benzos, and also the novel cannabinoids, IMHO.
It's actually surprisingly effective as long as you don't mind just eating peppercorns. It definitely reduces the high from THC in edibles (and it's the only thing I know of that does besides CBD), and it promotes the health effects of turmeric.
Since we're talking about amphetamine here, this is actually the way Vyvanse works (it's bound to L-lysine and the liver splits it apart) and those nonlinearities are the reason it has such a longer effect life than Dexedrine/Adderall IR.
As an unfortunate side effect, you have to watch the pH of the meal you take it with, eg taking it with orange juice completely inactivates it.
The reason meth addicts have bad teeth isn't because of the dosage of the drug. It's because stimulants make you want to eat candy and drink sugar water, because meth addicts lose track of oral hygiene in favor of doing meth or something else more interesting, and because they're smoking it (along with other drugs).
I don’t know how I forgot cocaine, but it has the same jaw clenching problem
Some people even seem to enjoy absorbing Coffee through their nose.
But cathinones differ from "pure" substituted amphetamines by a ketone group at the Beta-position, which is what I mean here.
And regardless, the point stands for substituted phenethylamines like the 2C family, which are clearly not amphetamines.
Every portion of my body felt like it was being burned from the inside. I had to start tramadol to counter act the pain.
It also upped cranial pressure. Causing a lot of secondary problems.
This was made much worse as dosage went up.
I had to stop it before downward spiral completely destroyed me.
Vyvanse was a mild version of all this.
Can’t imagine anything more intense.
Benadryl will cause me and my kids to go completely nuts. Like climbing the ceiling of the hospital level.
Was describing that to one nurse and she almost started crying. Apparently she had same reaction and no one would believe her.
In contrast, every source I find cites the things the prior poster mentioned as the causes.
For example:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/meth...
> The dental problems may be caused by a combination of poor nutrition and dental hygiene as well as dry mouth and teeth grinding caused by the drug.
I would think they would be mentioning that the toxic smoke is a cause or contributor if there was evidence to support it.
“Meth mouth” is caused by the fact that it dries your mouth out, you grind your teeth a LOT, and is often observed in people that have used drugs long/hard enough to find themselves no longer taking care of their health in general, let alone oral hygiene. This often is coupled with financial ruin and utter alienation from society. Somehow, mysteriously, all of the rich house wives and Silicon Valley coders that use it develop meth mouth at a lower rate.
I don't think housewives would enjoy abusing it, unless they're studying for the GRE.
I'm not a big fan of any of the drug family.
Meth has a reputation for being a “poor people drug” which is not really accurate.
While a lot of poorer communities have been very publicly hit by it, that wasn’t at the exclusion of more affluent communities. It’s literally everywhere to some degree or another, and there are dealers that cater to pretty much everybody. (For example, I knew a meth dealer that owned a prominent local legitimate business, lived in one of the richest zip codes in the US, drove a black Mercedes and always showed up in a full suit and tie, sober.)
Anecdotally, in my head the image of a meth user is just… a person. They’re not rich or poor, young or old, skinny or fat, and they’re not necessarily acting weird. I suppose the only difference is the pupil dilation. My mental image of a meth addict is pretty much identical but maybe (but not always) a bit skinnier and maybe (but not always) acting weird.
It’s an incredibly shameful and stigmatized addiction and people sometimes go to extreme lengths to hide it.
At the end of the day it is a ubiquitous stimulant that people really seem to like.
So the mental image of meth as a poor person drug exists possibly because poor people bear a greater burden of the damage it causes.
I think it's more that when wealthy people use/abuse drugs, they have a way bigger financial, social, and medical safety net, so that their drug use ends up having a far smaller (and less publicly noticeable) impact on their lives and future opportunities.
Yes, people with less access to financial security have more statistical drug use, but the statistics might also be skewed by
1. the fact that non-wealthy people have more interaction with State-funded services (police, rehab, therapy, prisons), which track and report drug use more systematically & robustly than the obscenely-expensive, private, and very discreet rehab facilities the wealthy have access to
2. because of the aforementioned safety net, there's simply less likelihood of a wealthy person being 'caught' using drugs by an entity that would report those statistics (police, schools, etc).
The higher one's poverty rate, the more vulnerable one is to having their actions scrutinized, catalogued, and punished by the State.
Almost all of our drug statistics are based on interactions with police which produce legal consequences for a medical issue. All that said, I'm not saying "drugs are more safe than previously thought!" just that most of our public knowledge and legislation is about incarceration and leaves out an invisible population. The study was a few years old, I believe it was done just as the opiate epidemic came into view and well before anyone knew what carfentanyl was. Opiates affected rich white people's children has widened out the understanding a bit and migrogram opiates put a lot more people in front of police and medical. Also microgram opiates pop up in a lot of drugs that aren't supposed to contain them so I think that changes some things too.
A quick google has not produced this study or related, but if I find it, I'll tag it back in an edit.
Drugs as a whole are incredibly expensive as a lifestyle. Often times you’ll hear about poor people committing crime to support their habits and it’s understandable to think that they use drugs at a higher rate.
However more affluent people can simply afford the drugs, so when you hear about the mistakes they make while intoxicated it’s framed in a different narrative. Instead of some random poor person doing a robbery for meth, you read a story about a Hollywood actor getting into a car accident or a popular sports player committing sexual assault, or a singer going to a “retreat for exhaustion.”
This group has much more ability to control the story.
Humans are humans. The value proposition of “awake, alert, focused, euphoric, horny” appeals to people equally regardless of one’s bank balance.
Rich people aren’t noticeably smarter about avoiding these pitfalls as far as I can tell. They have bad days, make bad decisions, and develop bad habits just like everybody else.
https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_article2.shtm...
I've taken about 1000mg over the course of several months, at irregular intervals. While it is somewhat higher than Scott's 280mg/month, it's not an order of magnitude higher. Certainly nowhere near 90,000mg/month.
I can report one event of pain while peeing, a few days ago. So it looks like my body is not built to handle even moderate levels of ketamine use, and I'd have to stay closer to 100mg/month or lower to be on the safe side.
That said, let me reiterate, this is anecdote. I only think it's interesting because there is no other reasonable explanation for my recent urinary pain, and I didn't expect such low doses of Ketamine to have noticeable effects.
Applied topically? Or in the sense that the anesthetic disassociative effects dull most sensations?
I took it insufflated, the short duration of action and general anesthesia makes it decently practical.
(Of course it sounds pretty silly to recommend Ketamine for a small everyday itch. But that's what I had on hand, and I happen to dislike mosquitos with a very particular intensity =] )
In general it seems to make no distinction with addicts using high doses to overcome tolerance levels with recreational drug users in general.
Methamphetamines and amphetamines are not the same chemical, despite being similar.
https://methoide.fcm.arizona.edu/infocenter/index.cfm?stid=1...
The small differences between the molecules allow it to penetrate the blood brain barrier more efficiently, has longer lasting toxic effects and acts more as a central nervous system stimulant and
>less peripheral nervous system and cardiovascular stimulation activity. Another difference between amphetamine and MA is that amphetamine stimulates the CNS indirectly by activating the release of catecholamines and inhibiting their breakdown and storage. In contrast, MA stimulates the postsynaptic catecholamine receptors directly.[2]
Increased dosage is only one part of the difference between Methamphetamine and Amphetamines. Street meth is also far more likely to have fillers, leftover solvents and a bunch of other things that are not good for you.
>In general, recreational drug users take their drugs at doses so much higher than psychiatric patients that they're basically two different chemicals
Recreational drug users come in a wide range. The first two sections of the article speak about addicts doing extremely large doses, then seems to lump 'recreational drug users' altogether with that.
There is the person that uses amphetamines to get high SAT scores, high college grades and stops after landing a FAANG job.
There is the person using alcohol as "social lube". Never drinks alone, never gets wasted.
There is the person using LSD and other party drugs few times per year or less in a controlled setting
And then there are the extremely addicted people. And everything in between. It's a sliding scale. People need to be educated to learn the risks and recognize harmful behavioral patterns.
Simply telling people "drugs are bad for you" might be the abridged version of the truth. But is as effective as the "war on drugs" in reducing drug abuse.
Some times on the weekends I'll take 2mg or less of my ADHD meds just to clear the noise out of my head so I can get a nap. It works a treat, I wake up feeling refreshed and I can tackle some chores or do nothing at all with only muted versions of my normal symptoms.
I wouldn't say this is not recreational. It's my body and am curious about how it works and also I think it's always good to experiment with making very low doses or even medication fasts (in relation to stims specifically THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE) part of any regimen. Testing out strategies on my free time and not at work is just responsible. My ADHD medication makes me employable and has helped tremendously with my ability to maintain valuable relationships, it's crucial for me to make my way in a world designed around shit that is nearly torture for me, but I really hope to not be on the stims one day and I think it's going to take some work to figure that out. I'm a long time psychonaut so what is recreation to you might not be the same thing it is to me but I consider the observations and experiments to be recreational.
It profiled a young guy who had destroyed his bladder and needed to use a pump and hole in his belly to urinate.
Really disturbing.
It just skips right on to meth, and dosages, and never mentions Ketamine again.
We get that 280mg a month mostly doesn't, and 90,000mg a month can.
But are these "party people" the same as the people doing that higher amount prorated to daily? More specifically, are the "party people" I've been around secretly having bladder problems and getting a hole in their belly and not really ubering home but ubering to the hospital?
Let me know when you, or anyone passing by, find that article
One customer in particular used ketamine heavily. Due to a string of poor decisions, he was on federal probation and subjected to random drug tests.
He determined two drugs were not detectible by the tests at that time: ketamine and GHB. And he frequently consumed them. I remember him stumbling around my store, sipping caps of G every so often... sniffling behind tall pallets to suck up another key bump.
Over a year or so, he developed severe problems with his bladder, but wouldn't / couldn't stop his drug use, even after I broke it down to him plainly; "Bro, you are killing yourself."
From what I can tell, users don't keep track of doses, or much of anything. Their objectives are short term in nature: get high asap.
I suspect any such article that provides hard numbers like what you want will provide guestimates at best.
Doesnt seem to support enforcing varying levels of prohibition
The real con here is that you must limit your intake of fluids drastically
I'm not just talking about how a small percent of users spend the most on loot-box games, but also how the top 10% of drinkers consume 50% of all the alcohol sold in the USA.
I also believe it must apply to people who use cannabis, as a 'dab' setup allows a heavy user to inhale in one breath what would literally be 50 sessions worth of doses for an infrequent smoker.
This isn't necessarily the same topic as what the author wrote, but I'd like to see someone explore the connection.
It's important to clear up the FUD here because it has led to some backwards progress for legalization in states like Colorado recently.
Someone without a THC tolerance will be completely satisfied with a 5mg dose, total.
Thats 47 doses out of the 236mg the stoner _absorbed_
It’s true though that concentrated sources like this make it technically possible to ingest amounts that weren’t feasible before, I suppose.
If 120mg of Adderal made your teeth fall out then tons more people would have their teeth falling out.
Is he like 300 lbs?
You're right that 500mg is far into overdose territory for novice users. But, he probably has been using for a long time and has a very high tolerance.
The Vyvanse way amplified aggressive and confrontational tendencies for me though. I miss having time for hobbies however.
Usually bounce between 240-270lbs.
Even 90 is extremely high for XR, and would probably be broken into 2 45 doses throughout the day.
(You can't fill across State lines anymore, and insurance puts up astronomical red tape to dispensing more than a month at a time thanks to DEA quantity limits.)
You dampen your ability to forge paths of understanding in novel contexts, but the trade off is you're cut off emotionally from anyone around you because no one else is holding onto or working with the context you can throw around. When the impedance mismatch is that high, misanthropy is a hazard one has to actively decultivate. The practical upshot of coming down from it after acquiring your context/understanding though is you tend to generalize what you learned and render it more communicable. The anhedonia is also a #$&-+.
Point being, the medical literature is based on averages. Not everybody lives in the hump of a Gaussian distribution.
> I hesitate to say the risk of bladder injury from a normal psychiatric dose of ketamine is literally zero
The author's hesitation to make such a claim is very important to this quote.
But realistically, it compared dosages of drugs in heavy users compared to regular use at medical doses and the side effects of them. It never stated these were normal users, just stating the things that happen with a lot of use. I was surprised.
Sure, it could have went on to say that occasional recreational use probably won't hurt you, but that's difficult when it could be seen as promoting drugs and a lot of places have pretty draconian drug laws.
and to your point: some places have draconian laws about possession of MA in the same amounts that get prescribed in the US. if i were from thailand i would argue that this person is shamelessly drugging his patients.
there is nothing wrong with telling the truth about occasional recreational use, and yes, "drug addicts use a lot of drugs". that's a necessary condition for "addiction".