80% of people couldn't distinguish I.V. cocaine from I.V. caffeine in some study I am unable to locate at the moment, which I think involved Nora Volkow from NIH, either as PI or collaborator.
All this tells me is that I'm clearly consuming caffeine incorrectly in the form of coffee and/or tea.
Mucosal absorption is definitely way faster than pills (unless you chew them) or drink.
One time a friend and I tried making caffeine patches with DMSO as a transport, and put it on our arms with a cotton ball and tape...NOT PLEASANT. Extreme pruritus and erythema at the administration site. Hoo boy were we alert though. Nowadays the gum is perhaps a bit too fast even, it's easy to overdue and I get palpitations.
Follow me for more horrible ideas and biohacks. /s. I don't actually have a channel for my misadventures and shenanigans...maybe I should?
I can’t imagine buying caffeine for its own sake. The effects aren’t good enough. If I didn’t drink coffee/tea I just wouldn’t get any caffeine.
Also as I understand: it is against the rules to import it so it will be stopped if caught but not against the rules to have it so you do not get fines or anything on record. Thus if you buy it abroad you can bring it into country with you unless caught in which case they confiscate it. This used to be the same case with Modafinil / Adrafinil and I suppose it is still the same.
I don’t know what I would even do with liquid caffeine. But again, I don’t want caffeine badly enough to be looking for alternative ways to get it.
The problem of course is that they want to make sure you don't take too much caffeine and have a problem, so they want to limit the strength of what you can get and my understanding from him was the strength was limited so that it was hard to get anything into you with the strength of a cup of espresso, as ridiculous as that sounds but nanny-statism is a thing.
I was absolutely lit up and it was an incredible experience. I felt utterly amazing. Like I could take on the world. I had a hard time focusing at work, because I just wanted to be talking to people (not an extrovert) or going for a 10 mile run.
I can't compare it to cocaine, because I've never tried it, but I'm guessing the reason for your perception of it is because of your tolerance to caffeine.
> I can't compare it to cocaine
Sounds like you just did.
The past being a different country, I was fortunate in the early Noughts to be able to purchase Bolivian coca tea bags from an early online drug dealer called Amazon dot com.
They were a fantastic addition to the tea shelf. I would favor a cup of the coca tea when energy was low going into an evening with social plans. Even, bright energy, short acting (duration is two hours roughly) barely feel it fading.
How does that compare to refined cocaine taken intranasally? Remarkably, I can't tell you, I don't touch the stuff. Sure wish I could still buy mate de coca though.
Coca tea is awesome.
Immediate, bright energy, short acting (duration is half hour), feel it fading within minutes (which is why you want more)
Should perhaps be insufflation
Insufflation is actually a misnomer for nasal administration, insufflation is blowing something into a person for medical reasons, not using vacuum to pull it into the body.
Now, it's a common misnomer, which I generally let pass without correction. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!
Sure, some people do fall down into the trap of doing something too much, this is true for lots of things, including video games (which I've been more addicted to than drugs at some points in my life). But if you have a kind of normal life during the week that you like too much to lose, then it's not that hard to keep your drug usage to where it's accepted, for your sake and others.
I do love cocaine, but seeing what happen to others when consuming things too much, is a great tool to avoid liking it too much so it takes over your life.
Aren't 45% of US adults obese?
But normal. The cloud of thoughts gone, I am able to make myself do anything with one thought, I have energy, the aches are gone, the tinnitus is gone, I don't second guess, I don't overthink. I just am and I do. It's amazing. This is what people like Bezos and Musk must be like lol
Amphetamine probably feels like this, too, although many say it's actually quite distinct. The price, (un)availability, very short duration and the comedown are big negatives, sadly.
But yeah, comparing it to caffeine... nah. Can't comment on IV, but I can compare it to insufflated caffeine. It has some similarities, but the important parts are missing. Or maybe I'm just desensitized to caffeine. At least I'm a good fake coke detector lol
“So, the first time you tried cocaine, were you surprised that you didn’t react the way everyone else did? Did it calm you down instead of getting you keyed up?”
“I’ve never done cocaine”
“Look, yes, some doctors might disqualify you for stimulant prescriptions for admitting to past substance abuse, but it doesn’t bother me at all. I actually do some research at $local_university specifically looking at how properly managed ADHD dramatically reduces the chance of substance abuse.”
“Serious, I’ve smoked pot, I’ve done mushrooms, but I’ve never tried coke. Had lots of opportunities if I wanted to, but it didn’t appeal to me”
“Huh! With lots of the patients that come through here, they see me for the first time after casually mentioning to a GP that they’re worried they’re weird when coke doesn’t work right for them!”
I was diagnosed twice, both times in adulthood. The first time was by a neuropsychologist who did something like 8-10 hours of testing over about 3 days. I’m not even sure if she ever asked me about any sort of drug use.
The second person to diagnose me was a physician at the student health center where I was a graduate student. Believe it or not, he was actually a pediatrician! I think he may have asked me about my caffeine consumption (excessive!), while also being impressed by my shockingly normal blood pressure (almost always between 110/70 and 125/83). I actually think going on Adderall might have lowered my BP overall, due to the increased ability it gave ume to tolerate and problem solve my way through stressful situations.
> This is what people like Bezos and Musk must be like
I would agree with you that it makes me feel normal in the sense that's what it seems I should have been. The first time I tried it, I was like "so when I'm gonna feel the effect?" for a few seconds and then I realized I feel it and thought "That's the way it [life] 's meant to be played" :D
Have you been evaluated for ADHD? This is one of the classic tells. Methylphenidate is structurally and chemically very similar to cocaine.
Vyvanse is definitely the best when it comes to duration and classical stimulants. Modafinil has even longer duration, but it isn't always as effective at targeting ADHD symptoms. Vyvanse is kind of stupid expensive, but you can get a savings card. It would be $330 for me even with a good Rx plan, and the card knocks it down to $45/month. Sounds like you would also respond well to Concerta (extended release methylphenidate). I don't like it because I apparently have the metabolism of a honeybadger and get like 4-6h of otherwise "all day" meds like concerta. I have to split my vyvanse and take it in two doses to get a full day.
> This is what people like Bezos and Musk must be like
My headcannon is both these guys are ADHD and/or on the spectrum, have a doctor's script for vyvanse, adderall, modafinil, and/or whatever else, and have figured out how to ride the tolerance curve properly to maximize productivity.
However, Ritalin is less neurotoxic than amphetamines that can indeed hike your risks of Parkinson’s (and probably few other things)
Pls send some studies, very interesting.
> We observed decreased expression of this enzyme for all applied substances.
Yeah no I'm not buying it. Amphetamine, perhaps, but atomoxetine causing DNA damage? That sets off my "spurious results" detector, hard.
I'll look into it more but I've done deep research into all things psychostimulants and I have not seen any indication of genotoxicity of methylphenidate or atomoxetine. Amphetamine has a slight risk of increased oxidative stress due to making dopamine leak places where it shouldn't, and DA's electronic structure makes it prone to generating singlet oxygen and ROS, but it's typically only observed in really high doses, like the equivalent of hundreds of mgs per dose.
Like, maybe there's some increased ROS due to any drug that boosts DA/NA (oxidizing catecholamines produces ROS in general), but like, "ritalin causes DNA damage" is the wrong conclusion to draw from that.
The chief problem I have with all stimulants is too fast of an impulse response. It comes on too fast, crashes too fast. For me, for instant release drugs, I experience the following half-lives:
- methylphenidate: 60-90m
- amphetamine salts/dexedrine: 3-4h
- caffeine: 3h
- modafinil: 6-8h
Once a drug reaches about 1.5 HLs (about one Tau/time constant, conveniently), I start fading hard. There is a hysteresis effect: peaking/crashing/re-dosing is not the same as plateauing at some in-between value. Once my brain checks out, that's kind of it for the day.
So what Concerta, Adderall XR, and similar do for me, is give me what feels like two randomly spaced doses of instant release over a 4-6h window. This is unpredictable and thrashes my mental state. It peaks too high and crashes too low. The companies market these drugs based on averaging the plasma profiles of individuals to show a nice smooth curve, but I dug into the literature and this is NOT what you see on an individual level, at all. Concerta just doesn't do it for me.
Vyvanse is way smoother. The plasma peak is already low-pass filtered by the pharmacokinetics of hydrolysis of the lysdexamphetamine. As a result, my subjective experience is basically a 6h plateau. I split my dose to basically get a nice, actually smooth profile over 8-12h with a gentle taper instead of a crash. That also means lower peak plasma conc, and peak plasma is the greatest risk factor in neurotoxicity.
If you actually dig into the literature on neurotoxicity of amphetamines, you basically don't see any until you start getting to the equivalent of 50-100mg IR, and even then it's basically within the noise floor until you get to hundreds of mg per day.
ADHD is just most likely because it’s so common, with sleep apnea being close second. I would rule out ADHD and sleep disorders first.
Potentially also, UARS, which is also form of sleep disordered breathing but not commonly detected with current technology (and also not easy to treat), some physicians do a full nasopharyngeal endoscopy under propofol anesthesia. I believe it’s incredibly undiagnosed and probably accounts for more than 10% of apnea cases, but most patients are thin instead of obese and so nobody suspects apnea-like disorder. If you needed braces or needed corrective jaw surgery UARS should be ruled out.
ADHD can be somewhat objectively measured with some tests like CPT, but that would also often show abnormalities in sleep disorders.
If your measures of attention, and sleep study, along with wakefulness maintenance test, if warranted, are all normal, and your pulse and blood pressure is normal, and by normal I mean very close to ideal 120/80, with hr below 70 - maybe you are just a mutant.
See a good neuropsych that specializes in sleep disorders. Stanford is one of the better centres for that. They will know what to do if it’s not a sleep issue also.
dx of ADHD and good response do not preclude the possibility of other disorders.
you can obtain treatment that way, and investigate other causes later, you may have to wash out from stimulants for a few weeks for the CPT and WMT, and preferably for sleep studies also, because they increase muscle tone and if your sleep issue is due to some neuromuscular issue, stimulants may partially obscure it. (This is still in research, and most physicians won’t tell you this, as it’s not yet standard of care in most places afaik)
That is complete bullshit.
IV bleach would also have pretty serious effects, but likely no one would confuse it for cocaine.
The onus is on inter_netuser to provide evidence for the claim, not for pennaMann to refute it. I would imagine that literally no study exists comparing the effects of intravenous caffeine and cocaine, because who would possibly fund that study, and to what end, and what review board would approve it?
> Intravenous nicotine and caffeine: subjective and physiological effects in cocaine abusers
> The subjective and physiological effects of intravenously administered caffeine and nicotine were compared in nine subjects with histories of using caffeine, tobacco, and cocaine.
> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11160635/
Since this study exists, why is it so far off the other study exists? I don't know why it got funded, or to what end, but I'm sure happy it did. We need to study drugs more, not less.
Idk why people are so surprised. Even iv DMT has been funded and officially researched some time around 90s
Also, LD50 values are always extrapolated from single dose tests on lab animals, typically rats or mice. Not only is that not how a human would end up ingesting 10+ grams of caffeine, the LD50 varies considerably from one animal to the next.
For instance:
> [S]ome LD50s for dichlorvos, an insecticide commonly used in household pesticide strips, are listed below:[0]
> Oral LD50 (rat): 56 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (rabbit) 10 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (pigeon:): 23.7 mg/kg
> Oral LD50 (rat): 56 mg/kg
> Oral (mouse): 61 mg/kg
> Oral (dog): 100 mg/kg
> Oral (pig): 157 mg/kg
As you can see, these numbers don’t seem to scale up in any intuitive way when you start crossing animal species.
——-
If we imagine a study where the users have never had either I.V. caffeine nor cocaine, well, how are you supposed to reliably distinguish between two stimulants hitting your heart and brain directly, without passing through any sort of blood brain barrier, when having that experience for the first time?
Now, it would be a useless study for us. But not useless for the chucklehead who padded his or her CV with it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25414797/
or this :
https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2002/09/02/Coffee-acts... https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q4/mixing-ener... https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q4/mixing-ener...
they seem to imply something similar what you are stating
this one found no such effect on rats:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
and most of the articles I found say that caffeine INCREASES the effect of caffeine
That's expected, there is a reason why it's most common cocaine adulterant, along with lidocaine.
People cutting it probably read the same studies.
https://archive.fo/bLX94 >This is obviously worrying. “Cocaine is one of the most addictive substances of abuse,” says Volkow. “Ritalin we give to children.” She stresses, however, that taking a stimulant orally is very different to injecting or snorting it. Intravenous caffeine also resembles cocaine, she points out.
h/t to those with better google-fu than mine. all from this thread.
fwiw, caffeine is also the most common adulterant in cocaine, so chances are your iv cocaine also had a good amount of caffeine and lidocaine in it.
....but why would you even try pure i.v. caffeine though? cocaine i can understand, but caffeine?
Sometimes when you're an IV drug user and you're out of real drugs, you do weird shit. I had a tub of anhydrous caffeine, had to try it.
I get that you think you can disprove things like this with science, and that's generally a good perspective to have. But cocaine and caffeine are nothing alike. It's the difference between a kiss on the cheek and a punch in the face. You could describe those two things in the same terms if you wanted to be abstract and clinical enough, but the idea that they are indistinguishable is laughable to anyone who has experienced both.
Caffeine is a moderate boost to wakefulness. You feel a little more energetic, a little more awake. Maybe a bit happier. Cocaine is every form of success you've ever felt multiplied by 100, rolled into one, and compressed into 3 seconds. You ever win a low probability bet, or be right about something when everyone you know doubted you? That's what cocaine feels like.
Shoot up caffeine and you might work a little harder for a couple of hours. Shoot up cocaine and you might marry a stripper you don't even know yet.
EDIT: What I will say is that, perhaps at a sufficiently low dose, they may be hard to distinguish. But at the doses consumed by recreational users, they very much are not. My guess is that these studies are using very low doses of cocaine compared to what a recreational user would take, for ethical/safety reasons. So, in that context, it may be true, but you should not take that to mean that cocaine and caffeine are in any meaningful sense indistinguishable.
If you think cocaine and caffeine are even remotely comparable in their effects, then, well, spring chicken, let me introduce you to the world.....
[*] I'm only calling out the LDS community here because they don't consume coffee, or cocaine, generally speaking.
They just drink ephedrine instead of caffeine.
But, due to a lot of retroactive canon gymnastics, cold caffeinated beverages like soda are consumed in great quantities by Mormons. Actually, under the latest "official" stance, tea made from the "mormon tea" plant would actually be banned, as it's a "hot beverage" with mental effects.
The idea that caffeine is comparable to cocaine is pretty nuts. People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?
I can totally believe that if you give someone who’s never done drugs a high dose of caffeine and tell them it’s cocaine, they might believe you. But that’s not at all the same as the two actually being indistinguishable.
“I feel like my heart’s going to explode and I can’t stop moving!” “That’s the cocaine.” “Not what I would have expected, but okay!”
I am quite certain the study exists, because I recall her talking about the findings, and then reading the abstract.
But I’d love to be wrong. That would be a very interesting result.
but, like it or not, caffeine is a psychostimulant, and psychostimulant substitution is fairly well established, idk whats the controversy.
if you want to find it, you might have to crawl thru every reference of volkow's 100+ papers on cocaine.
If you want to use the reference, I suggest you find it and validate it exists before trying to make some claim.
I also don’t think anything malicious but think it’s more likely that you misunderstand something than the paper exists and you can’t find it.
As a reader trying to determine if your claim is bullshit it’s not worth the risk that you’re wrong for me to exhaustively review all 100+ papers to make sure it doesn’t exist.
As the saying goes, “If you hear hoofbeats outside your door, it’s probably a horse not a zebra.”
>Intravenous caffeine also resembles cocaine, she points out.
If you were seriously addicted but not high at the time, I expect you might feel agitated, but also kind of sorry for yourself / miserable and not so much in a murdering frame of mind.
Large amounts of money (which large amounts of cocaine can be exchanged for), on the other hand...
The DARE program told me that definitely 100% of illegal drug users eventually turn to murder to acquire more, but that might have been an exaggeration.
Someone rips you off in the drug industry you and your buddies go beat them up and take their stuff of value. Someone rips you off in above the table business you sue them.
Heroin withdrawals are quite painful (literally), and many users are also simply suffering from endogenous depression that responds to almost nothing, and in fact used to be treated by morphine.
Same goes for alcohol and benzo withdrawals that WILL give you seizures and quite possibly death.
Psychostimulants (cocaine, amphetamines, cathionines, other assorted alkaloids, including caffeine) withdrawals means being very tired, lethargic and sleeping a lot, they are not life threatening.
If people could buy cocaine at Starbucks (or get cheap stuff at a dollar store), would supply be such a problem for users that they resort to crime?
If caffeine were banned tomorrow and prices rose a thousand-fold, to what lengths would millions of addicts go to postpone the dreaded headache, constipation and lethargy for another day?
I would expect society would have a bad weekend, and then people would get over it quickly.
Honestly: easily accessible opiates are known (history) to do a lot of damage.
here is a very old one, but oral not i.v.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4900434/
5mg/10mg amphetamine sulphate vs 300mg and 600mg of caffeine (all oral). The study scales ended up being skewed because one subject had paradoxical response and felt relaxed instead on amphetamines, lol.
If you have access to the full text, check out page 89: fig5 and fig6.
Volkow's lecture may have referenced multiple studies, I've heard that in the context of her lecture on various findings on psychostimulants. amphetamines and cocaine have been fairly repeatedly shown fairly consistent substitutes, so it may have been a study on amp vs caffeine.
She just loves to study and talk about cocaine for some reason, has literally a hundred+ papers on it.
That happens to me and I want to research what it means but your link doesnt seem to work
Being calm and relaxed on amphetamines can potentially mean there is some arousal disorder: sleep apnea, narcolepsy, delayed sleep syndrome, or just chronic sleep deficit. Maybe concussions (mild TBI), amphetamines work for that too.
ADHD is most likely because it’s so common, with sleep apnea being close second. I would rule out ADHD and sleep disorders first.
Potentially also, UARS, which is also form of sleep disordered breathing but not commonly detected with current technology (and also not easy to treat), some physicians do a full nasopharyngeal endoscopy under propofol anesthesia. I believe it’s incredibly undiagnosed and probably accounts for more than 10% of apnea cases, but most patients are thin instead of obese and so nobody suspects apnea-like disorder. If you needed braces or needed corrective jaw surgery UARS should be ruled out.
ADHD can be somewhat objectively measured with some tests like CPT, but that would also show abnormalities in sleep disorders.
If your measures of attention, and sleep study, along with wakefulness maintenance test, if warranted, are all normal, and your blood pressure is normal - maybe you are just a mutant.
See a good neuropsych that specializes in sleep disorders. Stanford is one of the better centres for that.
I don't know, when's the last time Starbucks was selling pure caffeine injectable via IV?
on edit: another day, another downvote, but that doesn't change the fact that the whole discussed comparison is between IV versions of the drug, and as such it's ridiculous to compare cocaine against Starbucks coffee as if that disproves the assertion.
Allow me to introduce you to a bit of unpleasantness called the Opium Wars.
Which could also be called the "Give us the Tea, or Else" wars.
Sugar can't be as addictive as heroin! People give blowjobs to get more heroin, no one gives a blowjob for a chocolate bar.
But that has nothing to do with addictiveness.
I don't need to murder someone for coffee or provide oral sex for a snickers, because I can easily get those things anywhere, anyway
I just mean that it's a bad argument.
>Intravenous caffeine also resembles cocaine, she points out.
https://www.nytimes.com/1914/02/08/archives/negro-cocaine-fi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_in_the_United_States
however, modafinil it's actually cleaner and even safer than caffeine. That's the point. a less toxic, safer drug is illegal to possess (w/o rx).
How would you justify making a much more toxic drug completely unrestricted, what would be your argument? We'd just have cops showing confiscated bags of big bad evil drug caffeine to kids in DARE classes.