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Comment by loves_mangoes | Hacker News Reader

The way to test these things is by starting with an alergy test, a dose low enough that it definitely won't have any effect, and also definitely will not kill you.

If you feel fine, you wait several days and try a bigger dose, then see if you feel any effects. Stop when it becomes unpleasant or unwise.

This is not safe. There is no safe way to ingest dozens of unknown chemicals. Somehow, chemists like Shulgin show that it's possible to test all those compounds on yourself and still live a long healthy life. Still, I would not recommend tempting fate.

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"The way to test these things is by starting with an alergy test, a dose low enough that it definitely won't have any effect, and also definitely will not kill you. If you feel fine, you wait several days and try a bigger dose, then see if you feel any effects. Stop when it becomes unpleasant or unwise."

If you absolutely must experiment, this method is a good for hopefully avoiding short-term adverse effects, but not long-term ones.

Much safer is to stick to substances that have a long history of safe human use.

Long-term effects tends to come from prolonged use or very high amounts, not from doing smaller tests.

> Much safer is to stick to substances that have a long history of safe human use.

Yeah, so much is clear, but saying "stick to the classic ones" when one brings up experimentation with new ones doesn't bring much new to the table. Much better to provide education up front on how to dosage new drugs (not just new to the world, but new to your body too) for the ones who do want to exist in that space.

Absolutely. If you're looking for examples of things going wrong, the researchchemicals forum unfortunately has more than a few cases of people showing symptoms of serious nerve damage after experimenting with NPS ('novel psychoactive substances') stimulants ordered from RC vendors.

That is despite a (smaller) subset of them being careful and methodical with dosage.

Personally, as a very squeamish person, I'm more than happy to stick with the tried and true, and in desperately boring moderate amounts :)

Unfortunately almost all of the moderately safe, well known compounds were made illegal by people afraid of their own shadow.

Yes this is aggressive, and yes I'm quite angry about how these laws have held back scientific progress.

It's sad that the war on drugs is just pushing recreational drug users (often unknowingly) to more-readily synthesized chemicals with worse safety profiles, thereby increasing the net harm to society. It really puts the lie to the idea that harm reduction is part of the agenda in most western countries.

Say what you will about the recreational drugs of the 20th century, their long-term effects are well understood.

I think the main problem with bromo-dragonfly is that the active dose is somewhere around 200 micrograms, around 50-100 times more potent than what they were expecting (2cb-fly). In fact there’s very little other than lysergamides and some opioids that’s active at that level. I guess some sort of volumetric dilution might have helped, otherwise I t’s actually pretty difficult to dose that low.

The definition of survivor bias though

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