Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved (1991)
erowid.org
erowid.org
Anne was there, too. I talked with her afterwards and she was so kind, sharing stories about their last weekend in Barcelona and the power of a mushroom trip combined with Gaudi’s architectural works and sculptures.
It all made me realize: I still want to be taking psychedelics in my old age. Why not?
Maybe if you don't count frying your brain as a risk to your physical health.
> MDMA provides an immediate enjoyable feeling by stimulating the release of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain. Unfortunately, abnormal regulation of the brain neurotransmitters, as well as the increased oxidative stress causes damage to the brain neurons after the MDMA exposure.
>MDMA has been administered to approximately 1,700 human subjects with only one serious adverse reaction.
There are currently human studies of MDMA. These would probably not be moving forward if they found "brain frying" although I appreciate your willingness to read abstracts
I was surprised to learn the US Military resurrected MDMA in the 50's and then in the 70's Prof Alex Shulgin got hold of it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/
Other country's handled it differently. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6435835/
But it does lend credence to the conspiracy theory that the British security services started flooding the football terraces to reduce the football hooliganism that was blighting the British isles, as "documented" by later films like Football Factory starring Danny Dyer and many more.
Still without it, would the world have what the US call EDM and what others call the Rave culture?
If they experienced serotonin syndrome it was quite easy to just point at the reported seratonergic substance that had been ingested (and which also may not have been present at all, depending on the source).
However, the same is repeated in literature about plain methamphetamine, not just methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine, so I would not entirely trust the current state of science on this.
I trust specific doctors who specialize in psychedelic medicine and psychiatry who have deep understanding of the metabolic pathways and pharmacokinetics of these substances.
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/serotonin-syndrome-myths-...
It does "something" to your cognitive abilities that is not beneficial. I don't know how permanent it is. Probably recoverable in most cases?
Maybe not using 3 time a year (or whatever) but multiple times per week for months on end yes, it makes a person get "funny in the head". I've seen it with more then one person.
I'm not anti drug nor denying therapeutic use (makes sense) but I'm fully convinced from observation MDMA is not risk free or harmless, especially when used to excess. Yes, anecdotal. But just a word of advice for whatever it's worth.
The dangers of riding a horse are immediately apparent and it's easy to link cause and effect. Additionally the damage from a bad horse ride (unless you hit your head) are more likely to be physical trauma, a broken leg etc.
The (possible) negative effects of a drug on cognition are more subtle and harder to attribute.
Again, I'm not anti drug at all (especially legally speaking).
It's just, what I saw and I feel I should relate it as a bit of a cautionary tale. I am convinced overuse of MDMA has a negative effects on the kind of cognition that allows a person to plan, link cause and effect, think abstractly and that kind of thing. It's not a scientific study, just what I believe from observation.
One set might be jacked adrenals due to your propensity for epic soundtracks and caffeine or chocolate consumption.
Another set might be alcohol and social feedback.
If you spend a lot of time in these states, your unbiased function diminishes because you are optimizing for a different chemical bias.
If you are not so far gone, or are exceptionally motivated or introspective, you can integrate those experiences, and it might expand your awareness. If you can’t, or don’t, it might increase your function while using but reduce your sober function. This effect will increase as you spend more and more time ‘high’: you are transitioning function within your own constrained cognitive capacity to a different bias.
That range of regulation is what we drift towards when we start adapting to an exogenous compound (some drug) that is consistently present through repeated dosing.
Considering that information, we do adapt to become "normal functioning" (according to the previously mentioned genetics) and it becomes more difficult again when we suddenly remove the drug (again forcing us out of that range that our genetic regulatory mechanisms would like us in)
During periods that we are using the exogenous compound we can form new habits driven by changes made by the drug which can stick around after removal, as removal of the drug won't suddenly undo many of the synaptic changes that occurred. I think this is what we can call the integration of experiences and I think that long term potentiation is a big factor in those changes (which is a pretty neat topic on its own, I'd recommend reading about LTP if you want to understand some of the mechanisms of learning)
that is not use but abuse, and I'd expect bad consequences.
A soda a day rots far more brains than an occasional trip.
https://books.google.nl/books?id=wL5G8s3xpxwC&lpg=PR11&ots=w...
Edit: I'm not a smoker, I'm a toxicnaut.
It's maybe less funny today but ridicule remains the appropriate response.
heh. that's mostly fair, though DARE waged a propaganda campaign entirely unmatched by teenage druggies, who are mostly just people trying to get by.
Drugs, prescription or not, can be very bad when used in excess or ignorance. These people know what they're putting in their bodies, and have the knowledge and means to test or even make them, but the majority of drug users don't.
The best way to advance may be to let more smart people try drugs without artificial consequences.
Dose is probably important in all this but it’s hard to say with such a small, probably biased, sample size.
And there is no evidence that McKenna’s drug use did not cause his brain cancer. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The best we can say is that we do not know.
There are lots of studies on the safety of psychedelics.
Your ignorance does not indicate lack of research in the real world.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt>
In 2007 Nutt published a controversial study on the harms of drug use in The Lancet.[17] Eventually, this led to his dismissal from his position in the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD); see government positions below. Subsequently, Nutt and a number of his colleagues who had subsequently resigned from the ACMD founded the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, which was later re-named Drug Science.[18]
(read: the uk government didn't like what he had to say, that drugs weren't totally appalling meritless things, so they sacked him)
from that wiki page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarmCausedByDrugsTable.sv...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Development_of_a_rational...>
But the next time drugs comes up you'll doubtless post the same thing.
there are many studies about these medicines - curious where this statement that there are none is coming from?
here's a tip of the iceberg, a good place to start --
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00952990.2016.11...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/hallucin...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/magic_mu...
Also I was interested by your other comment suggesting I think that B6 could increase indogenous production of HT-something in the body... Did I get that right? Could you maybe point me to the direction of more of that type of information?
Edit: Thanks for sending me down the 5-HT2b rabbit hole. This was the cause of the Phen-Fen appetite suppressant heart issues. All psychedelics do seem to affect 5-HT2b receptors. I assume this is a dose dependent effect—where a daily high dose of Phen-Fen would be much more dangerous than occasional low weight psychedelic doses. But I appreciate the grounded caution and more research is clearly needed, ideally before I’m 70+.
You can't know that. Those are pretty common diseases of advanced age. It might've been the drugs, it might not.
His wife took as many psychedelics as he did, right along with him, and she's fine.
With this kind of super-heavy use of novel psychoactive substances, there really can never be anything but anecdotes. We'll never see double-blind studies of large groups of people taking all the substances that the Shulgins took over their lifetimes, so anecdotes are all we have.
1) Sasha generally took low/threshold doses. Drugs are all about the dosage. It might not be so easy for you to replicate that.
2) He was an extraordinarily talented chemist and would make the drugs himself. You would need to either use shrooms/peyote (harder to take low doses( or buy from the darknets (with questionable safety and dosage)
3) He is an anecdote/small sample size, we don't have a large scale study here
4) There is an element of survivorship bias - you've never heard of the chemist who made LSD in their 30s and had a mental breakdown because, well, they didn't write a book
Why? If you can take a full dose, you can take a threshold dose. Just divide the full dose up - e.g. dissolve a blotter in a 10ml dropper bottle of vodka. Then 1ml = 10% of a dose (or probably a bit less).
Maybe a bit harder for weird research chems, but if you're getting into those then hopefully you'll do the research to know how to dose correctly.
> use shrooms/peyote (harder to take low doses
Again, why? It's particularly easy to take low doses of shrooms, all you need is a scale that measures down to 0.1g, such as a coffee scale.
> you've never heard of the chemist who made LSD
However, they also didn't die. Because then we would have heard about it.
If you have the means ($100? $200) there are labs (or lab) that will test the chemical for you before you take it.
This is allegedly because the government doesn't want to help illegal drug manufacturers to refine their products. Which, if true, is horrible because it doesn't lead to improved safety but to more dangerous illegal drugs.
1) It's not that hard to take low doses of psychedelics as regularly or irregularly as you'd like. They are extremely non-compulsive.
2) Testing is not so hard these days in many parts of the world. In my city there are at least a couple mass spectrometry machines available for free testing. Besides that, no need for powders from the internet; growing magic mushrooms at home is a simple project anyone can take on.
3) No we don't have a study, so like a lot of things in life we have to rely on more informal observation and anecdotes. A couple of other notable psychedelic old-timers are Albert Hofmann, Paul Stamets. I've met many "psychedelic seniors" over the years, and they've always been very bright, admirable people.
Personally, I've been using psychedelics for 30y, and while I can see that they aren't completely without risks, on the whole they are of great benefit and I plan on aging into becoming one of these psychedelic seniors myself.
4) Psychedelic use is associated with improved mental health outcomes: - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881114565653 - https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/5/2/article-p83.xm...
I haven't heard of the psychedelic chemist who had a mental breakdown, I think that's a myth. The biggest risk to mental health for a psychedelic chemist is ending up in prison.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01301-9
"Repeated lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) reverses stress-induced anxiety-like behavior, cortical synaptogenesis deficits and serotonergic neurotransmission decline" (in mice)
Anecdotally I do know someone who had a psychotic episode on psychedelics and spent awhile in recovery. They eventually did recover, but that did make me wary.
As for your point about doses - low doses are hard on chemicals because you don't know what you're getting. Using mushrooms, well dosage varies wildly per gram depending on what you've picked. It wasn't a point about addiction.
I have had great experiences on threshold doses of mushrooms (and experimented on much higher doses of acid in my past), but I do think a healthy amount of caution is generally good.
Definitely. These are potent levers, not toys. Knowing your dose is critical and really does need to be emphasized. Thanks.
Re: chemicals - you can know very accurately but you really have to know what you're doing and most people aren't up for the effort.
"Drugs don't make you stupid. You already were."
I don't know how much I want to put any faith into that being correct; but the anecdotal evidence definitely seems to agree. From my angle at least.
When taking mystery drugs mixed with other drugs, you really have no idea what that's doing to your brain.
First, he knew exactly what each compound was, as he made them himself. He wasn't trying mystery drugs he was completely clueless about.
Second, he tried the smallest dose he suspected might be safe and active, based on his world-class chemical and pharmacological knowledge.
Third, he didn't (to my knowledge) mix novel compounds, but only tried pure ones.
Fourth, if he got even a hint that they might be toxic, he stopped doing them, and only if there were no hints of toxicity did he slowly, very slowly up the dosage and let his wife/friends try it to see if his experiences were unique due to maybe his own body chemistry or other factors.
This nothing like the majority of people, who often don't have the capacity, desire, patience, or knowledge to test their drugs themselves or go to the effort and expense of having someone else do it for them.
Even if the compounds are tested by, say, groups like DanceSafe at festivals, they can only tell you what in the compound they're testing matches their reference sample.. if it also contains some other novel compound that they don't have a reference sample for then they can't tell you what it is. It's a completely different situation from Shulgin, as he knew exactly what was in the compounds he made himself.
What Shulgin did was still risky... especially in the long-term.. and I personally wouldn't do it myself, just as I wouldn't climb Mt Everest, fly in a wingsuit, go extreme skiing, or risk my life/brain in a million other ways, but I'm grateful to him for doing so in the way he did and publishing the results.
Again, that's completely different from the reckless way most people do mystery drugs.
Read the first part of PiHKAL (ie. the part that's deliberately not published on the website the parent HN post links to).
It's all there. He goes in to great detail about exactly how he did what he did and why.
"EXTENSIONS AND COMMENTARY: This specific compound is probably the first sulfur-containing phenethylamine to have been evaluated as a potentially active CNS stimulant or psychedelic. It was a complete, total, absolute unknown. The first trials were made at the sub-microgram level, specifically at 0.25 micrograms, at 11:30 AM on September 3, 1975. Part of this extreme precaution was due to the uniqueness of a new heteroatom in a phenethylamine system. But part was due to the strange manic excitement that occurred at the time of the isolation and characterizing of the final product in the laboratory. Although it was certainly all placebo response, I was jumpy and unable to stay in the lab for more than a few minutes at a time. Maybe dust in the air? Maybe some skin contact with the free base? Now, I know there was nothing, but the possibility of extraordinary potency was real, and I did indeed wash everything down anyway. In fact, it took a total of 18 trials to work the experimental dosage up to as much as a single milligram. In retrospect, overly cautious. But retrospection, as they say, is cheap."
starting at 1/4 microgram (that's 250 nanograms!), took 18 steps up to a milligram. I approve. And thanks BTW.
However, the entry you quote certainly does illustrate his diligence and commitment to safety. I very much doubt he would have been able to discover and sample something like 400+ psychoactive substances in probably many thousands of trials without being as careful and safety-conscious as he was.
Actually, he avoided animal experimentation. In PiKHAL, I believe he wrote that he hadn't experimented with animals in 20 years. His method was to first try each of the substances he discovered on himself.
To paraphrase him he says something like "inserting thermocouples into that rectums of restrained rabbits is not something that I'm much enthused about and I have a jaundiced view of."
I'll try to find that link and update it heh :)
So for your reference that's exactly what I meant by animal experimentation obviously helped him stay safe by giving him some more data on the compound before he took it himself.
edit: link: last paragraph here https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal125.sht...
Then again <https://dirtworship.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/sasha-shulgin-o...>
"This (MME) is one of the very few compounds with which I actually risked (and took) the lives of experimental animals" - worth reading the rest
it wouldn’t make any sense to compare it to an existing sample. not to mention the legality of that, depending on where the festival is happening.
if you are curious, all of their tests are available on their website
When I ran across this book, Shulgin instantly became my hero for daring to do what no one had done before -- to open to the world a treasure trove of hundreds of psychedelics, both in how they are made and what their effects were, each of which he and his intrepid group of psychonauts had tried on themselves.
This was completely unheard of at the time, at least on that scale... it probably still is, especially if you consider that after this magnum opus he came out with another huge tome: TiHKAL, which contained information on hundreds of other compounds.
If more people were even half as generous and helpful to the world, it would be a much better place.
ORDERING INFORMATION: The first half of PiHKAL is an excellent commentary on the Shulgin's personal experiences with phenethylamines. It is highly recommended and well worth purchasing the book. Purchasing the book also gets you a far more complete cross-index into the chemicals described in the second half. If you are seriously interested in the chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy." And
The Copyright for Part 1 of PiHKAL has been reserved in all forms and it may not be distributed. Part 2 of PiHKAL may be distributed for non-commerical reproduction provided... And
This is the online version of the second half of the book "PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story" by Alexander and Ann Shulgin. It is presented with the express permission of the authors in order to spread the factual information as widely as possible and make it permanently available in the public domain....
Unrelated, but couldn't help myself:
I am awestruck by one thing in particular. At one point Anne took a drug that basically induced a severe psychiatric disorder, a very painful one. It was essentially the worst case scenario for drug users. But eventually she decided to take decisive action by taking another powerful drug, MDMA. Believe me, I can tell you from personal experience, when you have a severe psychiatric disorder caused by a drug, the idea of taking another drug is terrifying. But, believing it would fix her, she did. And the crazy thing is that it actually worked. I will never understand the strength it must have taken to do that.
Sasha shulgin in the greatest hero of our time. He experimented on himself to pave the way for the cure to PTSD and soon many other things. He should be put on the dollar bill.
It might have been strength rooted in desperation.
Incidentally, Shulgin didn't discover MDMA himself. It was discovered around 1910 IIRC, but hadn't found to be useful back then. He rediscovered it much later.
There were some other gems like (if I'm not mistaken) someone's heart stopping after a massive hit of something exotic. I want to say DMT but I'm not sure.
It's useful advice, for those who don't want to get burnt out on acid. So many suffer the 'grim meathook reality' as Hunter Thompson wrote. I mean psychedelics do induce spiritual experiences when the set & setting is right, but too many over-indulge and think they're the Messiah / Second Coming after it all, which is dangerous.
Also: the west has no shamanic centers where we can do psychedelics safely, apart from the Native American churches where you can do peyote rituals without getting arrested. Sadly the men in white coats are the closest thing to a shaman you can get in the West, and we sometimes need a sitter/guide especially with high doses, preferably someone who has done it before multiple times, and can calm you down incase you start having very pronounced anxiety.
That quote originally came from Alan Watts, not Terence McKenna (who, incidentally, didn't hang up the phone until near the end of his life, when he supposedly was too scared to do more mushrooms).
Alan Watts said:
"[P]sychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen."[1]
To which I think it was Ram Dass or Dennis McKenna who answered: "I don't hang up on my teachers."
Also, what if you forget the message (as often the states in question are ineffable and the insights one gets are not able to be carried in to ordinary waking consciousness, or not for long)... or what if there is no message, just as seeing a sunset is devoid of messages but still worth seeing? What if you consider the experience sacred or a way to connect to your god(s), the spirit world, transcendent reality, or nature? What if you use psychedelics to enhance your creativity, have fun, or treat your depression?
None of these uses fit neatly in to the narrow "message" paradigm that Watts was talking about.
[1] - https://medium.com/@allevity/they-killed-alan-watts-quote-8b...
But I do know that often those seeking 'inspiration' will become so enamored with their own insights that they often fail to execute on what they have found. Instead they do everything they can to maintain that feeling of enlightenment at the expense of truly realizing the meaning of their insight.
This isn't specific to drug use, it's not specific to software development or any set of tasks, it is simply a common theme in human behavior I have anecdotally noticed in myself and others over the years.
So based on that...
What I think what Alan Watts intends to say is that if you don't *do* anything concrete with your inspiration then you're simply sitting around on the phone waiting for the next dopamine hit from your 'next great insight' about [literally anything].
In my opinion I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, just that Alan Watts was likely a more objective driven person than his peers, whom sought to live in the experience rather than use it to further some abstract objectives.
What do you do as a consequence of looking at a sunset or a great painting, listening to some amazing music, or having mind-blowing sex?
Are such experiences to be devalued unless they lead to something productive?
Maybe some great works of art do have influences on people, but they're not exactly as easy to trace as, say, being taught some useful skill. That doesn't mean that great works of art are valueless nor that we should only value what is useful.
Also, what if your mood improves after taking psychedelics? Or if you enjoy life more, or you're less stressed out? You haven't necessarily done anything based on the experience, but it's easy to see that your life has improved.
It's not all about useful messages or insights.
I don't see what's wrong with simply getting more pleasure out of life.
If you want to talk on the phone with your pharmacist for 20 minutes after confirming your prescription will be ready at 2PM, thats great. For someone who values efficacy and the reduction of "unnecessary" expenditure of time this would however be unacceptable.
I find myself struggling to let more of the former in my own life than the latter, but in this case I wanted to try and illustrate the *internal* dynamic I saw being expressed by the two viewpoints.
My writing was colored by my own belief of what is best in life, so it leaned towards minimizing the value of leisure, but to be clear, that wasn't the message I was trying to convey.
You don't need psychoactive drugs to have deep, earth-shattering mystical experiences, and I don't understand why one would want to rely on drugs to get them.
Maybe not.. but psychedelics seem to be the most reliable, easiest, and quickest way there.
Edit: to respond to your 'easiest' edit in -- it's only easy in the sense that the barrier for entry is lower, but 'lower barrier for entry' is optimising for quantity, not quality.
As for "quality", who's to say? Many meditators have never been heavy psychedelic users, so if they claim that meditation can get them to the same place they don't know what they're talking about.
That's not to mention that psychedelic experiences vary widely from person to person, and often even from trip to trip taken by the same person, so it's really hard to make generalizations that apply to all people, all substances, and all circumstances.
Also, some people dismiss psychedelic experiences as illusory, which to me just signals that they have nothing interesting to contribute to the conversation. I'm interested in exploring these substances and spaces, not in trying to sweep them under the rug or wishing they would go away.
Good luck trying to extract any words to describe it. Not that it can’t be done, but when you have a glimpse of more profound realities, who would expect it to be easy to articulate or execute upon?
But, in combination with weeks and months of effortful meditation and writing, outcomes can be had: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2022.01.001
Great book, one of the lesser known psychonauts
That's not to cast blame on him for the firing itself, which lands entirely on the shoulders of Harvard.
There is a growing field of therapeutics and medicine with a focus on using similar techniques. There's one that's growing pretty quickly in the Vancouver/Montreal/Toronto regions with centres where you can apply for ketamine or MDMA guided therapy. They also psychedelic integration counsellors and therapists. One company in particular recently gained a federal license to supply psilocybin for medical research.
It's encouraging. To me it seems there is undeniably something good there. How it is managed is crucial.
I don't think we've even scratched the surface, yet.
This is such a great way to put it, I've had this mentality for awhile now. Did it a few times, don't need any more.
"There were no significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics, lifetime use of specific psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote), or past year use of LSD and increased rate of any of the mental health outcomes. Rather, in several cases psychedelic use was associated with lower rate of mental health problems."[1]
Also: "We did not find use of psychedelics to be an independent risk factor for mental health problems."[1]
[1] - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Honestly though, I’m just glad to see erowid is alive and well. It’s one of my favorite websites that I don’t get around to often enough, and in my opinion it embodies everything good about the internet.
Same here, that stuff is magical the first time.
The common experience of there being something special/magical about the first time on MDMA (and some other compounds) is evidence that it's probably changing your brain in some way.
Hopefully with more research we'll eventually figure out what's happening there and make every use just as magical.
To reset tolerance, I have to wait till I've forgotten what the experience is really like, and only have vague memories.
First, they share the same chemical structure as some of the neurotrasmitters that make us tick: dopamine, adrenaline and noradrenaline among others.
I have taken some of those mentioned in PIHKAL during my experimentation years, mostly MDMA and 2C-I and they taught me a lot about how my brain works and the power of psychedelics when used with care and responsibly. I can't wait for the day when science finds a way to leverage their capacity for deep introspection in psychotherapy and to manage mental pain. I know MDMA was previously used in couples therapy and and now in helping with PTSD.
Lastly, I've recently been diagnosed with ADHD and I'm trialling dexamphetamine, yet another phenethylamine, and it's been life changing the effect it's having on me.
Phenethylamines are pretty cool.
100% this is the best thing couples should do if they need therapy.
Anecdotally I see with my own relationship and that of couples I know that almost all problems are due to inadequate communication (Saying the wrong things / not saying the right things).
MDMA totally opens you up, enabling you do communicate this to your partner. "I really love you but sometimes I just wish you would X". Understanding the other person's emotional needs and how important they are will go a very long way in fixing a relationship.
The enzyme, DDC, needed to make endogenous PEA needs adequate P5P to function.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P20711
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1729407/
Decarboxylation of phenylalanine by aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) is the rate-limiting step in the synthesis of 2-phenylethylamine (PE), a putative modulator of dopamine transmission.
What have you noticed since starting? I also have recently started treating ADD with this, and I'm starting to become much more in tune with my mind, and my emotional regulation issues are practically non-existent.
I'm on lisdexamfetamine and I don't have any side effect which is pretty crazy. Just calm, productivity and focus.
Spent entirely too much time there as a teenager/young man haha.
Erowid is an amazing force for good in the world. It is a reminder of what the internet is philosophically capable of.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991012063300/https://erowid.or...
I had no idea that the site erowid.org itself had existed for so long even.
Also, the archived version of the page from 1999 was using a black background. Dark mode before it was cool :)
Not to mention that black text on a white background was what most people were used to from books and articles on paper, so it was considered natural.
Amazing to think it’s coming up to 30 years now.
Edit: please consider donating!
Dark mode was actually pretty common in the mid-90s, then some idiot popularized the notion that black text on white background was easier on the eyes and more familiar for non-computer users and that nonsense continued for about 20 years (old CRTs were all white/yellow/green on black, stuff like xterminal displays often emulated their color schemes, it seemed like windows and mac was mostly where the white background was coming from -- lots of websites were the plain grey default background initially, but I remember black backgrounds being much more popular in the early web until they were nearly run out of existence).
Oh wow, the archive.org site is the original HTML that I did. Yeah, so 1999 was probably when I flipped it over to erowid after leaving UW or something like that.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961226004356/http://hyperreal....
previous to that it was a mailing list from '92:
https://web.archive.org/web/19971224110422/http://hyperreal....
The founder has other items to his credit :D
I thought Erowid was the project of Earth Erowid and Fire Erowid, who founded it in 1995: [1] [2]
From [2]:
"Erowid was founded in October 1995 by Fire and Earth Erowid. The site was a part-time project until October 1999 when it became large enough for Fire to begin working on it full-time. Earth joined her working full-time in March 2000. The site was run as a non-commercial business through 2007. As of January 2008, operation of the site was taken over by the newly formed non-profit Erowid Center. Erowid Center now has four primary staff members, two part-time staff, and dozens of valuable volunteers who help process incoming data, seek out new resources, and/or help keep the site up-to-date."
https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020.sht...
Anyone interested to know more is strongly advised to watch the documentary Dirty Pictures [0] so-called for Sasha's structural formulas of compounds.
i didnt realize there are two type of mdma either. those descriptions seems kind of regular. mdma is almost always mind blowing i think.
https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal023.sht...
Shulgin's "A day at the Stanford museum"[1] is much more representative of the beautiful experience it can provide, and the effects you describe are not at all common from what is generally reported. This said, I don't mean to discount your experience in the slightest and don't doubt that it happened as you described. Not only does everyone react differently, but with the current status of these substances it's also often difficult to know exactly what you're taking and how much of it.
I've friends who swear by taking it when coming down from MDMA; where for me doing that always ends up with large chunks of my visual field being replaced with oozing neon magma & me needing to go & have a "lie down..."
There’s stuff out there that the kids call “Tuci” or “Tusi”, in the form of a pink powder. That is 100% not 2C-B. It’s a mixture of 2C-B, ketamine, and amphetamine, and maybe some MDMA. Real trail mix of stuff.
Shit's fucking gross. They literally flavor it with strawberry drink powder to get girls to buy it. I think I saw the results of an assay and there's no 2C chemicals in it at all, it's just strawberry drink powder, K and M. Check out this reggaeton marketing commercial for it haha
…but yes. I first had it at a circuit party in 2019. And someone had some this summer as well.
I am fairly confident the stuff I had contained a non-trivial amount of 2C-B. I have (what I believe to be) had actual pure 2C-B, and the closed-eye fractals are a good indicator.
so the presence of closed eye visuals on a mixture containing at least MDMA and ketamine would not in any way suggest that it necessarily contains any 2C-B.
Even I—who is far too timid to take anything that doesn't come out of a reputable pharmaceutical company let alone ever risk manufacturing any of these chemicals—have an interest and can pretty much instantly recognize one of these molecules the moment I see its skeletal formula—even if I can't necessarily remember which specific one it is. So what is the principal interest among the mere curious—is it cultural, or the fact that society has gone to great lengths to ban them, or is it just a technical curiosity about the effect they have on humans?
There's little doubt there’s much interest among HN readers in the subject as this is the second article to appear on HN's same page-one only three stories removed from the first, the earlier one being Derek Lowe's article The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (science.org). At the time of this post that article had received 559 comments. In my comment to Lowe's article, I referred to an older HN article of similar nature posted at the end of November last year on the availability of the precursor phenylacetone—aka phenyl-2-propanone, P2P—and that story also had a large number of comments—361 in total.
Incidentally, my post to Lowe’s article was, I thought, a pretty innocuous one wherein I essentially agreed with Lowe’s comments and provided the link to the older HN P2P story that essentially backed up what Lowe was saying, nevertheless it received a number of down-votes without any explanation. It seems such stories are still quite divisive on HN.
Please, name one of these reputable companies for me. One that does not push pills based on their bottom line but for actually improving the health of users. One that has not been known for rewarding doctors for pushing their pill over a competitors pill. One that does not have advertisments on TV/print/internet that talk about a side effect might be death, but still encourage random people to push their doctors.
You're right of course, I cannot (and I fully agree with your points and sentiments). What I should have said is 'pharmaceutical companies that employ proper industrial control processes to ensure that what's inside the box is the same as printed on the packet' but that seemed a bit long-winded. In hindsight, putting 'reputable' in quotes would have been a better option.
Apologies for the following rave but I'm likely a stronger advocate on these points than you are. ;-)
In my defense I would let you know that if you were to look back into the archives of my HN posts—mind you, I'm not suggesting that you waste time actually doing so—then you would note that I've been one of the most outspoken, voracious and unquenchable critics of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals to post on HN. I consider what happened over the opioid epidemic not only an unforgivable failure on the part of the Sacklers and Purdue and that they have essentially gotten away with murder—the settlement being an unmitigated damn farce—but also a major systemic failure of Government (of the regulators/FDA) and of the medical profession in general.
How 150-plus† years of knowledge about opiates and opiate addiction—basic info that's a compulsory default requirement in 101 pharmacy/medicine—can be chucked out and ignored by the regulators and the medical profession alike simply defies adequate description let alone understanding. How the fuck did this happen, why have others, regulators, guilty MDs, etc., also not been brought to task over the matter? After all, everyone knows that outside certain radioactive nuclides and chemical weapons, VX etc., opiates are the most controlled and regulated chemicals on earth and have been governed by international treaties for going on 100 years. We still don't know how this happened and we still need a full and better accounting of what exactly went wrong.
Moreover, I've been an advocate for much tighter government control and regulation of drug companies and have held this view long before the Purdue incident. Similarly, I believe that we need to review drug patent laws to stop pharmaceutical companies exploiting consumers—I could write pages on this but I'll spare you the details.
I'd also ban drug advertisements, especially so those that are aimed at the public. I have a particular concern over the continued promotion of drugs on TV and elsewhere, especially so the promotion of the coal-tar antipyretic class of drugs—the NSAIDs such as ibuprofen, paracetamol (acetaminophen), etc. as being safe, fix-all painkillers (even if not mentioned, that's the effect of such promotions). They aren't as safe as made out in ads, and they're especially dangerous with long-term use, but drug companies promote them as safe and governments continue to allow such promotions without warnings and caveats. (Incidentally, expert medical knowledge isn't necessary to determine the dangers of using these drugs as their dangers are well documented in any number of pharmacopeias, even Wiki has their side-effects well covered.)
These antiquated 19th-Century drugs [paracetamol possibly made as early as 1852—see Wiki] are more dangerous than even many medicos think (the possible exception being the salicylates (aspirin) but even it has dangers). We have been progressively eliminating numbers of these ancient NSAIDs from the pharmacopeia since the 1930s—that is whenever we realize their kill-rate has become unacceptably high we move on to the next least dangerous one on the list instead of banning all of them outright (the last of the old ones still standing is paracetamol, its immediate forerunner, phenacetin, having since fallen). For example: acetanilide, pyrazolone, phenazone, amidopyrin (pyramidon), phenacetin, phenylbutazone (butazolidin) all derive from the 19th C. or from precursors that do. All have been progressively banned over a 30-40 year period (or in some instances their use limited to very specific applications), however it was obvious early on that these drugs were very dangerous and should not have been put in service (or at least withdrawn much earlier).
Back in the late 1950s and 1960s there was a huge kerfuffle over the dangers of use of phenacetin, especially so when mixed with aspirin and caffeine in a combination known as 'APC'—a concoction which had been in prior use for some 40 or so years. There were many thousands of cases of rotted-out kidneys as a result of their use. What's not generally understood is that phenacetin is metabolized into paracetamol and it's the paracetamol that provides the pain relief (but paracetamol can easily be life-threatening and kills many people every year). Wiki states that phenacetin was withdrawn in Canada in 1973 and by the U.S. FDA in 1983. Why the delay of some 10 - 20 years after it was known for certain that phenacetin was dangerous, even carcinogenic? I know this delay to be factual because I can remember the widespread publicity about the dangers of phenacetin as a kid in the 1960s.
(Incidentally, in recent years I've had both a pharmacist and a medico tell me that I could use paracetamol over long periods without any ill-effects and that combining it with aspirin was no problem so long as I didn't exceed the recommended maximum daily dose (exceeding the dose is extremely injurious to the liver). The pharmacist even suggested it was one of the safest drugs known. (Despite warnings in almost every pharmacopeia about the dangers, unfortunately it seems that lessons from the phenacetin incident haven't been well learned—if anyone knows the reasons for this then we ought to know about it.)
Moreover, nothing changed with the introduction of the newer COX-2 selective NSAIDs, rofecoxib (Vioxx), etc. The pharmaceutical companies were still up to their usual deceptive tricks, in this instance Merck was the main culprit in that it deliberately withheld important information about dangers of the drug.
Quoting Wiki: "Merck withdrew the drug after disclosures that it withheld information about rofecoxib's risks from doctors and patients for over five years, allegedly resulting in between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease."
The utter fucking hide of Merck!
I recall this well: in the early 2000s I read an article in Science mag that provided graphic stats that rofecoxib was causing heart attacks. It was of particular interest to me as I was taking the drug for my sore back. At the time I remember thinking that the drug would soon be banned even if it turned out that the article's data was found to be exaggerated (the damaging stats were too bad to think otherwise). That said, rofecoxib wasn't banned immediately despite overwhelming evidence against it; in fact, it took about three years from the publication of the Science article before Merck withdrew the drug from the market. That delay was unforgivable.
If ever there were a case to regulate these pharmaceutical bastards tightly then the Vioxx/rofecoxib incident is a quintessential example.
__
† The problems of opiate addiction became widely understood by the medical profession in the light of the US Civil War when the hypodermic needle first came into widespread use to administer opiates on the battlefield.
First, MDMA is a phenethylamine, and it's one of the most popular psychedelics.
Second, if you look at the trip reports of the "magical half-dozen"[1], they sound amazing, so they're pretty interesting just for that.
Third, even if one never does any of the phnethylamines in PiHKAL (I personally haven't, except for MDMA once many decades ago) they're still fascinating in terms of their effects, the potential for research and further development, and PiHKAL the book is interesting and admirable for the wealth of information it revealed on previously unknown compounds, the story of how they came to be, and all the self-experimentation Shulgin and his friends did.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL#Magical_half-dozen
My interest centers around two main reasons, the first is that such simple molecules can have such a dramatic effect on the brain and that relatively few changes to the basic amphetamine molecule can elicit such large changes in one's perception (i.e.: from one molecule to the next).
The second is that I'm always been surprised about how little of these chemicals are needed to have an effect - we never talk in grams, which itself is a small enough unit, but rather always in milligrams.
It's not only drugs but also poisons where milligrams can kill within minutes or even seconds - we all know how deadly chemicals with the structure x-CN are and how little of them is needed. I see an analogy between these chemicals and electronics. They act somewhat like high gain amplifiers with control circuits attached - that is they have gain as well as great specificity of action.
I don't take a huge interest in how individual phenethylamines are made but rather the fact that there are so many of them and that there are so many ways of synthesizing each one. As soon as some precursor becomes difficult to get then some ingenious chemist finds a substitute together with a new method of synthesis.
I'd say I'm more curious about chemists who are even more ingenious than those mentioned - those who break new ground in chemistry. Especially so when it comes to the synthesis of iconicially difficult molecules such as strychnine. This notorious and highly toxic poison (I know, as an evil bastard poisoned my dog with it when I was a kid and I watched horrified as he died in agony) - is also notoriously difficult to synthesize and has always been a challenge for chemists. It's the go-to molecule to synthesize if one wants a challenge, its synthesis challenged the greatest of chemists until the legendary Robert Woodward and his team managed to do so in 1954: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine_total_synthesis. I'd reckon, even today, if one came up with a new synthesis for it then one would be recognized to be at the very top of the profession.
You say reading about phenethylamines is one of your favorite internet rabbit holes. Whilst it's mine and obviously that of many others too, I'm somewhat paranoid at spending too much time doing so for fear of attracting too much attention. I had this feeling the last time phenethylamines came up on HN some five months ago, especially so after I followed a poster's link to Uncle Fester's (aka Steven Preisler) Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture which turned out to be on Wikileaks (I later learned it's also on the Internet Archive which is perhaps somewhat more innocuous (but likely not given the book's notorious content)).
BTW, I think that Preisler's publication of this document was irresponsible for all concerned - not for publication of the chemistry per se but rather the huge amounts of volatile chemicals he recommends without giving all the necessary warnings. Some novice could easily kill himself and others around him if Preisler's directions were followed (the quantities he suggested were more in keeping with those of a registered pharmaceutical lab than a backyard chemist). You can't blame responsible people for being concerned with such publications and I said so in a follow-up post at the time.
I wish it wasn't so, but except maybe during the heyday of psychedelia in the 60's when LSD was legal, psychedelic users even in the SF Bay Area have probably been in the minority.
My guess is that it takes a certain type to have tried psychedelics after they were made illegal and before the Psychedelic Renaissance. It took a certain amount of curiosity, daring, and non-conformity that most people don't have.