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Comment by crystaln | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day, researchers would just try the drugs instead of feeding them to mice for 20 years. Things moved a lot faster that way.

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Maybe they did, but they can't really say it publicly.

Anyways, it is not hard to find reports from people who tried these "research chemicals". These substances are often legal (because they haven't been controlled yet) and they are labs that will make them for you without asking too many questions. And by that I mean serious, registered, professional labs doing things up to specs, with GC/MS and all that stuff. Not a RV in a desert. Publish the synthesis and someone will make it and try it.

The safety track record has been very inconsistent for RCs.

Shulgin's popular creations turned out to be very safe, even in overdose, besides the few that were MAOIs (2C-T-7 and AMT, off the top of my head.) But Shulgin was looking for good, safe psychedelics.

David Nichols's lab worked in the same area, but focused on high-affinity 5-HT2A agonists. They made Bromo-DragonFLY (killed a few people after it was mislabeled as 2C-B-FLY), and then most recently the NBOMe series, which is often sold as counterfeit acid.

NBOMes produce spectacular, rich visuals, and a strong euphoria uncharacteristic for the class. Unfortunately, they seem to kill people at random, for no good reason. Even people taking it again at the same dose. And it can happen very abruptly. Seems to be from seizures disrupting the autonomic nervous system.

So chemical purity isn't the thing to worry about, it's the pharmacology. It's like test piloting experimental aircraft or something. If you experiment, use Shulgin's method and work up very, very slowly.

I had read that magnesium deficiency is generally the culprit in the case of NBOMe deaths

Umm, they published many books about it, TIKHAL and PIKHAL by the Shulgins being the most famous.

"Why was biopharma so much more productive in 1950" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u6ZkAVQfPA , tldw: their model systems were much closer to reality. ie, trying 8 compounds in mice models is more likely to find you a working drug than trying 8000 compounds in well plate cell culture models, or worse just binding studies.

Many probably still do. They just publish their research on Erowid and Bluelight instead of journals

I'm being somewhat glib but I genuinely think projects like Psychonaut and TripSit Wiki that try to at least organize the wealth of "underground" knowledge about these substances are tapping into a huge source of knowledge that has so far been ignored and even shunned. Obviously the challenge that remains is meaningful organization of it

Check out TIHKAL and PIHKAL by the Shulgins.

Yeah, feeding these drugs to mice and conclude they are hallucinogenic based on head twitches? Seems a bit ridiculous considering these compounds have been out on the research chemical market for years now.

People have been buying and consuming 5-apb as a"research chemical" for almost a decade at this point.

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