There was nothing “wasted” about my youth spent clubbing on ecstasy (2021)

It's a variation on the "commoditize your complement" pattern.

(before someone says: "actually x is less harmful than y", I mean their perception by the general public)

It's would be weird to drop in figures about drug deaths in this article or something like that. I don't see why that would be relevant.

But it'd be good if there was some more critical reflecting done. Perhaps your drug days would be remembered less fondly if a friend died of an OD? Or maybe you were shielded from the criminal elements of drugs. Perhaps you avoided catching any of the lifechanging STDs that run rampant amongst drug users.

It's the "it can't possibly happen to me" mentality that these nostalgia-fueled articles have that rubs me the wrong way.

With that said, I do think anti-drug messaging needs to confront other positive aspects of drug use, particularly in controlled clinical settings. Many staunch anti-drug people haven't even heard of it because they simply don't encounter it in their usual reading material.

Of course everything has risks. But nobody demands an article about the pleasures of equestrianism to include a warning about traumatic brain injury and paralysis risks.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/11/drugs-...

That makes sense, but GP wrote "once you've done it, everything becomes dull without it". I interpreted that to mean it happened after the first time.

rollsafe is a fantastic resource for harm reduction information. They have links to test kits from various retailers and instructions on how to use them.

They also have a page detailing a stack of supplements you can take to allegedly reduce the neurotoxicity of MDMA. I don’t know about the veracity of that information but the test kit info is spot-on.

You're right, though: put yourself in a situation where your drunk/high self needs to be responsible, and you're asking for trouble.

If you don't know what you're putting into your body, you're always making an irresponsible choice. You're trusting someone to tell you how it will affect you, how much is safe, and what the side effects will be. Plenty of women know that trusting someone to give you the substance you think you're getting can mean getting taken advantage of.

Being high doesn't implicitly eliminate all of your self control. As impractical as it might be, the smallest bit of planning and caution can save your life.

But the experience was simply mine and I wasn't speaking for anyone else. I don't know of anyone who's had a bad time on them, except a couple who it just made them throw up. It was just a data point, and I was not comfortable about the talk of comedowns as if they were inevitable and awful because they aren't. I've no doubt they can be though as you and @Mezzie testify.

Thanks for the feedback.

In fact I even said the exact opposite here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34380376

If clicking is too much work, here's the entire post: "Only a fool would consider any drug harmless, obviously all (including MDMA) can have consequences"

Some people have a genuine academic curiosity about human belief systems and the nature of experience. It is similar to how a Anthropologist might have many artifacts in their home or a religious scholar would have different religious text.

It doesn't mean that do you believe in everything, as much as that means that you enjoy being curious and engaging with different ideas.

Here's a better way to phrase the question. Has someone who has taken both MDMA, heroin and Meth care to explain the differences in "profoundness" or "life affirmation" levels of each drug?

I suspect ignorance is bliss. People who haven't taken MDMA don't know how profound it is. People who have taken MDMA but not Meth don't realize that MDMA is childs play and that Meth is even more profound.

Truth is just an expression. I use it in the same light as "profoundness".

I understand the stigma associated with the drug. But the emotions generated by the drugs themselves are in reality actualized by the brain and that actualization cannot be invalidated. It is worth it to ask, think and wonder about this actualization even when you have no plans around taking the drugs yourself.

I have a friend who does mdma regularly (like once every 3 months). Suffers from bruxism too. When he goes to the dentist, he can tell he's a mdma user.

You're free to waste your health as you wish (also mdma lowers t-cell rate in the blood, they never get back to normal afterwards, a japanese man taking multiple Es a day even died of immunodeficiency). Personally I prefer a good brewage of ipomea heavenly blue or some hawaian baby woodrose.

Edit: Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnptUdyDUKI&t=30m (timelink @ 30mins). It is said mdma is neurotoxic can induce permanent damages and trigger chronic depression. Scientist: "I think mdma like no other drug has a much higher neurotoxic potential". Then the dubbing voice takes over. Activates subtitles. "MDMA is a special case [among other ego distorting drugs]. It is delicate to give recommendation of use for this drug and if somebody asked me my opinion I would say it's best to stay away from it".

MDMA, sure, would have severe consequences if consumed so much.

Psychedelics, such as mushrooms or LSD, would cause hardly any harm and simply would stop working due to tolerance build up, unless the user keeps doubling the dose every time.

Furthermore, my point on psychedelics was about psychedelics, which was the context of the comment it answered, not heroin.

It's the addiction that's a bitch. Of course heroin street addicts end up in bad shape-- but a lot of that is from tangential effects, not directly from the drug itself.

I do think it's a helpful framing to say, "my intrusive thoughts are not me; they're weather that passes through my mind, no more meaningful than the shapes I find in clouds or the static between television channels." Like, if I'm feeling anxious, I might get a vivid fantasy of bizarre self harm; that's just some weird shit that happened, it doesn't mean anything more than that I'm anxious and that my mind is capable of producing some whack imagery. Before I had this framing I'd have concerns like, is there some deep dark part of me that's trying to harm me? But no, it's just that I'm a very complex machine, my sensory apparatus produces all kinds of weird signals and some of them are just noise; they can be ignored, I don't have to identify with them, and doing so would be dangerous.

What I was getting at was more that sometimes people invoke a naturalism fallacy, sometimes in combination with a "just suck it up" sort of mentality, which I reject for a few reasons:

1. We don't have to accept things because they are natural; we don't have to accept cancer, or our inability to fly, or depression.

2. There is nothing morally superior about being miserable ("just sucking it up"). Improving your life is a small way of improving the world; I think that's a moral good.

3. Consciousness is a reflexive process between you and your environment. You take in input which changes your inner world and you produce output that changes your environment. Your thinking can't be separated cleanly from that environment. For example, the people you regularly turn to for advice provide feedback you use to regulate yourself; they are part of your process for thinking and coming to decisions. If you take in input in the form of a substance that changes your thinking - that can be dangerous, it needs to be done with care, but it isn't actually "unnatural" in the first place. If there's a failure mode of your consciousness and taking an antidepressant helps you to avoid it, that's just a feedback mechanism you've discovered & adopted from the outside world.

And mind altering drugs can help overcome those - or they can push you deeper into them.

We are both our best parts and our worse parts, and to take an analogy further if one felt their ‚best self‘ on MDMA‚ that wouldn’t meant to say that taking it every day would make them feel their ‚best self‘ in aggregate.

If a recovering smoker avoids cigarettes are they avoiding their ‚true self‘? I retort both are their true self, and anyway your true self no doubt changes.

'no man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man'

I use marijuana to break out of loops of anxiety and repetitive, intrusive thoughts (blessedly legal where I live), and there are some modest downsides, mostly that it's expensive and only works if used in moderation. It helps snap me out of anxiety attacks and shorten the duration of depressive episodes but it isn't magic, I still have to confront my issues and work towards making my life better.

Virtually everyone I know has struggled with anxiety and/or depression and has had success going to therapy and taking some sort of antidepressant. Many of them had to go through several therapists & medications until they found a therapist they meshed with and a prescription/dosage that worked for them; it's a difficult and frustrating process, but I've seen it really work for people in my life.

Like I said, I'm not a doctor, I can only give the most general advice, but it is my belief that if you want your life to be different, it's a real possibility, it's something worth working towards, and if you feel that you use alcohol in excess, it's worth considering whether a professional can help you to identify a different strategy/medication.

That being said the same is true of a lot of things as well. People can become addicted to social media, expressions of material wealth, porn, food, ... Literally everything that provides a dopamine boost in some way.

The question depending on the specific object of desire is always how much of the addiction is in the "substance" and how much in the mind of the addicted person.

I think a realistic stance towards drugs like alcohol or MDMA demands that we do not ignore the problems these drugs cause, but also see with how many users they don't cause any problem at all.

For many, this is the whole point of taking psychedelics - to find self-improvement through these altered states. Science seem to confirm this works. [0] Why does it feel scary to you?

[0] Psychedelics and Neuroplasticity: A Systematic Review Unraveling the Biological Underpinnings of Psychedelics - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34566723/

"not for the type of people I want to be friends with."

That's the judgemental piece right there, just so you know for the future. Not that you don't want to do something, that you're writing swathes of people off entirely based on your own misconceptions about what they do want to do.

> Exactly, you feel understood without being understood.

And this is where you're making incorrect assumptions based on your own biases.

I highly recommend you don't touch anything more mind altering than a cup of tea, given your phobia of altered states.

Also increases risk of taking too much and ending up doing yourself harm.

Obviously they were all way better back in't day.

Everybody does a little bit of both, some people do one more preponderantly than the other. My experience is that drug users do less building and more consuming. Carpe diem philosophy and all that. This second article seems to reinforce that.

Nothing wrong with this way of life, if it brings fulfilment to the author, more power to her, but I seek other kind of people.

---

"In 2004, Sweden had 84 people per 100,000 in either prison or remand prison. This is less than the average for the OECD (132 people per 100,000) and much less than the number for the United States (725 per 100,000)."

--- Both taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Sweden - I'd say that whatever they're doing, it seems to be fairly effective.