MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)
chm.bris.ac.uk
chm.bris.ac.uk
I took a drug once called 3-MMC that I really enjoyed. I haven't been able to find it since and I don't even know a street name. But by all accounts it was a pleasant high somewhere between cocaine and MDMA with a moderate duration and minimal comedown. But for all I know it could cause irreparable brain damage.
I guess it's not too likely, since most recreational drugs have been around a long time and are well-studied, and most derivatives aren't radically different than their mainstream counterparts. And most street drugs are either prescribed medically or being studied for medical use. The real problem is purity, which is a problem caused by the ineffective and insanely expensive US "ban" on drugs.
Solve the purity and regulation issue and you end most overdose deaths, most black market violent crime, and, apparently, accidental brain damage.
The difference between Morphine and Codeine is minimal: a H is changed to a CH3. But one is 10x stronger than the other. In fact, morphine is more similar to codeine than to heroin. There is another opioid called Oripavine, similar to morphine (and can be transformed easily into), that is known to also have analgesic effects, but can't be used because it's highly toxic. It can itself be derived to M320, which is around 10000x more potent than morphine. In the opioid large family we could do this all day, with analogs and very similar molecules having a wild range of potency and toxicity.
Don't use similarity between derivatives as a guide or a scale of their potential toxicity. I agree that the easiest and safest way to deal with this is to just legalize all drugs. IMO that will have at least two desirable effects: you will know exactly what you are consuming instead of betting on a derivative, and the race after analogs will stop: people will just consume what is known to be safe and effective, as it happens with alcohol.
Amen. I'll be happy once I can pick up, say, LSD, from a pharmacy, and know that it's dosed accurately and unadulterated. Right now one would kinda have to buy it from either some guy or some darknet vendor and the only way to know it's safe is to test it with reagents. Those who don't test it run the risk of dying or suffering permanent damage from overdosing on some adulterant or substitute.
It would probably also help with the current opioid crisis where people are dying because their doses are adulterated with fentanyl. Just offer doses that don't have fentanyl in it! Let people buy it from a safe regulated source.
The reagent tests will give you an idea of whether what you’re looking for is there (maybe), but generally won’t tell you much about what else might be in there too.
If you have access to a reliable mail system, sending it away to a lab is your best test (but probably at a cost).
And even then, they may not be able to detect or identify things not in their library.
In the end this is all super sketch and risky, even with a lot of education and state-of-the-art testing facilities.
Dunno how illegal it is to submit something that you're actually not sure of the legality of until you get the results.
You can go to a pharmacy right now and look through aisle upon aisle of "medications" that rarely have the ingredients they say in them, and that's not illegal as long as they note "not approved by the FDA to treat any disease"
People act like legal products don't get adulterated
Prescription medication is heavily regulated and required to have a certain amount of the active ingredient. Some prescription medication is also available OTC. What you're describing is not prescription medication, even though it is often found in pharmacies.
If LSD were a prescription medication, either it would be available OTC or I would have a prescription for it; in both cases it wouldn't be subject to the same crap that you'd find on, say, Amazon.
But yeah ultimately I agree, I'd like to buy LSD at a pharmacy which I know is pure and 150ug per dose, full stop.
> LSD in particular seems to have a sub-culture of people that are out there making it for the good of humanity (in their eyes). At <$4/tab and being a drug you -- or at least I -- wouldn't want to take more than a few times per year, it doesn't seem to have the profit motive that your typical club drugs have.
I agree, and I've always tried my best to source it from a responsible dealer who cares about the quality of their product. I just wish I didn't have to do that; while I don't expect to ever receive NBOMe myself, there is a vast landscape out there and many people have died due to failing to source the correct substance.
> I guess you could accidentally get an NBOMe from a dealer that didn't know any better, but you're not going to overdose on it.
Um, if you receive NBOMe, it is not safe regardless of how low you think the dosage is. See: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/25x-NBOMe#Overdose
> One study found that 25I‐NBOMe and 25C‐NBOMe blotter papers contained 'hotspots' with higher quantities of the drug, implying an inherent risk of overdosing.
as well as the other content of that section.
Edit: Does anyone remember a Sky News (or other UK) clip where the journalist bought a kilo of mephedrone online from China and received it? I'd love to find it again. It was definitely the moment when the whole scene jumped the shark into absurdity.
Surprise pills can definitely be a surprise I guess.
Back when I was into that scene there were basic risk-reduction methods people would use to try to minimise the surprise.
Buy pure powders from sites that listed the IUPAC chemical names and structures of what they were selling. Even better if they listed results from GCMS assay on their supply. Make sure they could actually spell the name of the drugs they were selling. So look at listings for (e.g.) 4-MMC from a site the community trysted rather than a bag of "Plant food!" or "gogaine blend!" from a page that popped up yesterday and spelled 'methiopropamine' in three different ways.
Preferably get it tested yourself too. Basic mandelin, ehrlich, marquis chemical tests could give you some info on what you had but in the UK there was a service where you could send in anonymous samples for GCMS.
Always do an allergy test first, starting with a dilution of the substance down into the low micrograms.
It wouldn't protect you from an MPPP/MPTP type scenario, but nothing will (including buying mainstream drugs) and at least at that point you can be fairly confident of what you're taking. Depending how novel the substance is of course, you may not have the first clue as to what it'll do to you...
Wait for in vivo/in vitro test reports from others before consuming.
When it arrived we dissolved it in water at 1mg/mL so we could volumetrically measure 2mg doses accurately. Our first test doses were 500ug.
It took us so long to get though the jar that some mold started to grow on the solution, even though we kept it in the fridge! Not wanting to throw hundreds of doses down the drain we scooped off the mold, added Everclear (ethanol), redid our concentration math, and moved the jar to the freezer. Wild, innocent times.
Sadly, one of my friends in on the desoxypipradrol jar died from fentanyl contaminated dark web drugs a couple years ago.
> Our first test doses
implying there were more later
I'm genuinely ... horrified, impressed, and much more.
However at least in my circles nothing really bad ever happened
Was interesting to see that they weren’t entirely asleep at the switch.
If there is an experiment that has only 5 % chance of success, many will take it.
Synthetic drugs came about because they fell outside legislation designed to control the different classes of drugs.
The police could not prosecute because there was no law to cover synthetic drugs in the early days.
I saw the slow increase in the damage caused by synthetic drugs as I worked in Substance misuse as a methadome dispenser. Rather than woking predominantly with heroin addiction, clients were presenting more and more with synthetic substance addictions.
For me I would like to see all drugs legalised so that the consumer has a safe way to use drugs of their choice.
I used to smoke hash in the 80's from as far away places as Pakistan, Afganistan, lebanon and morocco.
Now it is all genetically modified skunk which is 10 times stronger than the proper hash I used to smoke.
Or just as illegal, but far easier to smuggle (that’s the expensive part), so the weak stuff disappears from the market while potent stuff becomes the only available option.
... and during the 20th century "performative law and order" was -- how should I put it -- big, as in the 1937 Nazi rally was attended by about a million people, and the 1939 one was called Rally for Peace (but cancelled a few days before and instead of the Rally the Nazis attacked Poland)
... fast-forward a few decades later, still September, but spin the globe a bit, and dear Nancy and Ronald are concerned about drugs! oh my ... while they supplied arms to Iraq ... and Iran at the same time, directly violating a law he personally signed.
Obesity will not lead you to abuse your spouse or children. Obese people can hold down a job. Obese people don't lose custody of their children.
The closest analogue, I think, is smoking. It will demonstrably take years of your lifespan and healthspan. It does lead to minor harm of people in your immediate vicinity (2nd hand smoke, those kids probably get fat too).
I want to acknowledge that weight isn't a simple calories in, calories out situation. That other illnesses, medications, childbirth and gut health have enormous impacts on the capacity to maintain or lose weight. And that many people (particularly in the US) live in food deserts. What I'd criticise is the valorisation or excusing of obesity as equivalent to healthy living.
'Healthy at any size' social messaging is enormously damaging on a social and personal level. I've personally known a few people who became politicised in this direction (as a subset of radical queer politics) and went from being highly functional to disabled due to overeating and other health consequences of inactivity and overeating. Life is difficult, aging is terrifying. Making it worse by pretending that these conditions aren't awful is extremely irresponsible.
It boils down the lifestyle, 2 generations ago their grandparents were most probably skinny due to simple food they ate and physical labor they went through every day. If kids see lazy tired parents, chances of them being athletic and eating healthily are very low, and its a baggage that gets heavier to shed off with each passing year.
So if I didn't have to pay for obese people's additional healthcare costs, I could have either gotten myself a rather sizeable tax break, or a couple week of extra holiday free every year.
I tried to look for some overview, and ... found this study .. and even more interestingly in the Netherlands obesity seems to be cheaper than the alternative (probably because living longer leads to having more cancers, and those are fucking expensive)
https://dom-pubs.pericles-prod.literatumonline.com/doi/10.11...
This one is much easier to interpret as the result is just "In per capita terms, costs of obesity in 2019 ranged from US$17 in India to US$940 in Australia." ... and yeah a thousands bucks could have been spent on something nice. Drugs for example!
Perhaps one week of work dedicated exclusively to subsidising obese people excess medical costs every year would be more reasonable for a more typical tax payer. But that’s still a lot.
I’m not sure I buy the increased mortality bringing that number down story very much either. Obesity tends to only take about 5-10 years off your life expectancy (depending on how obese…), but it’s going to drive your medical care costs up for your whole life. Obesity kills you a lot slower than cancer does.
I'm 220 pounds, I can run a 10 minute mile (not the 5:45 I ran in high school, but I'm also 20 years older and don't have the 5-hours per day dedicated to training I did back then). I just completed a 5-day, 125 mile hike through the Scotish highlands with a torn MCL. I'm probably the "healthiest" I've ever been, even though every one of my doctors tells me I need to lose 75 pounds.
The reagent to test for LSD is usually Ehrlich's reagent, but many reagent kits come with multiple reagents so you can not only verify the presence of LSD but also the absence of other adulterants. One can never really be too safe; the wrong drug can have all sorts of undesired effects, all the way up to potential death (or Parkinson's as in the linked article).
Market it as “for research only” and that law does not apply.
> [...] but sellers get around that by saying the substance is for research purposes only and not for human consumption; then you simply consume it anyway.
Not true. LSD raises your body temperature, which can be fatal, especially in the summer. "Just take a cold shower" yeah I was too high to come up with this idea, so I was just lying in my bed being miserably hot. I'm not taking a full tab ever again because it fucks my brain to the point I cannot do basic things to ensure my own survival.
With that said, it would indeed be a problem for you not to be able to think well enough to perform basic self-care. At the very least, LSD is dehydrating as the body attempts to filter it out as urine, so you'd need to get that out and then drink water (or gatorade or something hydrating). I'm sure dehydration would contribute at least partially to the additional body heat.
Anyway, you totally don't need LSD to suffer heat stroke in the summer. All I'd need to do is walk outside and stand there for a while.
With that said, it's not exactly like generating additional body heat necessarily kills you as long as you can keep yourself cool somehow. Even if you can't, I wouldn't consider the LSD to have been the source of the death, just the overheating, which is a general failure regardless of how the overheating happened (e.g. panic attack, overexertion, etc.).
That said, I’m less convinced that it raises your core body temp enough to kill you.
So is jumping off a bridge not the cause of death? Should we say blunt trauma?
But yes in that case blunt trauma is the cause of death and the blunt trauma occurred because they jumped off the bridge.
That said, you can be as open as you want about your diagnosis. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your comment.
We have a long history of using naturally occurring and manufactured drugs. The wide majority of living humans consume psychoactive substances regularly. What's objectively different about our drugs versus theirs? Theirs might be more potent, but in my younger days I made up for that in volume of things like alcohol.
Abstinence-only education is an abysmal failure regardless of the subject. "Don't get high" is right up there with "don't have sex" on the list of recommendations that almost no one's going to follow.
> Animals love to get drunk.
Dolphins. I love dolphins. Getting high is a social activity for them, much like nearly everything else. They will pass a pufferfish around the group and take turns huffing the toxin in order to get high. It's adorable~
In case of these designer drugs we changing and appending the original naturally occurring molecules. It’s similar to what the pharma industry does to be able to sell with exorbitant prices, changing and appending the working molecule to get fresh patents.
Yes, much of the reason drugs even have an effect is because receptors for them already exist in the body. That's also the reason why they can be so dangerous; normally endogenous signals are regulated by the body, but externally administered substances are often not. Physical dependence is the body's self-regulation trying to compensate for the presence of external substances that it can't downregulate; a sudden lack of the substance may cause withdrawal symptoms as the body takes time to adjust back to normal. These withdrawal symptoms can be fatal (such as in the case of benzodiazepine withdrawal, or indeed opioid withdrawal). Also, external substances can trigger receptors or permutations of receptors that don't naturally occur as frequently, as strongly, or at all, resulting in undesirable or even potentially fatal effects. Small changes even to substances that are normally unproblematic can nonetheless change their effects significantly enough to cause a problem, as illustrated by the submission.
(Side note: I don't know what's so special about prescribers when most of them don't even fully understand the substances they're prescribing. It's possible that fully educating myself about what I'm doing might actually have been better than having blindly accepted a prescription for it, at least in some hypothetical future where this stuff can even be prescribed at all. I guess some people associate illegality automatically with immorality/irresponsibility.)
If you don't know what I'm talking about or how that is possible, please don't accuse me of chasing a high and not valuing my own life. You don't know what I am chasing (it is executive function).
The fact that there's relatively little professional research into the substance should mean that you can't know how dangerous it is or isn't; you should know not to jump to conclusions.
Academic papers about the effects of psilocybin are slowly starting to trickle out of clinical trials, but there's still much as of yet unexplored.
Everyone is on some kind of spectrum and both people I had arguments with about your point of view - are both dead now thanks to overdosing.
I think the medical profession has a reason to exist and I‘d rather see people using professionals to treat their conditions than self-experimenting with possible fatal substances.
There's a lot we don't understand about these substances, but I have overwhelming evidence from experience that what it does for me is something that helps. I'm sorry to hear about the overdoses.
But that safety promise goes for the ones we have plenty of experience with, especially the naturals; once you start putting random substances in your body, all bets are off.
Making sure you're actually taking what you intend to take is indeed very important, because if it's something else, that indeed would be random and you might not only apply the wrong strategy, but take an incorrect dose as well; the correct dose may be "none" if it is a toxic or lethal substance.
But even when you know exactly what you're taking and what are the risks involved, you can't guarantee safety; no one can. This is important to understand. An incorrect understanding can lead to reckless behavior that will get you killed.
Sure, it wasn't the drug itself's fault; all it did was make me sensitive to smell, and then the smell made me faint. I had been fine for something like 8 hours since having taken it. But stuff like this is a risk with psychedelics. If I had fallen slightly differently I probably could've died.
I took the other half of the psilocybin about a week later in order to process the trauma; I figured out the reason for the fainting when I walked past the bathroom again and felt like it was about to happen again. Pretty crazy if you ask me.
I guess the moral of the story is that you really can't expect anything to be perfectly safe even if it won't kill you on its own.
Look, nothing in this world is guaranteed to be completely safe. We take risks all the time, otherwise we wouldn't get out of bed.
Never heard of anything like it though, so I'm going to assume it's not very common.
It wasn't a memory; I had to physically be near the source of the smell in order for it to happen, so it indeed seems like what changed was the body's sensitivity to some component of the scent. Maybe something like ammonia since it was cat pee.
> Look, nothing in this world is guaranteed to be completely safe. We take risks all the time, otherwise we wouldn't get out of bed.
Of course. I accept risks all the time.
> Never heard of anything like it though, so I'm going to assume it's not very common.
I've never heard of it happening to anyone else. I've heard of death by overdose of course, and I had certainly taken quite a lot, but I have never heard of someone being completely fine until a mere scent knocks them unconscious (especially when they wouldn't even perceive the scent normally).
LSD is technically legally considered a hard drug, because it has the potential to trigger schizophrenia and psychosis in individuals who are in any way predisposed to such; it also is legally classified as a hallucinogen, and all of which are classified as hard drugs, legally speaking.
However, non-legally speaking, I don't consider it a hard drug because it doesn't cause dependence, addiction, or brain damage that is detectable; despite the relative lack of professional research into the substance, there is at least decent evidence that it is not literally neurotoxic. With that said, the potential psychological effects are not to be underestimated, and the experience of a bad trip can cause significant damage purely through the emotional trauma of it.
Practically speaking, there's little difference between being prescribed the substance by a doctor and administering the substance myself, other than that the responsibility of managing my regimen would fall to the doctor rather than myself; however, I'd technically prefer to get this stuff from the pharmacy because then I'd know it's not adulterated, but I can just do reagent tests at home for now.
I would be happy to move to a prescribed treatment if ever this treatment is able to be offered by prescription; that aside, however, my own due diligence is sufficient for my needs and is not likely to result in a fatal overdose. I can't be entirely confident that it's impossible of course, but I can have a high degree of confidence that I'm not putting myself in significant danger right now.
The slippery slope argument doesn't entirely apply here, as I've actually tried other hard drugs (benzos, opioids, dissociatives, etc.) and could never really get into them (with the exception of benzos which I had to stop filling). I understand how they become addictive for others, but I don't really think I'm personally interested in them. What's more addictive for me isn't a body high but the ability to fully utilize my mind, which is what LSD does for me. It makes me feel as if I'm not limited like I am normally, which is incredibly refreshing.
Please do note, however, that there are psychedelics which are not serotonergic psychedelics, such as psychedelic amphetamines. These are not typically nearly as safe, just as amphetamines in general typically are not particularly safe when used incorrectly.
There are also non-stimulant medications, such as Wellbutrin (bupropion; an atypical antidepressant that is known to help in certain cases of ADHD). I've also heard of SSRIs potentially helping, but I would not recommend them because of their long-term effects (they can damage serotonin receptors permanently).
Plenty of legal options if you haven't already tried them yet. Obviously, please discuss them with a real doctor if you intend to look into them.
I'm still waiting on actually getting to talk to a doctor about a prescription, because supply issues and the speed of the NHS, and I also have to take an ECG, which I didn't think I needed but after this experience, I absolutely think I need lol. I think they're going to trial me on methylphenidate first, assuming the ECG lets me, but I'll bring up the other options you recommended as well. Thanks!
> I'm also not honestly that surprised that it didn't work so well, given how genetic ADHD is
It's not necessarily just that ADHD is genetic as much as it is that ADHD is pathological. It affects your whole brain. Sometimes stimulants really do help, because dopamine and/or norepinephrine can absolutely be possible culprits for entire brain dysfunction, but if you happen to have another root cause for the disorder then they might not particularly help.
Still, you can't necessarily rule it out just by taking 20mg and then 40mg; it may be possible that a lower dose could still help you.
Having a quick look at wikipedia, the source of all correct knowledge, it looks like 50mg of lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (elvanse used in oral capsules) is roughly equivalent to 20mg of dextroamphetamine sulfate or 15mg of free base dextroamphetamine, which is backed up by its citation at medicines.org.uk, so 20 lis would be like 6 dex
I meant the genetic stuff because the person that gave them to me was close family, and I suspect another close family member has it too, so I'd guess it would present and potentially be helped in similar ways between us, as well as having similar side effects
[citation needed] (/s)
> Would taking too much also have no effect?
It's not that it has no effect, it's that the effect it has can stop treating the ADHD at too high a dose, if that makes any sense.
YMMV, of course.
Since taking it results in a psychedelic trip, it can be extremely easy for that to backfire and result in a very negative and potentially traumatic experience, commonly referred to as a bad trip.
It's also typically intoxicating; not quite to the level of alcohol, but enough to mess with your sense of balance and ability to speak coherently.
I know this from personal experience - this did not start out as an ADHD treatment for me; it started out as a recreational activity, and required the same amount of investment as psychedelic use typically does. I used to hallucinate (mildly) and be at risk of having a bad trip if anxiety took over. The first time I took this, I had HPPD for the following two weeks; the experience was actually quite comforting for me, but it's important to note that risk as well.
However, over time, even only using it every two to three weeks, my brain gradually became tolerant to its effects. I believe there's some sort of permanent tolerance that isn't documented on PsychonautWiki, which was my primary source of info about the substance; on a couple occasions, I've gone over a month between doses, and it's never quite been as intense as the first time I ever took it, even if I were to take more than before.
I don't know if this happens for everyone. I really do not. I cannot guarantee or even suggest that it would happen to you or anyone if one were to reproduce these steps. There is a lack of study-backed research that exists in this area; this substance really is not especially well understood except by recreational users, and even then, they are only aware of and able to share anecdotes about its effects on themselves individually. Anyone who claims to know whether or not LSD would be safe for you is lying.
But, I will tell you what I am doing, for the express purpose of academic curiosity. Perform your own research into anything that you are ever curious about trying, and please do not take my comment as a suggestion that this will work for you; it would likely not.
I take dextroamphetamine (dexedrine), which I am prescribed for ADHD by my doctor. I take LSD while this drug is still in my body; that is, I mix them. I started the dexedrine before I ever started taking LSD, but I have always been on dexedrine even while dosing LSD. I find that, on its own, dexedrine does not fully help with the ADHD anymore, at least not like it once did; however, combined with LSD, my brain seems to just work, and I finally feel in full control of my actions.
My doctor is aware that I use LSD in this way. He professionally recommends against it because he cannot guarantee that it is safe, but he understands that I find it helpful. Obviously, you should generally not tell medical professionals that you regularly do illegal drugs; I trust my doctor to a great degree, and he seems to trust me, too.
This more frequent usage (i.e. more frequent than a couple times a month) started slightly over a week ago, when I took this stuff to help myself process the resultant trauma from being hit by a truck and nearly dying about a week prior. It felt incredible to me how much it helped, not only with processing the trauma, but even just with general cognition, language, and executive function; I started taking it about every other day for a couple times, then switched to taking a small non-microdose (100–200μg) every morning. I take my dexedrine in the evening, right before I go to sleep; my dose is 30mg per day.
By the way, without getting into LSD or even alternative medicine in general, it's important to note that different drug manufacturers produce different products even when it's supposed to be the same drug. Actavis/Teva produces dexedrine that I can't take because it immediately puts me into a hypertensive crisis, but Mallinckrodt makes stuff that I can take 30mg/day of and nonetheless maintain a completely normal blood pressure. (My doctor takes it every visit, so he would have told me a long time ago if it were abnormal.)
I would always recommend the prescription route if possible, just because it does lessen the burden on you and it also somewhat lessens your responsibility. I am responsible for my own self, and involving non-prescription drugs means that I need to pay a lot closer attention to their effects in order to ensure that I'm not harming my health. Sometimes this is not worth the effort, especially if the responsibility can't be properly handled for whatever reason.
https://www.modelorg.com/upload/default/20200410/86db5182a0b...
Worked on me.
Hopefully you also warn them about the opiates that their doctor will cheerfully prescribe.
Frankly, if the opiate epidemic taught us anything it's that there's probably lower risk in your teenagers taking an edible at a party than getting an overly aggressive codeine prescription from their doc after breaking their arm.
I'm not really arguing with you, education of kids is key. But legality is such a poor yardstick. See: opiates, tobacco, and alcohol - super damaging, extremely habit forming, yet completely legal and even culturally acceptable.
Meanwhile, LSD is treated like fentanyl (literally the same Control Substances Act schedule - the highest #1) and is pushed underground where it's adulterated by god knows what, even though a small gov-sanctioned lab could easily produce the entire country's supply of entirely pure substance in a few weeks.
I don't know what the answer is, but surely it's more nuanced than drugs=bad, legal=fine, doctor-perscribed=no-risk. (I'm not saying you're arguing these points, I'm just channelling the zeitgeist as I see it).
Edit: What bothers me most on these HN discussions is how casual some commenters act of taking drugs. Like it's somehow great. Let's not act as if taking drugs is normal or something everyone should try.
I'm from Europe, so your theory to control certain communities sounds very much as a conspiracy theory to me.
You also didn't answer my question about alcohol. Why is it legal and not cannabis?
If I had a magic wand and had to pick 1 legal one, I would go for cannabis. I think it has less negative effect on society than alcohol. But here we are, and my standpoint is to no approve new drugs and try to phase out the current ones.
I like my beer, wine and tequila, but I also see youth doesn't flock to it as much as my and previous generations. If properly done, it can be phased out.
Then your argument is moot, as you engage in drug use. Just because it's a liquid in a glass bottle doesn't mean it isn't a drug.
Furthermore, the simple fact is that not everyone agrees with your take on personal freedom.
You have quite a lot of work ahead of you to prove that an adult from consuming a substance in their own home should be arrested and fined/jailed under threat of State violence.
This argument is so hard to make, that Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst, two of the leading forces behind the criminalization of cannabis in the US a century ago, opted instead to rest their argument atop racism, political fearmongering and subterfuge (calling it marijuana instead of cannabis).
https://www.chieftain.com/story/news/2010/03/22/marijuana-s-...
I, for one, am glad that you don't have a magic wand to wave around and create law without due legislative process. That sounds like an incredibly autocratic method of governance. It would be good to consider that yours isn't the only valid opinion on this matter, and to reflect upon the arguments others are making.
And we don't have to choose only one, that's arbitrary too. We can easily dismantle the current prohibitory system to allow for a system of regulated production and access which would improve safety and reduce overdose deaths. Most overdoses happen because of the nature of the black market. There is no regulation or testing so substances, particularly opioids, can get cut to unknown potencies depending on the person handling it. This makes it a gamble every time a person were to use rather than consuming a measured amount of a pure substance. Prohibition objectively increases harm to individuals, society, and the economy.
Prevention needs to be the main driver to prevent addicts.
Edit: And it's pretty absurd to believe functioning societies are built on drug addicts.
I love how you also ignored the rest of my points about whose society you're referencing.
Do you work in the drug or addiction field?
> normal
By most definitions of the term, yeah, using drugs is "normal", and ancient practice. Strict persecution seems to me to be a recent invention
> everyone should try
Absolutely: not everyone should try all recreational drugs. As radical as saying that no one should try any recreational drug, right?
The discussion here is about meeting in a healthy middle and you seemed to have taken the latter position, which you must agree is radical and out of the question
At some level, everything we put into our bodies has consequences, but it seems terrifying to me to have discussions about a healthy middle ground of how much meth is ok in a serving of mozzarella. Then again, I have no idea if the fancy chemical names currently listed as ingredients on the labels of food I eat are preservatves or what, and what their actual consequences are to my health.
Corn syrup, as bad as it may be to consume in great quantities with a modern lifestyle, is food with calories even if it may lack other more healthy nutrients. Should be banned? I don't think so. But regulated so companies don't abuse it as a cheap ingredient.
For how legal recreational drugs would work just look at nicotine regulation.
And it already improved since I was young. People would smoke in cafees and parties. The non-smokers just had to live with all the crap. I'm happy my kids can go out now without the terrible smell in their hair, clothes and passive smoke in their lungs. It's getting prohibitted in more and more places, so I'm on the winning side :D.
So, if the actual goal is harm-reduction for the population at large (and not for what seems to be a small sample who wouldn't care either way since they're not into that), maybe instead of outlawing substances, we should make sure that people don't take random crap that will mess them up even worse than what they were originally looking for. Because it seems that people will continue taking drugs.
So maybe, as a society, we should finally accept reality instead of insisting that wishful thinking will somehow work after it has failed miserably for ages.
The legal aspect is a very difficult discussion, and it's more based on opinions than facts.
But at start we need to decide if we want these drugs in our society or not. And I'm always surprised at how the HN crowd is: taking drugs are awesome, we want it in our society.
As an easy example: I don't consider myself an alcoholic and even hate being drunk, yet I would be bummed to never be able to have a drink again.
> I think it starts with educating youth, with proper campaigns. Make it clear living as an addict is not something you want.
Indeed. But I'm not convinced that banning the substances in addition to this education is actually useful.
> But at start we need to decide if we want these drugs in our society or not.
That's a good question. But, like it or not, these drugs are in our society today. I don't see any practical means of getting rid of them. Outlawing them clearly not only doesn't work, but actually has some pretty terrible side-effects of its own: health-related (via adulterants) as well as social (drug-related gang crime).
After the discussion here, I wonder if there would be some middle ground. Make it legal to buy, but very controlled and individual. That way people who want to stop might get the help they need. Or the strict control would be able to prevent excesses. It's for sure a very complex problem, with lots of different opinions.
Roughly 50% of US adults have dabbled in drugs, and that number goes way up if you include legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol.
Education is important, but so are structural protections. It's the C vs Rust debate, you can have safety by being super-duper diligent all the time, or you can have safety by design.
My parents did a great job. Sobriety was a core part of my identity throughout high-school and I'd proudly express that I had no desire to use drugs or alcohol. That lasted to the ripe old age of 20, which to be fair was longer than most of my peers.
Obviously there's plenty of downsides too - but the idea that a stern lecture or twenty will stop kids taking drugs is kind of laughable.
When we go to hospitals, and those cancer patients are outside smoking, I point out "see, these are the smokers". Every opportunity when marginaal people are smoking, I point out how stupid and marginaal they look. My kids are disgusted by it, the same way I was.
So it's not a "you are not allowed to smoke" or "smoke is bad for you", it's a "you want to be a loser who thinks he's cool? Go ahead and smoke"
I'm not sure these should be called "designer drugs" because that makes it sound like people are making and taking them to have specific, desirable effects. That's not the case: in most cases, people don't want to be taking these drugs, they want to be taking the illegal drugs that have "better" effects, but are taking legal or grey-legality drugs because drug prohibition keeps them from taking the drugs they actually want to take, which are better-understood and generally safer.
I'd prefer to call these grey-market substances "research chemicals" because it's a neutral term without the fearmongering associated with "bath salts" or the romanticizing of "designer drugs". And it's honest: these are chemicals that we are researching and should continue to research, to understand both the positive and negative effects these substances have.
It's a dangerous world out there. If you're going to use drugs, please use a test kit. And everyone should obtain and learn how to administer Narcan if you can.
They can't legally be sold as drugs, that would require some kind of approval from a regulatory agency, which they obviously don't have. So they call it by a name that don't suggest human consumption. "research chemicals", as if they were reagents, "bath salts", "plant food", etc... often with a "not for human consumption" label. Certainly not "designer drugs", that's a term I generally only see in articles with an "anti drug" stance.
As you say the illegal drugs have the “better” effect and are well understood.
You can watch here:
https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_474CF2C8A20B4173988486A...
https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/future_synthetic...
It was clear even then that synthetic opioids were going to be significant.
Fentanyl (compound 52, Figure 17) is an analgesic of high potency, approximately 300 times that of morphine, which was developed by Janssen in 1962 (Janssen 1962b) and is N-[(2-phenylethyl)-4-piperidyl]-N-phenyl-propanamide. The first CsA (controlled substance analog) of fentanyl came to the attention of law enforcement in late 1979 but was not identified until 1981 (Allen et al. 1981). In the next three years a procession of new fentanyl CsA's appeared in the illicit drug market. The abuse of fentanyl CsA's peaked in 1985 and has since decreased dramatically (Henderson 1987), a phenomena which was the result of DEA successfully terminating the operation of the responsible laboratories. However, the ripple effect is still being felt as international and national meetings have been held to discuss the problems presented by CsA's.
It is the author's opinion that fentanyl CsA's will be back as the future analgesic drugs of abuse. The thoughts behind this statement are that the published synthesis schemes for the fentanyl compounds allow for the use of wide variety of precursors as discovered by the confiscated notes from an anonymous clandestine laboratory that synthesized a drug, based on information presented in two separate volumes of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (...). Also, several fentanyl derivatives have such high potencies that the quantities required to be synthesized are trivial. For instance, carfentanil (...) is approximately 4000 times as potent as heroin and has an extremely favorable therapeutic index (Janssen 1985). Hence, an easy week's work for two chemists could provide 10 kilograms of carfentanil which would be equivalent to 40 metric tons of pure heroin.
[0] https://cen.acs.org/policy/global-health/Afghanistans-crysta...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/afghan...
Edit: I misunderstood the article.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2023/November/...
There definitely seems to be a connection here
If we're going to look at the real tragedies of early times, it's probably best to consider thalidomide. Unlike people who took hard drugs in those days, knowing the consequences, thalidomide users consumed the pills for anxiety, trouble sleeping, "tension" (whatever that means), resulting in more than 10000 children over the same decade born with deformities.
Worth a read, it's quite a tale.
Trigger/content warning, folks: there are some deeply unpleasant parts to that story. It ends well enough, but the path is pretty dark.
Also stay away from hard drugs like this.
An error occurred during a connection to www.chm.bris.ac.uk. PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR