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That's terrifying.

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.

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Careful! Analogs can be very different in toxicity and other properties: some people drink ethanol on a daily basis, and damage is relatively low. Methanol is similar, but is very toxic and can damage and kill you easily. R-Thalidomide is used as anti-inflamatory and sedative, L-Thalidomide is teratogenic; and what is worse, one form can switch into the other form.

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.

Funny thing with codine is that it's metabolized into morphine, and this happens at vastly different rates, from "not effective as a treatment" to "somewhat high risk of abuse due to euphoria"

> 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.

> and the only way to know it's safe is to test it with reagents

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.

On top of that, you would have to test every single dose because there is no assurance of any consistency.

In the end this is all super sketch and risky, even with a lot of education and state-of-the-art testing facilities.

Ehrlich's reagent on its own can only tell you that LSD is present, but usually it's recommended to use multiple reagents to confirm that nothing else is present as well.

And even then, there are other substances that can give you a false-positive on Ehrlich's

What's the legality like on this? I know there's a comprehensive testing lab in Spain, but I feel like shipping LSD across the US via the postal system alone is a multiple felony, not to mention overseas travel? Is there a legal exception to this or is it just done on faith?

watch your DNA droppings/fingerprints and don't put down a return address.

Dunno how illegal it is to submit something that you're actually not sure of the legality of until you get the results.

Is this really a risk with LSD though? 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 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. I'd be more concerned with getting something nasty when buying MDMA or ketamine.

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.

There is a pinned post on r/LSD of a chart showing advertised doses vs actual doses, it's a pretty crummy state of things in the wild.

I get it for $1.90 per 100μg tab and take a couple tabs every single day at this point. I guess it's similar to how some people microdose every few days; I just use (a lot) more.

> 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.

>Amen. I'll be happy once I can pick up, say, LSD, from a pharmacy, and know that it's dosed accurately and unadulterated.

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

That's not the same thing.

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.

Chirality is a fun one too. "Same" molecule but in the left/right hand version can have effects from nothing at all to super deadly cancer causing agent. Your buddies in their bathtub lab would have no idea if they are making them or not.

Taking mephedrone analogues bought off the internet in the 2010s was a real wild west and gamble. There's nothing like reading a review from another buyer about how what they ordered has destroyed their brain beyond repair and becoming paranoid its too late, you've done the same to yourself. Thankfully, for me at least, it was probably some drug induced psychosis on their end.

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.

Not to be fear mongering but I knew someone who's boyfriend ordered drugs online like this frequently. They lived together and one morning my girlfriend got a call from a friend, saying the guy killed his girlfriend, walked up and down his apartment building for hours during the night while shouting, and finally killed himself at dawn. No history of any mental illness, completely out of the blue.

Surprise pills can definitely be a surprise I guess.

”Pills” is a misnomer here, we’re talking miniscule doses of powders/liquids. Sounds like they took too much MDPV.

This. MDPV was super available and super super weird. I remember forcing friends to get sleep after days because they reached a literal zombie state.

However at least in my circles nothing really bad ever happened

I live in a country that doesn’t update their drug laws very often, but they still went out of their way to schedule mdpv.

Was interesting to see that they weren’t entirely asleep at the switch.

Minuscule indeed. In the late 2000s I ordered a gram of desoxypipradrol [1] from a sketchy Chinese chemical company. A gram was the smallest unit they'd sell.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desoxypipradrol

That stuff looks fucking terrifying. Incredibly potent and super lipophilic so long-acting...

Definitely a "take it in the morning and maybe skip the coffee" kind of thing. The effects feel like methylphenidate. I wish it was further explored commercially, but the duration is a very obvious reason not to.

> It took us so long to get though the jar

> Our first test doses

implying there were more later

I'm genuinely ... horrified, impressed, and much more.

> 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...

The other (debatable) harm reduction approach is to buy stuff, and not take it for a while.

Wait for in vivo/in vitro test reports from others before consuming.

Be careful with 3-MMC. It’s rampant in The Netherlands, everyone and their mom is using it as a party drug. 16 year old kids are getting addicted and I have multiple friends that went to rehab for it. Pretty sure I damaged my kidney with it as well.

Unfortunately a lot of 3-MMC sold these days is actually 3-CMC which is thought to be a lot more neurotoxic.

3-MMC is huge in Europe at the moment, never tried it but would be a little wary of it as I haven’t found a lot of reliable information on it.

This should be a reliable source on 3mmc, but it is in Dutch: https://www.trimbos.nl/aanbod/webwinkel/af1916-factsheet-3mm...

Thanks

https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_3Methylmethcathi...

and it's related chemical

https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/4_methylmethcathinone/4_met...

I don't know if 3-mmc ever got a street name but it's got a sister compound 4-mmc that's commonly called mephedrone

4-MMC for £10 a gram in 2010, bought and sold legally, those were the days. God, it really stunk though.

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