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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice take on the reality of the middle to upper middle class drug economy.

It's not all episodes of the Wire. If you're picking up ecstasy or high-grade cannabis, chances are you're doing it like this.

I have to admit that I miss MDMA. I haven't touched the stuff in over 10 years, but it was awesome to use once a year or so. I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that I overcame some issues with trusting people and forming human connections as an accidental side effect of wanting to have a good time.

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I've personally seen MDMA fix two marriages, with one session each. Its divine stuff. I'm very happy that new studies have been completed or are being planned to further explore the psychotherapeutical side of the drug.

But aside from that, I agree. It's the best. No hangover (if it's pure), short duration, music sounds amazing, an amplified sense of intellectual focus and compassion, and good times with friends. You can't ask for anything more from an intoxicant. Its the best.

agreed. I take one whenever i go to a job interview. Without it I'm a stuttering idiot during an interview. where as with ecstasy I turn in to the dos equis beer guy.

you probably feel like dos equis beer guy but to the interviewer you just have pupils the size of saucers and can't stop feeling the fabric of your clothes really earnestly

How often to you go to job interviews? If you have lots of them and take MDMA before each one, I think it might not be as helpful as you feel it is.

good point!

No hangover? Except for, let's see, a short list:

Severely depleted serotonin levels, causing irritability and possibly depression

Loss of focus, concentration, and attention (good luck programming competently the day after)

Bruxism (jaw clenching/grinding)

Hangovers tend to occur when you've had MDMA mixed with one of the ever-more-frequent mixers such as methamphetamine, cocaine or even MDA, which actually targets dopamine receptors far more prominently than the serotonin and knock you out for days. Pressed pills are usually the culprit, and I would avoid them unless you know exactly where they're coming from.

From a wide array of experience, pure MDMA (in recommended doses, meaning 200mg or less) produces less of a hangover than two beers, with a very real "afterglow" which lasts for days after. Excellent focus and concentration included.

This is a good read: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pure-ecstasy-...

From your own article:

"The drug's letdown can include feelings of confusion, irritability, anxiety, paranoia and depression, and people may experience memory loss or sleep problems, jaundice or liver damage."

And:

"Dr. John Halpern, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor who led the research, said pure MDMA can change core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure in the short-term, and decrease immune resistance for a few days."

Sounds like a hangover to me:

"2a : disagreeable physical effects following heavy consumption of alcohol or the use of drugs" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hangover

I'm not saying MDMA is terrible for you, but it certainly does cause hangover effects (and of course, this will vary by person).

It definitely varies by person. I know people who say they consistently get an afterglow and feel even better the next day, whereas others consistently feel the serotonin deficiency and can feel a bit depressed. The jaw clenching seems to be more universal.

There are also supplements that help prevent the negative side effects plus protect against some of the toxicity.. magnesium + gum for the jaw clenching, Vitamin C [1][2] + ALA [3] + Vitamin E [4] + others for antioxidants and preventing neurotoxicity and hepatoxicity.

1: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15212815 2: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1098-2396%2820010... 3: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10619665 4: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11931860

Bruxism (jaw clenching/grinding)

This happens when MDMA is cut with meth. I think he mentioned "pure", but when it's illegal it's hard to guarantee purity, so legalization would have at least that benefit.

I'm pretty sure that jaw clenching happens with pure MDMA. I've experienced it on every roll, with stuff sourced from a variety of highly rated Silk Road vendors.

Careful. MDMA can have beneficial effects, but there's mounting evidence that it's some degree of neurotoxic. If you use it weekly, you'll likely cause some amount of permanent damage in the long run. I can also tell you that MDMA can cause anxious/depressive episodes that last a few days after use. There's even a name for this (suicide Tuesday). Not everyone experiences this side-effect, but like any other drug, it's not for everyone, and people should be careful with it. It nearly depletes your brain's serotonin reserves, and some people don't deal with that very well at all. A large proportion of users (most?) are not careful: they do not supplement, do not use test kits, do not know how much is in a capsule/pill and will redose multiple times in a night.

I agree with this completely. Like everything, moderation is absolutely key.

But that being said, unlike many drugs MDMA has a built-in cut-off switch (another perk) which basically prevents you from feeling anything more after about three doses. That's not saying that eager people wont continue to do more (especially if they're on other drugs or at a festival and not thinking clearly) but the effect is basically nil once you get into the 300mg range.

I used a lot of MDMA 20+ years ago. I was immediately aware, on trying it, that it was neurotoxic. I don't know how I knew that, but I did. However, after I quit I saw no evidence of permanent damage. As a fairly high-level software developer, I'm pretty sensitive to the state of my brain, and I don't recall ever experiencing difficulty working more than 2 or 3 weeks after taking MDMA.

Also, I only heard about this right before I quit, but a lot of the toxicity can be averted by taking 20mg of fluoxetine 3 to 4 hours into the experience. (It diminishes the drug effect, so you don't want to take it too soon.) The theory I heard is that MDMA or, more likely, one of its metabolites, binds to serotonin receptors and damages them. Taking something else that binds to the receptors, then, can help protect them. I tried it once and it seemed to help. St. John's Wort might work too, and is easier to get.

All that said -- I agree that people should be more careful with it. It's a potent psychoactive drug that's harder on the body than most of them, dehydration being a real risk.

You're correct in saying that fluoxetine (prozac) can reduce the ability of the chemical that causes MDMA neurotoxicity (whatever it is) to get inside the axon and cause damage. However, in doing so fluoxetine reduces MDMA’s ability to work (as you stated).

People regularly dosing with SSRIs may be safe from neurotoxicity, but they usually don’t feel the normal effects of MDMA either. The idea of using SSRIs to prevent neurotoxicity is something of a catch-22: If you take the SSRI after coming down from the MDMA, it’s probably too late to do a lot of good. On the other hand, taking an SSRI before-hand tends to reduce the desired effects of MDMA, making it more logical to simply take less MDMA in the first place.

All things considered, it’s unlikely that taking an SSRI before or after MDMA is a very useful prevention strategy. Since SSRIs have their own side effects and potential risks, the practice should probably be avoided.

source: http://www.dancesafe.org/drug-information/is-mdma-neurotoxic...

> This is a nice take on the reality of the middle to upper middle class drug economy. It's not all episodes of the Wire.

It may still be there, just slightly beyond the frame of this picture. The article doesn't go into how the drugs actually get across the Canadian border, for example.

The show Weeds was unrealistic in some ways, but one thing that the first couple of seasons did reasonably well was to depict Nancy's descent into progressively more dangerous situations and the beginning of her relationship with organized crime.

At any appreciable scale, the drug trade[0] gets messy very quickly - not always to the end user, but certainly one or two degrees removed. If it looks clean, either it's because it's a very small scale and vertically integrated (eg, the marijuana equivalent of "microbrew"), or you're just not looking far enough down the supply chain.

[0] Of course, this is not a comment on the inherent nature of the drug trade, but on the inherent nature of any illicit trade; legal (or "less illegal") supply and distribution channels will have far less crime associated with them.

Was it the war on drugs what kept you from using it more than once a year or so, or something else?

It was health concerns. I had read and heard that the huge amounts of serotonin released in the brain had no bad effects provided it wasn't too often.

The metabolites of MDMA are thought to be neurotoxic. Though it's known the chemical itself is not. In a sane world, we would use drug discovery to find drugs with similar effects but without the toxic metabolites. But we love to punish people for their vices, so there is no research on creating safer alternatives to existent drugs.

> But we love to punish people for their vices, so there is no research on creating safer alternatives to existent drugs.

And even in the areas where people are creating safer alternatives (e-cigarettes), there are politicians nearby ready to use their banhammers.

> And even in the areas where people are creating safer alternatives (e-cigarettes), there are politicians nearby ready to use their banhammers.

I don't think this ("banhammers") is a fair comparison.

To my knowledge, most if not all of the major regulation regarding e-cigarettes is around restricting the sale to minors or restricting the areas in which they can be used, as opposed to a blanket ban on the sale or possession of e-cigarettes.

All of that is analogous to existing regulation regarding cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana[0]. The only difference from marijuana is that we're starting from the other end of the spectrum (zero regulation) instead of starting from a blanket ban, but the theoretical convergence point is the same: use of marijuana and e-cigarettes are permitted, but regulated in some way around the age of purchaser and location (setting) of use.

You can make the argument that restricting the use of e-cigarettes indoors (or by minors) is incorrect, but people have been arguing that 18-year-olds should be able to drink (like in the rest of the world)[1] or use marijuana, so the details of the regulation regarding those aren't necessarily perfect or justified either.

A better example of "banhammers" would be Salvia divinorum, which was legal in every (or almost every) state ten years ago, and is now prohibited in 8 states (and there were attempts to prohibit it outright, like marijuana, in several more)[2].

[0] in (e.g.) Colorado, where recreational sale and use is permitted.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#US_legality

> All of that is analogous to existing regulation regarding cigarettes

But this is why e-cigarette campaigners say that politicians are just meddling out of personal distaste, rather than any scientific backing. The two core reasons why cigarettes cannot be smoked indoors are:

1) Doing so (potentially) causes deleterious effects to people who inhale the second-hand smoke. At the very least, it can be agreed that it's not preferable to breathe smoke.

2) It makes it likelier that the smoker will give up their dangerous addiction.

Neither case can be particularly easily applied to e-cigarettes, which emit harmless water vapour, and are to many smokers a means of giving up their dangerous smoking addiction.

I must say I agree with the e-cigarette campaigners that attempts to apply the same laws to e-cigarettes as cigarettes is just yet another example of politicians wanting to control something absent of any scientific proof that they need to do so.

While many may emit water vapour, I believe there's studies which show that there are non-negligible amounts of other substances in some e-cigarette vapours. I do not think there's enough scientific data to make a long-term decision; perhaps just regulating the manufacturers so that we know what's putting what into the air is enough?

My personal opinion is that no matter the safety, I cannot cope with the smell of e-cigarettes, having been around people who use them indoors, and would like to have at least some recourse for being forced to smell it all day in my workplace. If vapers manage to convince companies that it is their "right" to vape in the workplace, I will not be able to work. I would thus like some regulation around using e-cigarettes in places where I have little choice to be.

I don't think that either smell nor "non-water compounds" are reasons to regulate e-cigarettes tighter than we regulate perfumes, colognes, or spray deodorants.

Similar regulation for all four seems reasonable to me.

Those things don't tend to protrude more than a few inches, maximum, from a person's body, and there's an established culture whereby people will be reprimanded if they do.

Heh, tell that to the elevator in my office building. You find e-cigs offensive? I don't, but I do have those sort of problems with perfumes.

This is the reason I stopped going to malls. The olfactory assault emanating from some of those stores is quite unpleasant and will give me migraines. Applies to the weekend bar scene, too, but I was never wont to hang around drunk people anyway.

Quite a few perfumes give me a migraine with even fairly limited exposure. By the time I notice the smell enough to run away, it's usually too late. If someone is wearing axe body spray I have to immediately leave the room.

http://www.ewg.org/research/not-so-sexy

> I cannot cope with the smell of e-cigarettes

Okay, fair enough. Have you tried asking the vapers if they would mind not smoking them indoors? I know I've stopped doing so in confined conference rooms after a coworker commented that they didn't like the smell.

I appreciate it sucks that vaping is just one more thing which intrudes on your personal space and freedoms, but so do so many things at the office, from people chatting, to coughing, to cracking their knuckles or delighting you with the irritating buzz of their headphones. I'm not really sure that e-cigarettes warrant regulation any more than any of the other annoyances that are encountered throughout the day.

EDIT: Also, for anyone interested in learning more about the science of e-cigarette safety, Dr. Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health pretty vociferously supports e-cigarettes and writes a blog on the science and politics of the matter:

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/comparison.htm...

Yes, I realize that's a shameless appeal to authority.

> Have you tried asking the vapers if they would mind not smoking them indoors?

Yes. Unfortunately, some people do not seem to care about others, especially when they see what they're doing as "harmless". There seems to be a certain militancy among some vapers that doesn't exist around most other things.

The apathy is not a cigarette/e-cig problem, sounds more like a personality trait. A little mindfulness would do our culture good(real practice, not the Time magazine version).

I posit the militancy is a possible result of persecution.

Yes, I am a 2nd class smoking citizen.

Wow, arseholes. It's hard to recommend any course of action really, because I can't think of any coworkers I've ever had who'd refuse a reasonable request like that. I guess I'd offer to buy them some flavoured nicotine gum and ask them to try that for a while?

I think it's reasonable to ask vapers around you to take it elsewhere if it bothers you. Similarly, if someone is wearing a very strong perfume that bothers you, take it up with them. As a vaper, I'll generally ask first before vaping in a closed area, but if I don't, I'm totally okay with someone asking me to take it elsewhere. If you run into large groups of people who don't, those people are just dicks. That doesn't mean we should start legislating away everything that's irritating to some group of people.

It seems to me that the argument for legislation seems to come from the idea that smoking is bad, smokers are bad people, so anything that looks like smoking is also bad.

Aye, it probably does come from that. I'll wait to see what becomes of "vaper culture" before making an opinion, but before then, I'm honestly not going to get involved either way on this process.

> which emit harmless water vapour

Considering how few e-liquids contain water…

The base is usually vegetable glycerin [0] and/or propylene glycol [1], sometimes a low amount of distilled water or alcohol is added (I think up to 10%; usually with glycerin to lower it's viscosity) and finally food-grade flavours for taste. And of course nicotine in varying amounts from usually 0-36 mg/ml (36mg being rather rare in EU but I heard vapers in the US sometimes go that high)

Harmless is a very strong word. The Clearstream study [2] concluded that it "could be more unhealty to breath air in big cities compared to staying in the same room with someone who is vaping.", which is great but wouldn't make me use the word "harmless".

As a vaper for over 2y now after being a smoker for 8y, I obviously disagree with regulating vaping the same way smoking is, but imo we need some kind of regulation, sadly, as people are idiots. There is everything from Chinese liquids of strongly varying degrees of quality (that was the problem with the 2009 FDA study) to people who think they can just blow huge clouds in restaurants.

My personal policy is not to vape at all where people are eating and anywhere else indoors, unless it's specifically vaper friendly, to stealth vape (a technique where you inhale deeply and breathe out slowly, avoiding visible vapour).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycerol

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

[2] [PDF] http://clearstream.flavourart.it/site/wp-content/uploads/201...

Google for David Nutt in the UK. An scientific expert in the area of drugs. British government asked him to conduct a study of the relative dangers. Didn't like the result. They sacked him.

Cannot locate the item right now, but didn't the entire brain-trust leave with him, too? Sucks working for an org that ignores the results that don't suit their ends.

Heh, not only that but the person who fired him got sacked for doing so [1] and Nutt ended up helping start what is, essentially, a political competitor to the organization he was thrown out of [2].

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8349300.stm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Scientific_Committe...

And worse people cycle through novel compounds to avoid drugs laws to create "legal highs" which have bery little data to show how safe or not they are.

It's weird just how sub optimal current laws are.

> so there is no research on creating safer alternatives to existent drugs

That's not entirely true, MDAI was created as a safer alternative to MDMA, however reports say it's somewhat lacking in the experience.

We already have a non-neurotoxic version, it's called MDAI.

It doesn't work if you use it too much.

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