Study the rest. The ban has brought many bad things, but it's also brought good alternatives. The 2C family, for example, arose because of the ban on LSD/mescaline/mushrooms, and is considered to have similar safety profile as the originals. Certain benzofurans (5/6-APB, APDB, MAPB, EAPB, etc) receive bigger love than MDMA because of fewer side effects and because they "bring back the magic" that prolonged MDMA use tends to dull out.
The 2C-x drugs certainly did not arise from the prohibition of older psychedelics. The man who invented them (along with MDMA earlier) was Alexander Shulgin. It was his life's work to discover and test these new drugs. I seriously doubt it was in reaction to prohibition.
2C-x as far as we know does not have a similar safety profile to the drugs you have mentioned in general. LSD is known to be safe in at least 1000x the normal dose. The highest dose in the literature for 2C-B is 5x the normal dose. Certain drugs in the series such as 2C-P have a very low safety margin[1].
[1] https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal036...
Certainly he dedicated his life to discovery and testing of all sorts of interesting things, and his legacy is enormous, but I didn't think that one was his invention.
I'd love to see a citation for that
https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_death.shtml
Ok, well maybe not 'safe', but people have taken that amount and survived. It is certainly not something I would recommend.
A normal dose of LSD is measured in micrograms, so the 1000x statement is at least very conservative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusko#The_elephant_on_LSD
> "Tusko" was also the name of a male Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962,[4] researchers from the University of Oklahoma injected (human use involves oral ingestion) 297 mg of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to him, which is over 1,000 times the dose typical of human recreational use. Within five minutes he collapsed to the ground and one hour and forty minutes later he died. It is believed that the LSD was the cause of his death, although some speculate that the drugs the researchers used in an attempt to revive him may have contributed to his death.
That said, when they were legal here, they were rather excellent...
So here's a question - I had assumed that the SERT-dumping action of MDMA took place in the brain and did not spread masses of serotonin to the rest of the body, is this correct? Or does MDMA trigger serotonin floods that do get out to the system in general?
The drug (be it MDMA or xAPB) is swimming around the whole system and is therefore free to act on the 5HT2b receptors present in the heart itself, which could promote valve mutation. Is this true for the serotonin as well?
It's not true for serotonin. Serotonin is to be released, taken back and metabolized locally, in and around the synapse. It doesn't travel around the body, at least in significant amounts, as hormones do.
And then the other big issue with safety is when you get a white powder it's impossible to tell what it is without testing. People snort something they think is one drug, turns out they just took a massive of another.
I don't reckon many people would bother with them if they could buy LSD though.
I find some novel psychedelics interesting, specifically anything that might not last quite so long.
For what's it's worth many people think they have a higher risk of causing HPPD.