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.
However at least in my circles nothing really bad ever happened
Was interesting to see that they weren’t entirely asleep at the switch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.