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.