Lads, I wasn't sure whether to post this here or on /V/ but you need to watch this. It's a surprisingly in depth look at the research chemical trade/history and how the drugs effect people. I thought it was very good, honest and reasonably hard hitting in some aspects. Check it out.
I was expecting some sort of reefer madness nonsense, but I thought it was a reasonable account of the current state of play. Totally not surprised about how things panned out for Baxter.
I found this really unnerving to watch, mostly because those dickhead teenagers remind me of myself and my uni mates about 6 years ago. I'm glad I never turned into a Baxter, selling weed and mephedrone to fund my coke habit was about as far as I went although I used to be really intrigued by smack. The scenes where they're shooting up that ket analogue are pretty dark, I seriously hope I've never appeared quite THAT fucked up to anyone, although I did once eat a bunch of (so-called) "E" that made my housemates afraid of me for some reason, god knows what was in that.
I was a bit confused by the bit where the chemist guy starts going on about how they're spending millions doing human and animal trials, does he really believe that those coming back "safe" would stop the chemicals from being banned?
And then his mate chimes in with this bizarre vision of how in twenty year's time we'll all routinely be taking a red pill for "happy" and then the blue pill later for "chilled" etc etc. Leaving aside the likely biological problems with this (what goes up must come down - you can't get high without some kind of low afterwards), what a weird synthetic dystopia that would be, where we all just take a pill when we want to feel an emotion. Reminds me of the Voigt-Kampff machine from Do Androids Dream.
I can also advise you that by the time you hit 35-40, the come downs will be so bad it will take you at least week to get over. Extremely unpleasant when you have job/wife/kids to deal with. Almost takes the fun out of it. Almost.
Very well presented and balanced though.
I had no idea mephedrone had sold so much. Also it surprised me that about the same amount is still being sold.
>>5991 It's quite high on the list but as usual there's a physical backlog of books that never seems to diminish.
Anyway, no, I did definitely did mean Do Androids Dream although I got the name of the machine wrong, it's called a mood organ. The trivialisation of emotion which it entails is explored through Deckard's wife, who uses it to become depressed.
Seems like a lot of Philip K Dick's work, especially those based on drug culture seem to just be slightly more extreme versions of reality. When I was reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It felt so alien, but now you mention it, we do have things which can change our emotions easily. We have drugs which make you happy, make you depressed, make you work better, make you lazier, make you more energetic, chill you out.
>just be slightly more extreme versions of reality.
They might "just" be that now, but they weren't at the time of writing. PKD was startlingly accurate on a number of points, which is one of the greater reasons he's so lauded.
This is definitely what I mean, his work was definitely ahead of its time. People say that dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World are predictive but PKD seems to have got it spot on.
Sorry to be the prick in this thread; but someone has to be:
"chemicals widely untested on humans may have adverse affects shocker".
Seriously. When I was a teenlad I would have thrown anything down my neck, these days I stick to drugs that are prescribed as safe by doctors. That means that'd they've undergone stringent testing and that they're not going to kill you for some unknown reason (barring allergic reaction).
Before someone shouts 'killjoy', let me just say that that list includes:
Cannabis, cocaine, heroin, morphine, all medically prescribed opiates, amphetamine, methamphetamine, ketamine and GHB.
Obviously there are exceptions that have simply been proved safe through decades of use; in this category we can count MDMA, LSD, mescaline and probably 2cb and maybe 2ci.
Pretty much anything else is pretty much analogous to signing up to be an experimental subject in a drugs trial.
The best example of this so far was mephedrone, which anyone who read the literature already knew had cardio-toxic metabolites with massive half-lives. WTG guys.
Obviously, this links back into drugs legislation. If you ban and reduce access to the good stuff, people (and particularly nasty money-grabbing companies) will latch onto whatever similar molecules they can find to sell on legally - with nary a concern for what unseen damage they be causing. Remember the old adage; follow the money.
As a final note, I'm not railing against drugs here! But research chemicals are exactly that - use at your own risk. Or, be safe and use known safe drugs. :)
I think that the research chems situation is far, far more risky than most people realise.
Drug nerds are well aware of the MPPP disasters. In 1976 and 1982, there were outbreaks of Parkinson's disease amongst groups of young people, caused by batches of MPPP which had been inadvertently contaminated with the extremely neurotoxic MPTP. In both cases, the MPTP was produced simply due to inadequate temperature control of an intermediate reaction.
The research chemicals scene is digging deep into the pharmacopoeia, so we're now at the stage where trip reports on Bluelight are often the first in-vivo trials of new drugs. Something disastrous is going to happen and it's a matter of when, not if. We've already had a major incident, when a batch of Bromo-DragonFLY was accidentally sold as 2C-B-FLY, a drug 20 times less potent; That led to several confirmed fatalities.
>>5997 >these days I stick to drugs that are prescribed as safe by doctors
>Cannabis, cocaine, heroin, morphine, all medically prescribed opiates, amphetamine, methamphetamine, ketamine and GHB.
So ketamine (just to pick one) is "prescribed as safe by doctors", is it?
Ketamine is used specifically for its safety. Paramedics use it routinely on trauma patients, because it's much safer than most other anaesthetic agents - it doesn't suppress respiration or circulation, even in moderate overdose.
If I had a teenage child, I'd be happier with them taking ketamine than binge drinking. It's quite hard to take a life-threatening overdose of ketamine, because of the broad therapeutic index and the sedative effect impairing the ability of the user to continue dosing; Young people are quite resistant to the sedative effects of alcohol, so can easily drink life-threatening amounts.
Ketamine is only seriously risky if used chronically, where it may cause Olney's lesions or bladder damage.
