Testing Legal Highs Would Save Lives
buzzfeed.com
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And yet we love LSD, and we still try to find safe sources of the drug. We don't like playing with fire and would much rather pay even heavily marked up prices to buy LSD from a pharmacy where we can get guarantees about the purity and dose.
The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior. People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse. Legal pot is a good first step, but we've got a long way to go.
People don't need to die trying to get high when the drug they want is safe in the first place.
Compared to these, LSD is much safer. Doses are ridiculously low (most poisons don't work in doses of 100µg), huge overdoses are not immediately dangerous, and an addiction does not form.
One can invent many reasons to ban LSD, but preserving public health can't be sensibly among them.
See the works of Bruce K. Alexander on this: http://www.brucekalexander.com/
There is a withdrawal in a different sense I think. I had HPPD for around 3 months after heavy psychedelic use with LSD as the centerpiece of that. I was doing up to 10 tabs at once and using mushrooms and certain research chemicals every two or three days for a few months.
Not to excuse my risky behavior, but other people go much harder than I do. MDMA is a favorite choice, especially in Europe where it is cheaper. There are endless stories on Erowid and Bluelight of young people buying 10 grams of a research chemical and plowing through it in a summer. Often it's stuff like MDPV or 25i NBOME, with a short history of human use and carrying cardiac risks.
A wide range of psychedelic drugs have addictive potential IMO. I'm not sure how meaningful the distinction really is between psychological and physiological in the context of addiction.
Your statement assumes that drug prohibitions exist to protect the health of the public. This is, as you've pointed out, demonstrably false. If, on the other hand, you view drug laws as a means to criminalize a large percentage of the population and give police a ton of discretion in declaring who is and isn't a criminal, the situation become entirely consistent and you realize that drug laws are nothing more than a way to keep prisons full and allow police to remove "undesirables" (read: minorities) from society.
Allowing the the drug war to be framed as a public health issue means arguing on terms chosen by proponents of the drug war. We need to reject that premise and discuss it for what it really is, a racially-motivated tool for social repression. If those that argue against what you suggest (safe an legal avenues for drug use) were forced to show that, absent the current drug laws, the damage to society would be greater than the damage inflicted by the drug laws themselves, their arguments would look even more foolish than they currently appear.
In my country there are no private prisons and no racial minorities to criminalize but the drug laws are just as bad as in the US. Actually, much worse. And if you go to the comments section under any article about legal highs on the local news sites, most people are demanding even more draconian measures, including death penalty for possession.
In your country, wherever that is, the undesireables are the poor, as they are most everywhere.
No, that doesn't work. The inequality here is minimal.
I had a friend die while on LSD when I was a kid. He didn't die because of the drug, but as a hallucinogen, it is suspected he got himself into a situation where he followed his fancy unaware of the danger of the environment he had entered.
Of course, you could say 'but people trip and hit their head and die all the time when they are drunk too', but the difference is, people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.
As a self-declared LSD user, do you consider things other than the long-term chemical effects of the drug? If so, what are those things?
If it sounds like I'm picking a fight or trolling, that is not the intention, I am genuinely curious.
[Citation Needed]
I read stories about college kids falling, drowning, crashing their cars, and almost always it's because they were heading home totally smashed from a party. I would say, from my impressions, that the proportion of people hitting their head (or falling into a lake and drowning, or what have you) is far lower for sober people than it is for people intoxicated by alcohol.
A sober person has reflexes that would have prevented that.
That's just absurdly wrong.
Not knowing the purity and the fact that I can be extremely neurotic/overly analytical just immediately worries me that I'll have a bad trip and cause irreparable psychological damage. Is there anything to be said about the psychological effects of these drugs? Sometimes I feel like when they assess "safe" they're assessing this from a toxicological perspective only, and not on the psychological well-being of the people who are consuming them.
Something about our current batch seems off, everyone's been having weird trips. Despite this red flag, we've taken over 2/3 of the batch. You can't be 100% certain doing testing-at-home either, because there are inert compounds that will test positive for LSD - a careful dealer can fake the test results.
And it's a damn shame, because if you are uncertain about the quality of your substance, those doubts will amplify throughout your trip (that is the nature of psychedelics), and every little effect that you aren't expecting will cause a flurry of uncertainty.
Basically the risk of getting 25x-NBOMe or DOx instead of LSD is very high, but the risk of getting NBOMe mixed with LSD is negligible.
Amusingly, we keep inventing new drugs to "fix" the old ones, discovering that they're just as bad (if not worse), and rinse/repeating.
Believe it or not, heroin was originally sold by Bayer (yes, as in "aspirin") as a "safer, less addictive" alternative to morphine. Both drugs were very commonly used as cough medicine (as was morphine's predecessor, laudanum).
Now, of course, we know that heroin is actually rather addictive, and instead we treat heroin addiction with other opiates that have a similar effect[0]. And so the cycle continues.
[0] Usually which bind to the same receptors, to reduce issues of withdrawal.
http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/demon-drug-...
I would be very hesitant to call addiction a myth when we can measure it, and measure the relative addictivity of various substances.
Bruce K Alexander has some interesting views and some unteresting data but AFAICT has failed to really prove his case or overthrow the current models.
Take as much aspirin as a psychoactive dose of LSD (say 100µg) and there will be no toxic effect from aspirin, but take as much LSD as an active dose of aspirin (400mg every 4 hours for an adult to to treat fever/pain) and you have a dose of 33 times the LD50 of LSD which is quite toxic imo.
Because of its minute dose, LSD has the problem that it's hard to know how big the dose you're taking is, since most people don't have analytic balances in their kitchens. Even still, most people are going to need to take at least 10mg of LSD to overdose, even with the highest toxicity results published, which is pretty easy to distinguish from a high recreational dose of 200µg.
Heroine is a prime example. Whilst the argument could be given for "Educated use" you must take into account that the greater population at large will not educate themselves, and will come to harm - mainly through addiction.
Cigarettes are a nice example. We spend vast quantities of money on health care for people who smoke - the information is there, everybody knows that it causes cancer, yet huge amounts of people do it. We would be better off as a planet if everyone just stopped.
Whilst incarceration clearly is not the correct response to addicts, some form of regulation is needed to protect idiots from themselves.
The supply chain funds warlords and criminal gangs. Impurities in the heroin cause abcesses and the need for amputation for injecting users. Restrictions on needles cause spread of blood-borne disease - and this also affect low wage workers who have handle sharps in public bathrooms and so on. People need money to feed their addiction and so they turn to prostitution[1] or acquisitive crime.
Treating heroin as a criminal problem has failed to protect people from themselves, but it also fails to protect wider society.
I do agree that we need to be cautious though. Look at the mess caused by alcohol. (That may be more true in the UK than the US.)
And you only have to look at Russia to see what happens when supply completely dwindles to addicts of hard drugs, the krokodil epidemic is truly horrifying.
My point is just that a free for all on all drugs no matter what harm they cause could be disastrous for society as a whole, as you mention there are plenty of people that currently use alcohol to escape their problems that are in difficult places, especially in poorer demographics. Imagine if they could get hold of heroine or methamphetamines on a whim.
It's a fine balance and I personally cannot see a good way to strike one that will keep everybody safe and happy.
There are plenty of drugs which if used responsibly I could see being legal though, marijuana, ecstasy and some hallucinogens to name a few. If taxed the government could stand to make a lot of money from them as well.
Yes, legalizing will be dangerous; people will still do heroin, become addicted, and possibly die. But the harm of such use is shifted from a wider group, to a much smaller group largely consisting of users who have made the decision for themselves.
But drugs like Ice, Meth or Heroin are incredibly dangerous, toxic and addictive regardless of how well they are made. Making them readily accessible to existing addicts makes sense. But to first-time users ? No way.
Most heroin ODs are actually the reverse problem....a frequent user gets something that for once ISN'T cut, takes their normal dose and instantly ODs. Even that is easily handled if Narcan is available.
I'm not saying anyone should use heroin, but from a purely pharmaceutical standpoint it isn't an especially dangerous drug, and in many places (but not the US) is used for the treatment of severe pain. Something like Oxycontin is harder on the body due to the acetaminophen.
Anyway, you can legalize all these drugs, but make the harder ones prescription only and highly taxed.
According to Wikipedia, it's 120,000 alone in Mexico's recent drug war. Colombia has been one of the most violent places on earth for decades now. And it's not a coincidence that we're dealing with terrorism threats from the country that produces 70% of the world's opium. The number of people who've had their lives ruined by illegal drugs goes way beyond those that consume those drugs.
In this program they explored something not so obvious about legalizing drugs, namely that the pharmaceutical industrial complex would fill the market with many new drugs, think the current issues with legal highs but industrial scale. Another point is drug interactions are very unpredictable and very difficult to test.
This show is probably available on the web somewhere, here's the bbc page about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/if/4075235.stm
Imagine if we unleashed the full power of science and capitalism at the problem!
Of course we would need to find a regulatory framework that allowed us to optimise for that outcome rather than for addiction...
A good primer on why we need testing is the Bunk Police's documentary "What's in My Baggie". In it they travel to festivals testing people's drugs. Nearly every drug they test is misrepresented. Most people believe they have MDMA when they have "bath salts". Even the positive tests may be adulterated or one of several compounds that give similar test results. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYzmZ1IU4zY
Not that MDMA is safe; it's without question a dangerous drug. Hundreds of thousands[1] of people taking unknown substances in unknown quantities is a much much larger problem.
[1]Electric Daisy Carnival alone attracts 150,000 people and runs 3 nights. There are several other festivals of similar size, and dozens that attract tens of thousands per night.
A great example of what can happen is Fen-Phen, the diet drug that was taken off the market a while back. The drug fenfluramine also activates the 5-HT2B receptor and causes heart valve damage.
All of these designer drugs out there could certainly have off-target effects that would never be noticed unless a clinical trial was run (even then maybe not!) or unless enough users have enough problems that it's noticed (MPTP is great example).
Washington, on the other hand, appears to at least be funneling revenue soley into the health department.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
Is it possible to predict how close the effect to the illegal one, will be.
[Edit] Also I'm wondering how is it possible that chemists like Shulgin, have an ability to create such a large number of molecules, with psychoactive effects.
Many designer drugs are close analogs of schedule I substances.
The drugs mentioned in there - Benzo Fury (I hate that name, let's call it 6-APB because that's the molecule on the wrapper) is extremely close to MDA, aMT is a tryptamine which escaped the generic tryptamine regulations and the NBOMes are a twist on the generic 2C-x structure.
Also he was friend with Bob Sager and he worked with and for the DEA.
Then there are the majority of the users, who are looking for a legal alternative to <insert popular drug here>, who effectively fund the production and marketing of the scene, and without whom the first group would not have such an easy time of it. The main concerns with this group are legality and ease of access.
The first group are likely to have their use under control, to be very clued in about allergy tests, measured doses, side effects mitigation etc. They may have lapses into unhealthy use patterns but generally are in control. They are served well by the current system and find services like WEDINOS invaluable.
The second group tend to be far less interested in what they're doing, may not be educated about any of it, probably aren't part of an online community to ask for help, they may even buy into the fallacy that legal == safe. They are effectively playing russian roulette. One of the cases mentioned in the article was one of these - that kid from Southampton died from taking over a gram of aMT. The dose range for that substance is usually around 30-50mg, the kid took 20 times that and died.
This group would be best served by legalisation of things that are known to be mostly safe. MDMA (or some of its safer derivatives like MBDB), cannabis etc.
All this said, if any of the many bans were effective at stopping the proliferation of NPS, it's not actually going to help anyone, because you'll just end up back at square one - kids buying unknown substances of unknown purity from unknown sources.
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