Are legal drugs harmful?

I mean the use of DXM, nitrous oxide and poppers is NOT against the law. But I am afraid to use that stuff for health reasons.

Using them not according to the directions is illegal though. As for DXM, I vaguely recall something from my college days called “Bromide poisoning”. I don’t know anything about it, but when I would read about robo-tripping, that phrase would come up, I believe, from over use.
I’d start there.

of course they can be. Think about it, you are taking a prescription medicine (or OTC one for that matter) because of the effect you want it to have on your body. It stands to reason it will have an effect, even a advere effect. The only med I have found with no side effect is simethicone. (GasX. mylicon drops) those are OTC even for newborns!

Cite?

I’ve been interested in trying DXM mostly because I understand that it’s legal and relatively safe if used occasionally with proper preparation, but for several reasons including health concerns and lack of knowledge on how to prepare it I have not done so.

I don’t seem to really have an addictive personality, so the biggest personal concerns I have over doing drugs recreationally would be accidentally causing an acute overdose and getting into legal trouble over drug use. If marijuana were really and truly-o 100% legal to buy, possess, and use here I might do it, but at this stage in my life a drug conviction could wreck my career. For DXM danger #1, OD’ing, is still an issue.

Junkie.

Either you are mistaken or the (free student) lawyer I spoke to in '06 was mistaken or the laws have changed.

But my life is very boring.

Seems I was wrong about that one. I’d swear OTC meds had a statement on them saying that it was illegal to use them not according to the directions, but I checked and it’s not written on them and I can’t find anything on a handful of OTC med’s websites. So either it was there and isn’t now or it was never there and I’m thinking of prescription meds or spray paint or something.

Prescription meds kill more people than illegal drugs, even though they’re usually used as directed at first, so if the OP’s concern is about “health,” then I’d say the legality of the stuff isn’t really the issue.

Come to think of it, I don’t thing OTC drugs have such a warning. But all sorts of other chemical products do! I have here a spray can of Raid that says:

And likewise on a bottle of Clorox and a bottle of Lysol. No doubt on spray paint too.

Go figure.

I’m no medical professional, or even amateur, or indeed anything at all… Hmm. Perhaps you shouldn’t listen to me.

Anyway, drugs are designed to adjust your brain or body chemistry to bring you back into proper healthy alignment. If you are already quite healthy, then it stands to reason that taking drugs would push you back out of alignment, which in my opinion is the opposite of a good thing.

Since the OP said it was legal and I thought it wasn’t, I was just saying that taking a legal drug that’s OTC in a way designed to abuse it would make it illegal. Turns out I was wrong about that.

I came across that phrase quite a bit when I was searching the internet. I always thought it had to do with huffing. Turns out it’s required by the EPA. It’s an environmental protection thing.

I would swear you are correct here (granted I don’t really know), based on things like Kratom - can be sold as incense, but not as something for consumption. Another thing that comes to mind are research chems, but that could be because they are supposed to be akin to prescription meds.

If kratom being sold in gas stations/head shops now, that’s clearly the beginning of the end for it. Start counting down to the day some teenage moron crams a 10,000x dose up his ass with a rubber hose and bellows and then passes out in his car while jerking off to Maroon 5 with the engine running in a closed garage. That grey-haired ghoul on Dateline will call it the “new bath salts” and conduct a couple of hidden-camera ambushes of shifty-eyed South Asian convenience store clerks intercut with extreme close-ups of the tearful parents being interviewed about their campaign for “[Name of Teenage Moron]'s Law,” which will of course be passed unanimously almost overnight.

Shoot…now I want to see that. I can only image the law and order episode.

I also wanted to say that there is some thought that the FDA is going to do something about racetams.

I’m not sure about nitrous and poppers, but DXM is far less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. Each of them kills a single digit percent of the world’s population all by themselves. (You have to work to get there with alcohol, but you can add in the cancers and accidents to the alcoholism and alcohol poisoning/suffocation. However, one confounding datum is the fact that alcohol likely reduces the incidents of some diseases, by how much we’re not sure.)

In fact, alcohol and tobacco are far more dangerous than marijuana and acid. Probably more dangerous than cocaine as well: how many tens of thousands of deaths happen a year from cocaine overdoses? (The answer is not many at all.)

I’m not sure about Ecstasy, designer drugs, and meth, because I’m not sure they are ever reliably pure enough to determine how safe they’d be if they were legal and regulated. Which isn’t to say that meth wouldn’t be a societal scourge even if legal, I’m just not sure how many deaths would happen due to it.

Drugs aren’t approved because they are safe. They are approved because they are *relatively safe]/i], compared to the untreated disease and/or other available medication and result in statistically improved symptoms of the stated disease while having an acceptable level of harmful or unwanted side effects).

To use a forced example, many cancer drugs have the potential to cause cancer, but can cure or treat an existing cancer. Many patients feel that a 90% chance at remission today is worth a 30% risk of another cancer 40-50 years from now. The drug isn’t safe, in fact, it is quite toxic and other longterm problems may arise (liver and kidney failure, eye problems, high blood pressure, hormonal imbalances like early menopause in women, etc) but the patient is cancer free.

The same is pretty much true of any product sold as a drug, whether prescription or OTC. They all have side effects, they all have long-term use issues, they all have problems. But they treat what they should treat in a statistically significant portion of the population, so they are approved for use.

Nothing designed to alter your body’s biochemistry will ever be completely safe because…get this… it alters your body’s biochemistry. Most of our bodies don’t work on a 1:1 system; enzymes and chemical pathways do more than one thing. If you alter a pathway to cure a headache, you get relief for the headache, but you also affect something else (offhand, I don’t know…liver function maybe?)

No drug is really safe.

Legal drugs? Pshaw. The illegal ones are waaaaay better.

Spam ain’t good for you, either.
Reported.(herbalkratom)