Whatever happened to the drugs I learned about back in junior high, like PCP, Quaaludes, hash, opium, etc.? Do people still do those drugs? Pretty much all I hear about nowadays are crack, meth, heroin, prescription painkillers, and cocaine every now and then.
Hash is still popular around here. Actually it went down in price with the war in Afghanistan. No idea about the others.
Heroin[sup]tm[/sup] and amphetamines aren’t exactly new, and cocaine is ancient, and in my experience, cocaine and amphetamines are still pretty popular. IIRC heroin over here (the Netherlands) has been on the decline for decades with most of the market being long-time junkies (i.e. the people who got addicted years ago).
Hash is still popular everywhere, though depending where you live it may be much easier to get “unprocessed” weed. Like weed, opium should be available anywhere (since it’s completely easy to grow), but in my experience it’s not very popular.
I have heard of people doing PCP sometimes known as “water”, but that is just hearsay. Hash is certainly popular in Europe or at least Amsterdam. I knew a girl who said she had smoked opium, but that was in the early '90s and in Thailand.
Rob
I’ve never known anybody that tried PCP or Quaaludes (as far as I know, anyway) but hash is something most of my pot smoking acquaintances have fond stories about doing and I know people online who make tea from opium poppies. I don’t think either are very popular as they’re harder to get/grow than a lot of other stuff, but they are out there.
I remember reading that in South Africa and other southern African countries Quaaludes are still very popular. I can’t remember where I read that, so it may have been quite awhile back. I wonder if they still are.
Methaqualone is industrially produced, (you can’t just make it in your back yard,) and has limited medical usage, (there are other drugs that do the same thing that didn’t have the same visibility of recreational use.) It was made illegal and most of the producers were convinced to stop producing it and the recreational use went away, too. (except in South Africa, as mentioned.)
A similar campaign is often suggested to eliminate methamphetamine abuse as well, since the ephedrine/pseudoephedrine are industrially produced and more of the precursor is made into illegal meth than is used as legal cold medications.
Currently they’re trying to restrict illegal access while keeping a legal production as well. This has resulted in a 75% drop in U.S. imports of ephedrine/pseudoephedrine. http://www.methhelponline.com/meth-statistics.htm And yet, you can still get cold medication or meth if you try. Quaaludes, however, you just can’t get in North America.
Is that still necessary?
People gravitate to the drugs that are most easily available for the lowest prices. That changes from year to year for any number of reasons. In five years you’ll be asking this about a different set of drugs.
Don’t think so. It was intended more as a reminder that heroin isn’t something new.
I guess we always hear about the new danger. The “new” drugs are unknown and scary… and news programs like that stuff.
And you forgot X (ecstasy) on the list of new, news-making drugs. I still hear about that one…
The real problem is that the TM symbol is for an unregistered trademark. When the trademark is properly registered the ® symbol (called a racol - I didn’t know that) is used.
Which would have been used for heroin? I searched and didn’t come up with a good answer. Bayer did trademark heroin in 1898. (Whether they trademarked it simultaneously in the U.S. as well as Germny is probable, but I couldn’t confirm that.) The searchable trademark database doesn’t seem to go back that far. I found a canceled trademark for heroin perfume and, far weirder, one for heroin wheel rims, also thankfully dead.
It’s easy to find the heroin bottle in an image search, but I don’t see any symbols either on the bottle or on the accompanying advertising. It’s possible that the symbols came later. I don’t see any symbols on contemporary Bayer aspirin bottles or advertising either. Both bottles do spell out that they are trademarks, though.
You just got me curious about the history of the symbols so I thought I’d share my research.
The Bayer logo is trademarked on that image (you can see the word Trade- at the right-hand horizon of the bottle). I don’t think it was particularly uncommon to do it that way back then. But, no, I don’t see any indication that Heroin was a trademark in that image, either. Perhaps the lawyers weren’t as worried about every little thing back then. 
I always thought of hash as a “European” drug; maybe popular in someplace like Oslo or Paris, but not really in North America.
Wasn’t heroin an “old drug” before its revival of sorts in the mid-to-late 1990s? Heroin seemed to be associated with the junkies of the 1960s and 1970s, and then it disappeared for a while, becoming another one of those “European” drugs you’d see far more frequently on the streets of Geneva than Kansas City.
Don’t hear much about LSD anymore, either.
Yeah, that was my reasoning for including it in the list of “new” drugs.
I think opiates are on the downslide. Even the most uneducated slob knows that particular family of drugs is very dangerous. They produce strong addictions quickly, develop tolerance just as quickly, and are easy to overdose on. The side effects are pretty nasty as well. I’m guessing the drugs are also harder and more expensive to get.
Meth has only one attraction to the user. It’s cheap and easy to make and get. Other than that, it has nasty side effects as well.
Marijuana seems to be timeless. It’s not particularly dangerous, but it is very easy to test for in urine samples since it’s residuals aren’t eliminated from the body quickly.
I don’t do drugs, but my advice to the government would be to make the pot legal but regulated, and concentrate on the rest of the more dangerous crap. At first glance, pot doesn’t seem any more of a threat to society than alcohol. I could be very wrong though.
I recommend staying away from it all period, including excessive drinking. All the paths lead to nowhere.
The vast majority of LSD was manufactured by Clyde Apperson and William Pickard.
I emphasize: was.
Apparently there isn’t a lot of acid floating around these days…
Unfortunately.
Sigh…
Memories.
Back when I was in my “experimenting with drugs” phase (only about 5-6 years ago) I really wanted to try opium. I knew several drug dealers and tried many times to find someone who could hook it up. Never was able to score any at all. That stuff is rare, at least here in the States.