I was reading this thread, and it got me to thinking about drugs of yesteryear. What illegal drugs were popular in the day but are no longer common? Do people still do quaaludes? I remember a few years ago there was a big fuss over the new drug GHB and how dangerous it was. Now, I hear nothing. What happened to it?
I think the answer for both of your examples is that the precursors were controlled and there was not enough demand for black market synthesis.
Quaaludes are still abused in South Africa? I believe.
GHB was synthed from GBL which became controlled.
GHB is now legal by prescription as Zyrem and has been for quite some time. It is very tightly controlled however - at least that was true a few years ago. Now that I check it’s listed as Schedule III. I don’t know if it was always so. Maybe things have changed. My information is second hand.
There were a lot of psychedelics that were available if not all that common in the 60’s and 70’s - things like DMT, STP even ketamine (the last of which seems to be a near miraculous cure for depression).
I think many of the so-call bath salts that are such a problem now evolved from the psychedelic amphetamines like MDA, MMDA, MDMA, etc, but I would have to research that. Oh, and some of those drugs seem to be beneficial in treating things as disparate as PTSD and OCD.
Due to their nature, PiHKAL and TiHKAL likely contain a number of drugs that nobody has bothered to use after Shulgin synthesized them and did them once or twice, for the simple reason they’re not any better than illegal drugs that are already being made in volume and are therefore readily available.
Right. “Bath salts”, which is really a catch-all term for research chemicals, are the hot ticket item in psychedelics and stimulants. Easy enough to acquire overseas legally and with many of the same effects as the old school drugs that are now illegal. Harder to get in the US because of the DEA’s recent push to arrest many of the domestic suppliers under the Analog Act. Though it remains to be seen how effective that particular legislation will be once these cases make it through the court system.
Yep yep. They’re also incredibly hard to make with any consistency and the effects are variable from person to person.
I have never done illegal drugs but LSD is supposedly really, really rare these days. It is difficult to make without an advanced understanding of chemistry techniques and the base ingredients are not easy to get either. It is non-addictive and tends to be fairly cheap when it is available so the profit motive to make it on a large scale isn’t worth the risk to the people that could make it.
Doses are in the microgram range however so a single lab can produce tens of millions of hits of it in a very short time. Only one lab is needed to supply the whole country as long as an effective supply chain is in place but it makes the whole supply very vulnerable to shutdowns through drug enforcement busts. LSD has been mostly supplanted by Ecstasy which is easier to make and has a higher profit potential.
It is sad that TV shows don’t need to show the effects of LSD abuse like they once did in the infamous Blue Boy episode of Dragnet.
That is interesting about Ketamine, I wonder if PCP or DXM would have the same effect. However I thought Ketamine was more of a 90s rave drug than a 60s/70s drug.
I came to post about quaaludes but the OP already mentioned them. Halcion though, I haven’t heard of that one (I’m guessing doctors don’t prescribe it as much). I think it is mostly stuff like xanax and ambien now.
I would assume drugs go out of fashion because safer/cheaper alternatives come out and doctors prescribe less of one drug or another (barbituate abuse is probably down, but benzo abuse is up. Benzos are safer than barbituates and therefore easier to get from a doctor).
Or like Shagnasty says, the risk outweighs the reward.
I wonder what role culture plays in which drugs are popular. LSD may be popular with hippies, but probably not with gang bangers.
Though as I understand it, Ecstasy and LSD produce a different kind of high. Ecstasy is classified as a empathogen (produces empathy, stimulation, etc.) while LSD is more of a psychedelic. I don’t know that there is any drug thats popular enough to compete with LSD as a psychedelic aside from mescaline or some other roots used for religious ceremonies. If the user really just wanted a psychedelic, then LSD would be the most available substance out there.
/I officially know way more than I should about these things.
Ketamine, DXM, and PCP are all classified as disassociates, which surprises me really. Apparently Ketamine was designed in part to replace PCP as a safer alternative. I personally have never heard anything close to the type of behavior in Ketamine users that I’ve heard about PCP users, so I guess it is safer in that regard. From what I seen Ketamine puts the user in more of trance (the proverbial K-Hole) while from what I’ve heard about PCP and its effects would lend me to believe its a less trancy and a lot more go psychotic-y.
I have the impression that shrooms are much easier to find than acid. They’re not a perfect substitute, but much more so than ecstasy.
You can have a severe, violent reaction to ketamine… Witnessed it on TV on one of those paramedic programmes. A patient with a fractured pelvis and other suspected injuries undergoing rapid induction flipped out and it took several burly police, ambulance and firemen to restrain.
In America, the drop in usage of LSD has been extraordinary.
In Australia, on the other hand, LSD usage has doubled since 2007.
In both the Rave and Neo-Psychedelic Jam Band scenes, taking Ecstacy and LSD together is very common, and many of these so-called Candy Flippers say that when combined, the effects are highly synergistic, meaning a small dose of each taken simultaneously produces a really intense stone.
Yeah I would think that they would be very popular together, especially in social settings with music.
They are!!!
(or so I’ve been told)
LSD is still around, it’s just that, where you used to be able to split one $5 hit among a few friends, now it takes 3-4 $10 hits to trip even a little. I lost sight of it for a decade or so, but I’ve been seeing it, in its weaker form, lately.
Here’s one: Prior to the 80s you could buy medicine for angina pectoris in drug stores. Like, a vial you broke and sniffed the fumes out off. Presumably an upper? They used it a lot on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. Forgot the name of it though, and of course nobody uses it anymore. Does anybody know?
Amyl Nitrate, supposedly big in the dance club scene back in the 70’s and 80’s.
Poppers?
Is it an urban legend that they are or were popular amongst some gay men?