Never tried it but ketamine has been very popular with clubbers here the last decade or so.
To directly answer the O.P., several drugs come to mind that were quite popular at one time but have largely fallen from favor. Opium was everywhere until the mid-20th century, both as a letitimate painkiller and as a recreational drug, but I don’t know anyone who has ever used it recreationally, although derivitives of it are still around. I recently, in another thread, alluded to having tried something called “lettuce opium”, an alledged opium substitut derived from a commonweed called “prickly lettuce”. It was apparently used as an opium substitute at one time and enjoyed a brief period (in the '60’s, when else?) as a recreational drug, but inmy experience was pretty much of a non-starter.
Another popular mind-bender of the 60’s was morning glory or Hawaiian wood rose seeds. Old hippies (so it is said) would eat a bowl of them with cream & sugar for breakfast and float all day. It’s been years since I’ve heard of anyone partaking.
Another one that I’ve always been curious about, but never had the nerve to try is Datura Wrightii, commonly known as Sacred Datura or Moonflower. Carlos Castenada wrote about it, Edward Abbey was familiar with it, heck, the stuff grows wild along the highways in California and flower gardeners here in Oregon prize it, but no one seems to be aware of its hallucinogenic properties. It is said to be somewhat unpredictable and dangerous for the uninitiated, and maybe that’s what puts people off. At any rate, it enjoyed a period of relative popularity, but seems to have fallen off theradar for the most part. AFAIK it’s even legal
The only drug I would advise no one to even try, it doesn’t even produce a high per se more like dysphoric delirium. Throughly unpleasant and even dangerous due to both the unknown dosage in the plant material.
+1
I know I’ve read that the abuse potential for Datura is pretty much nil, because nobody likes it enough to keep using it. This was in a medical text but my google fu is weak, so I’ll just give you a snippet of wiki, bolding mine
Ketamine, OTOH, I administer on a regular basis, we use it all the time for sedating kids.
Yes I would very strongly agree!!! Avoid also the so called “tree daturas” a very common landscaping tree(quite fragrant drooping yellow, orange and peach colored flowers) in the southwest US, technically a member of the brugmansia family I believe.
Active component is scopalomine, from which the anti-sea sickness stick on medicines are made. Supposedly used as a “zombie” drug in Columbia, to rob victims with their consent…:eek: There is a farily recent documentary on this called “the Devils Breath”.The datura trip reports are very scary. Every few years someone dies in southern calilfornia, trying out “jimson weed” or “loco weed”…dehydration often.
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/ is a good laymans source for both natural and artificial drugs being used and or abused.
Kinda of the opposite of the OP’s question, but it seems there are quite a few plant species, being “rediscovered” after being used for hundreds of years in south america, africa ,and now cultivated in the west.
Part “new age” party people and part hard core researchers looking for the next plant based medicine. Interesting times.
Yes, poppers. And come to think of it, I was going to gay bars/clubs at the time when they were in general use. For dancing.
LSD (acid) is still available but it’s easier to get peyote.
If you want to go way back, in the '50s and '60s paragoric was in common use. Just about every mother used it at some time or other; it soothed a colicky baby or a tummy ache. It was regulated so you had to sign for it, but you could walk into any drug store and get it. In the '60s it became known that “certain people” were soaking cigaretts in it, letting them dry and then smoking them ,thereby coping a buzz. It became a controlled substance. I don’t know if it’s even used anymore, but it was immortalized in the book Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me written by Richard Farina, Joan Baez’s BIL. The book also describes, possibly, the world’s largest turd.
Carlos Castenada. Yeah (the Lines of the World.)
I see Halcion at least once every couple of weeks in my community pharmacy. The local dentists seem like to prescribe it for prophylaxis of anxiety before a dental visit.
No one calls it Halcion anymore, though – the generic name is triazolam and that’s all any of them ever writes on the prescription pad. And I don’t dispense enough of it to even consider it a drug of abuse anymore.
In the 60s, barbiturates were a common form of downer. Now they’ve largely been supplanted by other CNS depressants.
There are lots and lots of readily-available hallucinogens. The problem is, as with this, that they are generally (a) dangerous and (b) unpleasant.
A short walk in the woods up here and you will find enough amanita muscaria mushrooms to keep an army stoned … but you would not really want to try it.
I read this great interview with an underground chemist who suffered from phantom limb syndrome. He claims ketamine treated it effectively, but MXE a ketamine analog he created cured him.
http://www.vice.com/read/interview-with-ketamine-chemist-704-v18n2
Anybody know where to score some laudanum? No? How about opium? C’mon, there’s gotta be an opium den around here somewhere, fulla Chinese guys with water pipes …
Damn, not even any Miltown pills?
Similary, you used to be able to buy menthol nasal inhalers for a stuffy nose that apparently had a felt strip inside of them soaked in some form of amphetamine. I remember the inhalers well, but never ran the experiment.
I sure don’t hear much about PCP any more like we used to.
I don’t understand this post. How did friends share a single hit? I’m not sure of the mechanics of that. From the late eighties to mid nineties it was running about $5 per hit for some intense experiences. Also, where is it up to $30 to $40 per hit?
I just took in a bunch of shows (good summer: when we catch 7 Walkers in October, we’ll have caught Further and Phil, Bobby and Mickey solo) and while I had no idea what they meant, there were people walking by quietly saying “doses.” It’s still pretty prevalent in the circles I spin in. Ah, memories.
Back in the 60s/70s in the UK there were several popular drugs that don’t seem to be around much now.
Artane (trihexyphenidyl) was an absolutely crazy high. It was meant for Parkinson’s disease and really screwed with your head while the high lasted. I’d be deep in conversation with someone walking down the road in the wee hours, turn my head for a moment and they’d vanish. After walking back and looking in shop doorways for a while I’d suddenly remember that we’d parted company earlier and I’d been talking to a hallucination for the last ten minutes. Creepy stuff.
That was a weird one but far more popular back then were Diconal tablets (Dipipanone hydrochloride), a synthetic narcotic that delivered a powerful punch when the tablets were crushed and mainlined. In the early days they were known as Coke and Morph as the flash was quite similar to a combination of cocaine and morphine. Absolute murder on the veins though.
As someone commented above barbiturates were far more common back then, in the shape of Nembutal, Tuinal, Seconal, etc. Many forms of tablet amphetamine too, Drinamyl, Dexedrine, Durophet, etc.
Arsenic (late 1800s. Used by women for complexion and by men to promote sexual vigor. Or so they thought.)
Actually, arsenic tri-oxide.
“You just gotta poke around…”
H.G. Wells mentions use of strychnine as a stimulant in his novel The Invisible Man. Not very popular nowadays, now that we have “better” stimulants.
Regards,
Shodan
Schlitz?
You can buy poppers over the counter in the UK, I think most teenager will try them once and then wonder why the hell anyone would take them again.
Never heard of Artane but you can still get dipipanone if you really want it. Some really lucky bastards are prescribed it cause they got addicted to it when it was popular and nothing else will do.
In the mid-70s, if it was blotter, one might take a razor blade and cut the little blotch into sections as equal as possible, like it was a tiny little pie.