Ephedrine is made out to be a very dangerous drug in the media, but OTC pseudoephedrine compounds are readily available and I don’t recall seeing any stories about alot of people getting sick or dying on pseudoephedrine.
So is pseudoephedrine safer mg per mg than ephedrine? Or is it the fact that alot of the people who use ephedrine are tempted to use too much of it for indefinite periods of time (for weight loss) while people who use pseudoephedrine only use it for a few weeks at a time? However people who use pseudoephedrine use reasonably large doses, 30-60mg every 4-6 hours to a max of 240mg a day is the recommended dosage.
I am not a chemist nor a doctor, but here’s what I know on the subject:
a) Ephedra plant derivative used in weight loss products is at least 4 different ephedrine-like alkaloids including pseudoephedrine and ephedrine in rather random proportions. The interaction of different alkaloids and not knowing the dose is one of the key factors that made it dangerous.
b) There have been studies on the dangers of pseudoephedrine, but the one I read looked like a bunch of scientific scaremongering. Specifically, they could only dig up like 20-something recorded strokes, and in every one of them, based on the description something fishy was going on. A lot of people were tested using some older amphetamine toxicology screen (if I remember correctly) that also shows positive for pseudoephedrine/ephedrine. The reaserches simply assumed the test was positive due to pseudoephedrine and not amphetamine use because amphetamine use was unlikely (???). Sorry I don’t have a cite right now, but if you have access to New England Journal of Medicine, search for “pseudoephedrine”.
c) Ephedra is now effectively banned from nutritional supplements, however the deaths attributed to it were few and far in between. How many millions of people took ephedra-containing diet pills without doctor’s supervision? How many of them died? If you’re guessing thousands, you’re probably an order of magnitude too high. I believe FDA has only about 150 deaths recorded attributed to ephedra use.
d) How many of those were overdoses? People are a lot more lax with “all natural weight loss aid” dosage than they are with “Dangerous cold medication” dosage. If Sudafed warns against taking more than 240mg of pseudoephedrine a day, just popping diet pills when you felt like it could wind you up with several grams of ephedrine alkaloids in your bloodstream.
So, Groman says relax
I’ll be willingly corrected, but I think the key to the first part is that ephedrine is a precursor for making methamphetamine; I don’t really think ephedrine is all that dangerous in and of itself. Even though, like most drugs, if one takes a large dose it can have bad effects. I say this just to head off the inevitable “but it can cause death!” responses.
Is it safer than pseudoephedrine by mg? I don’t know, but I can say that I know people who have taken at least 200mg of ephidrine in a dose.
You can make meth out of ephedrine, pseduoephedrine, synephrine, etc. They are all almost identical chemically except for a hydrogen, alcohol or methyl group in a different place. When I hear news stories on meth I usually hear of people making it out of pseudoephedrine, not regular ephedrine.
The FDA ban on Ephedra was lifted in April of this year, about 1 year after it went into effect. While there are a small handful of states that ban it in some form or another, the nation wide ban is no more.
And for some reason you could always buy the extract ephedrine, but not the herb ephedra. Ephedra is the herb which contains ephedrine and pseudoephedrine but ephedrine is the active ingredient. It was like banning marijuana but keeping THC legal.
Right, but my only point was that I think the reason the press demonizes ephedrine (and the reason you (you’re in IN, right?) now need to get Sudafed, etc. from behind the counter) is that they are meth precursors, not because they are all that dangerous.
You used to be able to buy the herb in Texas. I don’t know if you can anymore, but I used to sometimes take capsules stuffed full of it that I bought at a convenience store to stay awake. It’s only been about four years since I had any.
I think what groman is trying to say is that you’re confusing ephedra with ephedrine. If not, that’s what s/he should be saying.
Seriously, I have only heard about ephedra and pseudoephedrine in the media - ephedra becuase of the reasons mentioned in groman’s post, and pseudoephedrine because it’s so readily available to meth cookers.
Only ephedra would be considered “dangerous”, and even that’s debatable.
