Hello Everyone,
When I was much younger I remember qualudes being a big thing among drug users. If I remember correctly, they also went by the number 714. Where did they go? I never hear about them any longer.
Didn’t Bill Cosby use them all up giving them to women he wanted to bang?
I miss 'ludes!
Just because it made a great line when my students were too rambunctious.
“Kyle, sit down! Ky… Jenna, I’ll bet you’ve got some qualudes in your backpack. Can you forcefeed Kyle a handful?”
I remember Quaaludes. So does the Dope.
It was withdrawn from the American market in 1982, and made a schedule I drug in 1984. It’s still available in some other countries.
Here’s a BBC story about it from 2015.
They’ve largely disappeared because more enjoyable, safer alternatives became available. The wiki says they were club drugs and could induce a coma with about 6-7 standard doses when mixed with alcohol. MDMA is likely the main replacement as a club drug and is comparatively safer since it’s a stimulant rather than a depressant.
Right, except most of what is sold as MDMA is not actually MDMA. It’s either a chemical analogue that may have much worse side effects, or in some cases a mixture of methamphetamine and an opiate of some kind.
Wolf Of Wallstreet took them all?
Methaqualone is still one of the most popular recreation drugs in South Africa, under the name Mandrax. It’s usually crushed and smoked with dope.
The real reason is that the level of abuse, and addiction, prompted a switch to a sleeping tablet that wasn’t as enjoyable… diazapam and similar… Therefore no one wants to buy the sleeping tablets and only people who need it use it.
Didn’t the movie have a big long diatribe on Ludes and their history? I vaguely recall him mentioning they were such a useful party pill that they’d been pulled from the market. By the time depicted in the movie, real commercially made pills were almost impossible to find, thus making them not only fun to party with but a status symbol due to price.
Back in the day it was also called a “lude.”
One day after high school I was driving around town with a friend of mine. We stopped at a stoplight behind a Honda Prelude. My friend said, “Prelude? Is that what you take, like, before a lude?”
When I think about ludes I think of a couple of old acquaintances: Stumbleina; good times times speculating on which body part she would have bandaged or in a cast next week – and Thumper; an executive named for the sound his head made when hitting the carpet.
Good times?? I think not.
I knew a guy in the late 70s who was on prescription methaqualone, aka ludes. On his medication he was pretty normal, but he would skimp on his dosage so he could sell. Jittery and creepy, but we treated him well because he was the lude source.
I probably had the only legal prescription for Quaaludes on my college campus. One tablet was sufficiently strong that I could break it in half or even quarters to put me to sleep and even then it made my loopy. How people could take several of them at once and then party was unimaginable. I know my body is wired weirdly (opioids don’t work on me, which makes hospital stays less fun) but ludes are powerful stuff. I’m glad they were taken off the market.
Not on my campus. At our school, they were “sopors.”
Moderator Note
Let’s refrain from joke answers before the question has received factual responses in GQ. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Called “blues” in my HS. Had a friend die from them.
What type of drug are qualuudes? Were they barbiturates? Hypnotics?
I don’t think they were technically barbiturates, (e.g., Seconal or Tuniol) but they were depressants.