I follow the twenty dollar rule I came up with long ago. If you can buy enough of a drug for twenty bucks to reliably kill yourself with, it’s a drug you should stay away from. Alcohol, by that rule, is a bad drug. Street prices go up though so I should probably update that to a forty buck rule but nevertheless it’s a pretty decent rule of thumb.
Club drugs are dodgy, many of them make you too dopy and impair memory to the point where you can’t protect yourself from the people around you, not to mention there’s really no way to be sure you’re getting what they say you’re getting. Best avoided overall.
Salvia divinorum is short acting but from what I’ve seen if it goes bad for you it’s really, really bad and people have killed themselves reacting to what they think is going on so if you must, never without a sober babysitter who can physically restrain you for up to a half hour or so.
I tend to prefer to stick to drugs I can (or do) grow myself. Those are fairly hard to go wrong with, even if you grow poppies because you’re limited by the small amounts of latex you can harvest without having a really big and noticeable field to grow them in. Opium is also a lot easier on your body than the refined versions, with a lesser effect and easier withdrawal if you get too enthusiastic about it. On the other hand, if you have chronic back pain and no health insurance, that’s a pretty good solution to pain management. Not ideal, but it does work.
PCP is the stupidest drug of them all. Stay off PCP no matter what you do. It shuts off all thinking functions while leaving its victim conscious and alert.
Are we including inhalants like toluene(used in paint thinner and glue) and acetone(in nail polish remover)? Because I have a relative who suffered brain damage from using them and my impression was that they were a very dangerous way to get high.
I’ve heard about people getting brain damage from drugs. I can see how it would happen with depressants that deprive the brain of oxygen or stimulants that result in cardiac arrest but what about solvents? What psychological effect do they have (I’m not willing to try it myself)?
Maybe it’s a bit like fruits vs refined sugar; You can eat a lot of fruit without getting fat but refined sugar like donuts and soda will fatten you up quickly.
Thank you for the information. I get runner’s high and lifter’s high pretty easily so that might be why Dilaudid did little for me.
What might be the factors that lead people to prefer acute stimulants like amphetamines or crack? How about psychedelics?
Same thing, depriving the brain of oxygen. When I was a teenager in the 70s there were kids huffing PAM, the cooking spray. It had propane as the propellant I think. I don’t know why, we could get alcohol and weed quite easily. Kids were raiding their parents medicine cabinets for other drugs. Why you want to get down to the point of inhaling propane, or gasoline, or glue, or paint thinner, or who knows what, I have no idea. I’m sure someone who does this already has some serious problems.
I’m not sure about the chemistry of it: The propellant binds to the oxygen, depriving the brain of it and giving a woozy sensation? I guess that’s what people into erotic asphyxiation get out of it.
And yeah, people who huff paint are probably the same who drink pruno/moonshine or, in Russia, inject Krokodil. That’s such a miserable place, I don’t know if my difficulty in imagining comes from inability or unwillingness.
There my knowledge fails. I’ve rather focused on opioids over the years. I am NOT an addictionist, just very knowledgeable about a few areas of addiction. I’d have to study other areas more to have a chance of passing the addiction medicine boards. Which I don’t plan to do, honestly. Though it could make a nice part-time semi-retirement career . . .
When I was a Family Practice Resident in the Air Force, I had to take care of a Nurse Anesthetist that was doing exactly that (giving patient saline and taking the dose home). The reference sources at that time had no information on withdrawal symptoms. I had to ask him what symptoms we needed to watch for. Also had to ask him where his “good vein” was, and he helped me start his IV!
There was a kid in my area who died from huffing Freon, by freezing his lungs. Huffing gasoline is a very common problem in highly poverty-stricken areas where people cannot get any other recreational drugs, and it quickly causes permanent brain damage.
I also read (IIRC in Newsweek, but I can’t find the story online) about an abandoned factory somewhere that turned into a big party spot, and when the kids found the 55-gallon drums of liquid mercury, it basically turned the town into a Superfund site because the kids were throwing it around and even taking it home with them. One kid dipped a cigarette into the mercury and smoked it, and almost died from mercury poisoning. (Darwin Award, anyone?)
No matter what some aspects of the mass media may say, there is nothing fun, cool, or fashionable about being addicted to opiates, or anything else.
Quadgop, can you please share a link to the brand of N methyl folate supplements you take? Anything else you could share about how to take them would also be greatly appreciated.
A nurse was arrested in my area because she was getting her fentanyl from discarded patches, by sucking it out with a syringe. Who knows how long she did this before she forgot to discard one of these patches, which was found by a colleague and an investigation launched.
I won’t tell anyone else what to do or not do. I will just say that the one and only time I had cocaine, I had such an incredible appetite for it that I never touched it again. I saw it would ruin me.
I get why people say opiates are worse, as highs go it doesn’t get much better than that, but I never felt like I wanted to eat every single Vicodin in the world. (Also never had a regular supply, which is probably for the best).
But you might want to make sure you’re genetically heterozygous for rs1801131 and/or rs1801133 before investing. If you do 23andMe, they will have tested you for these genes, so you can just look up your results. I am heterozygous for both of them. If you’re heterozygous for at least one of them, the N methyl folate may benefit.
Here’s an excellent website that discusses this and other genetic phenomena in the brain: SNPedia
That site can give you more info on folks who are dopamine deficient like me due to those genes, plus other stuff.
One pill a day is the recommended dose.
1801131 and 1801133 are located in the MTHFR gene, and they are one MTHFR of a pain to have heterozygosity there, let me tell you!
Yeah, I have been around it a bit, and people all told me I would love it. I said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I’ll do cocaine under 2 conditions. The fate of the world depends on me staying awake and alert for 48+ hours and there are no other stimulants available, or I’m on my deathbed and figure why the hell not.
I’ve taken opiates for pain after I had my wisdom teeth out. I did really like the way that they kept me from feeling like someone had just ripped my wisdom teeth out, but other than that, I hated them. I hated the way they made me feel, the way they made me think. I felt like I was smothered under a heavy wet blanket.
Also note that I am not one to jump on the bandwagon for supplements. I chose to try N Methyl folate supplements only after hearing a respected researcher in addiction medicine, Dr. Howard Wetsman, give a talk on it at an addiction conference I was at. I spoke to him briefly after, and discussed it further via email, and determined my own genetic status before deciding to give it a go.