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LSD user here. As far as drugs go, LSD is among the safest substances. However, many cheaper-to-produce analogs are much more dangerous. Buying substances illegally means that you don't know what you are getting. It's hard to find tests, and most LSD tests you can do at home can be faked (there are inert compounds that will test positive for LSD).
And yet we love LSD, and we still try to find safe sources of the drug. We don't like playing with fire and would much rather pay even heavily marked up prices to buy LSD from a pharmacy where we can get guarantees about the purity and dose.
The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior. People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse. Legal pot is a good first step, but we've got a long way to go.
People don't need to die trying to get high when the drug they want is safe in the first place.
Nicotine and alcohol are two quite unpleasant drugs: addictive, rather poisonous (alcohol) or customarily consumed in an especially harmful way (smoking tobacco).
Compared to these, LSD is much safer. Doses are ridiculously low (most poisons don't work in doses of 100µg), huge overdoses are not immediately dangerous, and an addiction does not form.
One can invent many reasons to ban LSD, but preserving public health can't be sensibly among them.
Addiction can form over pretty much any substance or behaviour as this is mostly unrelated to the substance itself but to the living conditions of the addicted and his personal life experience.
See the works of Bruce K. Alexander on this: http://www.brucekalexander.com/
> People have been getting high for thousands of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse.
Your statement assumes that drug prohibitions exist to protect the health of the public. This is, as you've pointed out, demonstrably false. If, on the other hand, you view drug laws as a means to criminalize a large percentage of the population and give police a ton of discretion in declaring who is and isn't a criminal, the situation become entirely consistent and you realize that drug laws are nothing more than a way to keep prisons full and allow police to remove "undesirables" (read: minorities) from society.
Allowing the the drug war to be framed as a public health issue means arguing on terms chosen by proponents of the drug war. We need to reject that premise and discuss it for what it really is, a racially-motivated tool for social repression. If those that argue against what you suggest (safe an legal avenues for drug use) were forced to show that, absent the current drug laws, the damage to society would be greater than the damage inflicted by the drug laws themselves, their arguments would look even more foolish than they currently appear.
Sorry, but that's an outright conspiracy theory you have there. The drug policies are nothing but a populist response to the public demands to "do something" by politicians who know no ways to deal with undesirable phenomena other than trying to ban it. The same knee-jerk reaction is behind many if not most policies (most famously, rent controls).
In my country there are no private prisons and no racial minorities to criminalize but the drug laws are just as bad as in the US. Actually, much worse. And if you go to the comments section under any article about legal highs on the local news sites, most people are demanding even more draconian measures, including death penalty for possession.
When you consider the safeness of a drug, do you also take into account the environment where the drug is taken?
I had a friend die while on LSD when I was a kid. He didn't die because of the drug, but as a hallucinogen, it is suspected he got himself into a situation where he followed his fancy unaware of the danger of the environment he had entered.
Of course, you could say 'but people trip and hit their head and die all the time when they are drunk too', but the difference is, people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.
As a self-declared LSD user, do you consider things other than the long-term chemical effects of the drug? If so, what are those things?
If it sounds like I'm picking a fight or trolling, that is not the intention, I am genuinely curious.
The rate of tripping when drunk is much, much higher. I've tripped many more times while drunk than sober (not counting childhood), and I'm drunk fairly rarely. A friend of mine broke his teeth falling down stairs face first while drunk, someone in my school died from falling off a fence while drunk. I've never heard of comparable sober incidents sober outside of high speed sports.
>people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.
[Citation Needed]
I read stories about college kids falling, drowning, crashing their cars, and almost always it's because they were heading home totally smashed from a party. I would say, from my impressions, that the proportion of people hitting their head (or falling into a lake and drowning, or what have you) is far lower for sober people than it is for people intoxicated by alcohol.
> people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures
That's just absurdly wrong.
I assume this is true of most alcohol-related deaths: DUI's, people tripping/falling or just doing something plain stupid.
So one thing I can't rationalize is that people claim to be users of a drug, but are you doing independent purity tests yourself? I mean you take LSD and yet you're part of the same pool presumably that doesn't necessarily have access to the purity information of the drugs you're consuming.
Not knowing the purity and the fact that I can be extremely neurotic/overly analytical just immediately worries me that I'll have a bad trip and cause irreparable psychological damage. Is there anything to be said about the psychological effects of these drugs? Sometimes I feel like when they assess "safe" they're assessing this from a toxicological perspective only, and not on the psychological well-being of the people who are consuming them.
Unfortunately, we are not able to be certain about the quality of the drug we are taking. We buy from the Silk Road (well, Agora now I guess - still waiting for things to calm down), where we read reviews and base our decisions on the gossip posted by other users.
Something about our current batch seems off, everyone's been having weird trips. Despite this red flag, we've taken over 2/3 of the batch. You can't be 100% certain doing testing-at-home either, because there are inert compounds that will test positive for LSD - a careful dealer can fake the test results.
And it's a damn shame, because if you are uncertain about the quality of your substance, those doubts will amplify throughout your trip (that is the nature of psychedelics), and every little effect that you aren't expecting will cause a flurry of uncertainty.
LSD is the one drug where if your test kit shows you have the actual substance, then contamination isn't really an issue. There are only a handful of drugs that are active in the dose levels that fit on a square of blotter paper, and if the blotter has actual LSD on it then the chances of someone bulking it out with something else are basically zero.
Basically the risk of getting 25x-NBOMe or DOx instead of LSD is very high, but the risk of getting NBOMe mixed with LSD is negligible.
> The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior.
Amusingly, we keep inventing new drugs to "fix" the old ones, discovering that they're just as bad (if not worse), and rinse/repeating.
Believe it or not, heroin was originally sold by Bayer (yes, as in "aspirin") as a "safer, less addictive" alternative to morphine. Both drugs were very commonly used as cough medicine (as was morphine's predecessor, laudanum).
Now, of course, we know that heroin is actually rather addictive, and instead we treat heroin addiction with other opiates that have a similar effect[0]. And so the cycle continues.
[0] Usually which bind to the same receptors, to reduce issues of withdrawal.
Actually we've got a lot better since then, and know a lot more about the neuroscience of addiction. Longer acting opiates are better at treating addiction and helping people get free of it - see suboxone.
The belief that heroin or cocaine cause addiction has been seriously challenged for a while, you should read "The Myth of Drug-Induced Addiction", the speech to Senate of Canada by Bruce K. Alexander of rat park fame.
http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/demon-drug-...
LSD is less toxic than aspirin
This statement makes little to no sense by itself.
Take as much aspirin as a psychoactive dose of LSD (say 100µg) and there will be no toxic effect from aspirin, but take as much LSD as an active dose of aspirin (400mg every 4 hours for an adult to to treat fever/pain) and you have a dose of 33 times the LD50 of LSD which is quite toxic imo.
No, legalizing safe illegal highs would save lives. People are using these dangerous, untested chemicals because they can get them without running afoul of the law. People don't smoke spice because they prefer it over cannabis, they smoke it because they can buy it at a headshop.
This. Cannabis and MDMA are thoroughly tested, MDMA especially since it was intended for clinical use. They are about as well undersood as any psychoactive substance. It is batshit insane to insist that rather than legalise them, it's better to test a whole other class of substance that are just trying to replicate the same effect.
It would probably save more lives to just legalize all drugs. Until drugs are legalized and quality controlled there will be no way for consumers to even know what they're getting.
You must take the harm that these drugs can cause into consideration when you say that you want to legalize them all - it is unfortunately not that black and white.
Heroine is a prime example. Whilst the argument could be given for "Educated use" you must take into account that the greater population at large will not educate themselves, and will come to harm - mainly through addiction.
Cigarettes are a nice example. We spend vast quantities of money on health care for people who smoke - the information is there, everybody knows that it causes cancer, yet huge amounts of people do it. We would be better off as a planet if everyone just stopped.
Whilst incarceration clearly is not the correct response to addicts, some form of regulation is needed to protect idiots from themselves.
I tend to agree with you, but looking at heroin I see most of the harm comes from it being illegal.
The supply chain funds warlords and criminal gangs. Impurities in the heroin cause abcesses and the need for amputation for injecting users. Restrictions on needles cause spread of blood-borne disease - and this also affect low wage workers who have handle sharps in public bathrooms and so on. People need money to feed their addiction and so they turn to prostitution[1] or acquisitive crime.
Treating heroin as a criminal problem has failed to protect people from themselves, but it also fails to protect wider society.
I do agree that we need to be cautious though. Look at the mess caused by alcohol. (That may be more true in the UK than the US.)
One of the issues with legalising a drug at this point in time is that it sends a signal that it is safe. This is fine for drugs like Cannabis or even LSD/Ecstacy which are relatively benign and non-addictive.
But drugs like Ice, Meth or Heroin are incredibly dangerous, toxic and addictive regardless of how well they are made. Making them readily accessible to existing addicts makes sense. But to first-time users ? No way.
Heroin isn't especially dangerous from a medical standpoint. Heroin cut with god knows what injected with a reused needle is incredibly dangerous.
Most heroin ODs are actually the reverse problem....a frequent user gets something that for once ISN'T cut, takes their normal dose and instantly ODs. Even that is easily handled if Narcan is available.
I'm not saying anyone should use heroin, but from a purely pharmaceutical standpoint it isn't an especially dangerous drug, and in many places (but not the US) is used for the treatment of severe pain. Something like Oxycontin is harder on the body due to the acetaminophen.
Even making heroin available to addicts doesn't make sense, when you can feed them subutex as a ready alternative.
Anyway, you can legalize all these drugs, but make the harder ones prescription only and highly taxed.
If you're willing to expand the definition of "saving lives" to include people who would otherwise be thrown into prison and enter into the cycle of violence, recidivism and minimal job prospects, then your plan would literally save millions of lives. And when you consider that drugs are used to finance some seriously bad shit around the world, the number of "lives saved" grows even further.
According to Wikipedia, it's 120,000 alone in Mexico's recent drug war. Colombia has been one of the most violent places on earth for decades now. And it's not a coincidence that we're dealing with terrorism threats from the country that produces 70% of the world's opium. The number of people who've had their lives ruined by illegal drugs goes way beyond those that consume those drugs.
Columbia is far safer now than several decades ago. It is in fact a great example of a Latin American country that has really turned its economy around.
Or is it ? There was an interesting program on the BBC a few years back dealing with this question titled "If… drugs were legal".
In this program they explored something not so obvious about legalizing drugs, namely that the pharmaceutical industrial complex would fill the market with many new drugs, think the current issues with legal highs but industrial scale. Another point is drug interactions are very unpredictable and very difficult to test.
This show is probably available on the web somewhere, here's the bbc page about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/if/4075235.stm
Awesome. Let them. We absolutely should have the industry doing research into drugs that are safer and less addictive but still fun.
Imagine if we unleashed the full power of science and capitalism at the problem!
Of course we would need to find a regulatory framework that allowed us to optimise for that outcome rather than for addiction...
I'm not how viable this would be. There are hundreds of "legal highs" out there. To fully understand their safety you'd have to run clinical trials with hundreds of subjects for each drug. Not exactly a cheap proposition.
You're correct but testing some is better than none.
A good primer on why we need testing is the Bunk Police's documentary "What's in My Baggie". In it they travel to festivals testing people's drugs. Nearly every drug they test is misrepresented. Most people believe they have MDMA when they have "bath salts". Even the positive tests may be adulterated or one of several compounds that give similar test results. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYzmZ1IU4zY
Not that MDMA is safe; it's without question a dangerous drug. Hundreds of thousands[1] of people taking unknown substances in unknown quantities is a much much larger problem.
[1]Electric Daisy Carnival alone attracts 150,000 people and runs 3 nights. There are several other festivals of similar size, and dozens that attract tens of thousands per night.
The article isn't talking about running clinical trials, it's talking about making GCMS equipment and the like available.
That would help stop people from taking things that are adulterated, but I'd be concerned about the toxicity of the pure drugs as well.
A great example of what can happen is Fen-Phen, the diet drug that was taken off the market a while back. The drug fenfluramine also activates the 5-HT2B receptor and causes heart valve damage.
All of these designer drugs out there could certainly have off-target effects that would never be noticed unless a clinical trial was run (even then maybe not!) or unless enough users have enough problems that it's noticed (MPTP is great example).
OTOH it would be easier than usual to find subjects for the trials, you could even have them partially foot the bill.
It's one of the few major societal problems that can completely fund itself to the full extent current science permits. Unfortunately, many states, such as Colorado, are already blowing it by using the tax revenue from marijuana sales as supplementary income. Looking at state lotteries shows us that this path leads straight to hell as government becomes reliable and dependent on this money so much so that they actively push, and twist to appear noble, clearly destructive activites.
Washington, on the other hand, appears to at least be funneling revenue soley into the health department.
They mention the New Zealand testing scheme in the article, but it ran aground because of the issue of animal testing. The main way to test the drugs (apparently) is on laboratory animals, and there was a lot of opposition to killing animals to test unnecessary drugs.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
Am I right in thinking a number of legal highs are based on illegal counterparts, by modifying the molecule a small amount.
Is it possible to predict how close the effect to the illegal one, will be.
[Edit] Also I'm wondering how is it possible that chemists like Shulgin, have an ability to create such a large number of molecules, with psychoactive effects.
Nope, most 'legal highs' are manufactured to behave like legal alternatives, but are chemically different. FAA: "the chemical structure of which is substantially similar to the chemical structure of a controlled substance in schedule I or II" is illegal. Designer drugs have to be made chemically substantially different.
The key here is "if intended for human consumption." This is why legal highs are frequently sold as "plant food" or "bath salts." Some vendors are more careful than others, in the height of the first "wave" of designer drugs around ~2004, some vendors were as brazen as to offer "sample packs" and the like. And then Web Tryp [1] (my favorite codename ever) happened.
Many designer drugs are close analogs of schedule I substances.
That's a US-specific law though. The article is mostly about the UK market, and in the UK the law bans specific chemicals, and attempts to address families of chemicals. It invariably falls short and molecule-tweaks can skirt it.
The drugs mentioned in there - Benzo Fury (I hate that name, let's call it 6-APB because that's the molecule on the wrapper) is extremely close to MDA, aMT is a tryptamine which escaped the generic tryptamine regulations and the NBOMes are a twist on the generic 2C-x structure.
You can make educated guesses about the effects, but at the end there is no substitute for genuine data. You'd think that a good enterprising chemist makes field trials and pays close attention to user reports: "Hey, I love the pills with the skull on, but those with the rabbit just give me palpitations."
Alexander Shulgin was able to do what he did in his home lab because he got himself a DEA Schedule I license for an analytical Laboratory.
Also he was friend with Bob Sager and he worked with and for the DEA.
The NPS market is very interesting. There are a small proportion of users who are genuinely into NPS or RCs. These are people who want to try new things, who are fascinated by what happens if you tweak the molecule this way or that way, or you stick this extra bit on here and wow... Not all are chemistry geeks but some are, other just find it interesting, may have spiritual reasons for investigating all avenues etc. For this group legality is often a secondary concern compared to novelty.
Then there are the majority of the users, who are looking for a legal alternative to <insert popular drug here>, who effectively fund the production and marketing of the scene, and without whom the first group would not have such an easy time of it. The main concerns with this group are legality and ease of access.
The first group are likely to have their use under control, to be very clued in about allergy tests, measured doses, side effects mitigation etc. They may have lapses into unhealthy use patterns but generally are in control. They are served well by the current system and find services like WEDINOS invaluable.
The second group tend to be far less interested in what they're doing, may not be educated about any of it, probably aren't part of an online community to ask for help, they may even buy into the fallacy that legal == safe. They are effectively playing russian roulette. One of the cases mentioned in the article was one of these - that kid from Southampton died from taking over a gram of aMT. The dose range for that substance is usually around 30-50mg, the kid took 20 times that and died.
This group would be best served by legalisation of things that are known to be mostly safe. MDMA (or some of its safer derivatives like MBDB), cannabis etc.
All this said, if any of the many bans were effective at stopping the proliferation of NPS, it's not actually going to help anyone, because you'll just end up back at square one - kids buying unknown substances of unknown purity from unknown sources.
Regulating drugs properly also, as well as treating addiction as a medical problem rather than a criminal problem.