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I think another major factor that this article didn't point out is drug purity - and what those specific impurities are. Particularly with drugs like meth, whi
by cwkoss 5y ago
I think another major factor that this article didn't point out is drug purity - and what those specific impurities are.
Particularly with drugs like meth, which can be manufactured clandestinely by people who don't understand chemistry well, there are a lot of intermediates or potential reaction byproducts which are orders of magnitude more cardiotoxic or otherwise more harmful than pure methamphetamine. And that's before you get into the potential toxicity of any intentionally-added cutting agents.
I think ketamine synthesis is more involved, so it's likely that illegally manufactured ketamine is comparatively cleaner than illegally manufactured meth, but illicit ketamine is still probably harder on your body than pharmaceutical grade for the same reasons.
Illegal drug manufacturers have a moderate economic pressure to increase purity, but - short of not immediately killing users and losing your customer base - they have little economic incentive to ensure that the impurities that remain in the final product are safe or inert.
Yes, 500mgs of meth a day is almost certainly not good for your health. But these studies are usually not able to control for purity of the meth that is consumed, so I expect for these studies finding adverse effects of chronic use - at least some portion of this effect size is a result of purity issues rather than purely based on dosage.
- Smithalicious 5y agoAFAIK almost all street ketamine is just diverted medical supply. Might be cut with something, but other than that it is pharmaceutical grade.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- varispeed 5y ago> Illegal drug manufacturers have a moderate economic pressure to increase purity, but - short of not immediately killing users and losing your customer base - they have little economic incentive to ensure that the impurities that remain in the final product are safe or inert. From the time of alcohol prohibition, it was the government that was introducing contaminated batches that killed people. It was done for propaganda, to solidify the message "drugs are bad". When I read articles about another teenager died of bad Ecstasy batch, this always comes to my mind. It always accompanies PSA saying that bad batches are circulating in the area etc. but somehow nobody else dies. Then when you read article almost always it turns out the drug wasn't actually Ecstasy, but that information is hidden deep in the article. It's disgusting how such tragedies are used for propaganda purposes and it is never investigated if it was actually government involvement in the killings.
- cwkoss 5y agoI totally believe that there have been instances where governmental actors have intentionally poisoned drug supplies, but I don't think that's the majority of cases. Watching Vice documentaries about clandestine manufacturing and the conditions they work in, it is not hard for me to believe that the most frequent cause is just lack of will and chemistry talent in order to purify a substance. Cleaning inert cutting agents out of drugs is fairly easy because the molecules are often dissimilar. But when manufacturing drugs, there are often steps that have probabilistic products that are very similar. Hypothetical example: you end up with 99% MDMA but 1% something that is very structurally similar but has no recreational value and is cardiotoxic. These molecules are so similar that the only way to separate them are challenging and expensive: such as multiple rounds of recrystalization and chromatography. Only a tiny portion drug buyers will notice the 1% cardiotoxic byproduct (access to GCMS testing?), so there is no economic incentive to do these final expensive cleaning steps.