4 ms·

These will inevitably become "research chemicals" and potentially ruin a few psychonauts eager to try them.

morkalork 3y ago
The stories of people getting limbs amputated because the RC they were shipped by accident was an insanely strong vasoconstrictor while still tripping 24h after dosing is the stuff of nightmares.
- aaroninsf 3y ago
  True, and also, the stories in Phikal and Tikal of more disciplined people following titration protocols etc. and discovering hidden kingdoms of the mind, is the stuff of dreams.
- fb03 3y ago
  That's curious. Where can one read such stories? eRowid?
  - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
    Probably. Or bluelight. Bromo dragonfly back in like 2005ish
  - notamy 3y ago
    iirc the specific incident being referenced is Bromo-DragonFLY being mislabeled as 2C-B-FLY.
    - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
      Mislabeled and tainted RCs became enough of a risk when fentanyl and fentanyl analogs started gaining popularity that the guys I knew who were ordering from overseas just stopped messing with RCs. It's disappointing that it ended up like that. 2009-12 I had access to pure and dirt cheap 2C-E, methylone, 4-ACO-DMT, the JWHs, ketamine, methoxetamine, LSD (I don't think there were any analogs available yet?). It was a crazy time.
      - morkalork 3y ago
        Yuuuuuuup this right here. That's right when I was in university and was definitely the peak. Maybe a bit before when mephedrone was big. I feel like I aged out of it at just the right time. Now I don't even recognize the names of what's going around.
        dendrite9 3y ago
        I hung out with people who got various powder packages in the mail at that time. It was interesting, but already I knew it wasn't my scene. Still I learned a lot of names and watched the use on occasion. Looking at it now I'm glad it was then and I didn't have to worry about the various opioids getting mixed in. I don't think I thought enough about the consequences even though I worried about my friends dealing with various manners of contamination.
        zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
        This was when I was in college/just out of college too. Most of the guys I knew who became dealers were students and concert promoters and most of the customers were hippy and rave kids. This group was into Bitcoin early on because of silk road. But a lot of this stuff predates Bitcoin and was sold on the clearnet as plant food and bath salts. That's where the term bath salts came from. It wasn't necessarily one cathinone, it was just like this isn't for human consumption, it's just bath salts. The stuff would be shipped here either hidden in other objects or just mislabeled as common chemicals. I only know of one guy who got a package confiscated, but he was using a fake ID to rent mailboxes so wasn't a big deal. Oh yeah, fake IDs were big back then too. I'm in my mid/late 30s now and I wonder what kind of devious shit the kids are getting up to these days. Anyway, the paranoia from being involved in all of this was part of what lead me to leave the country to clear my head. The funny thing with that is I almost got involved in the same shit in Australia because I met this meth dealer who had heard about methylone but didn't have a source. I was talking to someone back home about setting up some deals that we'd route through the US but I figured that was a bad idea and I didn't want to go to prison in another country. Anyway, things chilled out and I'm just a dude working a blue collar job and I eat THC gummies every now and then. Speaking of THC gummies, wow, marijuana has been legal in the US since 2018. I was in that industry for a couple years but my business was too small to survive. Thanks for reading rambling thoughts as I drink my morning coffee.
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    For the curious, this Wikipedia article seems to document the case GP is talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Me and my friends found this drug conceptually hilarious back in the day and used to crack a lot of jokes about it. Its apparently almost as strong as LSD, takes hours to start working and the effect lasts several days. Worse in every respect. Why would anyone ever choose it?
    - fb03 3y ago
      Thank you. Truly scary stuff.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    NSFW IMO, https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/ https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/
    - empiricus 3y ago
      Hm, it looks like some ppl are having more fun than the rest of us :)
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
As a mostly "retired" psychonaut, I think this can easily be avoided by just legalising drugs. Very few people are going to want to try RCs if conventional alternatives don't present more legal risk. Most people using them are avoiding legal risk or trying to beat drug tests etc. There is a tiny minority of "true psychonauts" who are in it for the experimentation, but we tend to be acutely aware of the risk and take much better precautions than someone who is chasing a high they're addicted to. And adults knowingly taking risks(on their own behalf) and suffering consequences is just the human condition.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  I think they meant that some compounds are unsafe for consumption, and we don't necessarily know which without research. My recollection is inexact, but there was a story about a person who synthesized a novel theoretical psychedelic, tested it on himself, rapidly developed Parkinson's-like symptoms which deteriorated until his death. I don't know that Shulgin was ever or always the first to try novel syntheses, but I do think allowing known-safes is better that challenging people to put themselves at risk through self-experimentation.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    Did some googling. Are you talking about MPTP? >The neurotoxicity of MPTP was hinted at in 1976 after Barry Kidston, a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student in Maryland, US, synthesized MPPP with MPTP as a major impurity and self-injected the result. Within three days he began exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The National Institute of Mental Health found traces of MPTP and other pethidine analogs in his lab. They tested the substances on rats, but due to rodents' tolerance for this type of neurotoxin, nothing was observed. Kidston's Parkinsonism was treated with levodopa but he died 18 months later from a cocaine overdose. Upon autopsy, Lewy bodies and destruction of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra were discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP Seems you were mostly right, with a few caveats: 1. The toxin was an impurity in his synthesis of MPPP, which is a synthetic opioid. 2. He was diagnosed with parkinsonism and treated, but died from a cocaine OD(one wonders whether the cocaine was an attempt at self-medication, or a deliberate suicide attempt). According to the article this case of MPTP-induced parkinsonism has happened again in the 80s, again with tainted batches of MPPP. I'd say this young chemist was more similar to Shulgin than most psychonauts, but he was also skipping steps and clearly had issues with addiction. This would likely be avoided by Shulgin because he'd probably get the chemistry right in the first place. Shulgin also had a lot of pharmacology understanding that allowed him to make educated guesses about what kind of structures might be very dangerous. But he definitely was the first to both synthesise and ingest a lot of these more obscure psychedelic compounds. But he was extremely careful, which is why he lived well into his 80s.

The stories of people getting limbs amputated because the RC they were shipped by accident was an insanely strong vasoconstrictor while still tripping 24h after dosing is the stuff of nightmares.

aaroninsf 3y ago
True, and also, the stories in Phikal and Tikal of more disciplined people following titration protocols etc. and discovering hidden kingdoms of the mind, is the stuff of dreams.
fb03 3y ago
That's curious. Where can one read such stories? eRowid?
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  Probably. Or bluelight. Bromo dragonfly back in like 2005ish
- notamy 3y ago
  iirc the specific incident being referenced is Bromo-DragonFLY being mislabeled as 2C-B-FLY.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
    Mislabeled and tainted RCs became enough of a risk when fentanyl and fentanyl analogs started gaining popularity that the guys I knew who were ordering from overseas just stopped messing with RCs. It's disappointing that it ended up like that. 2009-12 I had access to pure and dirt cheap 2C-E, methylone, 4-ACO-DMT, the JWHs, ketamine, methoxetamine, LSD (I don't think there were any analogs available yet?). It was a crazy time.
    - morkalork 3y ago
      Yuuuuuuup this right here. That's right when I was in university and was definitely the peak. Maybe a bit before when mephedrone was big. I feel like I aged out of it at just the right time. Now I don't even recognize the names of what's going around.
      - dendrite9 3y ago
        I hung out with people who got various powder packages in the mail at that time. It was interesting, but already I knew it wasn't my scene. Still I learned a lot of names and watched the use on occasion. Looking at it now I'm glad it was then and I didn't have to worry about the various opioids getting mixed in. I don't think I thought enough about the consequences even though I worried about my friends dealing with various manners of contamination.
      - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
        This was when I was in college/just out of college too. Most of the guys I knew who became dealers were students and concert promoters and most of the customers were hippy and rave kids. This group was into Bitcoin early on because of silk road. But a lot of this stuff predates Bitcoin and was sold on the clearnet as plant food and bath salts. That's where the term bath salts came from. It wasn't necessarily one cathinone, it was just like this isn't for human consumption, it's just bath salts. The stuff would be shipped here either hidden in other objects or just mislabeled as common chemicals. I only know of one guy who got a package confiscated, but he was using a fake ID to rent mailboxes so wasn't a big deal. Oh yeah, fake IDs were big back then too. I'm in my mid/late 30s now and I wonder what kind of devious shit the kids are getting up to these days. Anyway, the paranoia from being involved in all of this was part of what lead me to leave the country to clear my head. The funny thing with that is I almost got involved in the same shit in Australia because I met this meth dealer who had heard about methylone but didn't have a source. I was talking to someone back home about setting up some deals that we'd route through the US but I figured that was a bad idea and I didn't want to go to prison in another country. Anyway, things chilled out and I'm just a dude working a blue collar job and I eat THC gummies every now and then. Speaking of THC gummies, wow, marijuana has been legal in the US since 2018. I was in that industry for a couple years but my business was too small to survive. Thanks for reading rambling thoughts as I drink my morning coffee.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  For the curious, this Wikipedia article seems to document the case GP is talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromo-DragonFLY
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Me and my friends found this drug conceptually hilarious back in the day and used to crack a lot of jokes about it. Its apparently almost as strong as LSD, takes hours to start working and the effect lasts several days. Worse in every respect. Why would anyone ever choose it?
  - fb03 3y ago
    Thank you. Truly scary stuff.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  NSFW IMO, https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/ https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/
  - empiricus 3y ago
    Hm, it looks like some ppl are having more fun than the rest of us :)

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

As a mostly "retired" psychonaut, I think this can easily be avoided by just legalising drugs. Very few people are going to want to try RCs if conventional alternatives don't present more legal risk. Most people using them are avoiding legal risk or trying to beat drug tests etc. There is a tiny minority of "true psychonauts" who are in it for the experimentation, but we tend to be acutely aware of the risk and take much better precautions than someone who is chasing a high they're addicted to. And adults knowingly taking risks(on their own behalf) and suffering consequences is just the human condition.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
washadjeffmad 3y ago
I think they meant that some compounds are unsafe for consumption, and we don't necessarily know which without research. My recollection is inexact, but there was a story about a person who synthesized a novel theoretical psychedelic, tested it on himself, rapidly developed Parkinson's-like symptoms which deteriorated until his death. I don't know that Shulgin was ever or always the first to try novel syntheses, but I do think allowing known-safes is better that challenging people to put themselves at risk through self-experimentation.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Did some googling. Are you talking about MPTP? >The neurotoxicity of MPTP was hinted at in 1976 after Barry Kidston, a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student in Maryland, US, synthesized MPPP with MPTP as a major impurity and self-injected the result. Within three days he began exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The National Institute of Mental Health found traces of MPTP and other pethidine analogs in his lab. They tested the substances on rats, but due to rodents' tolerance for this type of neurotoxin, nothing was observed. Kidston's Parkinsonism was treated with levodopa but he died 18 months later from a cocaine overdose. Upon autopsy, Lewy bodies and destruction of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra were discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP Seems you were mostly right, with a few caveats: 1. The toxin was an impurity in his synthesis of MPPP, which is a synthetic opioid. 2. He was diagnosed with parkinsonism and treated, but died from a cocaine OD(one wonders whether the cocaine was an attempt at self-medication, or a deliberate suicide attempt). According to the article this case of MPTP-induced parkinsonism has happened again in the 80s, again with tainted batches of MPPP. I'd say this young chemist was more similar to Shulgin than most psychonauts, but he was also skipping steps and clearly had issues with addiction. This would likely be avoided by Shulgin because he'd probably get the chemistry right in the first place. Shulgin also had a lot of pharmacology understanding that allowed him to make educated guesses about what kind of structures might be very dangerous. But he definitely was the first to both synthesise and ingest a lot of these more obscure psychedelic compounds. But he was extremely careful, which is why he lived well into his 80s.