Posts by Russell Brown
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Nice! I'd pop down on my bike for a daytime recce, but I appear to still be tired from my birthday party ...
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
And while Key and pals are salivating over the sale of our Genertailiers…
NZ can’t afford a NZ$3.5bn broadband ’white elephant’I think by definition it can't be a white elephant -- fibre in the ground is fibre in the ground -- but they certainly haven't done a great job of getting the public interested.
Of course, it might have helped had the government taken even remotely seriously the Commerce Commission's concerns about demand-side problem. But, of course, that would have meant upsetting Sky Television.
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Busytown: “Glory! Glory! There’s the salt!”, in reply to Jolisa,
Done.
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Muse: OPEN HOUSE: Margaret Mahy, The…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Arohanui!
And to you and all the family, Rob. I'm pleased and proud that everyone here can play our part in remembering.
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Hard News: Keeping our heads on "bath salts", in reply to Scott Chris,
Thanks Ned Flanders.
Erowid experience reporters generally are not Ned Flanders types, at all. There was one report in that vault I thought didn’t ring true, but I tend to trust the editors to filter out bogus accounts.
Secondly, if MDVP is really such a poor substitute for cocaine then in a free drugs market no one would use it.
Quite possibly. But let’s note that two of the top five drugs in David Nutt’s Drug Harm Index are cocaine. (The top one, by miles, is alcohol, and tobacco is No.6.) And it’s basically impossible to use methamphetamine for an extended period without suffering some sort of cognitive loss or even psychosis. So it’s not crazy to look for something less harmful than cocaine and methamphetamine to bless. Nutt himself is quite big on less harmful alternatives to alcohol.
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I just cried reading the final section, Jolisa. You reminded me that The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate works as it does because the parent reader internalises not only the words but the ideas they embody. I'd forgotten, you know?
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Hard News: Keeping our heads on "bath salts", in reply to vangam,
Because its effects are weak and short-lived – it is an incredibly underwhelming experience. Hence the need to keep doing it.
If that’s your experience, fair enough. But a notable proportion of the erowid experience reports on MDVP are strikingly bad.
My g/f and I went through 1.5gms of this pure hell powder over a period of 4 days. I first read about this chemical in the news and thought wow just like blow huh? I read further online and found a local shop that carried it and picked up a gram.
We both started with a 5mg line and over the following 4 days consumed between 5mg and 10mg lines every 1 to 2 hours. We ended up picking up another gram after day 2. It started out nicely enough with the near exact feeling of blow but that’s where the good similarities between the two substances ended! We never planned on being up for 4 days without food that’s for sure so its very addictive and in our opinion extremely dangerous. We both usually get paranoid from blow and this has that negative side effect as well. The extremely bad thing about this substance for both of us were the extreme hallucinations both visible and audible of all things we were fearing from the paranoia. At the end of day 4 I dumped the last half gram to stop the complete insanity and the g/f got extremely angry with me and she didn’t want to stop she went and got more that’s when I left for home.
Another difference between blow and this is the fact that after stopping I still couldn’t sleep for 36 hours and that’s after taking 20mg of xanex and the g/f had the the same problem when she finally stopped 2 days later. This was the worst chemical we’ve ever tried and we have done quite a few. We could have lost everything we had including our sanity due to 4 days of chaos for me and 6 days for her. She also almost died in my opinion after taking 50mg of xanex to try to sleep after her 6 day binge. We both agreed we would never do this again and only wished we had never heard about it in the first place!
In short its very addictive, the comedown is the worst of any substance we have tried, the paranoia and extremely vivid audible and visual hallucinations combined made for hell on earth. We lost our sanity for many days. Be warned if your crazy enough to play with this and be prepared for the possibility of some rather severe consequences!
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Hard News: Keeping our heads on "bath salts", in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Without a test kit on hand , regulation wont ensure that MDMA is that or is MDA that,
Is that coke , crystal meth or is that speed, ephedrine? Is that speed really now poor mans coke. How can one tell.?Do you test the nurofen you buy for your sore back? Otoh, does anyone have a test kit that will tell them exactly what's in their pills and a powders now? No one does. We just have to suck it and see.
It will have to be made by pharmaceutical companies to ensure accurate manufacture and then we will be back to a black market to allow all peeps interested to partake or we will have to push legislation through to allow doctors to prescribe on the community services card.
Many of the new psychoactive substances are already made in commercial labs, by drug companies. I don’t think we’d see prescriptions unless there was an actual therapeutic value – just like we don’t see alcohol, tobacco or caffieine prescribed.
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Hard News: Keeping our heads on "bath salts", in reply to Scott Chris,
Thing is, if all drugs were legal people wouldn’t need to resort to sniffing propane or suffer the allegedly horrendous come down wrought by ‘bath salts’. (not to mention the apocryphal sanguinary munchies….)
MDVP’s main problem seems to be the tendency to compulsive redosing, which is always going to end in tears. Its effect on the vascular systems isn’t great either. And perhaps as a well-informed consumer you’ll know that. But you’ll have no show whatsoever of telling one legal white powder from another legal white powder – absent any regulation there’s nothing to stop your vendor bulking out the good stuff with something else.
This isn’t the approach we take with anything else – food, medicines, dietary supplements, even alcohol.
Crap drugs are a bi-product of crap regulation. The market, if allowed, would select the best drugs.
Depends on what you mean by “crap drugs”. Freebase cocaine and methamphetamine are pretty freakin’ awesome from an immediate user perspective – you’ll probably want to trade again. Just a disaster from a public health standpoint.
From a public health perspective, there are various things you’d be looking for in a regulated psychoactive drug: absence of acute severe threats to health,or severe chronic health effects, low potential for addiction, a predictable dose-response curve (unlike, say, GHB, where the gap between pleasantly wasted and pulmonary arrest isn’t all that large and varies greatly between users) – and ideally, little or no potential for overdose.
Cannabis does pretty well on those criteria, unless you have the gene for cannabis-induced schizophrenia, which raises your risk a bit. It’s not at all out of the question that there are other drugs that pose a low health risk.
Would that get rid of all unlicensed drugs? No. It would lower the use of the ones you don’t want to have to deal with. And even in the case of your non-blessed psychoactive drugs, hard prohibition isn’t the answer. Portugal hasn’t legalised illicit drugs, it’s medicalised them. You will still probably have to go to court and – if the the court decides to send you – for treatment and counselling. It’s the medicalisation that has lowered drug harms there, particularly in the case of IV drugs. But that's different from licensing those drugs to be sold in shops.
We do some of this already here. There’s only one reason that people go to needle exchanges – to get clean gear to take IV drugs. Given their way, the police would probably want to follow them all home and bust them. But we do not let the police do that.
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Hard News: Keeping our heads on "bath salts", in reply to Scott Chris,
So the black market supplies quality controlled drugs?
No, the opposite. The only reliable means of quality control is regulation. Like we do for food.
In my opinion there should be more emphasis placed upon personal liability (seller) and personal choice (consumer).
It’s just that you have rather less chance of making a sound personal decision if you have no idea what you’re buying.
The practice in the Netherlands (where MDMA is illegal but tolerated in personal-use quantities) of allowing pill-testing at parties seems sensinble to me. Make it a health issue, not a moral one.
However that doesn’t mean no regulation. I’m in favour of a complete ban on advertising and displaying any psychoactive substance and with access to businesses selling said goods restricted to those over 18. That would mean plain packaging and no booze, for instance, in supermarkets or dairies. That kind of regulation is enforceable and effective imo.
I don’t think that degree of regulatory action is culturally possible in case of alcohol. And I honestly don’t think supermarkets are where under-age liquor sales are happening. That’s going on in R18 neighbourhood liquor shops.
But the British drug reform charity Release has some quite well-developed ideas around non-commercialisation of legalised drugs in general. Part of the problem with BZP was the irresponsible marketing of the cowboys who got on to selling it.
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