That is because you are old. You wrote the book.
[quote=“Buttercup”]
Eh? Why are you quoting my post? It is not related to yours.[/quote]
Sorry then! Apparently I have misinterpreted your post.
What, do you feed the sheep ecstasy then cook it into the haggis?
Toe Tag: I haven’t done anything in many years now. Seems like a different life all together. Trying to be high on life, though sometimes, I wonder what it would be like again. Think I did enough back in the day though.
Me too. Thinking back, its funny how they just pull you in and pull you along. Its like you’re on another wavelength. I mean I had total strangers walking up to me and saying “Hi, have you ever tried ketamine?” Or as a friend who did some 5 said “I’ve been to every corner of the universe!” Mostly I’m just into Vedanta lately, that gets me plenty high.
Mmm. I’d be interested to know what the criteria is by which these “independent experts” define their “mean harm rating”.
Is it physical or socio-economic? Sure, heroin is going to fuck your life up if you have to spend all your time trying to find money for an obviously vastly overpriced, illicit drug that doesn’t even make you high anymore when you are addicted to it.
Dodging the cops, stealing from your friends and family, prostitution, lies, deceit, not bothering to buy food or clean needles because you need every penny for your next fix.
Sure, it has the potential for overdose, as does crack, but these occurences are largely due to the unregulated nature of potency and quality control. Nigerian and Russian gangsters are hardly the epitome of The Bureau Of Standards.
Not advocating the use of heroin, but I have to think that sometimes it’s bad name comes merely from it’s addictive nature rather that from the physical harm it actually does one.
No doubt, a junkie who needs his/her fix will do almost anything to get it. What if it was legal and free? Would more people suddenly become heroin abusers? I doubt it. It takes a certain mindset to enter into slavery at that level.
That’s why I take this pseudo-scientific graph to task. If heroin was available in liquor stores, and at a price relative to it’s low cost to produce, it would wreak less harm on the community than liquor does. It makes you calm and sedated. You only get psycho if you need a hit and can’t get one.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, what is the opiate of the elite? Opiates I guess, or in the case of Rush Limbaugh, Oxycontin.
While on the subject, what are the risk factors of Cannabis and what makes it more dangerous than ‘solvents, GHB, etc.’? This chart is obviously completely faked and just another example of ass-quakery :loco: .
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]
It might change your view of life. I’d take hallucinogens over alcohol any day. Actually, LSD is what made me give up alcohol the first time (because I just felt really dumb on alcohol, and I always felt like shit the next day), and I ultimately gave up alcohol for good long before I gave up anything else. Of the drugs that I’ve tried (admittedly only about half a dozen or so), my least favourite are the two most popular (alcohol and marijuana). Being drunk or stoned are two of my least favourite states of consciousness. I’d even go as far as to say being stoned is downright horrible.[/quote]
So you managed to get away from alcohol by taking LSD? Well, I guess congats are in order…
Me too. But it was published in the Lancet, so it’s likely to be somewhat rational. Moreover, their order seems about right to me.
Nonsense. We all know alcohol kills millions through cirrhosis or car wrecks, etc, just as millions die from sucking on fags. And I’m strongly in favor of recreational drug use and loosening of antidrug laws. But heroin is clearly more deadly than either alcohol or tobacco. What do you think the heroin death rate would be if 100 million Americans used it regularly, or whatever the number, as it is with alcohol?
Ok, here’s more on that study/graph from the Lancet.
[quote]The new ranking system places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table, ahead of cannabis and several Class A drugs such as ecstasy.
The study, published in The Lancet, has been welcomed by a team reviewing drug research for the government.
The Academy of Medical Sciences group plans to put its recommendations to ministers in the autumn.
A new commission is also due to undertake a three-year review of general government drug policy.
The new system has been developed by a team led by Professor David Nutt, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council.
It [color=#FF0000]assesses drugs on the harm they do to the individual, to society and whether or not they induce dependence. [/color]
A panel of experts were asked to rate 20 different drugs on nine individual categories, which were combined to produce an overall estimate of harm.
In order to provide familiar benchmarks, five legal drugs, including tobacco and alcohol were included in the assessment. Alcohol was rated the fifth most dangerous substance, and tobacco ninth.
Heroin was rated as the most dangerous drug, followed by cocaine and barbiturates. Ecstasy, however, rated only 18th, while cannabis was 11th.
The researchers said [color=#FF0000]the current ABC system was too arbitrary[/color], and failed to give specific information about the relative risks of each drug.
It [color=#FF0000]also gave too much importance to unusual reactions, which would only affect a tiny number of users[/color].
Professor Nutt said people were not deterred by scare messages, which simply served to undermine trust in warnings about the danger of drugs.
He said: “The current system is not fit for purpose. Let’s treat people as adults. We should have a much more considered debate how we deal with dangerous drugs.”
He highlighted the fact that one person a week in the UK dies from alcohol poisoning, while less than 10 deaths a year are linked to ecstasy use.
Professor Leslie Iversen, a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences group considering drug policy, said the new system was a “landmark paper”.
He said: “It is a real step towards evidence-based classification of drugs.”
Professor Iversen said the fact that 500,000 young people routinely took ecstasy every weekend proved that current drug policy was in need of reform.
Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said: "We have no intention of reviewing the drug classification system.
"Our priority is harm reduction and to achieve this we focus on enforcement, education and treatment[/quote]
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6474053.stm
And here’s the actual study:
thelancet.com/journals/lance … 4/fulltext
[quote=“bob_honest”]So you managed to get away from alcohol by taking LSD? Well, I guess congats are in order…
[/quote]
No, I wasn’t an alcoholic (at least not at that point). I was like any other binge-drinking Australian university student. Actually, probably a little worse. I’d say alcohol is a very destructive drug. I never got violent, but I would make a general arse of myself in a much worse way than on other things, and I did hurt myself a few times.
My point about LSD was that by comparison, alcohol seemed to make me feel really stupid at the time, and the after-effects were really horrible. I never felt any after-effects from LSD (other than being tired, but then, I would usually be up all night). Alcohol stopped being as desirable as it was before, though there’s the social element to drinking (though there can be a very wacky social element to hallucinogens too).
These days, I don’t use anything, not even at a low level. My life is simpler (and cheaper) that way and I’m happy enough with this state of consciousness. There’s enough crazy shit going on a daily basis.
Glad to hear that! When I was younger, it was only too much alc. Aftereffects? Well, does a doc standing at my bedside (asking if that was a suicide attempt) count? Guess I should have taken that 70% label more seriously…
I reallllllly felt stupid that day…
probably not after a week or two a lot if we could give away alcholol with free heroin dosages that would make live meat into dead meat.
Sure would solve some of the unemployment problems in the USA.
Let me show you this little chart, rated harm of drugs:
So tell me, what is more tragic: some teens popping E pills from time to time or millions of people worldwide boozing every day, and to a large extent culturally accepted.
occasional ecstasy/amphetamines consumption: “very very evil and illegal”
blackouts every weekend because of excessive drinking etc.: “completely legal and hey - it’s fun”
?!
Drug abuse is always a thing to avoid, and can be very disastrous.
But I hate those double standards!
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6474053.stm
(Detailed report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/31_07_06_drugsreport.pdf[/quote]
How is GHB - the date rape drug - less harmful than Cannabis? Makes me wonder what motives these independent experts have. Would you like cream, sugar, in your coffee - or how about some GHB?!
The drug of choice with Asian party goers in Toronto happened to be GHB. I cannot believe the shit isn’t over here in extreme force given the fact that it’s so damned easy to make.
Really…someone would be RICH beyond their means if they could produce that shit here. I’m still in awe that it’s not available in Asia yet nearly every immigrant of the Asian decent that I happened to meet while partying or working in the Toronto club scene had done tons of the shit.
Naw well.
Motives? If you really want to know, feel free to read the full report that I linked to above. But to answer your question in short, here’s a brief statement of their motives:
[quote]The current classification system has evolved in an unsystematic way from somewhat arbitrary foundations with seemingly little scientific basis.
Here, we suggest a new system for assessing the potential harms of individual drugs on the basis of fact and scientific knowledge. This system is able to respond to evolving evidence about the potential harm of current drugs and to rank the threat presented by any new street drug.[/quote]
. . . their criteria: the researchers examined three categories of harms: physical harm, dependence and social harm.
[quote]Assessment of the propensity of a drug to cause physical harm—ie, damage to organs or systems—involves a systematic consideration of the safety margin of the drug in terms of its acute toxicity, as well as its likelihood to produce health problems in the long term. The effect of a drug on physiological functions—eg, respiratory and cardiac—is a major determinant of physical harm. The route of administration is also relevant to the assessment of harm. Drugs that can be taken intravenously—eg, heroin—carry a high risk of causing sudden death from respiratory depression, and therefore score highly on any metric of acute harm. Tobacco and alcohol have a high propensity to cause illness and death as a result of chronic use. Recently published evidence shows that long-term cigarette smoking reduces life expectancy, on average, by 10 years.9 Tobacco and alcohol together account for about 90% of all drug-related deaths in the UK. . . .
Dependence
This dimension of harm involves interdependent elements—the pleasurable effects of the drug and its propensity to produce dependent behaviour. Highly pleasurable drugs such as opioids and cocaine are commonly abused, and the street value of drugs is generally determined by their pleasurable potential. Drug-induced pleasure has two components—the initial, rapid effect (colloquially known as the rush) and the euphoria that follows this, often extending over several hours (the high). The faster the drug enters the brain the stronger the rush, which is why there is a drive to formulate street drugs in ways that allow them to be injected intravenously or smoked: in both cases, effects on the brain can occur within 30 seconds. Heroin, crack cocaine, tobacco (nicotine), and cannabis (tetrahydrocannabinol) are all taken by one or other of these rapid routes. Absorption through the nasal mucosa, as with powdered cocaine, is also surprisingly rapid. Taking the same drugs by mouth, so that they are only slowly absorbed into the body, generally has a less powerful pleasurable effect, although it can be longer lasting.
An essential feature of drugs of abuse is that they encourage repeated use. This tendency is driven by various factors and mechanisms. The special nature of drug experiences certainly has a role. Indeed, in the case of hallucinogens (eg, lysergic acid diethylamide [LSD], mescaline, etc) it might be the only factor that drives regular use, and such drugs are mostly used infrequently. At the other extreme are drugs such as crack cocaine and nicotine, which, for most users, induce powerful dependence. Physical dependence or addiction involves increasing tolerance (ie, progressively higher doses being needed for the same effect), intense craving, and withdrawal reactions—eg, tremors, diarrhoea, sweating, and sleeplessness—when drug use is stopped. These effects indicate that adaptive changes occur as a result of drug use. Addictive drugs are generally used repeatedly and frequently, partly because of the power of the craving and partly to avoid withdrawal. . . .
Social
Drugs harm society in several ways—eg, through the various effects of intoxication, through damaging family and social life, and through the costs to systems of health care, social care, and police. Drugs that lead to intense intoxication are associated with huge costs in terms of accidental damage to the user, to others, and to property. Alcohol intoxication, for instance, often leads to violent behaviour and is a common cause of car and other accidents. Many drugs cause major damage to the family, either because of the effect of intoxication or because they distort the motivations of users, taking them away from their families and into drug-related activities, including crime.
Societal damage also occurs through the immense health-care costs of some drugs. Tobacco is estimated to cause up to 40% of all hospital illness and 60% of drug-related fatalities. Alcohol is involved in over half of all visits to accident and emergency departments and orthopaedic admissions. . . .[/quote]
. . . and the means of judging:
[quote] Two independent groups of experts were asked to do the ratings. The first was the national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction. Replies were received and analysed from 29 of the 77 registered doctors who were asked to assess 14 compounds—heroin, cocaine, alcohol, barbiturates, amphetamine, methadone, benzodiazepines, solvents, buprenorphine, tobacco, ecstasy, cannabis, LSD, and steroids. Tobacco and alcohol were included because their extensive use has provided reliable data on their risks and harms, providing familiar benchmarks against which the absolute harms of other drugs can be judged. However, direct comparison of the scores for tobacco and alcohol with those of the other drugs is not possible since the fact that they are legal could affect their harms in various ways, especially through easier availability.
Having established that this nine-parameter matrix worked well, we convened meetings of a second group of experts with a wider spread of expertise. These experts had experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services… . . [/quote]
Here’s the full Lancet article (again).
thelancet.com/journals/lance … 4/fulltext
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]
[quote] … Tobacco and alcohol were included because their extensive use has provided reliable data on their risks and harms, providing familiar benchmarks against which the absolute harms of other drugs can be judged. However, direct comparison of the scores for tobacco and alcohol with those of the other drugs is not possible since the fact that they are legal could affect their harms in various ways, especially through easier availability.…
Here’s the full Lancet article (again).
thelancet.com/journals/lance … 4/fulltext[/quote][/quote]
Here is something that I agree with…
hahahahaha you guys are funny. and that dude with the OC image as his avatar HAHAHAHA. anyways, about that seizure. what a shame.
more like “an e a day might make the blues come later or the next day.” but molly…
Oh No!
We’re number One! We’re number One!
Just kidding. I am waiting for the fallout on which country the pills came from.
There’s a shitstorm a brewin, folks. Watch your backs. 
Indonesia gives the death penalty still for drug trafficking :