I'm pretty sure you've told that ** story before. If not, someone else has told a very similar story.
No, I'm sure I have. First, I'm repetitive. Second, I even kind of remembered having written it up, as I was re-writing it. Oh well.
I've been a paid volunteer in studies of intravenous THC (which is not really the same thing as K2, I suppose). It may just have been the clinical setting, but overall I found the experience intense but narrow. That is, some parts of the high were missing but the parts that were there were turned way up.
Intravenous THC isn't remotely the same thing as K2.
I'll see if I can't get some insight from the Class of 2016.
I told people to stay off the bath salts because of that guy who ate the other guy's face. Then it turns out that the guy eating the other guy's face wasn't on bath salts. Now I have to go back and tell everyone that bath salts are fine in so far as not triggering cannibalism goes.
The subject has come up before. Stick with regular old weed.
That's a good reminder that maybe I'm too fixated on cannibalism.
A friend of mine was prescribed some kind of THC drug in pill form when he was doing chemo (this was in Oregon in 2001). He found it impossible to work out a dosage between "doesn't do anything" and "makes me stare at the wall in a daze for an hour (and not in that fun way)." He reported this back to his doctor, who sighed, asked him unofficially if he had a hookup for the regular stuff, and implied that this was what happened every time with the prescribed crap.
As always, I attribute gswift's views on the subject to some combination of selection and confirmation bias, but I have no experience with the stuff.
7: this is your chance to go into more detail on the exact nature of 'wigging the fuck out'
Heebie you've told this story about ten times. Don't worry, it's amusing.
Also, is cannibalism really that bad?
It's a great story, and it'll only get better in the Unfogged retirement home.
7: tell us more about where you live, gswift. All we know so far is that it's a desert, everyone in it follows some weird minority religion, and the inhabitants tend to take a psychoactive substance called "spice".
Are there, for example, worms?
Looks awful. I don't want my kid smoking that shit. Legalization needs to hurry the fuck up and put this stuff out of business.
Also, is cannibalism really that bad?
Judging from the photo, I'd say yes.
[Click on that link at your own risk.]
It is supposed to be terrible, I think. I dunno, we had some training where they talked about a zillion different drugs (I thought I had heard of ALL THE DRUGS! I had not) in a non-hysterical way. This stuff sounded like something you'd want to stay away from. It should go without saying I can't remember any real details.
15 makes me laugh. ajay is the mindkiller.
What's cool (or horrifying, depending on your point of view) about these new "bath salts"/"synthetic THC" variants is that they mark a totally different approach to designer drugs; for many years people would pick up on fun-sounding variants (either from one of Shulgin's books or by noticing what an industrial chemical metabolized into or by, like, lit reviews of weird old things that people hadn't made in a long time) and take a crack at making them in bulk, to see if they'd catch on. These drugs, by contrast, are the product of an explicit industrial research process by underground Chinese labs -- at least one of the more recent ones is a completely novel synthesized compound. So, that is, underground-ish labs in China are actually advancing the frontiers of biochemistry in order to evade western drug laws with things that will plausibly get you high.
15 should of course have simply been "Tell me of the waters of your homeworld, gswift."
is a completely novel synthesized compound
cite?
I know a medical practitioner who used to prescribe (or rather, recommend) it for some mental patients for calming effects or something - too often regular marijuana is a big part of their slough of inactivity. Of course now it's been banned in a lot of places.
3: There are several other psychoactives in marijuana besides THC.
9: I'm informed that dronabinol (Marinol), which used to be and I think in the US still is the only prescription THC, was greatly hampered in its development by puritanism - they felt constrained to minimize any high it might produce.
23: this isn't what I was thinking of, but mentions some things that are close-ish.
The one I was thinking of wasn't a variant, though, if I'm remembering.
These drugs, by contrast, are the product of an explicit industrial research process by underground Chinese labs -- at least one of the more recent ones is a completely novel synthesized compound.
So what you're saying is you were into synthetic marijuana before it sold out?
That does explain why I heard that when K2 was banned in one state, its distributors were immediately ready with a non-banned substitute.
Spice/K2 that most everyone knows about was a biological tool compound designed by Clemson professor John W. Huffman to study THC receptors. The poor guy did not recognize that, by publishing the study and the structure, he was allowing an industry to flourish. It's not his fault that people were misusing his work.
The interesting problem with JWH-018 is that the synthesis is simple enough to be quite modular; when the initial DEA bans happened, it was fairly easy for manufacturers to start making other analogs that were not banned.
Since they do not have lungs or specialized circulatory organs, considering the largest size that a worm could reach is an interetsing question. Caecilians look similar, but almost all of them they have lungs, and all of them have hearts, so different limits.
Permian dragonflies the size of canned hams are not that helpful, since just how much more oxygen-rich the atmosphere was then is not known with much certainty. They did manage a metabolism that let them fly in the somewhat denser atmosphere.
There's apparently an open grad position for studying isopod anatomy in Australia.
So if we could alter the climate of our planet or another so that the atmosphere is denser and more oxygen-rich, could we get dragonflies the size of canned hams again?
it was fairly easy for manufacturers to start making other analogs that were not banned.
Everybody should appreciate the need for a ban an analogs.
Oh hey, the so-called "penis snake" is a caecilian. Those are awesome.
30: Alas, the development of birds is another limit on the size of flying insects.
33: make those suckers big and fierce enough and we'll soon see who's limiting who.
32: That could honestly use a NSFW warning. Good lord.
30: Sorry, we've already taken it in a different direction.
Caecilians look similar, but almost all of them they have lungs, and all of them have hearts, so different limits.
Also, you should never go up against one when death is on the line.
20/23/26: <troll>Hey, it's almost as if patent protection isn't necessary after all in order to get commercial discovery and development of pharmaceuticals!</troll>
(And yes, I recognize that human testing is the main cost driver, and the whole problem with these synthetics is that human testing is woefully lacking. I love this part:
Mr. Llewellyn, meanwhile, is unfazed. He boasts that his safety testing method is foolproof: He and several colleagues sit in a room and take a new product "almost to overdose levels" to see what happens. "We'll all sit with a pen and a pad, some good music on, and one person who's straight who's watching everything," he says.)
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So I went to a lecture last night (for a class I'm probably going to audit) and the lecturer had Tourette's. That, as it turns out, is kind of awesome. He had physical tics, which weren't terribly distracting, and I think he had verbal outbursts, but they were all integrated really well into his joke-filled lecture. Like, "so then you decide I'm going to weight these variables, but you can't just do that for no reason -- DON'T weight the variables. STUPID, STUPID, STUPID -- in this approach." It was great.
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38: wait, are you trolling me? I already agree with that.
39: Did he say "Cox regression" or "Cocks, regression"?
You could refer to an unrequited passion as "non-Abelian".
As always, I attribute gswift's views on the subject to some combination of selection and confirmation bias
These are terms with meaning and you can't just hand wave them in. I've repeatedly stated on this very blog that marijuana should be legal in the same way as alcohol. I'm also not sure where you're getting selection bias. It's SOP for police and fire to get dispatched to any type of suspected overdose as well as public erratic behavior in individuals where the cause is suspected to be drug use. These types of calls are almost non existent for marijuana and that is not the case for the synthetics.
7: this is your chance to go into more detail on the exact nature of 'wigging the fuck out'
Sometimes there's the catatonic thing described in 9. But while I wouldn't put it in the same frequency as crack or crystal meth we do sometimes see the type of paranoia and combativeness that usually results from a bad trip on the stimulants.
Our pal marijuana itself doesn't play well with psychosis, of course.
So few things do.
As has been mentioned before, smoking seems to and so I keep some in my work car.
44: I was mostly joking here. I don't actually have an opinion on the subject, and certainly don't know of any evidence against your observations.
Or, I guess my opinion would be that novel psychoactive drugs could certainly have all sorts of nasty effects.
48: maybe one of these labs'll come up with something that's even better than smoking! Bath desalination formula, or whatever.
I guess we should ban tobacco to give them incentive.
38: wait, are you trolling me? I already agree with that.
No, not you; Halford or Liz or anyone else who's defended patents here in the past. It was a preemptive trolling.
It reminds me of the old patent medicines, which (contrary to their name) commonly were not actually patented in order to keep the ingredients secret. Of course they were generally triumphs of advertising rather than efficacy. Of course if there are biggish businesses behind K2 and the like, they presumably can only advertise by psychoeffect and word of mouth.
It's SOP for police and fire to get dispatched to any type of suspected overdose..These types of calls are almost non existent for marijuana.
MJ usually shows up as a pizza and twinkies overdose.
I linked to this article in the earlier thread gswift linked above, but it's definitely worth a read.
Fortunately, I get my high from the natural byproduct of yeast farting.
39 is pretty awesome, and makes me want to go tomorrow. Except that I have to be giving a talk across the river at precisely the time that's happening.
59: between this and the rodent thing you are dealing with a lot of tradeoffs around that talk.
Caecilians look similar, but almost all of them they have lungs, and all of them have hearts, so different limits.
Also, you should never go up against one when death is on the line.
Not only do caecilians have hearts, but they break hearts, and shake my confidence daily.