How much crack can a crackhead crack if a crackhead could crack crack!

[Venoms]

Just wanna know for the heck of it. But how common place are drugs/drug use in your life or around you. It doesnt have to be your use personally if at all but also the people/friends around you or community.

[C Elegans]

All sorts of drugs are extremely common around me since I work with medical research and we share some lab facilites and rooms with a group that specialise in drug dependancy mechanisms They have drugs there I didn't think existed. (These drugs are tested on slices of brain though, not on living animals or humans.) The chemist's in my own lab group have also invented some potent drugs by mistake, but they are safely locked away.

I assume though that you mean how much personal drug use or abuse we have around us. Many people around me are addicted to caffeine, either in coffee or tea or both. Most people I know drink alcohol but not do according to a pattern which would fulfil the criteria for dependency. I know some people who smoke or use snuff tobacco. That's about it.

More potent drugs, I have not had around me since I was in my teens. At that time, I used to hang around with a variety of different crowds, some of which where extremely drug liberal and used marijuana, hasch, cocaine or amphetamine. Cocaine was particularly popular.

When I was about 17-18, a friend of mine died of an overdose of heroine. It was very tragic. I had known him several years, and watched him sink deeper into the drug abuse swamp. When we met he was not addicted, but successivly he started using more and more potent drugs. His mother was a mixed alcohol and pills abuser, she had more psychopharmaca in her bathroom than we had at at the psychosis ward where I used to work. I am pretty sure his overdose was a suicide.

Another very close friend of mine became a heroine addict after his father died. Strangely, he hardly ever used any other drugs than beer before that, but after his father died he became deeply depressed and traumatised and gradually started drinking more, using other drugs, and then finally heroine. Last thing I heard from him was that he had got HIV, probably from an infected injection needle.

I used to know several people who later became drug abusers and either lived in a miserable way or ended their lives in a miserable way. As for me, the strongest drug I have ever touched is nicotine. I have never tried any "drugs of abuse" such as marijuana, hasch, amphetamine, cocaine, LSD, philocybin, mescaline, heroine, ecstacy, PTP or you name it. I don't drink alcohol either. I am however very insterested in psychotropic drugs, especially those acting on the serotonin system in the brain, but that is from a scientific point of view.

[jopperm2]

I personally use alcohol and caffeinne, but I used to use ecstacy on a semi-regular basis. Most of my friends also were into marijuana. I didn't care for it but I loved ecstacy. It's a terrible drug IMO. People here try to play it off like it's harmless if used "responsibly" but I don't think so at all. Perhaps CE could shed some light on that. I think it is a Seratonin affecting drug.

[Galuf the Dwarf]

On the outside world, I had a 'friend' (more of an enemy, to tell the truth) who died of a substance/drug overdose around February of last year, which did surprise me a bit in only that it happened so soon. I knew he was in for trouble around the last time I saw him, which was when I was 14.

The big town around my area was cited last year as one of the largest consumers in heroin, though, and was branded with the damaging nickname of 'Heroin Town'. That, and my homestate of Connecticut being branded as 'Corrupticut'. Then again, our last governor was put on trial for laundering money, so go figure.

Me, though, I haven't abused a single microscopic amount of any dangerously mind/body-altering substance, legal or illegal. I always drink decaf coffee and tea (whenever I have any of said beverages), limit my sugar intake (to prevent whacking out my blood sugar, even though I'm not a diabetic), and consider illegal substances to be one of my antithesis (plural sp?).

[araknid70]

Hmm. I don't smoke and I drink only on occasion, and I come from Singapore, where drug trafficking faces the death sentence. No way to get a lenient sentence (jail) - the only way out is to prove that the drugs found on your person were planted, and that you are totally innocent. And the drug carry limit is very low, too. So, very few drugs around me - although there's always people who manage to get their hands on drugs. Two of my close friends smoke, and they usually make it a point to stay downwind of me when they light up. Sorry, but I have a very high intolerance for smoking (as opposed to low tolerance, heh).

Well, for a lab class once I breathed 40% nitrous oxide for about twenty minutes. That's laughing gas, and I couldn't stop laughing throughout... Anything seemed to set me off. After coming off the gas mask I got a splitting headache. Huh, looks like I'm not cut out to be a druggie.

[C Elegans]

I didn't care for it but I loved ecstacy. It's a terrible drug IMO. People here try to play it off like it's harmless if used "responsibly" but I don't think so at all. Perhaps CE could shed some light on that. I think it is a Seratonin affecting drug.

Ecstasy (MDMA) is indeed a drug with primarily serotonergic action. It is far from harmless, but I think some people misunderstand what the risks are. E is not as physically addictive as for instance cocaine or heroine is the sense that moderate use does not necessarily lead to tolerance development (need to increase the dose to get the same effect) and craving. Withdrawal of the drug only result in abstince syndrome in heavy users. There are however some other problems with E:

1. Ecstasy is neurotoxic. In humans we don't know exactly what doses and how long use it takes to actually kill of serotonergic brain cells, but studies of frequent users have shown reduction of serotonin axon terminals. (The terminal is a part of the brain cell that sends out signals to other cells.) Changes of brain activity patterns has been reported after 18 months. Decreased memory performance has also been reported.

2. Probably due to its' neurotoxic properties, MDMA can induce irreversible depression in some users. It is not known why some people get affected after taking MDMA only once, whereas other may get affected after some time, and yet others never get affected. Probably it has to do with how your neurochemical systemed worked prior to taking the drug, there is a large variability in how much different people have of various substances and various receptors. Every brain is like a neurochemical fingerprint.

3. Due to some unknown mechanism, probably relating to the action MDMA has on the dopamine system in a certain part of the brain called nucleus accumbens, MDMA makes rats more and faster dependent of certain other drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine.

Sometimes you hear people claim that a certain drug is leading dangerous because it leads to heavier drug abuse later on. Such drugs are called "starter drugs", and often it is claimed that alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana are such drugs.

Those claims are almost always based on correlations, ie in studies you can see that people who never drink and smoke usually don't take E or cocaine either, whereas more people who take E or cocaine also smoke and drink alcohol. What is not discussed, is that a majority of people who drink and/or smoke never take E or cocaine. The temporal correlation, ie two things occur at the same time, is mistaken for a causal correlation, ie one thing leads to the other.

With MDMA though, it is likely that it is not only a temporal but actually a causal correlation since it has been demonstrated in experiments that MDMA increases the effects of amphetamine both at a neurobiological and behavioural level.

Here is an abstrace from a recent article published in one of the best scientific journals for neuropharmacology:

Human METH and MDMA users exhibit impairments in memory and executive functions, which may be a direct consequence of the neurotoxic potential of amphetamines.[/b] The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of amphetamines-induced neurotoxicity on Pavlovian learning. Using mouse models of selective DA neurotoxicity (METH; 5 mg/kg x 3), selective 5-HT neurotoxicity (fenfluramine /FEN; 25 mg/kg x 4) and dual DA and 5-HT neurotoxicity (MDMA; 15 mg/kg x 4), appetitive and aversive conditioning were investigated. Dopaminergic neurotoxicity significantly impaired METH and cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP), but had no effect on LiCl-induced conditioned place aversion (CPA). In contrast, serotonergic neurotoxicity significantly enhanced CPP, and had no effect on CPA. Dual dopaminergic/serotonergic neurotoxicity had no apparent effect on CPP; however, CPA was significantly attenuated. Postmortem analysis revealed that significantly diminished levels of DA and 5-HT markers persisted in the striatum, frontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala. These findings suggest that amphetamines-induced dopaminergic and serotonergic neurotoxicity exert opposing influences on the affective state produced by subsequent drug reward, while dual dopaminergic/serotonergic neurotoxicity impairs associative learning of aversive conditioning. Furthermore, results revealed that amphetamines-induced DA and 5-HT neurotoxicity modulates appetitive Pavlovian conditioning similar to other DA and 5-HT neurotoxins. Modulation of Pavlovian conditioning by amphetamines-induced neurotoxicity may be relevant to compulsive drug-seeking behavior in METH and MDMA abusers.

My bold. Not very nice. If you want to know more about the damaging effects of MDMA, here is a link to 1883 peer-reviewed scientific articles about MDMA:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... &DB=pubmed

[Magrus]

For myself, I dealt with being around alcohol in a lot of bad situations as a child so I swore off drinking until October or November of 2003 when I was living in a college dorm. I've had problems with insomnia for years, and I got back to not being able to sleep so I needed something to put me out cold and I started downing vodka until I passed out. I've gotten used to drinking and I drink when I can afford it and decide to get drunk with some friends, or again just to pass out.

A few of my friends have been drug dealers over the years and again, with my problems with insomnia, they suggested marijuana as a solution. So I've tried that, it doesn't work too well for me. I'm quite unsure of whether it's a lasting effect of my not having slept for 2 months straight a few years ago, or whatever it was that neurologist wouldn't tell me about that showed up as "odd" on the tests he did for seeing if I really did get migraines. I end up hallucinating badly and it wasn't conducive to getting sleep so I haven't used it since. It probably didn't help with the high quality stuff my friends had either though and my never using it. Oh well.

There's a town around here that is HUGE with heroin, there's just nothing to do so people turned to drugs. There are a lot of towns around here like that, mostly with marijuana. Cocaine has come back full-force too, my father just kicked an addiction with that.

A lot of people are doing Oxy-cotton, they crush up the pills and snort that. I've been told it's extremely addicting and something along the lines of a synthetic heroin.

I know my ex girlfriend who moved down to Miami said E and Xanax are huge down there as party drugs.

Cocaine and Marijuana are really the only two drugs that pop up often though wherever I show up in the surrounding area around here. The others occasionally, along with Opium, shrooms and just random stuff people end up doing. A lot of people just grab whatever they can find just to be able to say they've done it as an ego thing in high school I've noticed.

One guy showed up one night with a case of CO2 cartridges at a party just to announce that he was going to "Do whippits till it hurt" and took off. I was just amused by the fact he went door to door at the dorm to do so but found that quite sad really.

I find that whole "gateway drug thing" to be just ridiculous really. I know a good amount of people of all ages that have been smoking pot for years, some decades and never gone beyond that. It's all personal really. You don't start running in life, you learn to crawl, walk and then run. Most people who use them don't just pick up crack or herion out of the blue, they starts small and move up. Granted, some chemicals will cause you to be addicted and such and you will end up getting used to them and needing more.

I know I have a horrible time with any sort of chemical substance. Doctors just don't know what to do with me, I develop a tolerance to just about anything they hand me, including Tylenol so I can see if someone was addicted to a drug, and developed a tolerance to it, they'd move onto something else that got that craving to go away.

[Xandax]

Never had any euphoriant drugs around myself or friends, although some people in my class in public school did smoke pot I think - but I had little to do with them either.

Even in my "wild" younger days when I was out partying hard (very hard) 3 times a week, every week for a 10-12 months in a row, I had nothing to do with drugs. And it does flourish in the club/pub/disco enviornment

I've never seen the lure, benefit or anything from drugs and have this inate opinnion that only weak people use drugs. (Which I know is of course not the case, but still something I belive for some reason)

[C Elegans]

@Magrus: Insomnia is a horrible thing. I really hope you manage to cope without using drugs with a lot of dangerous side effects.

Your neurologist didn't want to tell you what was "odd" on your migraine tests? What did they do, EEG? In any case, it's a lousy doc who doesn't want to tell you what it is.

[QUOTE=Xandax]I've never seen the lure, benefit or anything from drugs and have this inate opinion that only weak people use drugs. (Which I know is of course not the case, but still something I belive for some reason)[/QUOTE]

Naaah, you're a smart and rational guy Xan, you should look at it like this instead - you (like me) are a very lucky person who is free from the many vulnerability factors that make people prone to become addicted to drugs. There are many such factors, genetic predisposition, social environment, peer group, upbringing and family...also temporary situations like lonliness, understimulation, emotional problems etc can increase the risk for certain persons to start taking drugs or becoming dependent. It is not they who are weak, it is we who are lucky

[frogus23]

I'm from Oxford, England...Drugs of all sorts abound, and to be honest, practically every one of my friends does pills, wizz, MD powder, mushrooms, marijuana, acid, coke, nitrous oxide, amyl nitrate and ketamine more or less frequently...Likewise I.

Coke, acid, mushrooms, pills and MDMA are used as 'party drugs' on nights out.
Coke is still expensive so its not especially common among my friends apart from those who are dealers themselves, but a lot of it happens at my school which is full of aristocracy.

Speed and weed are used more casually - the kind of thing you can do in the school lunch break...

Poppers (amyl nitrate) are used like commas when they're around.

Ketamine is a kind of social subculture, and the regular K users form a distinct crowd that you can recognise on the street, by their style of ****ed up dreadlocks and neon colour hair braids, shapeless clothes (alll black), piercings and ultraviolet accesories (plus distinctive meandering style of walk involving one step forward, two sideways, one backwards, a couple over there, one here....) A few of my friends have destructive habits (in my informed medical opinion ) of 20 and 25 grams a week which has a permanent effect of conversational retardation....

I have known people into crack and heroin but I have not had a friend survive a habit of either without becoming reclusive and criminal, so I couldn't count any current friends who do it.

[Xandax]

[QUOTE=C Elegans]<snip>
Naaah, you're a smart and rational guy Xan, you should look at it like this instead - you (like me) are a very lucky person who is free from the many vulnerability factors that make people prone to become addicted to drugs. There are many such factors, genetic predisposition, social environment, peer group, upbringing and family...also temporary situations like lonliness, understimulation, emotional problems etc can increase the risk for certain persons to start taking drugs or becoming dependent. It is not they who are weak, it is we who are lucky [/QUOTE]

Yeah - I know
Although I, on some irrational illogical level, still belive it.
My life has by no means - and still aren't - a "dance on roses" ...... hmm wrong analogy, because it would be all thorny and painfull, so maybe my life indeed is
Anyways, sidetracked, but .... I know that some people get hit by some sort of issues that makes them surcumb to for instance drugs as a reliant, however having been (and still are) subjected to many such situations makes it more incomprehensible for me to understand that lure of drugs.
In my personal opinnon, it would always be better to "feel reality" even if reality bites, then using drugs. Reality is in my view what defines us as humans, it is all we have - I don't belive in afterlife, reincarnation, ghosts and "the other side" or what not - This life is all we have and all we will ever see.
The choices we make each and every day for both the pleasure as well as the pain are what defines us and the time we have. Thus I on some personal - irrational level one could call it - have a very hard time sympathizing with addicts (of most any kind) or and even people using drugs for "fun", because it isn't real.
It is one of the areas in life where I truely lack empathy, mostly because I base it around my own life and situation, and use that as a standard for others.
(Which is also wrong on some level, I know. Damned - sometimes I hate being rational and reflective, things seem so much easier without )

[jopperm2]

@CE, I agree totally with all of those statements.. I have experienced first hand some of the things you mentioned. My ex-girlfriend did small doses(or we assumed they were small since you never really know what you are getting.. We only did one pill at a time though so they should be small doses, otherwise they would have been more expensive ) probably less than ten times and spaced with at least three months between doses. Since then it is very difficult to carry a aconversation with her. Her ADD seems to have gotten worse(I'm not sure if there is a link there or not), she can't remember things, her depression is much worse, and she exhibits a chaining speach pattern similar to how some psychotics speak. I'm wondering if perhaps she had other underlying problems though because I took all the same E as she did and had no problems. She had a history of being on Prozac before so I wonder if it has abything to do with that.

Anyway, all this is really only valid if you indeed get MDMA in your pills. THere are a lot of imitations out there that produce similar effects and are used to cut the mdma or replace it entirely. Most are cheaper and that is why they are used, but some are much better and are used to beef up the pills in order to sell more. ONce we got some pills that I think were piked with a drug called 2CB. It's very sililar to MDMA and is in fact an entactogen as MDMA is, but it is also a mild hallucinagen. Neither of us knew about 2CB at the time so I don't think the affects I'm about to describe were imagined.

We bought the pills from my regular dealer who gets her pills from a reliable guy in Daytona that allegedly bus from holland in bulk. They were smaller, very thin, split, and a uniform pale green with a semi-glossy finish. They were much more professionally made than the usual dusty clumps of pills we bought. I suspect they were produced commecially somewhere where such drugs are not banned. I'm not sure if they are legal in Holland or not. We were told by my dealer that they were way better than anything that she had ever tried. I trusted her(she was an employee of mine after all) so I agreed to pay nearly double what I normally pay and I bought an extra pill that we could split to make it last longer if we like. We followed her recommendation that we should split each pill into four pieces and take one piece every half hour until we were finished. We actually only took about three pieces before we thought we should stop.

My girlfriend started hallucinating badly and was very scared. She first thought she was in a the movie The Cell because of the way the light in the room looked. She thought she needed to lie perferctly still on the floor in order to avoid some sort of bad thing. When I finally got her up she went into the bathroom to sit on the toilet. She immediately froze in a terrified look and stared at the wall. I asked her what was wrong and she said she was hiding from "the bull." Later I found out it was a ram she was hiding from, she just couldn't remember the name of the animal. She was seeing its face in the pattern of the wall texture. She later saw a towel that she thought was a parrot and her backpack that she thought was her beagle Rudy. I experienced none of those effects but did have some minor "geometric" affects where certain patterns seemed to shift as I moved. Similar to mushrooms I have been told.

I never found out for sure what was in those pills, but from research I have done I think it must have been 2CB. The moral of the story is that you never know a) what you are getting and b) how it will affect you.

Drugs are bad, m'kay.

[dragon wench]

I have occasionally smoked pot, BC bud is the province's largest cash crop!
However, it has only ever been very occasionally.
I have toyed with the idea of trying some psychotropics like mushrooms or acid, but it has never happened.. and truthfully, I'm quite nervous about being under the influence of something that seriously makes me lose control.

As far as alcohol goes, I'm a very moderate drinker, and wine is my preference.
While I really appreciate a fine red, I suspect that if I never saw it again in my life I wouldn't be unduly upset either.
Coffee, on the other hand, is a completely different story...

[Chanak]

@Magrus: Being on an SSRI drug has alleviated my horrific problems with insomnia. While I never went without sleep for as long you did in that one instance, I would go for months subsisting on 4 hours or less of sleep nightly - some nights, none at all. Some psychiatrists have insisted that I also take a "mood stabilizer", but when they learn of how I'm doing currently just taking Lexapro only, they dismiss that idea. I only had one doctor insist that I take a mood stabilizer anyway. I disagreed with her, since her basis for that approach was "every person suffering from bipolar disorder should take a mood stabilizer." Perhaps the statistics support that - in fact, most bipolars I know take one - but if there's no apparent need for it, then why take it?

Have you looked into ECT, Magrus? It might help. Where drug therapy has failed, ECT often results in success. I know of several people who found relief, finally, with that therapy. I think CE has posted something about ECT in a different thread before. She would be a good person to pump for info on ECT.

The only drug I take is a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI). This drug has assisted in alleviating insomnia, depression, and anxiety/panic. Other than that, apart from an occasional aspirin, I don't take any drugs, including alcohol. Here in Austin, every sort of drug you could dream up is available nearby. Lately, synthetic opiates are very popular, such as oxycodone. During my teens I toyed around with marijuana and hashish for a few years, and didn't know how much that deepened my depressions until I stopped doing it a year or so before I joined the US Army. I had plenty of opportunities while I was in the Army to do cocaine (it seemed the drug of choice amongst the medical personnel ), tried it once, and never did it again. The very concept of doing drugs now doesn't appeal to me one whit - and if I could manage well enough without it, I wouldn't take that SSRI drug, either.

What concerns me about the SSRI drug I take is what happens to me when I forget to take my once a day dose. Not too long ago, I ran out of my perscription, and I didn't have insurance to help cover the costs. I therefore went over 30 days without the SSRI, and during that time I had to struggle daily at work to prevent myself from quitting. I spiraled into a very deep depression and started entertaining suicidal ideations. That bothers me a great deal.

[C Elegans]

[QUOTE=frogus23]I'm from Oxford, England...Drugs of all sorts abound, and to be honest, practically every one of my friends does pills, wizz, MD powder, mushrooms, marijuana, acid, coke, nitrous oxide, amyl nitrate and ketamine more or less frequently...Likewise I.

Coke, acid, mushrooms, pills and MDMA are used as 'party drugs' on nights out.[/QUOTE]

Dearest Frog, considering what we have discussed previously about serotonin, if I were you I would avoid serotonergic drugs entirely...take care of that lovely brain of yours, you don't want to decrease your abilities or get into irreversible mood alterations. If you want to use drugs, central stimulatia like cocaine and amphetamine is the best for you. Opiods would be the second choice. You should really, really stay away from LSD, MDMA, philocybin mushrooms, mescaline and such. If you absolutely want hallocinogenic experiences, try sleep deprivation or Salvatorin A, the only known hallucinogentic that is not mediated by the serotonin system.

[quote="Xandax]
In my personal opinnon"]

I share this opinion and value totally with you, and I have the same problem empathising with people who find value in non-reality. If I have the most wonderful dream or fantaly, what does it matter, it is not real and thus has no impact on anything outside a few minutes in my intrapsychological world?

However, what you and I should be happy for is that in difficult situation, we don't react with escape. In the fight-or-flight response choice, we don't end up on the flight side in this regard. There are situations where life is so horrible so almost nobody would continue to live on without the possibility to escape reality. For instance, I know that glue sniffing is common among homeless orphans who live on the street in some ghettos and make a living by prostituting themselves and stealing. Some say they would kill themselves if they didn't use glue to get away from the suffering, still, they hope for a better life in the future. This I can well understand. We just have to realise that different people have different reaction patterns and also different thresholds. Nothing wrong with that, in an evolutionary perspective, a person with a low threshold is simply a person with a very agile alarm system.

What I do not understand at all is the fun of taking mind altering drugs as recreation. There are so many ways to alter your state of consciousness by experiencing reality rather than construct illusions with different drugs. Maybe it's a matter of opportunity, ideas and self knowledge - finding interesting, inspirational and stimulating experiences takes some personal research, time and energy and a lot of trial and error. Drugs in a much easier way.

I think the most important is to realise that much of these differences between people are related to differences is basic personality traits. Such basic traits are 50% genetically determined. The other 50% is an unknown mix of everything from chemical characteristics in prenatal environment, to social learning and cultural conditioning. Again, in an evolutionary context as well as in a society, all these have a functional value. This does however not mean we have to like all sorts of combinations of traits, personally I dislike people with high anxiety traits and low sensation-seeking, but that's not a moral value, that's just personal opinion.

It is crucial to make a distinction between value system and
personal opinion. Value systems (like moral values) should be generalisable to objective reality, and thus based on objective reality. Personal opinion needs not the be generalisable at all, and can thus be based on totally subjective and irrational preferences, emotions, thoughts and experiences. I dislike people with certain types of traits and behaviours, thus I avoid them. However, I don't view them as corrupt, weak or less worthy as human beings. It's not necessary to like and sympathise with everybody, it's just necessary to attribute equal human value and thus equal opportunities and rights to everybody.

[quote="JopperM]Her ADD seems to have gotten worse(I'm not sure if there is a link there or not)"]

That's terrible Unless her neurotransmission has been monitored (which it never is, it's only if you participate in some scientific study as a volonteer) it is of course impossible to conclude the cause of her worsening, but one can speculate from what is known about the substances in general. Firstly, we know that people with a history of depression has some perturbations in the serotonin system. They are most likely more vulnerable to serotonergic acting drugs. Second, it is known that Prozac and all other SSRI:s cause downregulation of serotonin receptors over time. This is probably not permanent, the nerve cells will make new receptors, but it may take time - in chronic stress patients who have killed off their serotonin receptors with toxic effect of cortisol, it takes 8 months-2 years for the receptor system to recover. Third, MDMA is neurotoxic do serotonin and dopamin receptors. Worsening of depression in people with prior history of depression has been obsevered also after occational use, as well as depression in people who never before had it. Conclusion: it is very likely that the condition of your ex has worsened due to the MDMA use.

[quote="Chanak] I only had one doctor insist that I take a mood stabilizer anyway. I disagreed with her"]

I guess your doctor was too dogmatic based on the statistics that it has been demonstrated that a majority of people with bipolar disorder get successively worse over time. As usual, prediction to a specific individual can of course not be made from group statistics, so considering the side effects, there is no reason for you to start taking mood stabilisers as profylax. Instead, just keep being attentive and monitor you episodes closely. Ask some people who are close to you and who have known you well for a long time, to keep an eye on your behaviour. If you seem to worsen, you just start taking lithium then.

[quote="Chanak]
What concerns me about the SSRI drug I take is what happens to me when I forget to take my once a day dose. Not too long ago"]

*grinding teeth and trying to prevent falling into a rant about the US health care system*

You have all reason to be bothered by this. I think it is inhumane with a system that can prevent people from getting access to their medical treatment for insurance reasons. You are put at a great risk when you abstain from your medicine for as long as 30 days, what if you had not been able to resist your suicide impulses? It makes me absolutely mad to think about it. Also, as you know, you are at risk for severe, irreversible side effects if you stop taking the medicine suddenly, without a proper down-titration.

[jopperm2]

@CE, Is Salvatorin A the substace found in Salvia Divinorum? I had heard you could hallucinate off that stuff, but I thought it was a bunch of pot-heads imagining things when people told them about it.

[Dottie]

@Jopperm: Yes it is, it's more often called Salvinorin A instead of Salvatorin A but it's the same thing. It is highly psychoactive, the most potent hallucinogenic we know about that is found naturally. It binds to the kappa opiod receptor.

EDIT: ROFL, this is C Elegans, I am posting from Dottie's computer I forgot

[Magrus]

@Magrus: Insomnia is a horrible thing. I really hope you manage to cope without using drugs with a lot of dangerous side effects.

Your neurologist didn't want to tell you what was "odd" on your migraine tests? What did they do, EEG? In any case, it's a lousy doc who doesn't want to tell you what it is.

EEG, or EKG, I've had both, one recently for the migraine test, and one as a very young child (4 yr's or so) for a random seizure I had (the only one I've had) so I mix the two up. I was a minor and the doctor refused to inform me, despite whatever demands I had to know what on my chart could be considered "strange abnormalities with his brain" which he was whispering to the nurse. I wasn't too happy to not know what was going on as I was hallucinating from not sleeping at the age of 15. I think he got that impression before I left. I had to be dragged by my mother from the office after attempting to tear the file from his hands.

Only two doctors which I've met here, and I've been sent to a LOT of doctors, have I respected. The rest that I've met are either those refusing to accept anything not found in a book set before them, or those just looking for a paycheck.

Insomnia is indeed horrible, I used to be able to handle going without sleep for days, weeks, and it got to the point of up to 2 months at a time years ago. Now, if I end up going without sleep for more than 36 hours, I slide back into the mental state I was in from not sleeping for 2 months immediately. I've ended up needing 11 hours of sleep a day about 3-4 days a week in order to get enough rest after recovering from that point. Hallucinations, that little pink elephant on the Simpsons, I was seeing one of those before the Simpsons aired him. I put down a Smurf riot in my school one day. Yes, I was sober, but sleep deprivation does bad naughty things to your mind m'kay?

I was informed if I wasn't getting sleep my brain wasn't starting to essentially unravel from lack of rest and recooperation time we all needed. Unfortunately, when I was hospitalized during the times I was sleep deprived, they refused to listen to me that I WAS sleep deprived and drugged me for schitzophrenia, leading to some quite serious memory loss and other problems and my deep distrust of anyone with a doctorite degree.

@Chanak, no I haven't tried, or even heard of that, I'll have to look into those things.

@jopperm2, I've learned that unless you know how to make everything and make it yourself or supervise it's making, you can't know for sure what's in it. I do my best to see to it certain friends of mine keep to a somewhat moral lifestyle despite their dealing, and advise them. I've seen pot laced with opium, the effects of a girl in the hospital who smoked pot laced with what I believe was PCP who wasn't the same afterwards and the results of bad hallucinagens and all sorts of things. If your girlfriend's been on an anti-depressant for a while, it probably wasn't a good idea for her to try a hallucinagen, although depression is something I've dealt with myself so I can understand the wanting to try something to escape that reality. Once stuck in a loop of depression, your outlook on things changes. I'm sorry to hear about that, chances are that was simply too much for her with her brain chemistry, or you got a pill with something you weren't expecting in it.

@Frogus,

If you absolutely want hallocinogenic experiences, try sleep deprivation

I'd not suggest this unless you enjoy losing touch with reality on a permanent basis. I haven't had the same outlook on life since I started having sleep deprivation problems about a decade ago. Reality has the tendency to suddenly slide away from me after certain stimuli trigger it. Walking home through the fog in the snow the other night was enough to trigger hallucinations bad enough to make walking difficult after not sleeping for 2 days with me. My attempts at using pot to sleep have made my friends think I was hiding LSD on me somewhere based on how badly I was hallucinating from the mixture of sleep dep and pot. One attempt made my vision alter to seeing my friends play hacky-sack in a driveway as a cartoon on TV, with the borders of my vision as normal and when I told them they threw a remote at me and toyed with me.

On a side note, I've known for years my brains doesn't produce seratonin the same as most people just by observation of my behavior. That might very well be the why of a few things that occur with me but, I wasn't aware a lot of drugs affected that chemical in your brain. That makes much more sense with things though. A friend of mine used to take medication to control seratonin regulation in his brain and stopped, and essentially became a robot in regards to emotions. They just sort of shut off and he became coldly, brutally logical with everything, and then started seeking just about any drug he could find and take, which certain ones allowed him to be "normal" for a few hours. His doctors thought he didn't need the medication anymore after a talk with his family. Too many doctors listen to what they want to hear rather than what the patients say IMO. Irritating business frankly.

I spent a night watching a friend of mine trip on shrooms, whom I warned was a bad idea as he has a rare form of schitzophrenia and that such things shouldn't be mixed. He disregarded me and took them anyways, later ending up getting sick in the bathroom, begging for me to call his mother as he thought his arm had turned into a tentacle and I was a Blue Meanie and that he'd never come down.

[frogus23]

@CE Salvia is extremely rare and expensive, as well as being very difficult to use effectively, although I have tried it once. Anyway I appreciate that you care I use drugs responsibly enough I believe, but this is not the place to discuss illegal habits as I have been convivilly warned before

*screams...cries...slams door*

You're not my mum!

*sob*

PM me if you are worried

@Magrus, I think CE meant the sleep deprivation remark semi-seriously at most...
I know insomniacs, and I am truly sympathetic. I have only seen it positively solved by meditation, although family members have been treated IMO very crudely with sedatives.

@Jopperm, ecstacy is apparently an extremely bad idea for one on a Prozac course - this is what medical professionals have told in earnest to Prozac users I know, but I have never witnessed the effects of mixing them. Also, I've taken 2CB pills before (only once, they are not common at all) and had very similar effects - mushroom-tye geometric patterns etc. I'm sure you and your girlfriend are no fools, but I ecstacy and psychedelics are both an extremely dangerous idea, in emotional terms, for a depressive. They intensify emotions, and inevitably lead to intense and difficult-to-handle upsurges of subconscious and repressed feelings (I apologise for lay vocabulary, I do not know the science behind this). This is fine if it means confessing your innermost romantic feelings to your lover, but it can be catastrophic if it means confronting an imaginary entity which embodies your depression while in a confused and vulnerable mental state.

[Macleod1701]

I don't much like drugs! Only ever tried weed once and whether I'm immune or what but while everyone else sat there stoned it had absolutely no effect on me so after an hour of waiting I went to the shop to get beer and got drunk instead. Much more fun!