
Non-profit produced MDMA 'ecstasy' and psychedelics - tobiasgw
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/non-profit-produced-mdma-ecstasy-psychedelics--2
======
themartorana
This is easy to get behind. Although I have doubts of ever seeing these
products on store shelves in the US, one of the things that have kept my
personal drug experimentation extremely low is fear of product purity and lack
of quality control.

It's easy to show how terrible the War on Drugs has been. I'm still against
legalizing the worst of drugs like meth and heroin. But marijuana and LSD,
other plant-based psychedelics, I'm mostly for.

Keeping drugs under ground and in the shadows funds Mexican drug cartels and
puts the lives of millions at risk, while causing medical patients continuous,
unnecessary suffering. Legalization and good QC is the best thing we could
hope for.

~~~
snarfy
It's a slippery slope to pick one drug as OK and another as not. Putting
substances into your own body should not be illegal, regardless of the
substance. We would do a lot better if we focused on education, addiction, and
rehab than focusing on prohibition.

~~~
xalloc
> Putting substances into your own body should not be illegal

Why is this so? By axiom?

Any parent will forcibly forbid her child to put any substance in his body. We
make things illegal exactly because we recognize that a sufficiently large
portion of the population is unable to handle a certain freedom. Now what
exactly made you conclude that a sufficiently large percentage of the
population can handle their use of drugs?

~~~
soylentcola
Because arguably, the reason you shouldn't put these substances in your body
is because doing so can be unhealthy. Criminal charges and prison are
definitely unhealthy.

Making a person's diet a matter of law just goes against the values of many
people. I'm well aware of the fact that some compounds lend themselves to
addiction/habituation but so do many legal ones. You don't see people throwing
winos and pack-a-day smokers in prison unless they otherwise break the law in
a way that infringes the rights of someone else.

Likewise, if someone fails to use intoxicants or other recreational drugs
responsibly and develops a debilitating habit, it makes more sense to do as we
do for people who want to quit drinking or smoking, not as we do for people
who rape and murder.

~~~
xalloc
> Criminal charges and prison are definitely unhealthy.

Making someting illegal does not mean you have to put people in prison. You do
understand that we can forbid a drug and try to stop the sale of drugs, and
still provide support for people who develop drug habits?

Funny that you mention cigarettes. I'm quite sure that cigarettes will be made
illegal at some point in the future.

~~~
ecnahc515
Actually, it basically does mean you have to put people in prison. What else
are you going to due if its illegal? Fine them? Great, they'll never pay the
fine, do more drugs. Now what? Fine them some more? Okay...it only goes on so
long until they go to jail.

Any punishment oriented consequences are simply going to either be too harsh,
or too lenient.

------
PeterWhittaker
The folks involved did an AMA recently:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2ywf4a/science_ama_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/2ywf4a/science_ama_series_we_are_teri_krebs_p%C3%A5l%C3%B8rjan/)

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aheilbut
They want people to give them $1M for empty boxes from the future? Are they on
drugs?

It might well be a good idea to study the therapeutic applications of these
compounds more, or to change the laws. But the bottlenecks are in laws and in
actually establishing the medical utility, not in synthesis. If they want to
solicit donations for advocacy, fine.. but there are plenty more noble causes
worthy of support. Tying it to manufacturing drugs is just bizarre.

~~~
vilhelm_s
This does go towards establishing medical utility and changing the laws. They
say they will use the money to distribute psilocybin for free to researchers
running medical trials, to develop protocols and applications for a medical
trial in Oslo, and for general campaigning.

------
igrekel
Now, does supporting this can make you prosecutable for financing a criminal
organization under anti-gang law?

I am asking this seriously.

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tariqr
If I understand this correctly, the recipient (backer) is responsible for
obtaining necessary legal documents and approvals for medical use. They might
just end up putting a lot of people in danger of possession of drugs if this
is not handled properly. But +1 for looking into psychedelics, specifically
MDMA, with an objective lens and clearly demystifying their position in the
drug world.

~~~
yebyen
Unless I missed it, nowhere on the page does it say the backer is also the
recipient. There is no donation level where you get MDMA or Psilocybin for
yourself, it's all produced and distributed for free (through unspecified
channels, but assumedly with some more due diligence and responsibility than
just mailing it out indiscriminately to everyone who backs the project.)

Looks like you can get a box "from the future" which indicates to me it's
concept packaging so you can show you support the cause, not an actual box of
drugs.

------
roel_v
I'm not sure what the goal of this project is. It seems to be to produce
psilocybin and MDMA, but it fails to mention why this would be necessary, or
why they'd need any money to do so at all (apart from the modest cost of
precursor). I'll admit that I don't know much about synthetic psilocybin
manufacturing, so I'm talking about MDMA mostly. (but until last year, you
could buy 'only add water' growing sets for shrooms in smart shops here
(=Netherlands), so how hard can it be?) Either way, there are many syntheses
known, most of them (although I'm not a chemist, so I don't have first hand
knowledge) available to chemists with very modest understandings of chemistry
and rudimentary equipment needs. I'd imagine they already have labs in which
they can produce high quality product using high-yield syntheses.

With the right paperwork (which you'd need to get access to this project's
product), any researcher could just as easily get access to precursor and make
exactly what they want (be it MDMA, MDA, MDME, or any other variation Shulgin
described, or invented afterwards by others). Plus it's easier to get licensed
for owning e.g. saffrole than it is to import MDMA!

So maybe he's saying that they can do it cheaper? I doubt so, or at least I
doubt that the price difference would be relevant. MDMA available underground
in Europe has been more pure and cheaper than it ever was before; a gram of
pure MDMA costs 20 euros retail (that's about 10 doses) if you're buying from
the most expensive guy you can find. If you buy by the 100 grams, you can get
it for half or a quarter of that price. So we're talking less than a euro per
dose here - at a worst case estimate. After taking everything into account, I
have a hard time imagining cost being a factor here (the low price on the
underground market being a fascinating topic itself here - how can these
clandestine manufacturing gangs make real money on their operations, after
counting for the high cost of doing business?) (and before anyone says that
you don't know the quality of what you buy on the black market, these people
are professional pharmacologists, they could easily check quality of a sample
- until a few years ago, you could get your pills checked at raves for free
FFS).

Now if they're looking for a million dollars to fund drug legalization work,
then fine, that's a worthy goal in itself - but that's listed only in passing
in the project. So the only conclusion left is that this project is a PR
stunt, where they're using a headline grabbing project description to fund
much less exotic advocacy work.

(my comments in this thread make it seem that I have first hand knowledge
about these things, but it's been well over 15 years since I last used or even
saw illegal drugs. I just have a an interest in the economics and law of
underground (drug) markets, and I read case law, reports from our equivalent
of the DoJ, papers from academic researchers and government drug monitoring
agencies to keep up to date. Hey, other people collect stamps.)

------
sadsgasdsadsad
test

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digitalzombie
I think there was a documentary on knock off MDMA which the Chinese and other
countries are making and selling as x.t.c. but are actually Bath Salt.

------
probably_wrong
I have several problems with this:

First of all, creating an account just to submit a commercial link? That
should be a bannable offense, unless we are cool with marketers selling their
stuff here.

Second, I'm fairly sure this campaign goes against Indiegogo's term of use. I
would expect an actual ban there.

Third, and more to the point: I could get behind such a campaign if the money
went _first_ towards legal access and _second_ to production. The campaign may
use as many nice words as they want, but ultimately, they are not putting
their money where their mouth is. They "will support EmmaSofia's work to
legalize recreational use"... after collecting a nice 300-600K, and only if
people pay 400K extra for it. Call me skeptic.

And all of that without getting into the legal aspect of it, which I don't
like either.

~~~
true_religion
To be far this is HackerNews, a discussion board backed by a business
accelerator program and home to startups and VCs alike.

If there's anywhere that should be okay with commercial promotion its here.

And that's what I like about the place. No where else on the internet can you
find people at the ground level, promoting themselves and engaging in
discussion. If you want to ask hard questions about the product, its hard to
do it to a billboard in time square, but a lot easier to do against someone
who's promoting it on HN.

~~~
probably_wrong
Although I see where your comment is coming from, I think I should nitpick
that the posts from actual startups backed by YC cannot be voted on nor have
comments enabled. So unless they have the courtesy of showing up in an
"unofficial" post, you cannot actually ask any questions, hard or otherwise. I
wish I could link to it, but the best I can do is a screenshot[1].

More to the point: call me negative, but I think that fomenting a "post and
run" style will lead to a situation in which you find it increasingly harder
to talk to the actual creators. I'd rather not see "send link to HN" become
yet another item on the self-promotion checklist.

[1] [https://imgur.com/q7CsY0U](https://imgur.com/q7CsY0U)

~~~
true_religion
Isn't that just the hiring posts? YC companies do regular posts as well which
can get comments.

To be fair, you're right post and run is a bad concept, but a lot of that
happens already and its simply downvoted before it ever makes it close to the
frontpage.

