
Testing Legal Highs Would Save Lives - pepys
http://www.buzzfeed.com/timchester/testing-legal-highs-would-save-lives-so-why-isnt-it-happenin
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Taek
LSD user here. As far as drugs go, LSD is among the safest substances.
However, many cheaper-to-produce analogs are much more dangerous. Buying
substances illegally means that you don't know what you are getting. It's hard
to find tests, and most LSD tests you can do at home can be faked (there are
inert compounds that will test positive for LSD).

And yet we love LSD, and we still try to find safe sources of the drug. We
don't like playing with fire and would much rather pay even heavily marked up
prices to buy LSD from a pharmacy where we can get guarantees about the purity
and dose.

The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty
standard part of human behavior. People have been getting high for thousands
of years, and many drugs are no more dangerous than alcohol or nicotine. The
solution to the drug problem is to provide safe and legal avenues for drug
use, and healthy environments for detecting and treating abuse. Legal pot is a
good first step, but we've got a long way to go.

People don't need to die trying to get high when the drug they want is safe in
the first place.

~~~
pedalpete
When you consider the safeness of a drug, do you also take into account the
environment where the drug is taken?

I had a friend die while on LSD when I was a kid. He didn't die because of the
drug, but as a hallucinogen, it is suspected he got himself into a situation
where he followed his fancy unaware of the danger of the environment he had
entered.

Of course, you could say 'but people trip and hit their head and die all the
time when they are drunk too', but the difference is, people hit their head
and die when are not drunk in equal measures.

As a self-declared LSD user, do you consider things other than the long-term
chemical effects of the drug? If so, what are those things?

If it sounds like I'm picking a fight or trolling, that is not the intention,
I am genuinely curious.

~~~
quanticle
>people hit their head and die when are not drunk in equal measures.

[Citation Needed]

I read stories about college kids falling, drowning, crashing their cars, and
almost always it's because they were heading home totally smashed from a
party. I would say, from my impressions, that the proportion of people hitting
their head (or falling into a lake and drowning, or what have you) is far
lower for sober people than it is for people intoxicated by alcohol.

~~~
robert_tweed
I knew someone who died aged 20 because he was drunk, tired, and decided to go
to sleep at the side of the road. It rained. He drowned in a few inches of
water.

A sober person has reflexes that would have prevented that.

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mmanfrin
No, legalizing safe illegal highs would save lives. People are using these
dangerous, untested chemicals because they can get them without running afoul
of the law. People don't smoke spice because they prefer it over cannabis,
they smoke it because they can buy it at a headshop.

~~~
rodgerd
This. Cannabis and MDMA are thoroughly tested, MDMA especially since it was
intended for clinical use. They are about as well undersood as any
psychoactive substance. It is batshit insane to insist that rather than
legalise them, it's better to test a whole other class of substance that are
just trying to replicate the same effect.

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pcthrowaway
It would probably save more lives to just legalize all drugs. Until drugs are
legalized and quality controlled there will be no way for consumers to even
know what they're getting.

~~~
threeseed
One of the issues with legalising a drug at this point in time is that it
sends a signal that it is safe. This is fine for drugs like Cannabis or even
LSD/Ecstacy which are relatively benign and non-addictive.

But drugs like Ice, Meth or Heroin are incredibly dangerous, toxic and
addictive regardless of how well they are made. Making them readily accessible
to existing addicts makes sense. But to first-time users ? No way.

~~~
eru
Even making heroin available to addicts doesn't make sense, when you can feed
them subutex as a ready alternative.

Anyway, you can legalize all these drugs, but make the harder ones
prescription only and highly taxed.

~~~
aorloff
Its not just taxation that needs to occur with legalization of harder drugs.
Its a comprehensive reaction from the social safety net - no more
unemployment, no welfare, and CPS comes to check on your kids if you have
them.

~~~
eru
Why? Just treat those drugs like we treat alcohol today. (Or find a better
solution, and apply it to alcohol, too.)

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refurb
I'm not how viable this would be. There are hundreds of "legal highs" out
there. To fully understand their safety you'd have to run clinical trials with
hundreds of subjects for each drug. Not exactly a cheap proposition.

~~~
Alex3917
The article isn't talking about running clinical trials, it's talking about
making GCMS equipment and the like available.

~~~
refurb
That would help stop people from taking things that are adulterated, but I'd
be concerned about the toxicity of the pure drugs as well.

A great example of what can happen is Fen-Phen, the diet drug that was taken
off the market a while back. The drug fenfluramine also activates the 5-HT2B
receptor and causes heart valve damage.

All of these designer drugs out there could certainly have off-target effects
that would never be noticed unless a clinical trial was run (even then maybe
not!) or unless enough users have enough problems that it's noticed (MPTP is
great example).

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mprovost
They mention the New Zealand testing scheme in the article, but it ran aground
because of the issue of animal testing. The main way to test the drugs
(apparently) is on laboratory animals, and there was a lot of opposition to
killing animals to test unnecessary drugs.

[http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11249629)

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deutronium
Am I right in thinking a number of legal highs are based on illegal
counterparts, by modifying the molecule a small amount.

Is it possible to predict how close the effect to the illegal one, will be.

[Edit] Also I'm wondering how is it possible that chemists like Shulgin, have
an ability to create such a large number of molecules, with psychoactive
effects.

~~~
mmanfrin
Nope, most 'legal highs' are manufactured to behave like legal alternatives,
but are chemically different. FAA: "the chemical structure of which is
substantially similar to the chemical structure of a controlled substance in
schedule I or II" is illegal. Designer drugs have to be made chemically
substantially different.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analog_Act)

~~~
wcummings
The key here is "if intended for human consumption." This is why legal highs
are frequently sold as "plant food" or "bath salts." Some vendors are more
careful than others, in the height of the first "wave" of designer drugs
around ~2004, some vendors were as brazen as to offer "sample packs" and the
like. And then Web Tryp [1] (my favorite codename ever) happened.

Many designer drugs are close analogs of schedule I substances.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp)

------
Nursie
The NPS market is very interesting. There are a small proportion of users who
are genuinely into NPS or RCs. These are people who want to try new things,
who are fascinated by what happens if you tweak the molecule this way or that
way, or you stick this extra bit on here and wow... Not all are chemistry
geeks but some are, other just find it interesting, may have spiritual reasons
for investigating all avenues etc. For this group legality is often a
secondary concern compared to novelty.

Then there are the majority of the users, who are looking for a legal
alternative to <insert popular drug here>, who effectively fund the production
and marketing of the scene, and without whom the first group would not have
such an easy time of it. The main concerns with this group are legality and
ease of access.

The first group are likely to have their use under control, to be very clued
in about allergy tests, measured doses, side effects mitigation etc. They may
have lapses into unhealthy use patterns but generally are in control. They are
served well by the current system and find services like WEDINOS invaluable.

The second group tend to be far less interested in what they're doing, may not
be educated about any of it, probably aren't part of an online community to
ask for help, they may even buy into the fallacy that legal == safe. They are
effectively playing russian roulette. One of the cases mentioned in the
article was one of these - that kid from Southampton died from taking over a
gram of aMT. The dose range for that substance is usually around 30-50mg, the
kid took 20 times that and died.

This group would be best served by legalisation of things that are known to be
mostly safe. MDMA (or some of its safer derivatives like MBDB), cannabis etc.

All this said, if any of the many bans were effective at stopping the
proliferation of NPS, it's not actually going to help anyone, because you'll
just end up back at square one - kids buying unknown substances of unknown
purity from unknown sources.

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rwmj
Regulating drugs properly also, as well as treating addiction as a medical
problem rather than a criminal problem.

