Drug users use a lot of drugs • Hacker News Board

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#151

Post by QuadmasterXLII » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

treeman79 wrote: post #40

bawolff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adderall is also a stimulant(?) The authors suggestion is it would cause the same effect if taken in the same dosage.

I was on Adderall 10mg a day. Worked as advertised. ADHD under control. Chronic fatigue fixed. Every portion of my body felt like it was being burned from the inside. I had to start tramadol to counter act the pain. It also upped cranial pressure. Causing a lot of secondary problems. This was made much worse as dosage went up. I had to stop it before downward spiral completely destroyed me. Vyvanse was a mild version…

I think doctors in general start stimulant doses way too high. I’m about 200 lbs, but reacted badly to 15, 10, even 5 mg. However at, 2.5 mg, I couldn’t even tell I was taking anything - but for the next semester my GPA was up 2 points, from C’s to A’s.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#152

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

bufordtwain wrote: post #63

newbie789 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was incredibly lucky. I got to a point where I felt like I wanted to stop (which happens often to a lot of addicts), which coincided with an opportunity to move far away from my hometown, and then also coincidentally found myself surrounded by a fantastic support system. It’s the addict equivalent of flipping a quarter 50 times and having them all come up head. As for a general answer to your question, there isn’t…

Can you provide more details on what the "fantastic support system" consists of?

Wholesome, well adjusted peers to talk and engage in enjoyable activities with.

A safe, clean, and comfortable living environment.

Enough food.

The confidence in oneself, or their support network, to truly believe without fear, that they won’t end up back out on the streets.

A well paying job that isn’t dehumanizing, traumatizing, exploitative, or abusive.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#153

Post by salawat » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

boomboomsubban wrote: post #20

wincy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My neighbors teeth are falling out. Salesman, honestly pretty successful guy, making 6 figures. Apparently he takes 120mg if Adderall to wake up in the morning. At that dose, he’s basically just getting Walter White quality meth for his morning pick me up.

The max approved prescribed dose is 60mg per day, so at that point he's probably doing something illegal.

Said like someone who has never dealt with clinical tolerance before. I've been up in that territory before. Even that was done under the regular visits to a therapist. I've dedicated myself to suffering through learning how to cope with a lower, highly tolerance dampened dose. I will say there are days I miss it terribly. It's a bit like having an overclocked capacity to process information and learn. The multi-month adaptation process to the decreased dose is quite literally like being brain-starved. You want to think, you know you could at one point but you just can't get things to fire as fast as they used to.

You dampen your ability to forge paths of understanding in novel contexts, but the trade off is you're cut off emotionally from anyone around you because no one else is holding onto or working with the context you can throw around. When the impedance mismatch is that high, misanthropy is a hazard one has to actively decultivate. The practical upshot of coming down from it after acquiring your context/understanding though is you tend to generalize what you learned and render it more communicable. The anhedonia is also a #$&-+.

Point being, the medical literature is based on averages. Not everybody lives in the hump of a Gaussian distribution.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#154

Post by ultimape » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

type0 wrote: post #147

kbmunchkin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is meth induced because the meth keeps the person awake. You sound like someone who has not experienced it first hand.

Could just call it "meth induced paranoia hangover". How often is it persistent to be considered psychosis though?

Because it seems to cause cortical thinning https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3135731/ which is correlated with psychosis https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/952628 and so has been associated as partly causal?

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#155

Post by salawat » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

arthurcolle wrote: post #33

wincy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, 120mg is what he takes first thing in the morning. He takes more throughout the day. I’d guess he takes 500+ in a day.

That is impossible. There is no one someone's heart would be able to take that. I take 60 mg daily of Vyvanse and I'm pretty wired all day. I can't even fathom the effects of that on a human body. Is he like 300 lbs?

I've done 70mg Vyvanse followed by 50mg Adderall in the evening.

The Vyvanse way amplified aggressive and confrontational tendencies for me though. I miss having time for hobbies however.

Usually bounce between 240-270lbs.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#156

Post by salawat » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

arthurcolle wrote: post #36

kache_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there "tons of people" seriously taking 120mg of adderall?

No, that is far beyond the daily dosage threshold. Even 90 is extremely high for XR, and would probably be broken into 2 45 doses throughout the day.

It happens. Trust me. I'd still be doing it if I weren't getting increasingly pissed how Schedule 2 turns you into a second class citizen effectively in the United States.

(You can't fill across State lines anymore, and insurance puts up astronomical red tape to dispensing more than a month at a time thanks to DEA quantity limits.)

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#157

Post by lookalike74 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #111

newbie789 wrote: post #32

Former meth addict here. > The average crystal meth addict uses about 500 mg a day. And they snort it, which probably produces about double the peak plasma level as taking it orally. So they're getting the equivalent of 1000 mg oral amphetamine daily... 500mg sounds about right, but from my experience the most common route of administration (in the western United States at least) is smoking, not snorting. Because so…

> I like this article overall but I get irritated when I read stuff about drug users that is clearly written by somebody who hasn’t done a lot of drugs. To be fair, though, medical doctors with personal experience using meth are probably a very small group, and it's unlikely they're in a big hurry to write an article talking about their experience. But who knows...

I felt some of this to be naive. And I think the author may be a psychiatrist, which makes the comments about inexperience with drugs particularly interesting.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#158

Post by anticodon » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

eurasiantiger wrote: post #125

anticodon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who's an addict and he's becoming impossible to talk to. Not about drugs, just about anything. He doesn't want any help, and he starts to live in his own reality. When we meet in a group of friends he doesn't listen to anyone. He can talk non-stop for hours until everybody around is tired from his gibberish. But he doesn't listen to anyone in a sense that feels very selfish. For example, when someone…

Have you considered he may be right?

I know he's not right. From experience and from looking at him.

Also, he's unable to function in the society. He's becoming obnoxious, so all his friends and even relatives are starting to avoid him.

He doesn't look healthy, he doesn't look happy, and I know he is unable to achieve any of his goals (the goals I've heard from him that he wants to achieve).

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#159

Post by splithalf » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

The point is valid but I am not so sure the line between recreation and use is so clear cut. Take pain patients for example. If they are not getting enough pills from their doctor they’ll get them on the street. Is that person a patient or an addict? At what specific dosage does one crossover? Obviously everyone in the medical profession has a huge stake in dividing the world into two groups, patients and druggies, and so most will set the cutpoint low. The incentives all reinforce such behaviour; you could go to jail for being too liberal in handing out pain meds. So, despite the appearance of there being two groups, heavy use addicts and low use patients, I don’t think reality is so simply bifurcated. I think the appearance of two groups is largely an artifact of the system. Doctors restrict dosages artificially and if someone claims to need more pain pills and maybe seeks another doctors to proscribe them, that person will be reclassified by his doctor from being a legitimate patient to being a drug addict. Scott implies there are no edge cases but that’s because the system starts with that assumption. Definitions are everything.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#160

Post by newbie789 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

eurasiantiger wrote: post #124

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two methods I know of. Either you stop doing the thing, or you do other things instead. The first requires a presence of mind to enter the void left behind by the thing, that people doing drugs probably lack, since they are, in essence, stimulation addicts. Drugs fill a void they avoid facing. Stopping doing drugs would cause them to face that void. The second is more amenable, because you can taper off wit…

Chocolate has a lot of PEA which activates the TAAR1 receptor just like amphetamines. In fact, all amphetamines contain a PEA base - they are substitutes phenylethylamines, for example Alpha-MethylPHenEThylAMINE.

The primary effect of amphetamines (that matters) is VMAT inhibition. While lots of drugs hit lots of receptors, and there are lots of overlap because of this, this does not make different compounds equivalent.

For example, off the top of my head, mescaline is also in the phenylethylamine family but is a wildly different drug with different receptor bonding affinity and subjective effects. I doubt anyone would want to mix up the two.