Drug users use a lot of drugs • Hacker News Board

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#161

Post by eurasiantiger » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

anticodon wrote: post #158

eurasiantiger wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Tough call. Everything you described matches 1:1 with a friend who couldn’t deal with the stress of college and started to flare out with schizophrenia. Drugs came soon after, but the verbosity, obnoxiousness and grandiose ideas came first, coupled with execution incoherent enough to look nonexistent.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#162

Post by eurasiantiger » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

newbie789 wrote: post #160

eurasiantiger wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You are correct. However, PEA alone does have a stimulant effect through TAAR1, and in chocolate it is coupled with other xanthine stimulants.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#163

Post by eurasiantiger » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

tannedNerd wrote: post #141

eurasiantiger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No such thing as meth-induced psychosis. Yes, people might appear psychotic while under the influence, but that is not psychosis in the clinical sense. The few that do lose their rationality lose it because they don’t sleep for weeks. They likely also live in an unsafe environment which keeps them in a perpetual state of survival stress. Survival stress + not sleeping + stimulants —> psychosis. Very rarely any of the…

I’m not going to say you been in SF but you clearly haven’t walked through the tenderloin and probably not spent a lot of time around people that partake in harder drugs on regular basis. Yes it doesn’t match the clinical description, but that’s because the clinical description wasn’t written by someone who works in the heavily drug ridden areas. More likely by someone who probably only dealt with hard drug users onc…

Would you consider the people living in those areas to be living under constant survival stress?

Asking because THAT fucks up people and makes them use drugs to escape their situation.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#164

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #153

boomboomsubban wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-mont…

[deleted]

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#165

Post by eurasiantiger » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

ultimape wrote: post #154

type0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These studies are meaningless, as they cannot distinguish between the effects of the drug and the effects of the illegality of the drug: constant survival stress, negative outlook on self imposed by others, social exclusion, paranoia.

Survival stress, as in PTSD, causes cortical thinning, and explains everything in the scenario without the need to arbitrarily assign blame to methamphetamine.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#166

Post by sizzle » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

Congrats on your sobriety. Any advice or insights on how you quit that you’d like to share for anyone struggling with addiction here?

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#167

Post by arthurcolle » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #155

arthurcolle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah same, Vyvanse is a wild drug. it has less euphoria which I prefer because I hate the cracked out feeling in combination with the euphoria, but it definitely makes you incredibly amped up. Glad you found a system that works for you (not doing it) haha.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#168

Post by newbie789 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

yerwhat01010 wrote: post #113

newbie789 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meth does not make you crave any type of food. If that were the case Desoxyn would not be FDA approved for weight loss. “Meth mouth” is caused by the fact that it dries your mouth out, you grind your teeth a LOT, and is often observed in people that have used drugs long/hard enough to find themselves no longer taking care of their health in general, let alone oral hygiene. This often is coupled with financial ruin an…

Wait, are you saying that meth is popular among Silicon Valley coders and rich house wives? This is news to me.

Absolutely, yes.

Meth has a reputation for being a “poor people drug” which is not really accurate.

While a lot of poorer communities have been very publicly hit by it, that wasn’t at the exclusion of more affluent communities. It’s literally everywhere to some degree or another, and there are dealers that cater to pretty much everybody. (For example, I knew a meth dealer that owned a prominent local legitimate business, lived in one of the richest zip codes in the US, drove a black Mercedes and always showed up in a full suit and tie, sober.)

Anecdotally, in my head the image of a meth user is just… a person. They’re not rich or poor, young or old, skinny or fat, and they’re not necessarily acting weird. I suppose the only difference is the pupil dilation. My mental image of a meth addict is pretty much identical but maybe (but not always) a bit skinnier and maybe (but not always) acting weird.

It’s an incredibly shameful and stigmatized addiction and people sometimes go to extreme lengths to hide it.

At the end of the day it is a ubiquitous stimulant that people really seem to like.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#169

Post by newbie789 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

anon9001 wrote: post #120

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…

Thanks for sharing. A lot of people on this board have experience with prescription stimulants. How would you say the experience of "doing meth" differs from taking amphetamine orally? Was a typical experience for you "smoke meth, study or write code all night"? I like prescription stimulants, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to take overdose-levels of stimulants for fun, so I'm probably missing somethi…

retrac’s response to this is spot on so I’ll only add one thing.

In my experience, there were two factors that got me up to 500mg+/day: tolerance and price breaks.

When I first started meth it was incredibly affordable. I could get high all day off 1/10th of my $10-20 bag. Then it became 1/8th of my bag and then 1/4 etc. At some point it became (in my mind) uneconomical to buy little amounts because the $/dose got lower when I went from buying .1g to 1g, and then steeply went down again when I went from buying 1g to 3.5g. (As an aside I never really figured out the economics of meth at scale but the margins must be astronomical considering how big of discounts that street dealers are able to give for relatively small purchases and still make money)

I thought I was being smart, saving money! It turns out that when I had more, I used more. Tolerance built up rapidly and I found that I had to smoke 50-100mg to feel anything.

I also agree that it’s really not worth trying. Your concerns about the supply chain are valid. The difference between “good shit” and “bad shit” is enormous and can be the difference between having a nice day trying (pointlessly) to teach yourself Ruby and a day in the ER.

Re: Drug users use a lot of drugs

#170

Post by newbie789 » Thu, Jun 10, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

neolog wrote: post #114

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…

How long does a high last? How many uses during a normal day? e.g. 125 mg 4x daily or all at once or something else? Does it keep you from sleeping?

The “this feels good” part of the high typically lasts maybe 1-3 hours, after which you smoke more. The actual stimulant effect lasts much, much longer, maybe 12ish hours. That part very heavily depends on the dose size and quality, tolerance and your individual response to it.

Yes, it keeps you from sleeping. At my peak I didn’t really have much use for the concept of separate days since I was normally awake for ~72hrs at a time.