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Caffeine kills high school student

pmoseman said:
You do have a point. It is a drug, caffeine is often used as a medicine, but drug can also mean narcotics, such as an opiate, or hallucinogens, such as LSD. That is clearly what they mean when they say he did not take drugs.
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Thank you for clearing that up Captain Obvious.
 
I forget in what grade you learn anything is safe as long as it's legal. I think that was in american civics or home economics.
 
pmoseman said:
My point being how is education supposed to help this guy. You learn how to read in school. You learn to recognize trusted sources. Did he not go through chemistry? Did the teacher fail him by not pushing the bottle in his hand, like Helen Keller, slowly explaining over and over what overdose means?
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I have no knowledge of whether he took a chem class. But I do know that drug education is woefully underfunded in the US, and that the little that is provided in schools is biased propaganda, rather than science-based.

If one knee jerk reaction is to regulate, then another is to educate. You can't educate everybody on everything.
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Of course you can't. But that is not really relevant. If he had been educated about the effects and dosage and dangers of caffeine, he likely would still be alive. That is the point.


How much education do you suggest we give people to stop them from drunk driving? I am sure you've been to at least one of those classes. I am sure kids who start up smoking are educated about not doing that as well. Education is not the magic bullet, nothing is.
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I suggest that we give them 1.5-2 fucktons of education. I have never been to a class on drunk driving, but education can change attitudes and perspectives, so I believe that, if the classes were done well, the rate of drunk driving would drop. Not a magic bullet, maybe, but an effective solution.

What percent of drug users do you suppose this site has actually helped? Is there any correlation between Erowid going up and safer drug use?
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Most drug users have never used BL, so that percentage doesn't mean much. I believe that there are thousands of people who have been helped by BL. That is one of the main reasons I have spent enough time and energy and thought here to make 6000+ posts. Erowid is amazing, and there is no doubt that it has also helped thousands. Emergency room physicians use Erowid to research chemicals that patients tell them they have taken. Love BL, and love Erowid. <3
 
What is taught about drug use is science based. Good luck convincing me otherwise. They bring facts about abuse and stories from addicts. Even though people are educated about health benefits and drug addiction they still do harm to themselves.

I loathed school passionately as a kid; it was a serious nuisance. Throwing in a lecture about caffeine would be another day of forgotten school for me. I don't see any way you can provide any evidence that an education about caffeine abuse was lacking because of some conspiracy against drug users. I don't see anything compelling about the idea that they just refuse to teach kids anything about the dangers of caffeine. More like, they don't have the time to educate every student how to rock climb, raise goats, fix a head gasket, purify drinking water, and identify poisonous mushrooms. They are busy teaching people how to read and do math.

Of course you don't have any idea how many drug users the site helps. Meanwhile you moan on about how DARE is not science based? Not expecting anyone to be able to answer this question, just what percent do you think they help and what percent are just turning up in an emergency room department because they heard on Bluelight you can take 3000mg of caffeine and to ignore what they teach you school.
 
What is taught about drug use is science based. Good luck convincing me otherwise. They bring facts about abuse and stories from addicts. Even though people are educated about health benefits and drug addiction they still do harm to themselves.
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There is fundamental bias in the education kids receive about drugs.
I never heard a single story from a responsible drug user through DARE.
E.g. someone who described his eye-opening acid trips, which he spaces out at the rate of one a year, and only after preparing in every possible way.
E.g. someone who tests their pills and knows not to take random chemicals.

When you say "even though people are educated about...", you act like it is a black or white choice.
Either they are educated, or they aren't.
But what you are missing is that the quality of the education is key, and that a propaganda- and bias-free approach to drug education is what we need, but not what we are getting.
It has nothing to do with being in competition with reading and math, though I recognize that there are only so many hours in a day.
But of course I learned trigonometry and precalculus for approximately 200 hours each in my last two years of high school, and essentially stopped using both of them afterward (apart from a single university course on calculus - which I promptly never used again).
So I feel like teaching me a realistic view of drugs for a few dozen hours in those years would not have been too much to ask.
Since humans in all societies at all times of history have used drugs, it seems pretty relevant.
Since the majority of high school students have used or will use drugs, it seems pretty important.
Even more than precalculus, maybe, or at least some of those precalculus hours.

Of course you don't have any idea how many drug users the site helps. Meanwhile you moan on about how DARE is not science based? Not expecting anyone to be able to answer this question, just what percent do you think they help and what percent are just turning up in an emergency room department because they heard on Bluelight you can take 3000mg of caffeine and to ignore what they teach you school.
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I hope that nobody reads that "you can take 3000mg of caffeine" on BL.
Is someone saying that one should ignore what is taught in school? I am not, certainly.
I really don't get your point here.
 
pmoseman said:
I loathed school passionately as a kid; it was a serious nuisance. Throwing in a lecture about caffeine would be another day of forgotten school for me. I don't see any way you can provide any evidence that an education about caffeine abuse was lacking because of some conspiracy against drug users. I don't see anything compelling about the idea that they just refuse to teach kids anything about the dangers of caffeine.
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This is a very revealing comment.
You weren't engaged by classes at school? That's a shame. Basing education aims on that premise is incredibly defeatist.

Not to mention that "school doesn't have a monopoly on education or learning.
People learn throughout their lives, in many ways. Just because your school bored you and you ignored it doesn't mean there aren't plenty of inspiring, driven educators out there who care about teaching kids some of those practical things you mentioned - and teaching outside of a conventional framework.
Years ago, when I was in high school, I had a teacher tell my class:
"Don't buy powder drugs off people you don't know!"
This is practical HR advice! We didn't have DARE or too much blatant anti-drug propaganda in our drug education classes. Information slanted towards the "drugs are a negative thing to do" angle - but still based somewhat on facts and safe outcomes, should students choose to experiment with drugs (which by that point, most of us already were).
Now that I think of it, much of the imput was from the students themselves - from those of us that were getting high, and wanted more information from our (clearly not drug naive) teachers.
That was one of the most positive aspects to it - we weren't going to get in trouble if we intimated that we perhaps smoked pot and took a few pills or got drunk on occasion.

I'm not convinced that you actually understand what the "harm reduction" ethos of bluelight is about. People here are trying to make a difference, in a pragmatic way. Which begs the question - what is your agenda here?
 
Let's be respectful it is sad and perhaps now .."sigh" they're should be a warning ..certainly so with the "stay awake" caffeine pills ..

overall though ..this happens every day some ppl die of drugs ..not getting them high but purely accidental sugar to paint thinner ect (stuff you'd find in your house) ..they never think it'll kill them and it does..it's like and my saying for life is basically shit happens get over it and life your life before that shit happens to you ..

Times like this do remind me of the hypocrisy of our gov ..tobacco , alcohol , DXM, many many more ..including caffeine ...but weed had to fight forever to be half way to legalization and has other uses!! ..

but overall sad story , shit happens ...rip. Hope no one overreacts ..feel sorry for his fam and so on.. Hope ppl learn from others mistakes though!
 
spacejunk said:
I'm not convinced that you actually understand what the "harm reduction" ethos of bluelight is about. People here are trying to make a difference, in a pragmatic way. Which begs the question - what is your agenda here?
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I second this. We are all working hard to make the confusing mess of available information relevant and save people from bad situations, and possibly even save their lives.
You seem to be here mostly to argue.
 
Mycophile said:
Ok, so I just looked it up and I don't understand the distinction between "micrograms per millileter of blood" and "milligrams of caffeine".

I looked it up and the average cup of coffee has about 95 miligrams one site says...and people are recommended not to exceed 200 milligrams a day (which I obviously go over...) and so I probably generally have between 400-500 milligrams of caffeine a day but occassionally go as high as about 700.

So is 700 milligrams of caffeine equal to 50 micrograms per millileter of blood??

I hope not...
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Where did you hear not to exceed 200mg a day? A No-Doz caffeine pill or an Awake caffeine pill, a generic sold by Walgreens, is 200mg. I usually break it in half and take 100mg at a time, but the bottle just says don't take one more than every 3-4 hours. Also don't use as a substitute for sleep.

I would be conscious of how much caffeine you're taking in just so you have an idea and you can monitor it, but I wouldn't worry about overdosing or anything unless you suddenly decide to have a coffee drinking contest or something.
 
Carl Landrover said:
Where did you hear not to exceed 200mg a day? A No-Doz caffeine pill or an Awake caffeine pill, a generic sold by Walgreens, is 200mg. I usually break it in half and take 100mg at a time, but the bottle just says don't take one more than every 3-4 hours. Also don't use as a substitute for sleep.

I would be conscious of how much caffeine you're taking in just so you have an idea and you can monitor it, but I wouldn't worry about overdosing or anything unless you suddenly decide to have a coffee drinking contest or something.
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Haha, I do the same thing whenever ingesting caffeine in pill form. I've got 200mg pills as well, which I break in half.

Do you find caffeine helps you stay awake though? I don't - at least, not anymore.

Not that long ago, I made the big mistake of deciding to buy Starbucks' largest size of coffee they serve, which is (and I believe continues to be) a Venti (20oz / 591ml / 2.5 US cups). What I should have - but did not - realize, was that in about 30 minutes, I ingested approximately 415mg of caffeine. Yeah...

Anyways, that was the first time I've ever experienced (from the consumption of caffeine):

- profuse sweating
- severe paranoia
- severe anxiety
- a rather nasty panic attack
- mild heartburn
- severe nausea
- severe abdominal cramps
- explosive diarrhea
- pissing like a camel on blood pressure meds
- moderate hypertension
- moderate tachycardia

It didn't help much that before downing this jumbo-sized coffee, I skipped breakfast. On the contrary, it most likely contributed to the caffeine "high."

Apparently, the caffeine content of their Venti coffee was even higher about a decade ago (close to 500mg), before they were ordered to lower it. They did that by reducing the amount of coffee in a Venti from 24oz to 20.

But hey, maybe I just have a low tolerance? =D

Nowadays, if I need to stay up all night to study (and to be able to concentrate for prolonged periods during that time), I find that I usually have to use a moderate amount of ephedrine, or a lower-end dosage of methylphenidate or dexto-amphetamine.

Another drug which works well for me is nicotine in the form of smoking tobacco. Problem is that I need to smoke every 1-2 hours to make it through to the morning. And seeing as I recently quit for good after nearly 2 decades, I'd rather not give in to my often severe nicotine cravings.

As I said however, no amount of caffeine "temporarily restores mental alertness" in my case, which sucks, as the drugs which do can be difficult to obtain legally. In contrast, meth is easier to get, but I'm not gonna go that route anymore. It's the one popular stimulant that scares the shit out of me (mainly because the high lasts so long, and also due to some bad trips I've had in the past).

Even the regulations regarding the sale of ephedrine 8mg pills are being tightened around these parts. The last time I went to pick up some from a health and nutrition store, I had to show ID, sign my name on a clipboard, and was limited to a bottle every month. Edit - I've also heard rumors that they're starting to use a database (a la controlled Rx drugs) to track sales in order to stop shoppers from simply buying it again from another store.
 
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slimvictor said:
I second this. We are all working hard to make the confusing mess of available information relevant and save people from bad situations, and possibly even save their lives.
You seem to be here mostly to argue.
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The arguing starts when people try to make ridiculous claims.
 
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