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CC's vs UNITS....A Basic Guide on using terms correctly

Khadijah

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Dec 18, 2003
Messages
16,368
If this thread is unnecessary, I know my homies in the OD mod team will do wats needed, but I thought this might be helpful becuz I see so many people referring to units as CC's when talkin about needles, and that could potentially be dangerous.

insulin_syringes.jpg


ONE of those, is ONE CC. 100 UNITS.

The little numbers are the UNITS. So, if you draw up water to the line that says 40, you got 40 UNITS, not 40 cc's. Think about it. Quads and street bikes, their engines measured in cc's. Imagine a 450cc street bike. If one cc is equal to one unit, (not true, but that is the common misunderstanding), in that case imagine how small the engine would be. the size of four needles full of water (in cubic inches.) Maybe that can help some ppl remember, i dont know.

It aint a real big deal, but peeps need to remember this shit becuz at some time the information might make a difference in harm reduction. Say a certain amount of a liquid is fatal. A person who refers to units as cc's might say "oh you can inject up to 10 cc's of this and be safe, anything over is deadly." They meant ten units, but they referred to the measurement wrong. So its really that ten units is deadly,not ten cc's. Well now say the injecter actually knows wat a cc is, so he boots up say, one cc and overdoses. Becuz the person giving the info meant ten units, not ten syringe fulls. Of course that is just a theoretical situation but i aint just bein a grammar nazi when I ask that ppl try and remember the difference here. It might not matter most of the time, but if a uneducated person reading the forums for help reads directions about a certain amount of cc's when the poster is wrongly referring to units as cc's it could cause harm so I thought maybe t his might be helpful in some way. if not , then ban me lol.;)
 
Thanks lacey.

Most people mean 'units' when they say cc. I like it when people guess at measurements though, that's when people are like "HAY WHY DID I VOMIT THAR!11/ I DIDENT GET HIGH AT ALL!1".
 
Haha, I just saw someone make this mistake in another thread (probably the same thread that caused you to start this one).

Yeah, people make that mistake all the time. It's annoying. Hence my name. "a100unitSHOT" just sounds better than "a1ccSHOT" lol. But it couldn't be "a100ccSHOT" - That'd kill people.
 
It might not be that interesting or watever, but i felt like ppl needed to hear this becuz I am so sick of people like 'YA I SHOT UP 100CC's" Oh yea really you used ten syringefuls of solution, ok...8(
 
lacey: to clarify for a dumbass uneducated inexperienced non-US person like me: how many CC's are in a 'unit'?

and CC's are the same thing as millilitres. :)

never even heard of 'units', for anything.
 
lacey: to clarify for a dumbass uneducated inexperienced non-US person like me: how many CC's are in a 'unit'?

and CC's are the same thing as millilitres. :)

never even heard of 'units', for anything.

Look at the photo on top. 100 units are in a CC. Maybe its american, or maybe you dont IV drugs, i dont know. If you never heard of a unit, then wtf do they measure syringes with in the UK? a unit is one 100th of a cc, so if a cc is one milliliter, wat the hell measurement in the metric system means one 100th of a mL? Would it say that on the syringes yall got over there, instead of units? Or are you just unfamiliar with the world of IV'ing, which is pretty much the only place that term is used. I dont know, so i couldnt tell you.

But, I can tell you that the way you phrased your question was funny, becuz asking how many cc's are in a unit, thats like asking "How many pounds are in a ounce" or "how many kilograms are in a gram". The cc is the larger measurement, so it would be how many units go into a cc, not how many cc's go into a unit lol.:D

Anyways, hope that made some kind of sense in all the complicated "this is that, but that aint this" talk heh
 
wat the hell measurement in the metric system means one 100th of a mL?
There isn't one, as far as I know. Other than a few (like centi, 1/100th), the only ones that go by names are the ones in the series: "10^3, 10^6, 10^9 etc" - each being some multiple of one thousand. The closest one you have is the microliter, which is 1/1000th of a milliliter. So, 1 unit = 10 microliters.

Or, if you wanted to get fancy (overly technical), since centi means 1/100th, you could say "centimilliliter," to mean "one one-hundredth of one milliliter" But thats just two prefixes stuck together, and I don't know if its proper scientific notation. It could also be confusing. I suppose thats why they just call them "units." =D
 
Thank you, definitely a critical piece of knowledge for harm reduction that people misuse and it pisses me off too, good call, -Spaz-
 
Agreed,this is a great thread. Ml is so often confused with units. Many a time in RL Ive heard people say "oh cant you just sort me 20ml" or something similar. Obviously they mean 20 units and the syringe says clearly 1Ml capacity so i think this terminology is commonly confused.
 
thanks for this lacey, hopefully this will be the solution for people mixing up their solutions;).

i've never understood it when people say "i shot 60units of heroin last night" so fucking what, how does that give us an idea of how much heroin you used? that 60 units may have only contain 1mg of heroin:! they should be more along the line of i mixed half a bag with 60 units of water:|

i've definitely corrected my fair share of unintelligible people with this phenomenon of thinking 10cc is 10 units and all that shit.8)
 
Actually I think that a 'unit' (1/100 of one millilitre) is specifically used with insulin in most circumstances in medecine insulin as insulin is produced to a specific concentration so that 1/100ml i.e. one graduation on a U-100 insulin syringe contains a specific amount of insulin. I think other syringes used for other drugs in medicine (not by injecting drug users) are usually measured in CCs rather than units.
 
^ Indeed, it's all about insulin. The term "unit" really refers to an amount of insulin, which just happens to correspond to a fixed volume in a certain system. The "U-100" system is standard for human insulin. The "unit" in a U-100 syringe (for U-100 insulin) is 0.01 mL. There are other systems, such as U-40 (mainly for veterinary use), where 1 mL of solution will contain 40 units of insulin. U-40 syringes have 40 marks along the barrel per mL. So in a U-40 syringe, a "unit" is 0.025 mL, 2.5 times larger than a U-100 unit. You can use a chart to convert volumes between systems.

To be somewhat pedantic, I think the term "unit" should be avoided when talking about using an insulin syringe for anything other than insulin. Since a quantity of insulin is being misused as a measure of volume, the potential for confusion exists. Milliliters, being an actual unit of volume, should be used instead. On the other hand, one could argue that "10 units" is easier to say than "0.1 mL" or "1/10 mL". Oh well.
 
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