At what point exactly was it small enough? Too big?
It was small enough when it was a genuine and pretty tight knit community, or several such communities, and too big when it started to resemble a late 90s Internet boom startup but with Tor and all that.
Thorns Have Roses said:
It sounds like your perception of the old street drugs was colored by your personal experiences with them, the fond memories you have from your wide eyed youth or some such thing,
maybe, I've mentioned fond memories of buying drugs in the parking lot of the Red Apple and my first experiences cold copping dope in the hood, and so forth, and yeah, a lot of this is nostalgia, like how much I enjoyed the good old fashioned outdoor green weed that we had back home and can't stand the bizarre neon colored genetically engineered shit from out west that is now ubiquitous in this market ... on the other hand also fond memories of getting drugs in the mail from people who I'd actually have a working and in some cases even social relationship with. trust and personal connections. now they are gone or at least receded into the background. this is another deleterious effect of inviting the custie, which destroyed the whole sense of community and wreaked havoc on a very fragile ecosystem.
But yeah we did a lot of fucked up and degenerate shit. It wasn't a Golden Age by any stretch of the imagination. All this shit lead me to a very bad place in the end.
while your views on the newer drugs are largely informed by your impersonal experiences with them in a medical setting.
Somewhat true but you'd have to see some of the stuff that I've seen in a medical setting ... strapping people down for hours on end, wrestling with them, putting them in locked rooms, and injecting them with so many i.m. neuroleptics and benzos every couple of hours until they start to develop abscesses ... still incredibly psychotic ... all this from synthetic cannabinoids, lasting much longer and much more psychotic and violent than you might imagine. Cathinones are in many cases worse. A lot of the time we don't even know what we're dealing with and since we're a publicly funded institution we don't have resources to test for specific exotic drugs on every patient that comes in like this, basically it's guesswork. I suspect NMDA activity of synthetic cannabinoids, plus the fact that they're full agonists instead of the partial agonists that are in proper weed. PCP and crack cocaine were/are notorious for this sort of thing but generally the wore off quicker and responded better to sedation.
The old stuff was damned dangerous as well, and plenty of people manage to kill or damage themselves with them in various ways,
Yes, but the newer stuff, particular the cathinones, cannabinoids, and NBOMes are I dare say objectively more dangerous than the Shulginalia, early SCs and the better cathinones, and so on. And the worse thing is that each analog-whoring derivative of these drugs is worse than the last until we scrape the bottom of the barrel.
and the bulk of people dealing with RCs manage to use those chemicals without doing any more harm to themselves than one would expect to see in the average drug user.
True of any drug users really. Although demography is important here. The bluelighting drug nerd type may be able to practice harm reduction, but as we've seen here many of us do profoundly stupid things with both traditional and nontraditional recreational drugs. But now with unknown things being sold in foil packets to random people including my patients who are mostly psychotic and homeless, that's a totally different ball game. And again, the fault of the Internet and the opening up of the scene. Probably an inevitability but a damn shame.
I don't mean to brush aside your whole argument by saying that. I came into drug use in the late 2000s, so I might be trying to judge a complaint that I don't have the personal experience to understand, but I think as a rule of thumb one should be skeptical of golden age thinking.
I don't think that late 90s/early 00s was a golden age of any kind, there was a lot of silliness back then, mainly born of ignorance because we didn't have educational resources like this site that we have today, but on the other hand, we didn't have sites like this and maybe it was a good thing because as much as we preach harm reduction all the exposure to drugs and people's degenerate behaviour with drugs tends to give a false sense of security and get us deeper in. This is necessarily a trade off and I do believe in harm reduction, but some of the stuff you see on forums, including this one, is a little much.
Also, I don't romanticize dealers over vendors, or the clandestine mom-and-pop operation over larger producers.
A vendor is just a dealer with an email address and without a personal relationship with his user base. This isn't a plus. Now, vendors on the
bulk side of things, vending to dealers (in the more traditional sense) with whom they've established some sort of relationship, is another matter, but vending to the end user is bad news for all involved. Regardless doing business with somebody without any sort of personal relationship to feel each other out is fucking insane. A lot of people will be winding up in prison and a lot of end users will get themselves into trouble. Even more so when we're talking about branded products instead of proper drugs. Things just went too far, with branded SC/bK products, mephedrone, etc. although mephedrone had potential as a proper "street" level drug and was (still is?) for a time in the UK. Weird psychedelic esoterica has no business being in the hands of people who don't know what they're doing. Weird stimulants have a tendency to end in disaster (read the 3-FMP thread...)
I guess I can respect it if you feel that things have gone shit and don't want to be a part of it, and I can respect people who are perfectly comfortable with the scene today. I'm too eremitic to really go in for any side on an issue of culture like this, it's relative to any given person, based off of the exact nature of their experiences and entanglements within the culture.
Right, but I'm not just waxing nostalgic about my former participation in the culture, I'm on about the social and public health consequences of the current scene, and also the economic effects of the whole thing going corporate on people who made their living off all this. This Silicon Valley techno-libertarian "disruption" shit, Uber and the taxis, airbnb and the hotels, outsourcing all sorts of jobs to Southeast Asia or Mexico or wherever (where,
nota bene, quality tends to drop off...) This shit hurts real people, on all levels of the scene.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
