I'm one of those who've the bad luck of being overly sensitive to caffeine. When I'm tired, or in usually depressed mornings, I take one cup of instant and it wakes me up or it doesn't. It's a hit or miss. In the occasions of not, I either get nothing at all like from decaffeinated one, or then a jittery mess. Also while I'm not hypertonic, I have quite a bit of tachycardia (resting BPM never below 80, sometimes 90-100) which might be the result of a slight heart attack induced by excessive vasoconstriction while sky high on deschloroketamine. Remember collapsing after redosing in a public bathroom but didn't care (was severly destructive at that time, just lost my first long term gf). I had fast heartbeat before but not so extreme. Yeah, for that I usually take propranolol and with that I tolerate caffeine somewhat better, when not taking it, my BPM would rocket to over 100 just from one cup. Guess my adrenergic glands are pretty much fucked, PTSD stuff. Weirdly did morphine exacerbate the tachycardia.
@simstim: They don't allow smoking cigarettes? That's harsh, even when I have a strong aversion against all these nice carcinogens in tobacco smoke, I like the taste from time to time and the effects (which I also only sometimes get and only when not smoking more than maybe two a day, otherwise it's just an addiction-withdrawal-relief cycle.)
@JackARoe, exactly my thoughts. The main desaster of addiction isn't that itself but the stuff which comes along with, mostly thanks Nixon and his stupid war on drugs, but also an overly conservative society and politics leaders who don't wanna risk to go progressive. In Switzerland some decades ago they had a serious problem with open drug scenes, dying addicts injecting heroin in front of television cameras aren't good for the reputation so they quasi-decriminalized it by opening easily accessible maintenance programs first with methadone, then heroin and eventually retarded morphine. By easily accessible I mean easily so, the only thing besides a brief interview was a positive urine sample, nothing more and I walked home with a week's supply of methadone. Granted, I trialed buprenorphine before with the same clinic so they had me on the radar but given that I got bupe for dissociative addiction, not opioids (they knew fuck about dissos, probably still do and thought DXM was an opioid which needs to be substituted with methadone) it's still kinda remarkable. Not sure if going there was one of the more or less wise decisions of my life, maybe it saved me from jail but got me deeper into addiction than ever before. Still, after 3 years of full agonists, I am surprised by the relative mildness of withdrawal I get - this unfortunately doesn't help against relapsing, more the opposite.
Sorry, kinda walls of text today. Prolintane say thank'd, that one's ten times better than any coffee of this world if you ask me. They should bring back the times of OTC stims, would close a good part of the illicit stim market if things were just available, no more Mexican meth cooks in Amsterdam and there'd still be a majority of people who don't want to do drugs - afaik legal marijuana didn't bring in the flood of addicts and if you ask me, marijuana is one of the (mentally) more dangerous drugs out there. I get full-on panic attack from just two or three hits of an A'damer joint, the range between no effects and too much is very thin, and while it has been disproven that psychedelics should lead to psychosis, there is a relation between cannabis use and schizophrenia. It's just the question what came first, illness/predisposity and drug-induced relief or the drug. They should limit the strength of marijuana, or classify it as mild - medium - strong, so that the noobs choice correctly. My only positive experience with weed was from some low-strength outdoor stuff, and weirdly from one synth, UR-144 if I remember correctly. We took industrial hemp and infused that with UR-144, still don't know but speculated that the contained CBD might have helped. Indeed did a solid dose of CBD drops I happened to have bought the same time stop said A'dam panic attack.
But back to topic - caffeine. Why can't they come up with something better? Is it really just that such a thing would have no chance of ever getting approved for human consumption, that brave Dr. Nutt has been fired for suggesting a better alternative to booze (afaik, correct me if I'm wrong) and that's something society could really only beneficiate from. Also the opposite of caffeine, an adenosine reuptake inhibitor/agonist, might be something interesting to have handy when coming down from stims. That benzodiazepine antidote flumazenil is probably only tolerated because it's an adenosine RI, otherwise it would be an instant ticket to seizures. Seems to even aid with benzo withdrawal, which is remarkable for an antagonist.
