Stimulants Ethanol ______ serum concentrations of methamphetamine. Conflicting answers.

[m060mm]

True or False: Clark's Analysis of Drugs and Poisons (4th ed. 2011) says that alcohol increases serum concentrations of methamphetamine. This contradicts all conventional wisdom that, while not healthy, alcohol helps many with the comedown. Does ethanol potentiate meth? By which means?

I vaguely remember reading that drinking will speed the excretion of meth - perhaps via diuresis? Urine acidification? I forget. I'll look, you post.

 

[sekio]

That makes sense, ethanol is a broad-spectrum competitive liver enzyme inhibitor, so will reduce the amount of methamphetamine being metabolised by CYP450 enyzmes, and increase (though marginally) blood levels. I trust Clarke's over "conventional wisdom".

Ethanol would be expected to metabolise to acetic acid which would *acidify* the blood and urine and increase urinary excretion rate. In addition to consuming water, which flushes your system.

The end result is not a massive increase in serum concentration but it's measurable. Also note that just because ethanol increases m-amp's blood levels somewhat, it doesn't mean that ethanol doesn't counteract the stimulation through other mechanisms.

 

[m060mm]

Right, and I assume you'd need more than just a drink or two to initiate these changes. Definitely not worth it in my opinion - so much dehydration and generally toxic feel for an impractical increase in amp serum. Both also strain your immune system/deplete antioxidants.

 

[blight12]

Besides all the factual and heallth reasons about not combining them the fact is that stims and alcohol are made for each other. For shitty stims like the usual street quality coke yu need alcohol to take the edge off the usual anxiety to get the best out of the experience and its also a fukin miracle cure for any other shitty stimulant side effects.

Just earlier today i was suffering on day 3 of a meth binge for hours with the worst meth side effect ever, that vasoconstriction crap where you feel an evil numbness where your skin is ice cold with permanent goosflesh yet you feel overheated and sweating buckets at the same time and your hands are all red and fucked up with random stabbing pains and you feel the skin over your entire body tingling in a definitely negative "getting stabbed with millions of tiny needles laced with satanic acid" kind of way and nothing from food to liquids to vitamins to prayer or anything seems to help and all you want to do is slit your own throat since your know its your own fault for dosing to high/low/incorrectly and inviting this demonic side effect into your usually pleasant experience and fucking it up instead as a punishment for your utter failure at getting even the simplest things right... and so on and so forth...

When eventually i realized i had a possible solution and had a few glasses of whiskey which somehow i forgot is the natural enemy of vasoconstriction and all other forms of evil and despair and my day long reminder of the need to respect meth and take smaller doses in future turned into hours of the best high i had received from the entire binge so far. And this always works every time.

Alcohol is truly a tweakers best friend especially when the usually effective resolution of taking another dose to resolve any undesired effects eventually stops working. Hell I have often taken more meth to try feel better due to over stimulation from to much meth and it actually works more often the not (I dont question these things anymore) but when that fails you can always rely on any magical Ethanol based liquid to save your ass when things get out of hand.