I've just been writing a report of my experiences with ethylphenidate. Needless to say I'm still wide awake and tapping away at my keyboard because I've taken EPH. Got about half left from a gram. My writing is just a rambling, semi-coherent mess, unable to keep to the argument at hand, going off on all sorts of tangential page-long paragraphs, I'll wish I hadn't posted this in the morning, being pretty sure it'll make very little sense. But maybe that's a good thing; see how your thought processes get fucked hard by ethylphenidate.
Anyway sorry for hijacking the thread - I'll post this in a thread I plan to make at some point tonight concerning the health risks of EPH. Feel free to steer this thread back on track. Having said that, OP did ask about safety, and as daytryptr pointed out, this shit can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Exhibit A:
Concerning the awareness of EPH misuse amongst drug abuse treatment services and mental health workers, I'm afraid to say that the knowledge of their awareness was something acquired through first hand research. I know the 'online drug community's' first rule is never to mention currently unscheduled drugs, and I understand that, but when you're completely paranoid and anxious to the point of wondering if you've really fucked yourself up this time because everything hurts and you've not pissed for nearly 30 hours, and the doctor mentions a catheter to make you piss everything out of your balloon like swollen bladder, and then she asks, in perfect confidence, what you've been taking...well shit, let's just say I'd be a terrible spy under torture.
So you tell the doctor and it's typed up on your notes, which are shared between the drug treatment agency and all your psychiatrists and the nurses when you're sectioned under the mental health act, a week or so later - and despite your appeal against the sectioning, the three hour tribunal you have to endure (sat in front of 3 almost Dickensian looking men, spectacled and fobwatched, with whiskers neatly trimmed, two 'sirring' the third, the specialist mental health act [1983] Judge, who conducts the proceedings in a manner so formal you'd never have imagined it possible or healthy, staring quizzically down half moon spectacles at you for most of the three hours as if judging you by reading the very vilest secrets of your miserable soul and not by the accusations of neurotic illnesses so severe as to warrant detention for at least 4 weeks, read out from typed up assessments in turn by a squad of psychiatric health workers: a ward nurse, a social worker, the hospital psychiatrist; all delivering more damning judgements than the last....)...despite all that picking at the flesh of your mental state, chewing over all your character flaws, whilst you sit there in silence, waiting until the feast is complete, and all that is left of your scrawny ego is a pile of gristle and bones which you're left to ponder over as they fly away to reach their verdict, whilst you're wondering whether you really are the person 6 professionals have just discoursed over – a grotesque version of your own secret sense of self - you're still kept in as a 'risk to your self'. Not that you're sure you know who that is any more.
And if that little tangent from the point of this footnote should teach us anything, it is that in some individuals, in this instance an individual suffering from poor mental health left untreated, heavy use of EPH can cause psychotic symptoms, and worsen depression and anxiety if present, leading to self-harm, self-neglect (not showering for weeks on end, losing over a stone in weight in just over a fortnight), long periods of uncontrollable crying, feeling so sad you could die, but you don't kill yourself simply because you know it'd all get better if you stopped taking the drugs – yet you can't stop, not by yourself; you're only able to stop once you're forced to stop – once your behaviour becomes so extreme and worrying to others that you're sectioned, and for the first time in a month, during the first four weeks of your 6 week stay on the ward you have no access to EPH or any drug. And despite your constant appeals against the decision, despite your angry, sullen, reclusive behaviour upon being there for a week, struggling to adjust to the stimulation free pace of life in the hospital, and despite also the 'cracked pots of Humanity' who have walked straight off the pages of Kesey's novel and into your daily life: pacing the hallways either manic, laughing all day at jokes unshared, kept inside their heads; or mute with anxiety, able only to mutter a few stock phrases in greeting from mouths twisted into a rictus of awkwardness, a painfully shy impression of a smile, born from sheer nervousness as defence against the hostility they see everywhere in the world (and yet you don't recognise yourself in these people - these walking human catalogues of psychiatric diagnoses, diagnoses stuck upon them like labels, neat definitions of people as pigeon-holed checklists of apparently present medical symptoms: score 80% on this assessment, answering questions you'd beg were too complex for a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer, or a mark on a scale of 1-10 - score 80% and you fall very neatly into the category diagnosing Major Depressive Illness, as defined by an eminent academic of psychiatry, whose new diagnosis tests may prove to be the crowning achievement of his career, the singularly important piece of academic work which may very well land him the professorship next year, but only lands you a new diagnosis and a stay under observation day and night in a psychiatric hospital – no, you don't recognise yourself in these people, not at first, not until the anger at being deprived of your freedom, and lawfully, of feeling the winding powerlessness you have as one person against the state, which is a hard lesson to learn, leaving a bitterness and resentment, a mistrust and fear which overstays its welcome – you only recognise yourself as the same anxiety-ridden, socially inept, bored and miserable people that you share silent meals with for 6 weeks once the silently smoldering anger has burnt to ashes, turned imperceptibly into a sense of acceptance, and then a sense of comfort and safety.
finally your anger burnt mind transforms into a crucible of thankfulness: you feel so damned ...humbled by your experience over the past few months; at long last, you're able to truly feel your vulnerability by having removed the dust sheets that had for so long hidden your sense of happiness, contentment with life: the feelings a man must feel in order to feel the 'true' value of his life, and once able to feel this sense of precious value to your limited time on the face of this planet, you begin to feel a great tenderness towards all other living things, you feel a gentle sense of appreciation, genuine for a change, towards those who care for you, and slowly it dawns on you that the ideal of Love, not as a shriveled up and hollow abstract concept, but as a real feeling of gratitude and an almost servile want to please by showing that you're OK, seriously OK, has had the dust sheet lifted, if only briefly - and it feels better than any drug ever has.
Highly advise against this; I could easily have died a number of times during those days, but again, more due to the effects of the downer than the upper.)
