Coolio said:
Quinine is orally active and still found in tonic water at the grocery store. It's over the counter, not controlled. You can pre-dose with quinine to increase the rush, it doesn't have to be mixed in as a cut.
You'd have to drink 2 liters of tonic water to get a dose of quinine.They no longer sell pure quinine hydrochloride OTC in the US AFAIK. And I don't think quinine sulfate for aquariums is very water soluble.It's not banned in most states, just hard to find/acquirer.Although many states list it as drug paraphernalia.
Swimmingdancer said:
I don't even understand how injecting quinine could increase the rush.
Quinine might potentiate opiates orally due to being a local anesthetic, muscle relaxant and an alpha antagonist, but it gets the rush from IV. Normally IV quinine is given very slowly, like over a hour. However scramble is shot fast, so the quinine gives a pretty strong rush. It might also displace the H/metabolites from plasma protein or PGP and inhibit CYP3A4 and maybe esterase.
Quinine has a shit load of side effects, though in the doses I think are found in scramble I don't think it's too bad compared to H.However one of the worst heroin OD epidemics in US history was in DC, where relatively stronger H was cut with a lot of quinine.It may increases the toxicity of h, prolong the QT interval in higher doses, and in some people cause quininism, or cinchonism in high doses. It also might make oxy/hydrocodone/codeine/tramadol weaker due to CYP2D6 inhibition
There was a UNODC bulletin on narcotics article that said that heroin was cut 1:1 with quinine at the wholesale level, then diluted down to 3% with sugars for retail, at least in the 1950's."Blue Magic" from "American Gangster" was 55% mannitol, 35% quinine, and 10% heroin.
The reason, as mentioned in the link Swimmingdancers posted, quinine is used as a heroin cut is that in 1920's China there were general tonic/"anti-opium" pills. They generally contained about 2 parts heroin, 1 part quinine, and about 4 parts caffeine, the rest sugars or aspirin. The H content of the pills was about 2-3%. At first they also contained up to 1/4 weight of strychnine relative to heroin, but it gradually dropped to a trace. They had many brands, with different colors(red was the most popular), even had flavorings and scents added.
These pills were taken orally at first, then someone found you could smoke them in an opium pipe.It became a cheap alternative to opium.Unbeknownst to anyone then, the caffeine made the h smokable.
It was considered a poor mans' drug at first, but later even the rich were smoking them. It even spread to the US. Gradually in the US dealers dropped the caffeine and strychnine but left the quinine.Then scramble was born. It may have been as a potentiator, tradition, maybe to prevent infection from germs or malaria, to mask the sugar cut, or a mixture of any one of those.
A related form of scramble is with procaine instead of quinine, sometimes called P-dope. It also appeared in the US in the 1930's.I think it was 1/3 the weight of the H, at least at first. It may have been to increase the rush/high. Or for it's numbing effect, either to mask the burn of skinpopping street H or because many junkies back then were cokeheads who switched to H when coke stopped being available.
I too am curious as to what cut ratios are used in scramble, or any powder H, today. Does quinine/procaine/strychnine really effect the high/rush? I wouldn't know, all I get here is tar. A lot of it is pretty good, but there's a lot of garbage with instant coffee or even shoe polish. I'd rather have quinine than shoe polish8(.
Wasn't there someone on Bluelight who would uses like 50-60mg of quinidine or quinine, maybe even the sulfate, to potentiate opioids? I bet papaverine would work even better, like Turkish opium or Pantopon.
