> I feel its a price you have to pay if you truly
> want to research theese drugs. No one said it was
> going to be an easy ride.
Sure, there is a price to pay for research...
But what end is this research for? Is this just some sort of academic masturbation for pharmgeeks, or is it just a convenient excuse to get fucked up on exotic drugs? I'm sure for some people that's the case, however, I'd like to think most of us are/were in it for a higher purpose... The end goal here is not to research just for the hell of it, but to discover the good ones and weed out the second rate or worse ones. The goal is to find new psychedelics that can be declared ready for prime time some day... to find new tools for the psychotherapist and new entheogens for the shaman. The goal is to do enough research that they can either cease to be research chemicals and become mainstream drugs... or to find out if the drugs are duds that should just be kept frozen in the lab as reference samples.
Many research chemicals aren't going to turn out to make the cut. They're going to have too many problems... high levels of negative side effects, questionable or bad safety profiles, insufficient levels positive effects to be worthwhile, unpredictability, etc. What matters here isn't what individual people get out of them, but how it plays out in large groups. It doesn't matter if 5 or 6 people have great experiences with XYZ, if the other 94 or 95 people are having convulsions and blasting diarrhea and vomit all over the room. If those 5 or 6 researchers wanna keep using it, that's their call... but if most users react badly (or at least, not goodly enough) then the drug should probably be written off as "not ready for prime time" and crossed off the list of things worth researching.
Personally, I had some good times with 5-MeO-DIPT, for example. The only downside for me was diarrhea about half of the times. The problem though is that I didn't think it had very much to offer except perhaps as a recreational substance. It has *some* deeper potential, but not a whole lot. It probably wouldn't be too effective on the shrink's couch, and I can think of much better entheogens. Combine the small return with the diarrhea and the percentage of people who find it unpleasant, and I think you've got the makings of a little bit of a dud. There's chemicals with much more potential that DON'T make you pay the price, so why waste too much effort on it?
Anyhow, the fact that some people like some research chemical or another isn't the point here... Research chemicals not only need to be used with a different approach from standard drugs, they also need to be rated with a different approach. I'm rating these drugs not based so much on my personal experiences as on the way the whole user population reacts. What are the average trends? Think of research chemical users as the filter between the lab and the streets, which filters out the drugs not suited for general public audiences. We're sort of like the FDA of the psychedelic scene... we offer up our own bodies as lab rats to test new substances to make sure they're safe, effective, and not unduly unpleasant.
To try and take this back to the original topic... I don't think the piperazines really make the cut. My personal experiences with BZP, TFMPP and mCPP were very negative. I've heard many other negative reports, similar to and different from my experiences. The negative reports far outweigh the positive ones... and even the positive ones I've gotten have mostly been weak - stuff like "It didn't suck but I'd rather do meth" or "It was vaguely like MDMA which was interesting, but that headache..."
We even have some real clinical data on the piperazines. I've got a stack of over 100 pages of scientific journal articles on piperazines. These include the results of human tests on quite a few folks. The results aren't too pretty... especially mCPP, which earned the classification "panicogen" in two of the articles.
There hasn't been very much in the way of safety profiling... I don't know of any confirmed deaths so far, though there have been rumors. They certainly don't FEEL very safe, though that's not a very solid argument. They produced some very disturbing physical symptoms for me and others, and the fact that the stuff can give people pounding headaches and a flu-like sensation for 2 days.... that really doesn't give me the warm fuzzies about the safety of the piperazines.
All in all, this group of drugs doesn't really seem to make the grade as far as things I'd want to see being used by the general public. If you like them and don't mind the risk, I certainly won't stop you... but I really don't think these are substances that ought to be recommended to people.
> want to research theese drugs. No one said it was
> going to be an easy ride.
Sure, there is a price to pay for research...
But what end is this research for? Is this just some sort of academic masturbation for pharmgeeks, or is it just a convenient excuse to get fucked up on exotic drugs? I'm sure for some people that's the case, however, I'd like to think most of us are/were in it for a higher purpose... The end goal here is not to research just for the hell of it, but to discover the good ones and weed out the second rate or worse ones. The goal is to find new psychedelics that can be declared ready for prime time some day... to find new tools for the psychotherapist and new entheogens for the shaman. The goal is to do enough research that they can either cease to be research chemicals and become mainstream drugs... or to find out if the drugs are duds that should just be kept frozen in the lab as reference samples.
Many research chemicals aren't going to turn out to make the cut. They're going to have too many problems... high levels of negative side effects, questionable or bad safety profiles, insufficient levels positive effects to be worthwhile, unpredictability, etc. What matters here isn't what individual people get out of them, but how it plays out in large groups. It doesn't matter if 5 or 6 people have great experiences with XYZ, if the other 94 or 95 people are having convulsions and blasting diarrhea and vomit all over the room. If those 5 or 6 researchers wanna keep using it, that's their call... but if most users react badly (or at least, not goodly enough) then the drug should probably be written off as "not ready for prime time" and crossed off the list of things worth researching.
Personally, I had some good times with 5-MeO-DIPT, for example. The only downside for me was diarrhea about half of the times. The problem though is that I didn't think it had very much to offer except perhaps as a recreational substance. It has *some* deeper potential, but not a whole lot. It probably wouldn't be too effective on the shrink's couch, and I can think of much better entheogens. Combine the small return with the diarrhea and the percentage of people who find it unpleasant, and I think you've got the makings of a little bit of a dud. There's chemicals with much more potential that DON'T make you pay the price, so why waste too much effort on it?
Anyhow, the fact that some people like some research chemical or another isn't the point here... Research chemicals not only need to be used with a different approach from standard drugs, they also need to be rated with a different approach. I'm rating these drugs not based so much on my personal experiences as on the way the whole user population reacts. What are the average trends? Think of research chemical users as the filter between the lab and the streets, which filters out the drugs not suited for general public audiences. We're sort of like the FDA of the psychedelic scene... we offer up our own bodies as lab rats to test new substances to make sure they're safe, effective, and not unduly unpleasant.
To try and take this back to the original topic... I don't think the piperazines really make the cut. My personal experiences with BZP, TFMPP and mCPP were very negative. I've heard many other negative reports, similar to and different from my experiences. The negative reports far outweigh the positive ones... and even the positive ones I've gotten have mostly been weak - stuff like "It didn't suck but I'd rather do meth" or "It was vaguely like MDMA which was interesting, but that headache..."
We even have some real clinical data on the piperazines. I've got a stack of over 100 pages of scientific journal articles on piperazines. These include the results of human tests on quite a few folks. The results aren't too pretty... especially mCPP, which earned the classification "panicogen" in two of the articles.
There hasn't been very much in the way of safety profiling... I don't know of any confirmed deaths so far, though there have been rumors. They certainly don't FEEL very safe, though that's not a very solid argument. They produced some very disturbing physical symptoms for me and others, and the fact that the stuff can give people pounding headaches and a flu-like sensation for 2 days.... that really doesn't give me the warm fuzzies about the safety of the piperazines.
All in all, this group of drugs doesn't really seem to make the grade as far as things I'd want to see being used by the general public. If you like them and don't mind the risk, I certainly won't stop you... but I really don't think these are substances that ought to be recommended to people.
