☮ Social ☮ PD Social Thread: Trans-dimensional Hyperspace Cocktail Bar - Fractals Apply Within

[amanitadine]

Ahh Never you always delight me with your musings, quotes, citations, and all around way of "speaking"...good stuff

Waaay back before there were any anecdotes of bad experiences combining serotonin releasers with MXE I IM'd 80 mg of MXE 4 hours after taking 140 mg of MDA...now the comedown of MDA is surreal enough alone, as is 80mg of MXE IM'd....but this was something else, including lots of sweating and even more delirium than to be expected...

As the negatiive reports surfaced and then when the binding data on MXE was released it made a bit more sense...

4-FA certainly does a fair number on serotonin, so caution couldn't hurt! They don't know why, likely genetic, but an individuals chance for developing serotonin syndrome from drugs or combinations thereof vary wildly....so folks have no problems with certain things, others do...

A good number of people, myself included, experimented a bit with known and sensible doses of PMA almost 15 years ago...t'was before all the nasty incidents came pouring in. It was an easy synth with a readily available precursor...most of us enjoyed it, some more than others, but one gal became very hyperthermic for a spell...on a small dose. Quite scary. Everybody is different when it comes to such things!

I would steer clear of tramadol and MXE myself, even though their structures look like siblings :D

Ketamine combined well with just about everything....MXE not so much.....my best experiences were alone, either low dose, or very high dose...

 

[Xorkoth]

I talked to my wife right before I took it, a rather long conversation. It was mostly good but I am finding an annoying trend where she wants to consider our finances still together. I myself am trying to dig out of a bankruptcy situation that was the result of my own overspending on opiates coupled with her refusal to make a single dime for the last 5 and a half years. She says "well I owe the doctor $200, the insurance (my insurance she is on) paid $800. My mom is retired on a fixed income so it's a real strain for her". Well, me too. And she left me, twice, I didn't leave her. I have been paying lawyer bills for this bankruptcy and I just finished that and I have no extra money this month,. and I owe a couple of other things fr the 2nd half of the month (I get paid on the 15th). And she wants me to box up ALL of her clothes and ship them (she of course has a shitload of clothes in typical woman fashion). Last time I sent 1 box of clothes it cost $26 to ship it. I mean she said I can send them as I can but it's still going to be a burden. Also I files my taxes jointly and saved half of the tax return for her, roughly $1200. I am sending her that check so she can hold on to it. I got her to agree to pay the $200 for HER doctor visit out of that but it took some doing, I don't get it. You leave me, and I don';t care if we're still technically married, it's by definition only. You don't get to hit me up for money still.

Hmm. Occasionally I think she's being a big manipulator, the rest of the time I feel confident she is not.

 

[pharmakos]

yeah, tramadol and mxe strikes me as being a potentially dangerous combination, moreso than 4-fa and mxe






xorkoth, that sounds awful. its unfortunate that in this age of supposed "equality" many women still feel as if the men they are with/were with somehow financially owe them for their existence. i've dated girls like that before... was never with any of them for 12 years, but still, that would be a HUGE "gtfo" warning sign for me.

 

[Xorkoth]

Yeah I wouldn't mix those for sure. Tramadol is general is pretty sketchy I feel.I never liked it, I had 1 really nice experience on it, the first time I tried it. Every other time it's been uncomfortable and druggy feeling. Just kind of wrong.

 

[Roger&Me]

tramadol + pretty much anything is a bad combo imho. weird and unpredictable stuff. seizures, etc

 

[Xorkoth]

xorkoth, that sounds awful. its unfortunate that in this age of supposed "equality" many women still feel as if the men they are with/were with somehow financially owe them for their existence. i've dated girls like that before... was never with any of them for 12 years, but still, that would be a HUGE "gtfo" warning sign for me.

She a little bit blames me for her not having a job or life for the last 5 1/2 years... she says she was so scared of my opiate addiction that she felt she had to watch me at all times... later on when we had our really nice conversation recently and got stuff off our chests, she admitted it was because she was both personally overwhelmed and mad at me for all my lying, and told herself a deserved to take on that stress.

But in reality, the terrible financial situation I was in and my failure to support my small family was the absolutely most gargantuan stress in my life, so much stress I was starting to dissociate, and I fantastized about killing myself toward the end, and to deal with it, I took a lot, lot of opiates. I was in a unsolveable situation that I didn't want to admit would end in divorce and opiates were the only way I knew how to not be utterly consumed by anxiety as every single month I could mbarely make it by and added hundreds and hundreds of dolars ion my credit cards for legal opiates kratom and poppy tea. If she had just gone and made a minimum wage job somewhere things would have been SO MUCH better for both us us. So now I am confused since she admitted and apologized and finally understood what a terrible burden it was to put on me, but is now basically asking me to continue to do that. I suppose she's desperate.

 

[Roger&Me]

not that i'm really in any position to speak about the internal dynamics of your relationship, but from what you've posted she sounds very emotionally manipulative.

 

[Xorkoth]

I may have to accept that that's true. For some reason I am still averse to thinking negatively about her. She really does have a big hold on me, she always has, it's less now but I can still feel it. I have a really, really hard time saying no to her if she asks me for something.

 

[pharmakos]

How big of a role does environment play in addiction?

What role does environment and distress play in addiction? Below is an interesting scientific study whose controversial findings were published in a respectable journal named Psychopharmacology back in 1978 which lead to the university terminating the project. It would be interesting to see what role stressful environments impact other forms of addiction. Also how communities could be improved to lower suffering and self destructive behavior. If scientific freedom actually existed and projects were funded for the good of humanity in lieu of profits and mechanisms of control we would all live in a much happier world. Something defiantly worth exploring..

It's not the morphine, it's the size of the cage: Rat Park experiment upturns conventional wisdom about addiction

We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone argument in the war against drugs. Professor Avram Goldstein, the creator of that study, has said: "A rat addicted to heroin is not rebelling against society, is not a victim of socioeconomic circumstances, is not a product of a dysfunctional family, and is not a criminal. The rat's behavior is simply controlled by the action of heroin (actually morphine, to which heroin is converted in the body) on its brain." So, it's the drug, and its addictive control. Surely we must eradicate drugs as a result!

But there's another model out there by researcher Bruce Alexander of Simon Fraser University called Rat Park. From that wikipedia page:

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.

And so rats that are born into extreme conditions in small cages are clearly more likely to self-medicate. Tom Stafford of the BBC writes:

The results are catastrophic for the simplistic idea that one use of a drug inevitably hooks the user by rewiring their brain. When Alexander's rats were given something better to do than sit in a bare cage they turned their noses up at morphine because they preferred playing with their friends and exploring their surroundings to getting high.

Further support for his emphasis on living conditions came from another set of tests his team carried out in which rats brought up in ordinary cages were forced to consume morphine for 57 days in a row. If anything should create the conditions for chemical rewiring of their brains, this should be it. But once these rats were moved to Rat Park they chose water over morphine when given the choice, although they did exhibit some minor withdrawal symptoms.

You can read more about Rat Park in the original scientific report. A good summary is in this comic by Stuart McMillen.

So, if Rat Park is to be believed, drug addiction is a situation that arises from poor socioeconomic conditions. From literally being a rat in a cage. If you're a rat in a park, you'd rather hang out with your friends and explore the world around you.
Perhaps it's time the war on drugs becomes a war on the existence of poverty? (edit: Poverty of our relationships to family, community, and nation too, not merely monetary. As commenters have pointed out, there are plenty of people who have plenty of money who may well be the most poverty-ridden in other respects.)

It's not about the drugs. It's about the social environment in which we live.

 

[Roger&Me]

i saw a great cartoon illustration / comic book -type thing describing rat park a while ago. wish i could find it again.

 

[Xorkoth]

Very interesting, NTW, thanks for that.

 

[Roger&Me]

found it

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

 

[Xorkoth]

Nice comic, I enjoyed it

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

Everybody on a site like this should make themselves familiar with the Rat Park study. It also makes a great comeback to people assuming the position: illegal drug use = addiction. You just haveta retort, "Two words: Rat Park."

Perhaps it's time the war on drugs becomes a war on the existence of poverty?

You mean the War on Poverty, that's LBJ, War on Drugs wasn't 'til Nixon.

Ahh Never you always delight me with your musings, quotes, citations, and all around way of "speaking"...good stuff

Why, thank you. My internet-speech pattern is 50% affected, 25% my normal writing style, and 25% regional dialect (my efforts to rid myself of the filler words "like" and "totally" have failed dismally). My thoughts are all my own, for better or worse.

Ketamine combined well with just about everything....MXE not so much.....my best experiences were alone, either low dose, or very high dose...

Booze and MXE mixed very well IME (dissociative + GABAergic in general makes for fun times. GBL takes the cake for the latter half of the combo), but this is coming from a former drunk. Actually, the only thing I didn't like combining alcohol with was IV heroin.

stuff

Your wife sounds like my mother (note: my parents are divorced). Not intentionally manipulative, it's a side effect of a persecution complex combined with a pathological reliance on others. See: codependency and inverted narcissism.

that sounds like you're glowing and onto something special.

It sounds like antirational adolescent passion. The glowing is Uranium-235, deficiencies in cooling system and/or neutron moderator will lead to catastrophic meltdown.

Im in something deep

Must resist urge to say "shit".....too late. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not. *hides in fallout shelter*

Apropos to nothing, my therapist tells me that I have severe trust issues. Also, if the above two responses are particularly insensitive, I apologize, I have zero experience with relationships and cannot tell the difference between mildly inappropriate and crossing the line. I feel like I'm being reasonable, but maybe I'm not, I dunno.

 

[swilow]

NKB has some true wisdom methinks.

So today is my fortnightly opiate day. I'm considering not taking anything at all but its such a beautiful Sunday here, sitting at 31 degrees (Celsius, apparently its 87.8 Fahrenheit). Perfect warm golden sun, free day, time on my hands, laughter in my head... Do I need to supplement such an already perfect moment or should I just be content with existence?

Actually, you know what- fuck it, I'm gonna have some MXE, you guys are always going on about it. Joining the club.

 

[Solipsis]

Yeah really cool, knew about the experiments but not yet the comic.. thnx

I think for rats pain and other stress vs. pleasure, comfort and security is probably relatively simple. Socioeconomic conditions can be simulated but the human 'mental' component much less so.
My point is that while stress or stress-free contentedness are often heavily contingent on socioeconomic factors, there are other issues or problems people can still have. Maybe that was implicit in one of the last comic frames where 'outlook on life' was more or less mentioned...
And it doesn't take away from the fact that socioeconomic conditions determine a LOT and this still gives us so much insight!

So, what else is happening? Curious or unusual stuff? I feel like I witnessed some random silly or ironic shit very recently but I can't remember.. >_<

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

apparently its 87.8 Fahrenheit

That's how warm it was here today. Let us look down in pity upon all those wretched souls with less than perfect weather. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

actually, you know what- fuck it, I'm gonna have some MXE, you guys are always going on about it.

Low dose MXE is fantastic, it stands on equal footing with euphoric-functional doses of any of the big illegal drugs. YMMV.

(a)My point is that while stress or stress-free contentedness are often heavily contingent on socioeconomic factors, there are other issues or problems people can still have.
(b)it doesn't take away from the fact that socioeconomic conditions determine a LOT and this still gives us so much insight!

Indeed, (b) is what we should take away from the study, you'd have to adopt an antiquated radical behaviorist position to dispute (a).

 

[Xorkoth]

Your wife sounds like my mother (note: my parents are divorced). Not intentionally manipulative, it's a side effect of a persecution complex combined with a pathological reliance on others. See: codependency and inverted narcissism.

Holy crap, you hit it on the head! Wow, insightful man.

Higher dose MXE is also fantastic, it's like psychedelic ketamine. By that I mean, you're still connected to your emotions, it's more colorful, and there is a sense of excitement. I find it much less depersonalizing than ketamine and I remember it WAY better. I absolutely like it better than ketamine.

 

[swilow]

It's not about the drugs. It's about the social environment in which we live.

Similar to the concept of a purely chemical basis for addiction, the above statement is too simplistic. Rather then being only a mechanism of physicality or a byproduct of environment, it actually falls somewhere between both. For humans, environmental factors are almost insurmountable because we are so far away from our particular 'natural' habitat, and there is almost no way to actually get there. Rats evidently require a specific form of stimulus to cope with existence in a more neutral way- what do humans need? Are our requirements for non-chemical happiness too complex to actually be attained? What is a human 'rat-park'?

 

[Xorkoth]

Interesting point Willow, do you mean that we as a species, those of us in our civilizations, such as anyone on this forum, are so far away from our natural environment that we all fit that part of it? Because I agree. I think by moving to civilizations where we stayed put and built our surroundings, we doomed ourselves to always feeling out of synch, unexplainably anxious or wrong, and not spiritually fulfilled. Some feel this more than others, and hey, maybe some people have evolved past that and really are happy in cities. But I know that I feel an indefinable sense of loss and emptiness, and I am never fully comfortable except when I am camping or backpacking. In nature, my mind is free. In civilization, it's always filled with doubts and ingrained guilt (from my sense that I should always be doing something productive and "advancing myself" in my career or otherwise).