MDE with MDMA is necessary, the recipe, for true, proper ecstasy
Bollocks. MDE is
not a part of “
ecstasy” (which
is pure, racemic n-methyl-3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine hydrochloride, aka MDMA, either in crystal/powder form or pressed into tablets). MDE is “Eve”, MDA is “Sassy”, and MDMA is “Molly/Mandy” aka ecstasy, empathy, Adam… In the U.S. it's called “Molly” (short for "[Grateful Dead] Family Jewel molecule") and the high is called “rolling” whilst in the U.K. it's called “Mandy” and the high is sometimes referred to as “monging”. This is common street slang for the compound,
n-methyl-3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine. Anything else is an adulterant, and related 3,4-methylenedioxy-substituted phenethylamines and alpha-methylated phenethylamines are analogs and homologs with somewhat similar effect profiles, but they are not “proper ecstasy”. They all refer to one drug. In practice it's of course an unregulated free-for-all, but ignoring that for a moment, I think it's helpful to keep the definitions simple and consistent.
I was getting kinda heavy into oxy back around 2004 when I took Toronto Green Smilies and I remember the green smilies made me nod some.
MDMA kinda does this to me on a high enough dose. It's strange, but also euphoric and I usually don't mind and find that it passes before the high is over. What's more, different producers frequently have the same tablet dies and coloring. Poor-quality knock-offs are definitely a thing in that market.
And some idiot was saying that it's because of the heroin in that ecstasy
Good instinct. It almost certainly was not Heroin – it's just too expensive to have people wasting doses of good H in an e-pill when diacetylmorphine has such a low oral bioavailability – I think it's something like 40% through first-pass metabolism? Many users say if you're not shooting it, you're wasting it. So then consider how much H would need to go into
each pill to achieve any kind of appreciable high from it… Your instincts there were right, and whoever was saying the pills were cut with Heroin was just regurgitating bullshit they heard some other asswipe proclaim. Bertrand Russell said it best with: “
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
On the other hand, and especially in 2021, fentanyl is a very real possibility for inclusion in a pressed pill. It's why I bought bulk fentanyl tests and suggest others do the same to test your drugs.
but I kinda think the culprit was MDE eve. So what do I like about MDE? The fact that I could nod on it
Careful with that line of thought –
cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Or in other words:
correlation does not imply causation. Just because you took some pills and nodded, and you
think they have MDE because of something you saw on drugsdata.org (nevermind if that's
actually the same pill), it does not imply MDE typically causes somnolence. In fact it usually does the opposite. This is true in the literature, true for me personally, and what I've witnessed firsthand with very high confidence I had near-pharmaceutical-grade compounds (if not actual-grade stuff). I happen to have synthesized MDE twenty-something years ago in a clandestine lab (this is well beyond the statute of limitations so I have no qualms mentioning it now and I no longer synthesize contraband drugs). I was using a route whereby I vacuum distilled safrole from sassafras oil, converted it to a ketone intermediate and then I would usually reduce the ketone to MDMA or MDA, but I realized I could produce MDE just by substituting ethylamine for methylamine, or
nitroethane for
nitromethane, whatever donates and attaches the respective nitrogen moiety for the desired target compound.
So I made ~18 grams of it with which to experiment and give away to certain psychonaut friends and close associates (underground chemistry has perks). The consensus then was that it was a lighter roll with a duration of about 1.5 - 2.0 hours. Just as it starts to peak and I'd get that synapse flooding feeling of serotonin that rattles my brain and my eyes start getting nystagmus…
just as that begins to hit its peak, like it does with MDMA, I start coming down instead of continuing to blow up. Chasing the high doesn't do a whole lot of good, but the high can be kicked up a little bit more with effort. Arguably it's a “weekday evening after work” kinda drug, although I imagine it carries some neurotoxicity all the same. However, it didn't leave me feeling off-balance from a serotonin dump like MDMA does, but then… you get what you pay for, so to speak.
Either way, it was speedy AF and felt good; it just didn't last long enough which is irksome. I don't recall anyone nodding off on it, but that was just my experience. I can easily see nodding happening in the right individual, probably such as yourself. Still, I would not classify nodding as a standard qualitative effect. But you know, it doesn't mean anything necessarily either way. I've taken acid and mushrooms together before and wound up falling asleep in the middle of the peak…On many occasions I've seen people do a gangster rail of cocaine and then fall asleep within 5 minutes on the couch. Seen people do giant hot rails of good meth and then be yawning shortly afterward. Etcetera. You get the picture. Also, I get amped from benzos and opiates a little bit, especially at first, and the shit makes me oddly productive at times…
The point is: MDE is a bit of a lame fuckaround compared to the real deal Holyfield MDMA though it's not without its own charms.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make with your response.
Ok check it out.
You said: "I am even more firmly of the belief that MehDMA is 100% real." This statement confused me. Why that proclamation? You took some authentic, nearly pure MDMA and had a wonderful experience and your takeaway was that MehDMA exists? What did that experience rule out for you? Prior to this, were you questioning if the lackluster experiences on other so-called “MDMA” was the result of personal bias / loss of magic, or what? You say you
don't believe in those as possibilities, and that's fine, but either way, I think it's well known that some MDMA is widely agreed to be really good shit, while other stuff purported to be MDMA is, at times, awful. Concurrent to that, it's also possible for a person to use MDMA too frequently without giving their neurochemistry a break and a chance to recuperate fully, and this will keep them from having mind-blowing MDMA experiences. Both scenarios are real, possible, and common, in my opinion. Does this make sense?
So you found some good MDMA. I have a personal stash of some really bomb shit at the moment as well as a few pressed pills that I would classify as being “meh”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They can't all be zingers, I suppose. But all this proves to me is that the market is muddled with impure and/or imposter MDMA (responsible for at least
some of the “meh” experiences, in my opinion), and really good, pure, blissful MDMA that we all seek to find. There is no
easy way for the layperson to remove certain impurities from dirty MDMA, and there are other things that can actually be removed fairly easily with an ice-cold anhydrous acetone rinse, and/or a recrystallization from boiling isopropyl alcohol followed by another acetone rinse. Fractional, vacuum distillation would be the next technique up the ladder, as it were, followed by lithographic chromatography but this is well outside the scope of most individual's personal comfort level let alone ability and knowledge.
I don't believe intentionally cut or impure MDMA is the source of Meh experiences,
What? Why not? That has to be at least some of the cases. Seems perfectly reasonable, understandable and likely to me. This doesn't rule out other causes of the phenomenon and various other factors affecting it. Why is everyone trying to find just one culprit for this phenomenon?
and I don't understand why your first statement is relevant.
Mostly I'm saying I agree with you, and while we all have our own pet theories, sometimes with overlapping philosophies, I just want to remind people to be careful they're not inadvertently sharing poor intel, erroneous info, propaganda, dangerous myths, superstition, and/or FUD (
fear, uncertainty, doubt).
Ok let's break this next one down:
My experience is an important data point
Is it though?
in my scientific-speculative journey
And what does this mean exactly? What journey are you talking about? Just to be clear, are you doing real, funded research with the goal of publishing the results in a journal somewhere, or is this more of an informal, personal thing you're doing, possibly with friends and community and such? That's not a slight or a knock, I just want to be clear what you're talking about when you speak so authoritatively about “data points”.
in that it disproves myself and other friends having "lost the magic",
Ok so to you, you were just proven wrong about a previous assumption that your own “mehDMA” experiences were the result of some personal, biochemical process leading you to a damaged state of having “lost the magic”, is that correct? Well it's good to know you're willing to change your opinion on a matter in light of new facts you discover. But as I've said: it helps support the claim that
one possible cause for underwhelming MDMA experiences is: different batches of blackmarket MDMA have varying purities that
probably impact the qualitative effects quite a good bit. Technically speaking though, it does not irrefutably “prove” anything, not in any objective sense anyway. I mean, the term “losing the magic” is kind of vague enough to begin with. It's nothing we can quantify or measure. And what feels like “magic” to one person might not feel like “magic” to another. Maybe some people in your group needed a nice, long break from serotonergic drugs, or maybe someone didn't realize they were previously taking a medication that interfered with MDMA's action and they had no idea that [XYZ pharmaceutical].hydrochloride was a 5-HT reuptake inhibitor, or myriad other examples and factors that cannot be ruled out any longer and with an experiment that is assumably so informal.
shows a huge difference in potential MDMA experiences as experienced by a wide range of individuals with mostly different MDMA usage patterns, and more.
Right. Many things can affect the outcome of an individual's experience upon consuming varying quantities and purity/impurity matrices of MDMA and/or its analogs. I think we all agree on this point. The thing is: why are we trying to pinpoint some phantom cause-of-all-MDMA-woes substance we're calling “MehDMA”?
My original point was that not ALL the MDMA on the blackmarket is shit right now. There is good MDMA on the market still. Your recent experience bolsters my point that it's not all crap out there. Everyone agrees that crappy MDMA is present, call it “MehDMA” or whatever you want, no one denies it exists. I'm saying it doesn't exist in only
one form we could easily pinpoint and remove with some quick, clever kitchen chemistry. It's a much more varied and complex problem than that. The real solution is to figure a way to get underground producers of MDMA to avoid impurities and cuts altogether, but this is not an easy task to accomplish for reasons which should be obvious to anyone reading this.
Having said this, I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong in the above and that we can pinpoint a loss of MDMA-experience quality down to one or two particular impurities formed during specific phases in a common production process. Is this necessary and, if so,
cui bono? Sure, the user benefits, but who calls the shots? It's hard to picture academic interest, and pharmaceutical companies are equipped with all the analytical tools they need to perfect and optimize the synthesis of whatever they mass produce, so I suspect that point might be rendered a bit moot. (←Note: I mean “moot” in the American sense of “irrelevant”, not the British sense of “arguable”).
This product was tested with a wide variety of reagents, and showed results only for MDMA (though the MDMA vs MDA differentiation test showed a little violet, like MDA would), which was similar to most batches that this group has procured in the past few years, which is also an important data point.
More “data points”. And let's talk about that fancy-sounding “wide variety of reagents”. You're talking about
presumptive testing which is used to analyze a sample and can only establish one of the following: 1. the sample is definitely not a certain substance, or 2. the sample
probably contains the substance. It takes
confirmatory testing to know for sure. (
For anyone unfamiliar and interested in this). This is the only court-admissible standard because it's based on solid science and the chance of false positives can be reasonably reduced beyond the shadow of a doubt. The FDA recommends that such tests should bear a label that says:
“This assay provides only a preliminary result. Clinical consideration and professional judgment should be applied to any drug of abuse test result, in evaluating a preliminary positive result. To obtain a confirmed analytical result, a more specific alternate chemical method is needed.
Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) is the recommended confirmatory method.”
Also, as has been discussed in this thread, the presumptive tests would probably not be able to distinguish MDE from MDMA from MDDMA, and even if it could, the difference between MDE and MDDMA would be unclear given that they share the same empirical formula and molecular weight, plus they have the same basic shape and they largely react to most things the same way. There are methods to tell them apart, but it's outside the scope of presumptive testing
for sure. I mean take a look at the standard presumptive test for ecstasy,
The Marquis Reagent Test and just look at how many substances turn purple to black… Reagent testing is useful for quick field testing scenarios and for harm reduction purposes mostly. True analysis requires a deeper dive than this.