Why can't they make amphetamine-esque pills without the narcotic aspect?

[Ne0]

Ephedrine is psychoactive and gets you high... in fact for years they banned it in the US because people were abusing it. When I had hardly done any stims I used to take 50mg of ephedrine plus caffeine and god damn did I feel good. Eventually I found it start to feeling pretty dirty with a lot of side effects. But yeah ephedrine is certainly psychoactive.

Even pseudoephedrine can get you mildly high, done many times when didn't have speed. Dopamine released definitly, boosted with caffeine and nicotine.

 

[Nicomorphinist]

This 2,4-DNP has danger written all over it.

In addition to that, 2,4-dinitrophenylmorphine, which essentially appends the 2,4-DNP to morphine, was invented in Austria in 1931 as a narcotic with less respiratory depression, in the same burst of research that led to the invention of the combination product Scophedal. Both were sought out by researchers specifically to get a strong narcotic which supresses the circulation and breathing less. This also was big part of the reason for the invention of Brompton Mixture in London in 1896, by a Dr Snow of all people. . . A medicinal version of the speedball is used for much the same purpose, and in both cases, dextroamphetamine is substituted for the cocaine if the latter is not available for medical use in the locale in question.

The anti-emetic in Brompton Mixture was one of the more common uses for tincture of cannabis when it was available back in they day; now Compazine, Thorazine, or Phenergan are used for this purpose, as are diphenhydramine and dronabinol. When I had painful bronchitis a number of years ago, I had good results when I improvised some Brompton Mixture with morphine, cocaine or methylphenidate, cherry syrup in one case a lime syrup in the other, distilled water to add volume to make for more precise dosing, and gin into which I had hashish mixed and allowed to sit for a month.

At the same end of the continuum are lefetamine, and many or all of the benzimidizole opioids, which combine effects similar to MDMA with strong narcotic action. I am not sure if oxycodone's stimulating effects are enough to make it a useful anorectic, and it could be that the stimulation comes from elsewhere, and there are a large minority which do no get the oxycodone stimulation.

 

[Vastness]

A medicinal version of the speedball is used for much the same purpose, with dextroamphetamine being substituted for the cocaine if the latter is not available for medical use in the locale in question.

Can't tell if this is intended a little tongue-in-cheek but are you implying that in some locales, cocaine is still used medically for it's stimulating effects? Because it was my understanding that the use of this particular property was essentially gone from modern medical practice because of undesirable cardiovascular effects, with the only remaining use cases being in some otolaryngic or perhaps dental surgeries that make use of it's local anaesthetic properties when nothing else will do.

 

[Jabberwocky]

yo, I don't know if you guys have it in the UK but you should, it is called Amfepramone (brand name here is Regenon), no buzz, just energy.
it was heavily prescribed in the past for weight loss and it still sometimes is but a lot of young people abused it for partying in combination with other drugs.
try discussing about it with your doc,maybe you get lucky

wiki link for Amfepramone with some info

 

[Nicomorphinist]

Can't tell if this is intended a little tongue-in-cheek but are you implying that in some locales, cocaine is still used medically for it's stimulating effects? Because it was my understanding that the use of this particular property was essentially gone from modern medical practice because of undesirable cardiovascular effects, with the only remaining use cases being in some otolaryngic or perhaps dental surgeries that make use of it's local anaesthetic properties when nothing else will do.

O yes, indeed . . . it is possible for a physician or nurse in hospital and in a hospice situation in particular to get Brompton Mixture and narcotic-cocaine IV mixtures whipped up by the dispensary when needed. But, at least in the United States, there is another law there which makes it so that a mixture in which cocaine is an ingredient cannot be prescribed on an outpatient basis. Most assuredly, the days of being able to walk into Walgreen's with a prescription for powdered C-Jam in the form of tablets or capsules, not to mention loose powder, are long gone.

The stimulant and even empathogenic properties of C-Jam are still well known to quite a percentage of physicians and dispensary people, and is listed as a stimulant or CNS agent in official formularies in lot of cases. In Canada and Europe in the past, I have indeed had liquid mixtures with four or more other ingredients plus cocaine prescribed in small quantities as an ad hoc cure for orthostatic hypotension and somnolence when I was in the midst of a rapid increase in my narcotic dose, but it soon became apparent that caffeine plus ephedrine or racaemic amphetamine did a better job with the hypotension at least.

I can imagine that a lot of the substitutions of the cocaine in the prescription of Brompton Mixture, especially now in the United States, are done for political (CYA) purposes and some insurance companies will balk at covering such a mixture. For that reason, I have long had a small to middling-sized stash of methylphenidate and a few tablets each of methamphetamine, amphetamine, and dextroamphetamine from prescriptions over the years to be used in just such a case -- and cocaine and the amphetamines have direct potentiating effects on narcotics. One issue with cocaine is the brief duration of action.

I am guessing that the cardiotoxicity of cocaine is a distant second reason for this being the case. QT interval prolongation is another issue with these and other similar drugs. These appear to be most pronounced in the esters of benzoic acid, one of the four categories of local anaesthetics; the fact that most all of the local anaesthetics are sodium channel blockers can possibly be one of the reasons. There are, in fact, drugs of these chemical subclasses which are used for the exact opposite in certain cases -- procainamide and quinidine are commonly-used Class Ia antiarrhythmics and lignocaine is in Class Ib.

Cocaine first fell out of favour for a given medical use at the turn of the XX. Century when it was discovered that it could cause sloughing of the cornea, and about this time, the first cocaine analogues were discovered, and many were more useful for operating on the eye. I am thinking that eucaine was the first semi-synthetic or synthetic local anaesthetic, discovered in 1900.

Cocaine is, to cite one example, CSA Schedule II in the United States and similarly controlled elsewhere -- it is most commonly used as Tac (Tetracaine, Adrenaline & Cocaine), Tac and neat cocaine both come in 4 and 10 percent solutions for ear, nose & throat surgery, and once a chemist working in the dispensary of the hospital showed me a 60 gramme bottle of powdered cocaine -- and there is a new pure mixture, C-Topical Solution, I believe that in the United States which went on the market in 2016 for intractable nosebleeds. So in those cases the vasoconstriction and local anaesthetic powers are the ones sought out.

There are, I believe, pre-saturated cotton swabs and planchettes (also called tampons) of cocaine which are used in dentistry in addition to liquids which can be painted on to an area like Tac. There are phials and ampoules of sterile injection solution for use in place of other things like novocaine, which became the dominant infiltration local anaesthetic worldwide beginning in the early 1930s as well. Indications for using Bolivian Marching Powder in that case appear to be related to extreme bleeding, as it is much more of a vasoconstrictor than some of the others.

Back at the beginning, the most common cocaine OTC products were specifically intended for insufflation, such as the Grey and Birney Catarrh remedies, both of which came as bottles of powder with an apparatus for applying it consisting of a glass tube connected to a small rubber hose so that the patient could get a quantity of the powder into the apparatus then blow with their mouth to get the nose candy deep into the sinuses to solve the problem.

The narcotic in the Brompton Mixture is also sometimes changed for a specific situation; I have heard of methadone, diamorphine, phenadoxone, dipipanone, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, dextromoramide, pethidine, and ketobemidone switched in for patients with allergies or other trouble with morphine derivatives, The piperazine antihistamine cyclizine, as well as its close relative hydroxyzine, can be used as both an anti-emetic and a narcotic potentiator. Cyclizine is the second ingredient in Diconal (dipipanone) and Cyclomorphine (morphine) proprietary fixed combination products.

Cocaine hydrochloride apparently does or did come in containers of up to 500 grammes, as one of these was snagged by chemist shop burglars in the United States in 1990-ish according to the Canadian and US newspapers, and they cleaned out the whole place, including taking beta blockers, laxatives, antibiotics, and all sorts of other things in addition to the apparent objective of getting all of the narcotics, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and stimulants. The haul was apparently close to $1m street value . .

In the United States, there are in fact a number of Schedule II narcotics and other drugs which are simply not manufactured at this point but could, and some in III, IV and V as well and some uncontrolled ones too. Phencyclidine is one, as are phenazocine, bezitramide, metopon, alphaprodine, anileridine, piminodine and other narcotics, glutethimide is in Schedule II, methyprylon and ethchlorvynol are in Schedule III, Pyrovalerone is in schedule V, there are amphetamines not in use which range from uncontrolled to Schedule II, and I believe that the narcotic proheptazine was in Schedule IV for some time and has uncontrolled relatives like ethoheptazine, and so on.

And all of the above are under the closed system of the Controlled Substances Act 1970 in the United States -- other countries which allow off-licence prescription and a little more leeway for physicians, chemists, manufacturers will have a somewhat different situation.

The effect of dopamine on pain and what it does to the nervous system in particular may be the beginning of an answer to the OPs question.

 

[Vastness]

^ Wow, that is interesting indeed, thanks for the info!

 

[Bravoncius Roxford]

There are still a number of amphetamines used for weight loss (like phentermine and diethylpropion) that are considered to be less enjoyable, but they are still active amphetamines.

Phentermine and diethylpropion are mostly NE releasers. They are not pleasurable or rewarding at all. As someone who has taken both diethylpropion and the DRI's, methylphenidate and amineptine, I can tell you that the later are much, much more euphoric and rewarding than diethylpropion. DP gives you energy and makes you excited, but not the enjoyable type of excitement like methylphenidate gives you. It's not euphoric. It's just like the effect of 5 or 6 cups of really strong coffee.

 

[nznity]

You do know that narcotic stands for a drug that makes you sleepy right? amphetamines and cocaine dont fall in this category. It is a common misconception to call narcotic all the commonly known as schedule I/class A drugs.