What is wrong with the MDMA available today?

[G_Chem]

I’m not sure comedowns really can be used to gauge how magical the experience is..

When I was younger I’d get nasty comedowns too, emotionally and physically, but it’s not that my rolls were any better.

Back then I ate like shit, (we all did it seems) didn’t hydrate well, often drank with it, didn’t take antioxidants...

These days my rolls are WAY harder but I take all the necessary precautions to make sure once I comedown that it goes well. I often do use other substances like DMT in the day or two following to further negate any serotonin dip.

So I wonder if reduced comedowns are also the result of the health kick much of western society has been on in recent years compared to late 90’s/early 00’s.

Edit- Come to think of it the last time I was unable to follow a lot of my rolling rules, I got sick as hell right on comeup and spent the whole night feeling like I was freezing but really actually overheating under a blanket. I felt that comedown for months afterwards, I also felt that significantly more MDMa had been metabolized into MDA that trip cuz I was getting visuals like I’d never had on any MDxx before. (This was a batch I was VERY familiar with.)

-GC

 

[MountainTrails]

@MountainTrails Your posts have inspired me, and maybe I need to start a new thread. There is a nuance to the MDMA comedown that has value. It is an altered state in and of itself. I used to think of it as something to "get through." In recent years though, it has been great for writing and tapping into a separate corner of emotion. However, it is hard for me to know if this recent appreciation of the comedown is due to the MDMA being different, because "back in the day" comedowns were rough. They seemed to always involve crying and break ups...lol. If "Meh-DMA" is a separate drug, or a combination of specific byproducts, or a variation of MDMA or whatever...then maybe that is why the comedowns land differently for me now. Who knows.

Here's a crazy idea, what if MehDMA was a deliberate attempt to reduce the high of MDMA but maintain the therapeutic benefits? I can't say I always feel those therapeutic benefits, as MehDMA often just leaves me feeling ill, but it would be interesting if this were some kind of intentional experiment gone wrong.

@indigoaura Both you and G_Chem are using "comedown" slightly differently than I do, I believe.

For me, the comedown is the same-day slope down to baseline after taking the MDMA. What happens days or even weeks later I think of as "aftermath" and "aftereffects" rather than "comedown."

But as for slight differences in substance having different effects on receptors, yeah, absolutely I think that's reasonable. And I agree that "rolling smart" in the form of self-care in advance (and afterward) makes a big difference in the toll it takes on one's body. Rolling your tits off at a 100-degree F festival and getting dehydrated is more likely to smash you in the face afterward than other approaches.

I don't think MehDMA is a pharma experiment that got into the wild. I guess a company could try to develop something that had the therapeutic benefit but not the fun, but why? MDMA is on the fast track to rescheduling. And why take the pleasant part away? The people getting treated for things like PTSD maybe could use a few hours of happiness/contentment in their lives to balance out the crap. Aside from turning down the amygdala/fear circuit, positive feelings might help navigate those dark places getting explored. I'd be curious about an experienced therapist (or client) perspective on that one, because I'm typing away with no personal experience in that space (MDMA-assisted therapy).

 

[ShooShoo]

Anyone ever try blue ghosts around 2013 ? Had one at electric picnic very magical felt like all was right in the world

 

[indigoaura]

From Drugs Data:

Greetings. We've made a tiny bit of progress.

Last week we got a certified standard for 2,3-MDMA. 2,3-MDMA has been run against all our previous MDMA identifications and does not match anything we've had submitted to us.


I just ordered the following and expect to run them next week:

1. N-methyl Homarylamine. Cayman 22239
2. Homarylamine. Cayman 21351
3. 2-MeOMC. Cayman 9001186
4. Methedrone. (4-MeOMC) Cayman 10529
5. 3-MeOMC. Cayman 9001187.
6. BDB Cayman 14213.

The rest of the list is not yet identified fully and they may or may not be available through any certified source. But we're working on it. I'll send you the "full list" and how we've identified each of them. Currently it's all just hand written squiggles on paper ;]

earth

 

[G_Chem]

Earth doesn’t have to be doing this.. I suggest we collectively show our appreciation somehow. Dude is going above and beyond truly.

-GC

 

[indigoaura]

I am super impressed. They HEARD us, and read the articles, and are responding with actual action. Amazing.

 

[vecktor]

I am super impressed. They HEARD us, and read the articles, and are responding with actual action. Amazing.

That shows that the Gluhbarnum hypothesis about 2,3-MDMA is false. As predicted GC-MS can tell the difference.
Deduction based on the commercial unavailability of 2,3-methylenedioxy compounds suggested 2,3 is a dead end.
The only outside possibility as far as isomer goes is 3-methoxy-4-methyl and that is a really long shot.

No other isomer has the same fragmentation pattern as MDMA. So that pretty much kills the isobar isomer theory dead

I will go further and say the enantiomer hypothesis is also false because there is no plausible mechanism for creating one enantiomer over another using the commercial clandestine processes.

If this is effect is real and I currently think it as likely to be real as not, it leaves the following possibilities

Active impurities altering the pharmacology either:-

Missing active impurities with a positive (user POV) effect, ie the good stuff is actually less pure than bad stuff

Active impurities with a negative (user POV) effect, ie the good stuff is purer than the bad stuff.

if we are going down this particular impurity rabbit hole, the possible impurities must be essentially invisible to GC-MS which means either heavy or unstable, or it is being seen but ignored, which is why the TIC data file from IEC is important.
The inconclusive NMR data, suggests that the material Vash ran through NMR is essentially pure MDMA but not absolutely clear because NMR would struggle to see dimer contamination, More data is essential, in particular NMR for Meh material side by side with Magic material.

Or very much less likely but still not disproven,
Inactive impurity
An inactive cut that has similar or higher UV absorbance to MDMA which enables the drug to be heavily cut but appear to be relatively high in MDMA to the UV testing at IEC. Or a different polymorph or an impurity that sequesters MDMA altering absorption.

that is the scientific point of view.

 

[ThreePointCircle]

Great that Drugs Data are doing something.

@vecktor is it fair to say that these testing services should be detecting some sort of by-product profile in all of their tests? Looking at, e.g., A review of impurity profiling and synthetic route of manufacture... it looks like the academic analyses are always finding impurities.

If this is the case, should we be encouraging DD to simply go a bit further in their analysis? Is that how it works, i.e. they are seeing MDMA and stopping there, and treating any other information as noise? I'm just wondering if the problem nowadays is that the amount of impurities have increased and reached a threshold of causing a problem, or that new ones have been introduced.

And how does your theory about mdma dimer possibly being present in that other result fit with what DD are looking at, at the moment?

 

[G_Chem]

Yea I’ve never been a big fan of the iso-bar theory to be honest... The only way I could entertain it was to believe that there was some huge conspiracy in the Chinese PMK glycidate production chain that had them producing 2,3 instead of 3,4 simply due to economic or legal reasons. It’d have to be a pretty big conspiracy and as you pointed out @vecktor we’d see the results on GC/MS. (The latter point having been argued back and forth by you and Glubs.)

I’m still a major fan of impurity being the issue.. I also feel there is more of a spectrum than people give credit (a point I’ve been saying from the beginning as well) to both meh and magic MDMA.

I’m thinking about making a donation to earth wherever he’d like of 50$. Im not rich and this is far from easy for me to do but he deserves it.

-GC

 

[benson7]

Anyone ever try blue ghosts around 2013 ? Had one at electric picnic very magical felt like all was right in the world

Yes I tried the blue ghosts and they were probably the last truly great pill I took. I have taken many stronger pills since then but the ghosts were absolutely gorgeous. There was a lot of brown sugar MDMA going around the UK at the same time which was equally good.

 

[indigoaura]

@vecktor What do you make of this article that was posted earlier in the thread: http://www.icadtsinternational.com/files/documents/2007_271.pdf

It seems to imply that the regioisomers are present, and that they are detected in siezed samples, but that the peaks so perfectly mirror MDMA, that they are overlapped. Is that still a possibility? This article seems to imply that you have to use different testing procedures to identify their presence at all and move beyond GCMS. Am I reading the article right?

@vash445 is looking for the data from the two samples I sent. Hoping that whoever tested those samples can locate the reports, because those were both meh samples and it would be good data to look at in combination with the previous data.

I think active impurities seem likely at this point. We have multiple research articles that support this hypothesis. It also seems likely that testing companies may just not be reporting that info if it seems insignificant to the analysis. Maybe they see it the same way they see binding or filler. But ecstasy data did report their finding of the 1-(3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl)-2-propanol contamination in my meh sample that I sent to them in 2012. However, it was a pretty significant percentage of the capsule.

 

[saracen7]

IDK what you're talking about man modern MDMA is great, makes me feel like I've been knocked out by thousands of soft pillows and it feels good to BREATHE

 

[ADHDMY4SS]

Let me first give you a little background. I'm 51 years old and started doing ecstasy the last year it was legal in 1985. Needless to say the legal ecstasy from the so called "Dallas Group" was nothing short of spectacular. In 1988 I made a connection with someone from the San Francisco area who was in the production field of making MDMA. I have maintained that friendship and connection ever since with only small periods of downtime. The MDMA I get from him is an extremely fine bleach white crystalline powder that is fluffy and lays just like snow. The high from this MDMA takes about 10-15 minutes to take effect and the high is always the same. An extremely smooth come up followed by excessive love and empathy. You will literally melt into the person you're with and sex is out of this world. Touch and feel is heavenly. All you want to do is touch and feel on the person youre with and tell them how beautiful they are and how much you love them etc. There are massive eye wiggles and conversation flows like new born buddas. The come down is just as smooth as the come up. It drops you off just like a feather and sleep comes like a baby. The next day is nothing short of spectacular. You wake up feeling anti-depressed and chatty. You'll want to talk on the phone, visit friends or just drive around and enjoy the day with the top down. It's all I've ever known as an MDMA experience.

Now that brings me to modern day MDMA. There was a period back in the early 2000's when my connection was down and I scored pills from a local guy. They were great and with some very small exceptions, nearly as good as my crystalline powder. But once again I've been forced to score something locally and the stuff is just plain crap. And I mean crap. I've done both the orange Tesla's and the red Supremes. Absolutely awful, but from reading the trip reports on Pillreports, you would have thought they were the best ever. They're actually anything but. I had both of these pills tested on ecstasydata and both came back as pure MDMA.

Both of them took about 30-40 minutes to kick in and when they did, there was a slight feeling of euphoria and empathy that quickly faded and from there on out it was just a fucked up buzz. There were eye wiggles, but I wasn't feeling good when they were happening. I became extremely tired and kind of gacked out. The high from these pills seemed to last forever, maybe just because they sucked so much. I felt like a crackhead on the comedown and the next day felt like a bad MDA hangover. There was no next day afterglow at all. Just a different kind of fucked up than the night before. And that lasted the entire next day. There is a HUGE giveaway that youre doing todays crappy MDMA. Your pupils will not dialate all the way to the very edge like old school ecstasy. With old school ecstasy your pupils consume literally all of the color in your eye with only a microscopic sliver of color left around the outer edge. With modern day ecstasy your pupils will only dialate to slightly beyond normal if at all. Thats a big giveaway youre doing new school MDMA junk.

Before you jump to the assumption that this Le Junk guy is just old, hes done way to much ecstasy over the course of his lifetime and this is just a matter of tolerance, please re-read my post stating that I still have access to old school MDMA that Ive had since the 1980s. So in one hand I have modern day lab tested MDMA crap and in the other hand, old school MDMA heaven. So tolerance is out the window. Moving forward...

My question is this. Is this the best there is out there today? And since both pills tested on ecstasydata as pure MDMA, what is wrong with MDMA production nowdays? Does anyone else feel what I'm talking about here? My setting is pretty much always the same so that's not it. I always hear people talk about the setting as if that's an issue. With the crystalline powder, it doesn't matter where I am, it's always great. But with these Supremes and Teslas, it's just a sub-par, little euphoria, no real love or empathy, fucked up kinda buzz. Let me put it this way, if this was all that was available to me, I'd quit taking MDMA altogether. Terrible!

I've heard it's easy to pass the test kits. All they prove is there is MDMA and none of the other listed substances in your pill. That's not enough. There's so many fake pills now that were never fake before, so I can only imagine the level of counterfeiting has catapulted in the X/MDMA scene. That's where mixing and lacing really started and was repetitively done whether for profit or desire for taking different trips.

 

[vecktor]

@vecktor What do you make of this article that was posted earlier in the thread: http://www.icadtsinternational.com/files/documents/2007_271.pdf

It seems to imply that the regioisomers are present, and that they are detected in siezed samples, but that the peaks so perfectly mirror MDMA, that they are overlapped. Is that still a possibility? This article seems to imply that you have to use different testing procedures to identify their presence at all and move beyond GCMS. Am I reading the article right?

to me the article implies more there is something odd with their GC-MS analysis setup for example their sample preparation is not consistent with differing tablet formulations or possibly there is a something that is breaking down to MDMA in the GC injector. which then makes the injection and retention time appear delayed.

If they were different regioisomers then even if they overlapped the MS part of the system would label the peak as having what is called co-eluting peaks, simply because the all the regiosomers with different sidechains have subtly different fragmentation patterns. so the peak would have different MS fragments at the start and the end. The fragments associated with one compound would be higher at the start an lower at the end. this can be de-convoluted to extract the two separate peaks. Also any experienced analyst can see even co-eluting peaks if they are a tenth of a second apart because the peak shape is wrong.
If its suspected there were two co-eluting peaks then I would be very careful to run a peak purity check using the software, and then use deconvolution software like AMDIS.

They also claim that HPLC did not detect any extra peaks which is very odd because of the possible regioisomers most of them (apart from 2,3-MDMA which is seen separately on GCMS) differ greasiness (polarity and lipophilicity) from 3,4 MDMA, so should be separable on HPLC.

The UV IS absorbance mentioned is much more interesting because they call out an absorbance of over 100% in some samples. this is interesting because the chromophore for UV IS and fluorescence the methylenedioxyphenyl part of the compound.

Maybe they just discovered that their validated approved reference sample of MDMA contained less MDMA than it should. That would not be the first time. Validated references of pharmaceuticals from both Cayman and LGC and apparently SIAL too have been reported to contain less material than claimed, most pharmaceutical companies use internally validated references for this reason. Nobody trusts the reference material suppliers. Many pharmacopeia standards allow over 100% assay results to be passed because the references are not as good as they should be.

I asked earlier if anyone had found a peer reviewed published version of this work, the work is pretty old and the syntheses used in the clandestine pills would be pre PMK glycidate, most likely peracid oxidation of isosafrole or wacker oxidation of safrole followed by leuckardt or reductive amination. On that basis their results (if they are real, and I have my doubts,) have limited current relevance. Wacker is known to make MDphenylpropanal which does lead to a regioisomer however most forensic literature says that it is separated on GCMS.

more data is definitely required. If people held back 10mg every time they tasted MDMA and kept a record of whether that was magic or meh then it would build a number of samples which had been bio-assayed as meh or magic, it would be possible to look see if a physical or chemical difference can be seen using analysis. Having that set of samples would give researchers something to work with that they couldn't get anywhere else and you would find no difficulty getting someone to pick it up and do the work.

Keeping it simple ignore tablets and pills, because there are so many other confounding factors with pills, non uniform dosing, differing compression, non uniform surface non uniform dissolution and dispersion which are going to mask any chemical differences.

 

[G_Chem]

Sent our boy Earth a fiddy.. It ain’t much but Erowid deserves it.

-GC

 

[babooon87]

I’m still a major fan of impurity being the issue.. I also feel there is more of a spectrum than people give credit (a point I’ve been saying from the beginning as well) to both meh and magic MDMA.

-GC

That is an excellent point that I feel has not been discussed enough yet. In my experience there is definitely a spectrum with Magicdma at one end and the most boring Meh (the ones so boring you would have preferred being sober) at the other end.

When you get one or both of the extremes it is easy to draw a clear line but I noticed many samples seem to fall halfway between which do produce a pretty pleasurable experience but lacks the full spectrum of the effects we all remember MDMA having.

For me it is the nystagmus that has always been a huge staple of MDMA and that I never got AT ALL on any batches since 2009, even the ones that felt magic in all other ways. In fact that effect was what always what made me confident that what I had was MDMA/MDA since no other drugs produced that as consistently.

Anyone else remember being absolutely unable to read or write a text while peaking because of the double vision ? I haven't had and haven't heard of anyone discussing having that " issue " for years.

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

Anyone else remember being absolutely unable to read or write a text while peaking because of the double vision ? I haven't had and haven't heard of anyone discussing having that " issue " for years.

You haven't read any of my posts then :D

Unfortunately, this is not a reliable indicator of MagicDMA as I often get this on the Meh stuff as well. If you're not getting nystagmus at all then you're obviously not doing enough...

 

[babooon87]

You haven't read any of my posts then :D

Unfortunately, this is not a reliable indicator of MagicDMA as I often get this on the Meh stuff as well. If you're not getting nystagmus at all then you're obviously not doing enough...

Sorry I might have missed some posts with the length of this thread. As for the dosage don't worry upping the dose is something I have tried a few times with different batches but when some effects were missing it never seened to really bring them out any more. Maybe I should try dosing the magic clear crystals at got at christmas at 200 mg to see if I finally get those eye wiggles... Again, just for science

 

[indigoaura]

@babooon87 The nystagmus is a really good "side effect" to bring up. The batch that I did in October had intense (unable to use my phone to find a song on Spotify) nystagmus. But the lack of "feel good" just made it weird. That batch also had the most intense memory loss effect I have ever experienced. I could not complete a sentence. It also had a weird vibrating jaw effect that I did not care for. But it lacked magic.

The batch I did on NYE had no nystagmus at all. My vision was always 100% clear. But it had a more positive headspace and pro-social vibe, with none of the weird memory stuff. I was moving around and talking to people and felt great.

Same dose.

Obviously something VERY different going on with each batch.

Like you, I have never seen that increasing the dose causes dilation or nystagmus in batches where it is absent.

 

[SunriseChampion]

I don't know about nystagmus being a good indicator either. I mean maybe with standardised doses. I only ever got nystagmus when I was well and truly off my face level high. Lower doses of the good stuff didn't cause nystagmus.

These days, there is no way I'd want to test that level of dose again. I am scared of dosing as high at 34 as I did at 19.

....unless maybe the stuff is too good and it slips in, I guess.

Sigh, I'm still waiting for my sample to come in so I may only be dreaming of nystagmus anyway....no idea what's going on with my source. Has gone silent.