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What Do You Lot Think About The Odd Vendor Link?

March 5, 2010
12
Capitalist Pig

Yes, I’m A Cap­it­alist Pig. :-|

So, I keep getting emails from vendors of various sub­stances offering increasing amounts of cash for advert­ising on this site. To be per­fectly honest I could use a bit of extra cash since we’re saving up for a wedding. But, I’m not about to start advert­ising without asking your opin­ions first.

Here’s what I propose for the best outcome for us all. On indi­vidual pages, such as Mephed­rone:
The Facts and JWH-​​018 Tox­ic­o­logy, for example, I was thinking of including a single link to a single vendor, clearly marked out as an advert. Then, I’d be happy for people to email me with any bad feed­back on those vendors, and we could get rid of the link together and wait for a better vendor to come along.

That way, there’s no hidden spammy links or oth­er­wise tricking people into vis­iting a vendor’s site. It would be com­pletely trans­parent and you lot all all get some say.

So what do you think? Love it? Hate it? Got a sug­ges­tion to improve the idea for everyone? Plz leave a comment!!1

By the way, if you hate it, I’ll have to look at other options, like a “Donate” button next to every awesome joke. Like that side-​​splitter below the image above. Or, how about this one:

Why did the mush­room go to the party?

Because he was a fungi.

Or this one:

A load of sci­ent­ists are playing hide & seek in heaven. Einstein’s on and has nearly fin­ished counting. 98. 99. 100. He opens his eyes and sees Newton standing there in plain view. Ein­stein imme­di­ately tags Newton — “Got you, you sociopathic alchem­ical bastard!”

“Not quite!” exclaims Newton. A smug grin starts to emerge. “You see, I’ve drawn a box around me on the floor who’s sides are of length one metre”.

“You’ve actu­ally got one Newton per meter squared, so Pascal’s on!”

Ho ho ho!

Quick edit: Thinking about it, a donate button might be another great way to benefit a few more people other than myself (not that I need your money to spend hun­dreds of pounds on several pairs of shoes for our wedding…). How about a single donate button down the bottom of the right hand side, but then we’ll give say 20% of each dona­tion to charity, or at least a worth­while organ­isa­tion. 10% could be given to one of your choice from a select few and 10% could be given to one of my chosing, again from those select few. Some that spring to mind include Erowid, Drugs Forum or the Richard Dawkins Found­a­tion For Reason & Science (very much like the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too).

Quick Edit #2: Perhaps we could earn a few dona­tions… Like writing “[Your name] does drugz lolmayo!” in the sand of the Domin­ican Republic and taking a picture of us next to it. (Yes, we’re going there for our hon­ey­moon…). We could even get those pix printed out on a mug or some­thing for anyone par­tic­u­larly generous.

Other silly ideas welcome.

Posted in About This Site | Tagged advertising, money, vendors, wedding |

I Hate You All

February 27, 2010
4

Nice one, guys. Seriously.

You’ve all just cost me a shit­load of money. Once again, I’ve been forced to hand over more cash to upgrade my web hosting pack­ages, due to the blog’s pre­cip­itous, yet per­fectly pre­dict­able peak in popularity.

Synchronium Server

“Would you like to host a blog?”

I suppose you aren’t the only ones to blame. If my logical, well thought out, excel­lently artic­u­lated ideas and opin­ions require upgrading the infra­struc­ture neces­sary to pipe them to the masses, I suppose I’m at fault too, if only a little bit. If I was wrong about some­thing just a frac­tion of the time, or I was a tiny bit less modest, then maybe I could have kept the money for that death ray I’ve had my eye on.

Actu­ally, running out of band­width timed rather nicely with my JWH-​​018 Tox­ic­o­logy write-​​up receiving over 100 mostly sens­ible com­ments. Neither is worth writing about on its own, but both things hap­pening within a few days of each other prac­tic­ally forced me to write a bit of an update post.  So here’s a graph, some stats, and a few mediocre blog-​​related achievements:

Here’s the site’s traffic for every month since time began (I cer­tainly can’t remember a time before Syn​chronium​.net, and neither can you) to the end of January 2010. No actual numbers, but that’s some nice growth.

Sexy Statistics:

  • We’ve written 87 posts between us
  • Posts have rated 235 times with an average of score of 4.55
  • There are 714 com­ments approved so far
  • 9,178 spam com­ments have been dealt with
  • Tim is our top com­ment­ator, closely fol­lowed by MauiGreenDragon
  • Jo’s Hash Brownie Recipe has been viewed just over 100,000 times
  • My first post has only had 27 views to date :(
  • There are almost 10,000 links pointing to this site

Awesome Achievements

I’ve somehow con­vinced people that I know what I’m talking about

Thanks to my recent mephed­rone cov­erage, I’ve given inter­views and/​or helped with research on the subject for BBC Radio, Drug­Scope and AOL, as well as a handful of smaller things like local or uni­ver­sity news­pa­pers or local radio sta­tions. We also had the priv­ilege of telling Jeremy Kyle to fuck off when he wanted to inter­view us for some (pre­sum­ably ter­rible) legal highs “documentary”.

People keep nicking my shit

A lot of people have repub­lished art­icles and images on their site without asking or linking back — the bas­tards. It seemed that every dick­head research chem­ical vendor who set up shop recently in an attempt to get rich quick has used my rather snazzy chem­ical struc­ture images, and I’ve read more copied blog posts than I care to count. While def­in­itely annoying, it’s also pretty cool to have created some­thing worth nicking. One blog even had my entire RSS feed running down the right hand side for a while, but that was great, since each item linked back here mul­tiple times. Which brings me onto…

People keep “licensing my content”

That’s basic­ally the same as the above, but they ask me first and link back to the ori­ginal article. (If you’re plan­ning on nicking my shit, ask me first!)

We’ve stood up for the industry and drug­gies everywhere

Since Jo’s review on the second worst doc­u­mentary ever made, Can I Get High Legally (the recent Horizon about infinity has to be the worst), we’ve pub­lished the views of a couple of inter­viewees, which tell a com­pletely dif­ferent story. Journ­al­ists occa­sion­ally mention that review when they get in touch, agreeing with us, or using that as an example of what they’re not trying to do. Are they trying to earn our trust? Maybe. I think the real reason is that my “Internet powers” scare the shit out of them. Well, maybe not.

We’ve had some inter­esting results in Google

First off, we imme­di­ately began to rank number one when searching for “syn­chronium”, above Syn​chronium​.com, which has been there since 2004. Funnily enough, that guy prob­ably gets more traffic now than ever, since no one ever actu­ally searched for “syn­chronium” before this site came along.

Google Image Search is where all the fun is at though. At one point, our picture of Neal’s Yard Rem­edies super­im­posed with a giant rubber duck was on the first page of results for their name, but not any more. When you search for Daniel Siebert (“the salvia guy”), near the top is a picture of Kenny G, thanks to this post. Finally, Mephed­rone Cat has shown his cheeky little face on the first page of results when searching for “mephedrone”.

If things con­tinue like this, I reckon I’ll be king of the Internet in approx­im­ately 4 years.  Thanks to all of you for participating!

Posted in About This Site | Tagged bandwidth, media, statistics, traffic |

Legal Highs & Terrorism

February 18, 2010
3

This past week, there has been a series of dev­ast­ating fire­bomb attacks on a number of pubs in the centre of Birm­ingham. These attacks were carried out by a mil­itant Islamic group seeking to put an end to the “evils of alcohol”, as it is for­bidden by their reli­gion. In the weeks leading up to the attacks, each of the pubs tar­geted was issued a warning by the group, threat­ening serious con­sequences for those that didn’t shut down imme­di­ately. Other pubs in Birm­ingham have received a similar warning.

EthanolThe group has received sym­pathy and support from those addicted to the drug and the family and friends of those affected by alcohol.

Alcohol is a volatile and extremely flam­mable liquid that is used as an indus­trial solvent. Users com­monly mix it with other liquids, or “soft drinks”, to mask the unpleasant taste and to prevent chem­ical burns to their mouth and throat. This mixture is referred to as a “hard drink”, drawing atten­tion to the under­lying viol­ence and aggres­sion asso­ci­ated with Britain’s depraved drink culture. Side effects such as dizzi­ness, con­fu­sion, head­aches and depres­sion are reported by the majority of drinkers, espe­cially fol­lowing large doses.

The attacks have high­lighted the addictive nature of alcohol and the danger it poses to society. Birm­ingham offi­cials have responded by calling for the closure of all pubs in the city and trying to fast track legis­la­tion for a nation­wide ban on alcohol.

Wut?!

Ahh­h­h­h­hhhh, just kidding! Kind of.

If you replace Birm­ingham with Ireland, mil­itant Islamic group with para­mil­itary “vigil­ante” group known as the “Repub­lican Action Against Drugs”, pub with head­shop and alcohol with legal highs, then this is exactly the kind of bull­shit story you might have read about these past few weeks.

Basic­ally, a load of illegal drug dealers thinly veiled as a vigil­ante group are going round burning head­shops down and in one case shooting someone who sold legal highs from his shop. These are acts of terrorism.

First off, the fact that these people are illegal drug dealers is spec­u­la­tion, but since half a million euros was found in the burnt out husk of just one of these head­shops, it’s not hard to find a motive. They claim they’re against drugs in general, but no one who feels that drugs are so morally wrong would go out and shoot someone — a far more immoral crime. They’re either com­pletely moral, com­pletely immoral or com­pletely nuts. The situ­ation is chillingly similar to that Chris­tian loon who shot that abor­tion doctor in the US.

“Hey! Guys! Get a hit of this crazy shit! Bring crisps.”

That aside, the biggest issue is how these blatant acts of ter­rorism are being reported.  Just like my bull­shit news story above (c’mon, you fell for it at least for a few seconds, right?), the reports on these head­shop fires and shoot­ings somehow manage to segue past the whole ter­rorism thing to focus on just how bad for us these shops are. Check out these quotes from the Irish Times:

On Friday, the Nirvana head shop and a number of neigh­bouring outlets on Capel Street were des­troyed in a fire which began around the same time local res­id­ents reported hearing a loud bang coming from the outlet at 6am on Friday.

Gardaí are treating the Capel Street fire as arson although the exact cause of the blaze may never be known because most of the building has had to be demol­ished for safety reasons.

Although a link between the two fires has not yet been estab­lished there has been spec­u­la­tion that the incid­ents are related to a wide­spread cam­paign to outlaw such outlets.

Reg­u­la­tions which will outlaw a range of products sold as legal highs in head shops across the State are expected to be intro­duced later this year.

However, Mr Cos­tello today called for legis­la­tion to be brought forward to outlaw such products within weeks.

“There has been real anger in the local com­munity over the failure of the author­ities to act in rela­tion to head shops because a lot of young people around the area are cus­tomers buying products from them which mimic illegal drugs.

“It cer­tainly seems too much of a coin­cid­ence that there has been two such fires within days, and there is a real concern that these shops are being tar­geted, and there is a worry that not enough action is being taken either to stop the selling of these products or to protect people living near head shops who could be hurt in a fire,” he added. (My emphasis)

What the hell, Mr Cos­tello? Go and catch these ter­ror­ists! Not only does no one seem to care, but banning these products lit­er­ally diverts more profit to people that support this kind of sense­less violence.

Posted in Drugs | Tagged alcohol, headshops, legal highs, Republican Action Against Drugs, terrorism |

Music On Drugs

February 10, 2010
15

Everyone knows that music sounds better on drugs, right? Right. Sure, some drugs make music sound better than others, and some music is better suited to par­tic­ular drugs. I can’t imagine a heroin user sitting back, shooting up and slap­ping on the latest happy hard­core vinyl, for example, but in general, music and drugs are regarded as an excel­lent combination.

Here’s what everybody’s hero, Carl Sagan had to say about can­nabis and music:

A very similar improve­ment in my appre­ci­ation of music [com­pared with art] has occurred with can­nabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the sep­arate parts of a three-​​part harmony and the rich­ness of the coun­ter­point. I have since dis­covered that pro­fes­sional musi­cians can quite easily keep many sep­arate parts going sim­ul­tan­eously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning exper­i­ence when high has at least to some extent carried over when I’m down.

Music Is The Drug
Since there’s such an obvious synergy between good music and good drugs, I thought I’d put together a littler series of posts reviewing some music that I reckon is essen­tial to listen to while high. I’m not sure yet how it’s going to work — it might be single album recom­mend­a­tion, the odd col­lec­tion of awesome tracks or focusing on one par­tic­ular genre. I’m also not sure how fre­quent posts in this series will be. I’ll try to keep them pretty regular, but other more important stuff might crop up. I’ve created a new Music On Drugs cat­egory for these posts though, so they’ll all be in there.

This is the first post in that series, but today I’m not going to be sug­gesting any music — there’s a lot of pre­par­a­tion work to do before that!

Getting Your Shit Together

Before you can get the most out of your music, you’re going to need to spend a bit of money. Your aud­it­orium (bedroom) needs to not only sound good, but also be com­fort­able and look great too. Luckily, you don’t need to spend a fortune to really improve the atmosphere.

Comfort

This is important — you can’t get stoned sitting on a bar stool, so get your­self some kind of massive bean bag or reclining chair if your bed isn’t suit­able. You’ll want to be lying down so you can just focus on what you’re listening to.

Excellent Aesthetics

If the only lighting options in your room are having a harsh energy saving bulb either on or off, then con­sider getting some other lighting before we begin. You can spend hun­dreds on amazing lighting tech­no­logy, or you can get your­self a red light bulb for a couple of quid. Here are a tonne of options roughly ordered by price:

Salt Rock Lamp

If you play music through your com­puter, you might want to get your­self some great visu­al­isa­tions for whatever media player your using. I’d recom­mend G-​​Force.

Awesome Audio

You can NOT listen to any of the music I’ll be reviewing through shitty little PC speakers or built-​​in laptop speakers. You might think that they’re fine because you can hear all the words to your favourite Afroman song, but you are wrong. Luckily, you can get some adequate speakers for under £50. So long as you’ve got a sub­woofer (or sub; a giant speaker who’s job is to pump out the kind of bass that’s inaud­ible through laptop speakers), you’ll be OK. I’d recom­mend these Logitech X-​​230 speakers, which will plug straight into your PC or laptop.

Logitech X-230 Speakers

Great, so you’ve got some speakers. Now you need to arrange them so they sound good. First pick out where you’ll be sitting to listen to your music, then arrange the left and right speakers sym­met­ric­ally in front of you. Next, put your sub on top of a blanket or some­thing. This will stop vibra­tions from the sub trav­el­ling through your walls or floor. Not only will this make the bass sound better, but it also won’t piss off the neigh­bours any­where near as much, so you can turn it up even louder. Finally, make sure your speakers aren’t buried away at the back of your desk behind a load of crap. If sound waves have to nav­igate past old crisp packets, unpaid bills and ounces of weed, then the sound quality won’t be as good. If you’re going to spend the money on decent speakers, I’d also recom­mend actu­ally buying (or at least illeg­ally down­loading) the music talked about. YouTube quality will not do it justice.

You’ve got at least a week to get yo’ shit together. In the mean time, here’s some more from Carl Sagan:

Posted in Music On Drugs | Tagged cannabis, Carl Sagan, heroin, lighting, music, sound quality, speakers |

Some More Excellent Editing By The BBC

January 29, 2010
2

ChargeSince we watched and reviewed that BBC doc­u­mentary Can I Get High Legally? a while back, you may remember Matt Bowden, one of the people inter­viewed, had some much more inter­esting points to make than those they actu­ally showed in the doc­u­mentary. Chris from Pot​seeds​.co​.uk said a similar thing — they spent about three hours talking about all sorts of inter­esting stuff, which was edited down to a couple of sen­tences on Salvia divinorum and a joke about Horny Goat Weed.

I’ve recently been in touch with “Sam” (not his real name), the user of research chem­icals inter­viewed at the end of the program, and it’s no sur­prise that the same thing happened to him too. He com­mented on our review saying “What a fucking farse. I sat there an hour giving them a detailed inter­view about the state of affairs in the industry and they cut it down to fuck all and made me look like a fool.” Since every research chem­ical user I’ve spoken to (excluding those only inter­ested in mephed­rone) have all been at least reas­on­ably intel­li­gent, and at least two other pro-​​drugs inter­views were heavily edited, it seemed highly likely that Sam was telling the truth.

Once again, its down to me to report the full story. Here’s Sam’s recol­lec­tion of the events:

They asked me about my drug history.  I explained about using can­nabis since I was 13 and research chem­icals, which I informed them I started researching at the age of 16, before con­suming 2C-​​B at age 18, using correct safety pre­cau­tions. They then asked me to list the research chem­icals I had taken, then cut them down to only the legal list (which they got wrong).

They asked who I exper­i­mented with. I told them gen­er­ally if one of us found an inter­esting chem­ical we would explore it with the same group of 8 to 10 friends.

He asked what I gained from using these sub­stance. I explained that these chem­icals give me an insight on a per­cep­tion of this world which only a few thou­sand people in the whole world will have exper­i­enced. It’s a little piece of insight. Or outsight!

All the drugs shown in the inter­view were their own which they had ordered. They ask me to explain how they were similar. After showing the sub­stances to me they remarked about the purity of the mephed­rone (75%). I explained this was prob­ably a retailer issue as most major man­u­fac­turers produce quality chem­icals. Our 2C-​​B HCL tested at 98.9%. I remarked about Dutch bacon being 90% water from certain man­u­fac­turers yet they didn’t complain…

Why did I not want to be seen? As this is a doc­u­mentary on national TV and me being about to graduate, it may spoil my career if someone were to recog­nise me act­ively pro­moting these activ­ities. Admis­sion to illegal activity on national TV would guar­antee me prob­lems even if I chose to con­tinue them.

I explained the age old idea of the gov­ern­ment con­trolling these drugs prop­erly and using the pro­ceeds to better our world. The problem with drugs is pro­pa­ganda and the use of them as a weapon or as a tool for control and dom­in­a­tion (some places vary with this). Wanting to get high is natural and everyone does it in their own way. We have been put into a pos­i­tion where we are forced to pick from only a spe­cific list of intox­ic­ants based on what’s socially accept­able, dic­tated by upbringing, reli­gion and cor­porate meddling.

These drugs should be made under quality con­trolled con­di­tions, taxed and used sens­ibly. We as a whole need to open our eyes.

I think we now have over­whelming evid­ence that this doc­u­mentary was far from bal­anced, and inten­tion­ally mis­leading. They just did such a bad job of it, it was pain­fully obvious from the beginning.

Posted in Drugs | Tagged interviews, journalism, legal highs, research chemicals |

Should Mephedrone Be Legal?

January 6, 2010
17

Mephed­rone isn’t just another obscure research chem­ical. Everyone’s at it, all the time. Despite the media scare stories, over 20% of mephed­rone users polled on Drugs Forum take more than 10g each month, with just under half of those con­suming over 20g.  A lot of replies to that thread also reveal how quickly usage can escalate, meaning those results are prob­ably on the con­ser­vative side. “More accept­able than weed”, some have been saying. “Even my non-​​druggie friends are doing it!”

Mephedrone MoleculeMephed­rone has achieved this unusual status thanks to a number of factors. Firstly, it’s an effective stim­u­lant, which is more than can be said for ecstasy and cocaine these days; the former con­sisting mainly of dis­agree­able piperazines (due to their cheapness, and until recently, their legal status) rather than MDMA, and the latter being incred­ibly inpure. Next up is the lack of a comedown that would nor­mally be exper­i­enced with other stim­u­lants, espe­cially for new users. This means people can keep taking it for days on end with little to no per­ceived neg­ative effects. The other major con­trib­utor is the price — at around £10 a gram, it under­cuts a great many of its illegal coun­ter­parts, while often being more effective, or at least more reli­able. Other factors include (poten­tially inac­curate) purity meas­ures, the ease of buying it from the comfort of your own home  with a credit card, rather than handing over a fistful of crumpled notes to a typical drug dealer, and of course its legal status.  Although the majority of users under­stand that legal doesn’t mean safe, the fact that you can’t be imprisoned along­side mur­derers, rapists and other violent crim­inals for pos­sessing it is cer­tainly a plus. Oh, and it’s psy­cho­lo­gic­ally addictive — it won’t kill you if you stop taking it, but you might be able to think of nothing else.

Reports of chil­dren doing it, entire friend­ship groups crum­bling as a result of com­pulsive use and the media frenzy have got people under­stand­ably worried and calling for this “evil” drug to be banned.

I Dis­agree.

Why We Shouldn't Ban Mephedrone

If you haven’t read Top 10 Reasons Why Legal Highs Should Stay Legal, have a quick look now. Here are a few more mephedrone-​​specific points:

  • Chan­ging the law won’t change demand — we’ve already seen this with the reclas­si­fic­a­tion of can­nabis and the massive pop­ularity of the syn­thetic can­nabin­oids that just got banned. Also, the decrim­in­al­isa­tion of drugs in Por­tugal has res­ulted in not only a decline in drug use, but also a decline in drug-​​related illness and death (HIV from sharing needles, for example), as well as a increase in the number of people seeking treat­ment for addiction.
  • The current clas­si­fic­a­tion system doesn’t work — Our current ABC system is a shambles, as any sci­entist, or indeed anyone that values evid­ence, will testify. Cur­rently, one of the safest drugs, MDMA, sits along­side one of the (if not the) most dan­gerous, heroin. Can­nabis, and soon the syn­thetic can­nabin­oids, which haven’t killed anyone, are posi­tioned along­side amphet­amine, a drug with far more poten­tial dangers and addic­tion, mean­while alcohol, which hos­pit­al­ises over 1200 people a day and costs the NHS several billion pounds a year, remains legal along with tobacco. I would estimate the harms of mephed­rone to be similar to amphet­amine, if not a little worse, but placing it in class B would give the message that it is as dan­gerous as can­nabis. Placing it in class A wouldn’t be right, as it cer­tainly doesn’t appear to be as dan­gerous as heroin, but it’s prob­ably worse than MDMA. Placing it in class C would be ridicu­lous, as it sug­gests can­nabis is more dan­gerous. It would be impossible to have a sens­ible think on how to clas­sify it prop­erly without getting a headache.
  • If mephedrone’s pop­ularity per­sists, more people will die — in the event of an over­dose or an idio­syn­cratic response, people taking illegal drugs are far more likely not to either tell the doctors what they’ve taken or even go to hos­pital in the first place. That’s not to say that mephed­rone will kill a tonne of people, but if no one ever died whilst on mephed­rone, that would be pretty weird…

What Should We Do Instead?

Just because I don’t think it should be illegal doesn’t mean I think the current situ­ation is perfect. Instead, I think the best thing the gov­ern­ment could do to reduce harm is keep it legal, restrict its sale to people over the age of 21 and slap on a tax of some­thing like £15 per gram. This would make it much harder to buy large quant­ities at a time, espe­cially for kids with little expend­able income, and so curb mephedrone’s addictive nature. Obvi­ously, this wouldn’t be the perfect solu­tion, as some teen­agers would still be able to get hold of it just like they do with alcohol, but at least less people will be taking it and a lot more money would be avail­able to better fund the NHS, harm reduc­tion methods, edu­ca­tion about the drug and sci­entific research.

Why Mephedrone Won't Be Classified Immediately

Heh. The gov­ern­ment have cer­tainly shot them­selves in the foot here. Thanks to the sacking of Dave Nutt and the resig­na­tion of three others on the ACMD, the gov­ern­ment now lacks the skills to ban it. Dr Les King, one of the resignees, was respons­ible for a large part of the ban last month, so without people like him, the gov­ern­ment can’t do any­thing for a while. Looks like it’ll be legal for a good year or so yet.

How YOU Can Help

Well, you can’t really do any­thing about the mephed­rone situ­ation, but you can help me out by posting Mephed­rone Cat everywhere!

You might save mil­lions of lives by dir­ecting them to some of my harm reduc­tion art­icles. :)

Posted in Legislation | Tagged ACMD, alcohol, classification, David Nutt, harm reduction, legal highs, mephedrone, mephedrone cat, NHS |

Mephedrone Cat

January 5, 2010
1

Mephedrone Cat

Mephed­rone Cat knows when enough is enough, and so should you!

Posted in Drugs | Tagged harm reduction, mephedrone, mephedrone cat |

Top 10 Reasons Why Legal Highs Should Stay Legal

December 31, 2009
7

Last week’s ban on a few legal highs will cer­tainly do more to harm the public than keeping them legal. Here are 10 ways in which every sens­ible legal highs user has just been shafted:

#1 - Don't associate with dodgy people

Drug DealerSelling legal highs can be done by a legit­imate busi­ness. Since these busi­nesses aren’t breaking the law, enga­ging in any other kind of illegal beha­viour (guns, viol­ence, money laun­dering, etc) is a massive risk. People that deal illegal drugs are already breaking the law — if they get caught, they’re going to prison for a long time. Breaking the law a second time is no longer such a big deal, espe­cially if the price is right. Not only do you get the safety of dealing with an organ­isa­tion that doesn’t want to break the law, but you’re also not seen with any dodgy char­ac­ters, whether that’s meeting up on a street corner, vis­iting their house or them turning up at your place at a sus­pi­cious frequency.

#2 - Comparison Shopping

We all live in hope that one day we could type in RateMy​Weed​Dealer​.com, find the best prices in town and arrange for a delivery. For­tu­nately, as cus­tomers of legit­imate products, legal highs fans can shop around to their heart’s content. Selling some­thing for more than you should be? Then no one will buy it! It’s as simple as that, so, not only can cus­tomers get a better deal by shop­ping around, this beha­viour also encour­ages healthy com­pet­i­tion between legal highs vendors. Another plus for the customer!

#3 - Buyer Protection

Perhaps RateMy​Weed​Dealer​.com is a long way off, but what about just ringing your dealer to com­plain about some­thing? Inad­equate pack­aging? Does the product weigh half as much as you were prom­ised? Unfor­tu­nately, I doubt your dealer gives a shit. Luckily, for legal highs con­sumers, most sites out there have some form of cus­tomer service, and if they can’t resolve things, facil­ities for refunds or chargebacks exist to protect the customer.

#4 - A Strength For Everyone

The sheer number of similar products avail­able mean there is usually a strength for every occa­sion. Want a bit of an energy boost for work? Caf­feine! Want to go to a rave all night? Syn­thetics! Want to go to a rave but it’s not going to be a “big one” because you’ve got work in the morning, and, let’s face it, your joints and muscles aren’t what they used to be? Some­thing herbal!

I think asking an illegal drug dealer for some­thing cheaper and less effective would be a world first.

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#5 - Diversity

Not only is there a range in price and strength, there’s also an incred­ible range of effects avail­able. Clear headed stim­u­la­tion, total euphoria, intense rushes, powerful relax­ants, shit that makes you laugh — whatever you want, there’s prob­ably some­thing avail­able some­where that will do the trick. In the world of illegal drugs, that kind of product diversity could only be main­tained via a data­base of epic pro­por­tions con­taining your mil­lions of “hookups” and your own data entry guy.

#6 - Passing A Drug Test

Drug TestingSome people might thing it’s unfair that their co-​​workers can party all night on a litre of vodka, sleep for a few hours in a bathtub along­side their own sick and even­tu­ally drive to work still pissed, while they get fired for smoking a bit of weed after work. Sure, people should get fired if they let their abuse of any sub­stance inter­fere with their work, but some people may feel that what they get up to in their own time is their own busi­ness. These people may feel drug tests are massive breach of their privacy, so it’s a good job that they have a legal altern­ative to turn to, since they shouldn’t show up on drug tests.

#7 - Friends More Likely To Do The Right Thing

People that over­dose on illegal drugs will some­times go without the treat­ment they need to avoid any legal trouble for them­selves or their friends. Perhaps a friend might not tell the doctor what someone else has taken for fear of getting their mate into trouble. With legal highs, there’s no risk of pro­sec­u­tion so a) people can fully dis­close what they’ve taken and could even present the doc with the ori­ginal pack­aging and b) the quantity of chem­icals in pills or powders will be con­sistent between batches…

#8 - Batch Consistency

Not only can doctors share notes on spe­cific products, but users can too. It’s no good trying to compare ecstasy pills from dif­ferent ends of the country, since the con­tents are likely to vary wildly, even if they share the same stamp. With legal highs, that’s a dif­ferent story. Con­sist­ency between brands and batches facil­it­ates a great deal of dis­cus­sion not only on how good they are, but also harm reduc­tion. Occa­sion­ally man­u­fac­turers do change their ingredi­ents, but it only takes a short while for the changes to reach the entire country.

#9 - The Government Could Learn A Thing Or Two

Straight away, the fact that the legal highs industry even exists tells us that people want to get high and that people think the current drug laws are stupid. There’s one massive lesson that could be learned from it though — why not use it as a model for even­tu­ally leg­al­ising can­nabis and the rest? Instead of trying to ban every new sub­stance before anyone has died, why not look at reg­u­lating their sales with similar legis­la­tion to alcohol and tobacco? If we as a country could get this right with legal highs, we could see if it works or not and them maybe think of abol­ishing our current bull­shit excuse for a drugs law.

#10 - Taxes

PoundHere’s a list of taxes that illegal drug dealers don’t pay:

  • Per­sonal Income Tax
  • National Insur­ance
  • Cor­por­a­tion Tax
  • VAT

If legal highs remained legal and were taxed like alcohol and tobacco, the gov­ern­ment would even more money on top of the taxes above that they already receive. These products are rel­at­ively harm­less com­pared with alcohol, for example, which hos­pit­al­ises 1200 people a day and costs the NHS at least £2 billion to deal with, so a tax on them wouldn’t be paying for the damage they’d cause to society — they’d be making the gov­ern­ment a massive profit to spend on more doctors, nurses, medical research and fucking moats!

Nice one, G’ Brown!

Posted in Legislation | Tagged drug testing, government, harm reduction, legal highs, taxes |

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2009
1
Posted in Synchronium | Tagged christmas, dubstep |

Mephedrone Update

December 17, 2009
8

Apart from the expo­nen­tially expanding list of slang names for mephed­rone, there have been a couple of inter­esting new devel­op­ments everyone should be aware of.

#1 - Gabrielle Price Died From Bronchopneumonia

Gabi has fea­tured in pretty much every mephedrone-​​related news story these past few weeks, since she died at a party after con­suming mephed­rone and ket­amine (and prob­ably alcohol as well, although alcohol is so ingrained into our society it wouldn’t occur to anyone to report it). It turns out that Gabi actu­ally died from bron­chopneu­monia fol­lowing a group A strep­to­coccal infec­tion. Don’t get me wrong, this is nothing to be cheery about — a teen­ager still died. I’m just reporting this here because nowhere else will report it, since it’s no longer a story. Actu­ally, if you read about another mephed­rone article that men­tions this girl, do everyone a favour and leave a link to this blog post in their comments.

This also doesn’t mean mephed­rone is safer than we thought. Being on any drug isn’t a good idea if you also have a poten­tially fatal illness, never mind a cock­tail of drugs in a party environment.

#2 - No One Ripped Their Balls Off

This is another piece of bull­shit whipped out by the media at every oppor­tunity: appar­ently, some young gen­tleman thought he saw centi­pedes crawling about his person and tore his balls off in (a totally pro­por­tionate) response. Turns out, this prob­ably didn’t happen, since the “facts” were obtained from unsub­stan­ti­ated reports on poor quality forums and chat rooms. Well done, the media!

#3 - West Yorkshire Police Have No Idea What The Fuck They're Talking About

Here’s what they had to say fol­lowing a poster launch designed to raise awareness.

“MCAT is a sub­stance which is cur­rently legal, however; it is pre­dom­in­ately used for plants and can have quite an adverse effect if con­sumed by a human.

“We know that this sub­stance is often used by young people, par­tic­u­larly between the ages of 14 to 25. These posters are there­fore designed to reach this par­tic­ular gen­er­a­tion and help them to make an informed decision.

“Police and part­ners in Kirklees will be placing them in various loc­a­tions fre­quented by young people and hope­fully they will take in the message.

“MCAT is often referred to as a ‘legal high’ and gives the impres­sion that because it’s legal, it is safe. There are number of sub­stances, which are not con­trolled drugs or illegal which can be abused. We would always advise against ingesting any­thing into your body which is not for a bone fide medical reason. MCAT in par­tic­ular has the poten­tial to damage both mental and phys­ical health.

Their first mistake might be hard to spot, but MCAT means “meth­cath­inone” which is NOT mephed­rone (4-​​MMCAT). Their second mistake needs no more explain­a­tion or emphasis than a simple emboldening of their own words.

Unbe­liev­able.

Posted in Drugs | Tagged bullshit, media, mephedrone |
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