Yup. And partying people forget what other meds they're on, what else they've taken/eaten, how much they weight. (How often do people measure, log how much or test potency? Never.)
A roommate in uni was white, clammy and shivering on the floor from alcohol poisoning, refusing to go to the hospital. He managed to survive that night, but probably with some hard-core liver damage.
The other thing that turned me off from harder stuff is a second cousin looking like a diseased concentration-camp survivor and stealing from everyone in the family while neglecting her kid... Such addiction states turn people into zombie-like criminals. You want to help or intervene, but it's hard to convince anyone to adjust their lifestyle in the face of meth.
Picking out a few horror stories and ignoring everything else is a bit too easy - it's not all that bad.
How often do people measure, log how much or test potency? Never.
That is simply untrue.
I don't have any numbers of course. But from the people I actually know, including myself, almost everyone who was trying something new for the first time would first check what a normal dosage was and then take like 1/4th, or less depending on what type of drug, of that first just to see what to expect. We even had test kits for XTC pills which would check if they'd actually contain MDMA.
Moreover since a couple of years in the Netherlands there are labs to which you can send your drugs to get test results back about amount of active ingredients and so on.
This all just to illustrate there are in fact sensible drug users out there and not everyone, or everyone in a certain scene, just ingests/snorts whatever you give them.
Its a much different situation in the Netherlands though. In the US, you have fear of criminal prosecution for recreational amounts; testing is (from my observations) non-existant unless you're an educated, proactive recreational drug user.
While you could still be prosecuted in Austria, there's at least one institution in Vienna which tests (recreational) drugs for users and is accepted by the local police for their harm-reduction. The catch is that they can't return your (mostly quite small) samples after testing for legal reasons. http://www.checkyourdrugs.at/ if you read german.
* But from the people I actually know, including myself, almost everyone who was trying something new for the first time would first check what a normal dosage was and then take like 1/4th, or less depending on what type of drug, of that first just to see what to expect.*
My younger self wouldn't recognise that kind of behaviour. The first time I took ecstasy, I ended up taking five pills over the night.
That seems like bizarre, reckless behaviour to me now, but trying telling that to my younger self. He was bizarre and reckless.
Maybe not much from a safety standpoint, but it would be hard for somebody not to know they had just taken a third of a gram, unless the placebo also increases heart rate and causes flushing.
Anyone with increased heart rates and stress levels is likely also going to have difficulty processing others emotions. You don't need cocaine to do that.
So it may double the utility for stock broker trainers breaking in green trainees whom have latent objections to stealing from granny's life saving. :(
With the clichés of money, hookers and blow, the ease of excess partying habits can very easy and eventually kill most people. Felix Dennis nearly bought the farm in that lifestyle, many others weren't so lucky and/or weren't able to exhibit enough self-control.
I'm curious as to what the placebo they used was. It'd have to be something that could be mistaken for cocaine in low doses, otherwise it's not worth much as a placebo in this trial.
As with everything in biology there are exceptions, imperfect measurements or wrongly self-perceived measurements. In other words: it could be one of your two suggestions or something else :)
Only 12 people got the actual drug, and their performance was only degraded 10%. This is an interesting theory with a little evidence but hardly "stops you from recognizing other people's emotions", and may be just noise from the small sample.
> stops you from recognizing other people's emotions
Journalistic sensationalist garbage. I'm no advocate of drug usage but lying about things achieves nothing.
However, from an anecdotal perspective: my flatmate's ex-girlfriend had completely annihilated her brain with chronic use of that drug and, knowing her, would I agree with those incredibly inconclusive results? Somewhat - she definitely showed no capability of responding to emotions in others, but her brain way beyond fried: so it may have been systemic (or other drugs).
> little evidence
I wouldn't call it that, it is a weak correlation at best. They should have included significantly more people.
Also, there's the issue of what sorts of neurological "types" tend to abuse which sorts of drugs. I currently take medication for ADHD which works on the dopamine response and feedback system. Cocaine at least superficially works on similar mechanisms.
I remember when I was talking to my doctor prior to being put on the medication and discussing any past recreational drug use. I'm sure that part of this was in order to determine any abuse potential but the doc also mentioned that a lot of times people with atypical dopamine feedback will abuse or "self-medicate" with cocaine.
I wonder if more people who gravitate toward heavy cocaine use (or the ones more likely to become habitual cocaine users) do so because they don't get the same sort of feedback and reinforcement from external stimuli as more "neurotypical" people.
It's all just conjecture on my part but my experience is that a lot of people who use recreational drugs have their drugs of choice because it's not always just about getting "messed up" but could be because certain tweaks to their neurochemistry are more pleasurable than others.
So it impairs your acuity to negative signals from others while high. This is not interesting - it's kinda obvious. It would have been much more worrying if it continued long term.
A sensitive friend of a friend experienced it 3 out of 3 times exactly like that. Maybe for some people the effect is lower, but most people are not very sensitive towards emotions anyway...
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 83.2 ms ] threadUmm... that's an entire line (assuming 3 to a gram).
> They were also found with increased heart rate
Ya think?
A roommate in uni was white, clammy and shivering on the floor from alcohol poisoning, refusing to go to the hospital. He managed to survive that night, but probably with some hard-core liver damage.
The other thing that turned me off from harder stuff is a second cousin looking like a diseased concentration-camp survivor and stealing from everyone in the family while neglecting her kid... Such addiction states turn people into zombie-like criminals. You want to help or intervene, but it's hard to convince anyone to adjust their lifestyle in the face of meth.
How often do people measure, log how much or test potency? Never.
That is simply untrue.
I don't have any numbers of course. But from the people I actually know, including myself, almost everyone who was trying something new for the first time would first check what a normal dosage was and then take like 1/4th, or less depending on what type of drug, of that first just to see what to expect. We even had test kits for XTC pills which would check if they'd actually contain MDMA.
Moreover since a couple of years in the Netherlands there are labs to which you can send your drugs to get test results back about amount of active ingredients and so on.
This all just to illustrate there are in fact sensible drug users out there and not everyone, or everyone in a certain scene, just ingests/snorts whatever you give them.
My younger self wouldn't recognise that kind of behaviour. The first time I took ecstasy, I ended up taking five pills over the night.
That seems like bizarre, reckless behaviour to me now, but trying telling that to my younger self. He was bizarre and reckless.
What can I say? I miss the .com days of the 90s...
With the clichés of money, hookers and blow, the ease of excess partying habits can very easy and eventually kill most people. Felix Dennis nearly bought the farm in that lifestyle, many others weren't so lucky and/or weren't able to exhibit enough self-control.
Perhaps it just impairs performance on the simulators where emotion recognition is tested with images, and not in real life.
Or maybe my brain chemistry is different.
They are called psychoactives after all -- how reliable could my report be if my perception was altered?
Really, the annoying part is that it's always truncated with ellipses before you get to the guts of the URL on many services including my own.
Check out these two blog posts:
Journalistic sensationalist garbage. I'm no advocate of drug usage but lying about things achieves nothing.
However, from an anecdotal perspective: my flatmate's ex-girlfriend had completely annihilated her brain with chronic use of that drug and, knowing her, would I agree with those incredibly inconclusive results? Somewhat - she definitely showed no capability of responding to emotions in others, but her brain way beyond fried: so it may have been systemic (or other drugs).
> little evidence
I wouldn't call it that, it is a weak correlation at best. They should have included significantly more people.
I remember when I was talking to my doctor prior to being put on the medication and discussing any past recreational drug use. I'm sure that part of this was in order to determine any abuse potential but the doc also mentioned that a lot of times people with atypical dopamine feedback will abuse or "self-medicate" with cocaine.
I wonder if more people who gravitate toward heavy cocaine use (or the ones more likely to become habitual cocaine users) do so because they don't get the same sort of feedback and reinforcement from external stimuli as more "neurotypical" people.
It's all just conjecture on my part but my experience is that a lot of people who use recreational drugs have their drugs of choice because it's not always just about getting "messed up" but could be because certain tweaks to their neurochemistry are more pleasurable than others.