Please Note: This post does not constitute an endorsement of DMAA. I'm not a medical practitioner, and DMAA is not considered a legitimate medical product. Also, some of the information in this post is no longer accurate. See my update here on the legal status of DMAA.
I didn't choose this subject, it chose me. Backhanded FDA tactics, tweaking Marines, Youtube marketing of an untested synthetic stimulant, and a quick profit buzz followed by a nasty crash. I <3 this stuff.
DMAA aka Methylhexanamine is the latest stimulant to become available over the counter. As of this posting, I have no idea whether it is available at reputable workout supplement store shelves, next to the Horny Goat Weed and the creatine jelly beans. But you can definitely still buy it online. In New Zealand, DMAA was put mostly into party pills and has already been banned outright, much like Piperazines before. But in the USA, the substance has mostly been put into so-called pre-workout blends, extending the half-life of it's legitimacy. These pre-workout blends, like the cult favorite Jack3d, tend to be powder-potions of amino acids, artificial sweeteners, caffeine, and other marginal stimulants like schizandrol and synephrine, designed to get you pumped to pump. Adding DMAA makes these blends way more potent.
What is this stuff? Supposedly it is a trace ingredient in geranium oil, but there is little dispute that most DMAA sold is synthetically manufactured. But that technically shouldn't impact it's status as a natural ingredient by law. A large percentage of the "natural" products available in nutritional supplements are made synthetically, including the vast majority of Vitamin C. What matters is that these ingredients exist in nature, especially in foods or other organic matter with a long history of human consumption. This is a fairly low bar on a planet with millions of species where millions of people have been putting things in their mouths for quite a few years now. So, provided that this stuff really is contained in geranium oil, it is de facto legal in the USA.
What does this stuff do? Nobody knows, or if they do they aren't telling. Most likely, companies that market DMAA are better off that way, because that information could help justify a ban. People have made strong educated guesses based on it's chemical structure and effects on the heart that it increases the concentration of adrenaline and its cousin Norepinephrine in the body and brain. This is the same effect as ephedrine, an ingredient in the Chinese herb Ma Huang which was the ingredient behind blockbuster diet drugs like Herbalife and a handful of cautionary after-school specials, before getting yanked by the FDA due to "cardiac events"--all this after synthetic ephedrine was yanked from shelves in the form of decongestants like the Mini-Thins popular with a pre-stardom Eminem and his ilk. After Ma Huang was pulled, a handful of other ingredients were tried in diet pills and "pre-pump" blends but none caught on like DMAA.
Okay, but what does this stuff actually do? It's a stimulant, and personal reactions to stimulants vary quite a bit. One important thing to remember is that if you have experience only with caffeine or nicotine then that will not always generalize to "real" stimulants (those with a direct effect on dopamine or norepinephrine). Some people do find high enough doses of DMAA to be euphoric or similar to speed, but generally say that they "lose the magic" after trying it just a few times. DMAA has a short half-life in the body, and does not last as long as caffeine, but it might not feel that way for new users because your body is not adjusted to this type of stimulation. There is also a mini-debate online about whether DMAA has a very minimal comedown (making it preferable to caffeine) or a hellish emotional-hangover crash landing that will have you swearing it off forever. For the number of people taking DMAA products right now I am not seeing as much evidence online of addiction as I expected, but the cases I have seen tend to focus on the sex-enhancing and social lubricant aspects of the drug.
Is it safe? I need to reiterate the warning starting this post. The short answer to the question has to be NO because drugs, like cities, oysters, pre-washed spinach, cars, do-it-yourself home repair, cell phones, and intramural sports are definitely NOT safe. Or, at the very least, these things cannot ever be definitively proven to be safe. Some studies have been conducted to establish a safety profile for DMAA, but these studies have mostly been conducted by the companies that market it as a supplement, meaning they do not meet the sample size, control, and oversight standards of pharmaceutical studies. . .pharmaceutical studies which definitively established the "safety" of such balms of human wellness as Fen-phen and Raptiva. The good news is that, taken at recommended doses, DMAA doesn't seem to increase heart rate. Increasing heart rate tends to be associated with some of the nastiest potential effects from stimulants such as tachycardia and heart valve irregularities. It does increase blood pressure, and this is fairly standard for a thermogenic drug (a drug that can cause weight loss by increasing metabolism). Is it healthy to increase your metabolism and blood pressure by taking a drug? Maybe if you have chronic low blood pressure. But for most of us? Well, try composing a sentence containing the phrase "hypertension is healthy". Also note: Eli Lilly trademarked DMAA in 1944 as a decongestant.
Why is DMAA being banned? The short answer is because it is popular and effective. DMAA was first banned in 2010 by the World Anti-Doping Agency who decided that it had the potential to enhance athletic performance. This is the sort of endorsement that money can't buy. Soon Jack3d, which is available in flavors like Grape Bubblegum and Strawberry Pineapple (extra macho!), and a few other products were slanging "germanium" as fast as they could bundle the baggies. The Army pulled all DMAA products from on-base stores after two soldiers had heart attacks with DMAA in their system, although the same Army is also conducting a study on it's own soldiers to see whether DMAA is safe. Just because, you know, the Army is really worried about safety and not, say, interested in performance enhancement. At the end of April, the FDA sent out letters to major makers and retailers of DMAA products that they should pull them from shelves, based both on the arguement that DMAA is unsafe and that it is not actually a constituent of Geranium oil(!)obviously leading to an internet fire sale of these products along with pure DMAA powder and capsules, none of which are actually Federally banned substances at this time. But much to the chagrin of the FDA, big chains like GNC and Vitamin Shoppe did not obey. Retailers and manufacturers are hamstrung at this point: pulling the items from their shelves prior to an outright ban could be construed as an admission that the substance is harmful, and there are already consumer lawsuits alleging that it is. Either way, those who profit from the sales are going to need plenty of cash on hand to defend against these lawsuits, cash they can only get by selling more drugs to more consumers. If the FDA actually had solid evidence that DMAA should be banned it would be, but they haven't done their homework on a product that has been commercially available for at least six years. Maybe they are hoping that the huge surge of consumers buying DMAA in anticipation of a ban will cause a surge in adverse events (deaths, hospitalizations, etc) associated with the drug, helping in turn to justify the ban. You have to love a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, supplement companies are combing through millions of "natural" molecules to find the next "weight loss miracle".
Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Cavi & Carrots: The Tao of Skid Row
Disclaimer: I did not violate the confidentiality of any current or past clients in this post. Future clients? One can only hope.
I was struck by two things when I first started working on Skid Row (well, three if you count the smell) in Los Angeles. The first was how infrequently I was panhandled. It's like somebody called a truce. There are exceptions, sure, but usually it will either be so casually offhand that you are convinced somebody really did just need a quarter for the bus, or it will be so aggressive that you can tell the person is targeting you to make a point of some sort. A point such as: I don't appreciate you parking on my street, white boy. But the point is: panhandling is shockingly rare. As if somebody called a cease fire.
The second thing that I noticed, not that I could avoid noticing, was that people were always trying to sell me drugs. It's probably happened to me over 50 times in the past 3 months, although it seems like it is starting to decline somewhat recently. I didn't understand the slang at first, but you usually know someone is offering you drugs without knowing: because they are strangers talking to you in clipped and hushed tones, and because in Skid Row they are in my experience always relatively well-dressed and fit young black males. And sometimes if you look at their down-turned hand you will see a tiny nugget of crack resting between their knuckles like a Parmesan booger. They always, and I mean always say some variation or combination of the following three phrases:
"Cavi cavi! Buddha Buddha!"
"You good, my man? You straight?"
or
"Nickels. Dimes. Big nickels."
Cavi means crack (possibly from "caviar") and Buddha is weed but in this context always means low-grade Mexican skunk. These are the only drugs that are ever explicitly on offer. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask about the a la carte menu out of sheer curiosity, but I don't because I don't know if that could be potentially construed as illegal activity. Whatever your position on the morality/health/sanity of drug use, buying drugs in Skid Row would be like getting albacore sashimi from a guy pushing one of those ice cream hand-trucks around a Target parking lot. Caveat emptor times 5 million. You can smell the skunk burning at all hours at certain corners, especially by parks and in front of some of the largest residential hotels. The smell of crack is IMO very hard to detect with so many other smells in the area, especially because it is most often smoked inside public toilets.
I was a bit surprised when I spoke to other staff at my agency to learn that most of them had almost never been offered drugs of any kind on the streets. In some cases, they wear their employee IDs around their necks, essentially a clove of garlic. Most women (and most of my co-workers are women) get a constant stream of pick up lines ranging from extremely charming (impromptu a capella performances), to ineffective but hilarious ("I would love to take you home for the night. No? How about an hour? Fifteen minutes?"), to aggressive, super-explicit, or obviously psychotic (btw, if you work in this field, the psychotic ones don't bother you). Most of my male co-workers are black and they also seem to be offered drugs less often than me, and say they are more often propositioned by hookers. This has only happened to me once, and the woman's line was "Hey, are you divorced? No? Well you can have me anyways." So basically the vibe I'm putting out is divorced addict. Maybe it's the beard?
There is one other reaction I get consistently on the street and it is cubed when I wear sunglasses. Some people think I'm an undercover. They will point at me and say "that's the one" or "watch that one" or even "5-0!", obviously trying to let me know they are aware of my presence instead of just communicating that info to eachother which could be done through very simple code. I've been told repeatedly that the whole Skid Row area, but especially Gladys Park and San Julian Park, are loaded with undercover cops. If this is the case I can't imagine how easy it must be to make distribution arrests unless the vast majority of small-scale dealing is totally ignored 99% of the time. This is obviously a system rife for corruption, discrimination, or abuse. But I'm sure it's preferable to both cops (who can roll informants when they need to make a statistic without having to process an endless torrent of nickel dealers) and the dealers themselves, who stand a good chance of staying in the black if they have the right combination of tact, timing, and scale.
A cursory study of LA history will teach you that the drug war did not create Skid Row, even though in the past few decades the drug war has come to largely define it. Rather, Skid Row is what happened when Christian charity tried to catch up with the serrated edge of railroad capitalism. Prostitution, alcoholism, residential hotels, and a large disabled population were an inevitable outcome of large numbers of poor migrant males attracted to the frontier for dangerous and usually seasonal work. But the difference in Los Angeles was that there was no place else to go. Skid Row was the end of the line, and many missionary churches saw a relatively captive population whose souls could easily be won with a little good news and a lot of free stuff. And the shit-stained powdered-gravy train has rolled on into the present, low-grade socialism for capitalism's damaged goods, unbelievably prime for that hyper-capitalist enterprise known as the drug war.
Skid Row is a soft target. People with limited mainstream economic viability and galaxies of pain crammed together along sidewalks fed with a steady trickle of free resources. A drug that offers motivation, self confidence, the illusion of affordability, and enough energy and desperate clarity to push it's user to earn enough for the next hit. And over time the accumulation of more and more soldiers who have been so institutionalized and stigmatized by the rest of society due to their past convictions that it starts to look rational to view drugs sales, even low-volume street corner drug sales, not as a job but a profession.
You're probably wondering where the carrots come in? Well, Skid Row is a place where everything imaginable has value, all the way down to recyclable trash which you will almost never see littering the otherwise garbage-strewn streets. But there is one item that is so ubiquitous that it will be seen strewn randomly around the streets: in fact I'll bet that if you want this item you would probably only have to scan the sidewalk for three blocks to be almost guaranteed to find it. . .unattractively labelled cans of carrots! Imagine this existing in the slums of India or Nigeria! For that matter, imagine a can of carrots sitting unclaimed for days on the streets of 1930s Los Angeles. No way! It would be cracked open and cooked over a tiny fire! But look around Skid Row and you will see what looks superficially like Third World poverty. And that's because the resources, no matter how many we throw at the problem, will always get hoovered up by dealers. And what is the incentive for an ambitious and/or pension minded civil servant of any stripe to change the problem? About the same as the incentive for a dealers to obey the laws that have made them into permanent sub-citizens. How much incentive is that? About one can of carrots worth.
I was struck by two things when I first started working on Skid Row (well, three if you count the smell) in Los Angeles. The first was how infrequently I was panhandled. It's like somebody called a truce. There are exceptions, sure, but usually it will either be so casually offhand that you are convinced somebody really did just need a quarter for the bus, or it will be so aggressive that you can tell the person is targeting you to make a point of some sort. A point such as: I don't appreciate you parking on my street, white boy. But the point is: panhandling is shockingly rare. As if somebody called a cease fire.
The second thing that I noticed, not that I could avoid noticing, was that people were always trying to sell me drugs. It's probably happened to me over 50 times in the past 3 months, although it seems like it is starting to decline somewhat recently. I didn't understand the slang at first, but you usually know someone is offering you drugs without knowing: because they are strangers talking to you in clipped and hushed tones, and because in Skid Row they are in my experience always relatively well-dressed and fit young black males. And sometimes if you look at their down-turned hand you will see a tiny nugget of crack resting between their knuckles like a Parmesan booger. They always, and I mean always say some variation or combination of the following three phrases:
"Cavi cavi! Buddha Buddha!"
"You good, my man? You straight?"
or
"Nickels. Dimes. Big nickels."
Cavi means crack (possibly from "caviar") and Buddha is weed but in this context always means low-grade Mexican skunk. These are the only drugs that are ever explicitly on offer. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask about the a la carte menu out of sheer curiosity, but I don't because I don't know if that could be potentially construed as illegal activity. Whatever your position on the morality/health/sanity of drug use, buying drugs in Skid Row would be like getting albacore sashimi from a guy pushing one of those ice cream hand-trucks around a Target parking lot. Caveat emptor times 5 million. You can smell the skunk burning at all hours at certain corners, especially by parks and in front of some of the largest residential hotels. The smell of crack is IMO very hard to detect with so many other smells in the area, especially because it is most often smoked inside public toilets.
I was a bit surprised when I spoke to other staff at my agency to learn that most of them had almost never been offered drugs of any kind on the streets. In some cases, they wear their employee IDs around their necks, essentially a clove of garlic. Most women (and most of my co-workers are women) get a constant stream of pick up lines ranging from extremely charming (impromptu a capella performances), to ineffective but hilarious ("I would love to take you home for the night. No? How about an hour? Fifteen minutes?"), to aggressive, super-explicit, or obviously psychotic (btw, if you work in this field, the psychotic ones don't bother you). Most of my male co-workers are black and they also seem to be offered drugs less often than me, and say they are more often propositioned by hookers. This has only happened to me once, and the woman's line was "Hey, are you divorced? No? Well you can have me anyways." So basically the vibe I'm putting out is divorced addict. Maybe it's the beard?
There is one other reaction I get consistently on the street and it is cubed when I wear sunglasses. Some people think I'm an undercover. They will point at me and say "that's the one" or "watch that one" or even "5-0!", obviously trying to let me know they are aware of my presence instead of just communicating that info to eachother which could be done through very simple code. I've been told repeatedly that the whole Skid Row area, but especially Gladys Park and San Julian Park, are loaded with undercover cops. If this is the case I can't imagine how easy it must be to make distribution arrests unless the vast majority of small-scale dealing is totally ignored 99% of the time. This is obviously a system rife for corruption, discrimination, or abuse. But I'm sure it's preferable to both cops (who can roll informants when they need to make a statistic without having to process an endless torrent of nickel dealers) and the dealers themselves, who stand a good chance of staying in the black if they have the right combination of tact, timing, and scale.
A cursory study of LA history will teach you that the drug war did not create Skid Row, even though in the past few decades the drug war has come to largely define it. Rather, Skid Row is what happened when Christian charity tried to catch up with the serrated edge of railroad capitalism. Prostitution, alcoholism, residential hotels, and a large disabled population were an inevitable outcome of large numbers of poor migrant males attracted to the frontier for dangerous and usually seasonal work. But the difference in Los Angeles was that there was no place else to go. Skid Row was the end of the line, and many missionary churches saw a relatively captive population whose souls could easily be won with a little good news and a lot of free stuff. And the shit-stained powdered-gravy train has rolled on into the present, low-grade socialism for capitalism's damaged goods, unbelievably prime for that hyper-capitalist enterprise known as the drug war.
Skid Row is a soft target. People with limited mainstream economic viability and galaxies of pain crammed together along sidewalks fed with a steady trickle of free resources. A drug that offers motivation, self confidence, the illusion of affordability, and enough energy and desperate clarity to push it's user to earn enough for the next hit. And over time the accumulation of more and more soldiers who have been so institutionalized and stigmatized by the rest of society due to their past convictions that it starts to look rational to view drugs sales, even low-volume street corner drug sales, not as a job but a profession.
You're probably wondering where the carrots come in? Well, Skid Row is a place where everything imaginable has value, all the way down to recyclable trash which you will almost never see littering the otherwise garbage-strewn streets. But there is one item that is so ubiquitous that it will be seen strewn randomly around the streets: in fact I'll bet that if you want this item you would probably only have to scan the sidewalk for three blocks to be almost guaranteed to find it. . .unattractively labelled cans of carrots! Imagine this existing in the slums of India or Nigeria! For that matter, imagine a can of carrots sitting unclaimed for days on the streets of 1930s Los Angeles. No way! It would be cracked open and cooked over a tiny fire! But look around Skid Row and you will see what looks superficially like Third World poverty. And that's because the resources, no matter how many we throw at the problem, will always get hoovered up by dealers. And what is the incentive for an ambitious and/or pension minded civil servant of any stripe to change the problem? About the same as the incentive for a dealers to obey the laws that have made them into permanent sub-citizens. How much incentive is that? About one can of carrots worth.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Get Your Phenibut Out of My Baclofen: The Drug War Snoozes Onwards
I've always been fascinated with the Drug War, the most intricate reverse-welfare scheme ever engineered. And frankly, marijuana has always been the dullest part of the story for me (with the obvious exception of synthetic cannabinoids), wrapped up in so much baby boomer nostalgia it almost seems square. No, I'm fascinated by the drug war's ever-evolving underbelly, the tunnels where activists don't dare to tread, populated by Mexican pharmacists, Chinese bulk-chemical distributors, vitamin-store juiceheads, paid-off psychiatrists, and Fijian corporate raiders. And, of course, their lobbyists. Gather around, and I will tell you a tale of the latest chapters in the never ending race to the bottom of human consciousness. The Great Downer Race!
All real sedatives have one thing in common: an ability to affect the receptors for a transmitter called gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This is probably the 2nd most important neurotransmitter in the brain (after glutamate) and as a general rule tends to slow things down. If all the GABA in your brain stopped pumping, you would have a seizure pretty much instantly. I don't care how tough you are.
Please Note: This post does not constitute an endorsement of any of the sedatives described here. I'm not a medical practitioner, and you should consult your doctor, shaman, and mother-in-law before ingesting anything but kale or almond milk.
Alcohol acts on GABA but it also works on your brain in at least a half dozen other ways, which might explain why it is the most popular drug of all time. Most of the familiar actors on just GABA...benzos like xanax or klonopin or roofies, "zzzz" drugs like ambien, and barbituates (the stuff Don Draper takes), and chloral hydrate (one of the many things Anna Nicole Smith OD'd on) are all legal but not only require a doctor's prescription but are controlled by the DEA. A couple of them (GHB, Qualudes) are totally illegal (which isn't even true of meth, coke, or PCP).
With a few historical exceptions (the disco "lude" craze, date-rape hysterias) downers have always kind of flown under the radar compared to the big scourges of dope narcotics, crystal-whatever, Krishna-consciousness pills, and of course good old genetically-engineered super-skunk. Perhaps because the effects are so workingman pedestrian. They relieve stress, help you sleep, and maybe make you feel a little fuzzy in a non-threatening sort of way. Just don't take too much, or you might die. And don't stop taking them too fast. Or you might die. Kind of like our old friend alcohol.
Time was, in the not so distant past, there was one potent downer that had no DEA controls that was quite popular. Fairly appropriately, it's called Soma. Without DEA controls, Soma could be ordered online without a prescription in unlimited quantities from overseas pharmacies as legally as toothpaste. Folks have known about the abuse potential of Soma for a very long time, leading over a dozen states to control it independently, but the Federal government finally joined the club in January of this year. The reason it took so long? Lobbying by certain states, certain employers, and especially certain insurance providers who had a vested interest in controlling the price of workers compensation clams! See, Soma is considered a muscle relaxant (a meaningless kitchen-sink designation) along with many other drugs that are more expensive, don't work as well, or both. And controlled status is going to mean that lots of people with bad backs or other muscle spasms are going to be more expensive to treat. Who stands to benefit? King Pharmaceuticals--makers of Skelaxin, a drug that costs 8 times as much per dose and. . .get this. . .nobody has ANY IDEA how the drug works.
Relaxed?
Good, it's about to get weirder. In the mid-80s the US passed a law called the Analog Act in order to curb designer drugs. The idea behind it was that any chemical with a similar structure to an illegal or very strictly controlled chemical was automatically illegal. It was mostly designed to combat psychedelics but came in handy "battling" some uber-potent synthetic opiates also. The problem is, because benzos are scheduled at a lower level than the Analog Act covers, benzo analogs remain totally legal and can be sold as bulk chemicals. So if I want a valium, I need to see a doctor who may or may not send me to a psychiatrist who may or may not first have me checked out by a therapist (who all need to be paid and all have the right to shrug, not write the prescription, and get paid anyways) before I go to a registered pharmacy for the privilege of buying it. But if I want a huge bag of phenazepam (a potent Soviet-bloc benzo), I just go here. Of course, I will have to check a box saying that it won't be used for human consumption, but it's still legalish. And the best part? No age limit. Because it's for my chemistry set, and it's important that children learn chemistry to compete in the world economy. They can also get practice using their digital scale, because a dose of phenazepam is just 2 milligrams! I'll be honest, I don't know if there are any lobbyists involved here, just a loophole so weird it would keep Nixon up at night if he weren't permanently hitting the big snooze button in the sky.
But what if you want something less quasi-legal and more. . .say. . .something you can buy on Amazon.
Phenibut is considered a nutritional supplement (no, I really don't have any idea why) available at many healthfood stores. Not the kinds with hippies and six types of tea tree oil, but the type with two walls full of protein powders and products named to evoke the image of well-veined testicles. It was designed to replace another vitamin-aisle drug that actually did have a strong claim to belong there: GHB. See, GHB is a hormone naturally produced by your body (let's call it "god's date rape drug") that causes sedation but a whole lot of other crazy effects--one of which is increasing production of human growth hormone leading to muscle formation. Now, GHB is a bit of atypical sedative because it acts on the GABA-B receptor as well as the GABA-A receptor that our friends booze and benzos target. This accounts for it's unique capacity to cause amnesia when combined with high-dose alcohol. Now, as far as I know, Phenibut does not increase growth hormone but it does tag GABA-B. It has some weird features. First, it takes about 2 hours to kick in but it lasts a really long time. Second, on it's own it can work pretty well on anxiety but it is really not strong enough to deliver euphoria on it's own: that's why most recreational users tend to drink with it. It is probably the most effective OTC sleep aid available ever, and can be quite habit forming when used for this purpose. And lastly, if taken for long enough at Stallone doses it causes a withdrawal syndrome similar to GHB, which is not known to be fatal but can apparently involve seizures, "brain zaps", and make you want to die.
Kava on the other hand rightfully belongs on the shelves of healthfood stores, next to the bran fiber and the placenta extract. But the real scam is that, despite the fact that a culture was based around the use of kava as an intoxicant for hundreds of years, the kava capsules at Whole Foods might as well contain eraser shavings. To get the real thing you have to go online and buy the powder, which tastes like clean dirt (yes, you heard me) and will numb your mouth like nothing you have ever experienced. It's a hell of a strange way to circumvent the pharmaceutical monopoly, but sometimes people do things just because they can. Or, because they hate doctors, or hate lying to doctors, or hate being labelled for life with preexisting conditions. There's always that. I can't tell the story of the weird capitalist cowboys that brought real kava to Americans better than others already have (it kind of reminds me of the Five Hour Energy story), but I have to give them mad kudos for dodging the prohibitionist machinery thus far.
I was going to go deeper into nutritional-supplement lobbying politics, Mormon conspiracies, and weave that all into a larger narrative about the pharmaceutical industry via the modern snake oil Neurontin, but. . .well, maybe the Mormon faith should be off limits, right? Next post will be about Neurontin, "euphoric events", and assessment of drug abuse liability. But I'm afraid that it's Benadryl o'clock. . .
All real sedatives have one thing in common: an ability to affect the receptors for a transmitter called gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or GABA. This is probably the 2nd most important neurotransmitter in the brain (after glutamate) and as a general rule tends to slow things down. If all the GABA in your brain stopped pumping, you would have a seizure pretty much instantly. I don't care how tough you are.
Please Note: This post does not constitute an endorsement of any of the sedatives described here. I'm not a medical practitioner, and you should consult your doctor, shaman, and mother-in-law before ingesting anything but kale or almond milk.
Alcohol acts on GABA but it also works on your brain in at least a half dozen other ways, which might explain why it is the most popular drug of all time. Most of the familiar actors on just GABA...benzos like xanax or klonopin or roofies, "zzzz" drugs like ambien, and barbituates (the stuff Don Draper takes), and chloral hydrate (one of the many things Anna Nicole Smith OD'd on) are all legal but not only require a doctor's prescription but are controlled by the DEA. A couple of them (GHB, Qualudes) are totally illegal (which isn't even true of meth, coke, or PCP).
With a few historical exceptions (the disco "lude" craze, date-rape hysterias) downers have always kind of flown under the radar compared to the big scourges of dope narcotics, crystal-whatever, Krishna-consciousness pills, and of course good old genetically-engineered super-skunk. Perhaps because the effects are so workingman pedestrian. They relieve stress, help you sleep, and maybe make you feel a little fuzzy in a non-threatening sort of way. Just don't take too much, or you might die. And don't stop taking them too fast. Or you might die. Kind of like our old friend alcohol.
Time was, in the not so distant past, there was one potent downer that had no DEA controls that was quite popular. Fairly appropriately, it's called Soma. Without DEA controls, Soma could be ordered online without a prescription in unlimited quantities from overseas pharmacies as legally as toothpaste. Folks have known about the abuse potential of Soma for a very long time, leading over a dozen states to control it independently, but the Federal government finally joined the club in January of this year. The reason it took so long? Lobbying by certain states, certain employers, and especially certain insurance providers who had a vested interest in controlling the price of workers compensation clams! See, Soma is considered a muscle relaxant (a meaningless kitchen-sink designation) along with many other drugs that are more expensive, don't work as well, or both. And controlled status is going to mean that lots of people with bad backs or other muscle spasms are going to be more expensive to treat. Who stands to benefit? King Pharmaceuticals--makers of Skelaxin, a drug that costs 8 times as much per dose and. . .get this. . .nobody has ANY IDEA how the drug works.
Relaxed?
Good, it's about to get weirder. In the mid-80s the US passed a law called the Analog Act in order to curb designer drugs. The idea behind it was that any chemical with a similar structure to an illegal or very strictly controlled chemical was automatically illegal. It was mostly designed to combat psychedelics but came in handy "battling" some uber-potent synthetic opiates also. The problem is, because benzos are scheduled at a lower level than the Analog Act covers, benzo analogs remain totally legal and can be sold as bulk chemicals. So if I want a valium, I need to see a doctor who may or may not send me to a psychiatrist who may or may not first have me checked out by a therapist (who all need to be paid and all have the right to shrug, not write the prescription, and get paid anyways) before I go to a registered pharmacy for the privilege of buying it. But if I want a huge bag of phenazepam (a potent Soviet-bloc benzo), I just go here. Of course, I will have to check a box saying that it won't be used for human consumption, but it's still legalish. And the best part? No age limit. Because it's for my chemistry set, and it's important that children learn chemistry to compete in the world economy. They can also get practice using their digital scale, because a dose of phenazepam is just 2 milligrams! I'll be honest, I don't know if there are any lobbyists involved here, just a loophole so weird it would keep Nixon up at night if he weren't permanently hitting the big snooze button in the sky.
But what if you want something less quasi-legal and more. . .say. . .something you can buy on Amazon.
Phenibut is considered a nutritional supplement (no, I really don't have any idea why) available at many healthfood stores. Not the kinds with hippies and six types of tea tree oil, but the type with two walls full of protein powders and products named to evoke the image of well-veined testicles. It was designed to replace another vitamin-aisle drug that actually did have a strong claim to belong there: GHB. See, GHB is a hormone naturally produced by your body (let's call it "god's date rape drug") that causes sedation but a whole lot of other crazy effects--one of which is increasing production of human growth hormone leading to muscle formation. Now, GHB is a bit of atypical sedative because it acts on the GABA-B receptor as well as the GABA-A receptor that our friends booze and benzos target. This accounts for it's unique capacity to cause amnesia when combined with high-dose alcohol. Now, as far as I know, Phenibut does not increase growth hormone but it does tag GABA-B. It has some weird features. First, it takes about 2 hours to kick in but it lasts a really long time. Second, on it's own it can work pretty well on anxiety but it is really not strong enough to deliver euphoria on it's own: that's why most recreational users tend to drink with it. It is probably the most effective OTC sleep aid available ever, and can be quite habit forming when used for this purpose. And lastly, if taken for long enough at Stallone doses it causes a withdrawal syndrome similar to GHB, which is not known to be fatal but can apparently involve seizures, "brain zaps", and make you want to die.
Kava on the other hand rightfully belongs on the shelves of healthfood stores, next to the bran fiber and the placenta extract. But the real scam is that, despite the fact that a culture was based around the use of kava as an intoxicant for hundreds of years, the kava capsules at Whole Foods might as well contain eraser shavings. To get the real thing you have to go online and buy the powder, which tastes like clean dirt (yes, you heard me) and will numb your mouth like nothing you have ever experienced. It's a hell of a strange way to circumvent the pharmaceutical monopoly, but sometimes people do things just because they can. Or, because they hate doctors, or hate lying to doctors, or hate being labelled for life with preexisting conditions. There's always that. I can't tell the story of the weird capitalist cowboys that brought real kava to Americans better than others already have (it kind of reminds me of the Five Hour Energy story), but I have to give them mad kudos for dodging the prohibitionist machinery thus far.
I was going to go deeper into nutritional-supplement lobbying politics, Mormon conspiracies, and weave that all into a larger narrative about the pharmaceutical industry via the modern snake oil Neurontin, but. . .well, maybe the Mormon faith should be off limits, right? Next post will be about Neurontin, "euphoric events", and assessment of drug abuse liability. But I'm afraid that it's Benadryl o'clock. . .
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