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there’s so much to sneer at here, but the style is so long and rambling it’s almost like someone with a meth problem wrote it
But you might draw the line of "not good drugs" at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased "therapeutically dosing" as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it's literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it's significantly more metabolically demanding.
Alexander Shulgin has never quite stopped spinning in his grave, but the RPMs have noticeably increased
chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)
So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is "mind expanding", and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,
—and since we’ve asspulled the idea that all substituted amphetamines are equivalent to meth in spite of all pharmacological research, that means there’s no reason you shouldn’t be biohacking by snorting coke. you know, I think the author of this rant might be severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time
You may have seen Carl Hart's admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a neuroscientist smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won't rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like "are you okay?" and "I'm just here if you need anything."
how dare the people in my life patronize me with their concern and support when I tell them I’m doing fucking meth
I’m not gonna watch Carl’s video cause it sounds boring as shit, but I am gonna point out the fucking obvious: no, you aren’t qualified to freely control the dosage, frequency, and route of administration of your own heroin, regardless of your academic credentials. managing the dependency and tolerance profile for high-risk and (let’s be real) low reward shit like meth and coke yourself is extremely difficult in ways that education doesn’t fix, and what in the fuck is even the point of it? you’re just biohacking yourself into becoming the kind of asshole who acts like he’s on coke all the time