40,000 hits of X. Damned, that explains why I can’t find it ANYWHERE, cause this dude ate all of it.
All of which leads me to the sad conclusion that I’ll never be very good at taking drugs because in order to take drugs, you need to acquire drugs, and in order acquire drugs, you need to have friends, and I’m terribly introverted.
Plus I never learned the secret handshakes that the real drug takers know. I once ate dinner with someone who couldn’t pay for dinner, so he walked out and five minutes later came back in with money. I thought he’d gone to the ATM, but turns out he sold somebody weed. I don’t even understand how that works.
Ugh… I struggle with how we should deal with this kind of thing. It’s abundantly clear that the “war on drugs” has been a failure, and here in the states, at least, it has led to our current problems with a massive prison population. Plus, making a drug illegal has clearly given drug usage a counter-cultural cache. But at the same time, over-indulgence CAN be bad, and can lead to stuff like what happened to your friend… I think it’s just something that’s more deeply rooted in the culture of capitalism that pushes people to these extremes with regards to drug used (or alcohol, or whatever).
I am hopeful that improving mental health care, providing support for people to be able to have food and a roof over their head, and having fulfilling work that contributes a community that they feel a part of would solve most of our drug problems
I am less hopeful about the timeframe on getting to that though
Mr A didn’t just use MDMA, he had a history of polydrug use (“solvents, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine and heroin”) and was still smoking weed when he got help.<
Solvents, Mr. A? Really…
I read the 25 hits/day of MDMA and had a huge guess about what would ensue, but it got derailed once I saw “solvents” “benzos” “amphetamines” and “cocaine”…and wondered how he stayed alive with that fearsome foursome alone. Adding that he was still smoking cannabis seems highly (!) irrelevant at this point.
25 hits of MDMA, even ONCE just seems like “this guy doesn’t get it.” (Hell: 3!) The solvents, etc: ya gotta wonder whatever went wrong with this guy.
From the case report:
He eventually developed severe panic attacks, recurrent anxiety, depression, muscle rigidity (particularly at the neck and jaw levels), functional hallucinations, and paranoid ideation.<
None of us are surprised at this.
His family and before-drug-use psychiatric history were negative.<
This was a bit surprising. I suspected a recent onset of schizophrenia with paranoid auditory hallucinations and a (common) attempt to self-medicate the voices away, but nooo.
My gawd. No wonder I found it hard to find MDMA around the year 1997. This guy was taking it all. The previous “record” in the lit was 2000 hits. This guy took 40,000. I don’t think he got the preferred message from Ecstasy that we all got. Poor bastard, indeed. Mr. A: effing A!
Yea. Good point. If I used solvents with meth, coke, and benzos and I lost it and knew I wouldn’t get “it” back, I might varnish my story a bit, though I find it excruciatingly difficult to put myself in Mr. A’s shoes. So why sully the good name of MDMA?
I’ve never taken lots of MDMA, even semi-regularly, but people I know who have have had a rough time with it the following 2-3 days. Your natural serotonin levels are all out of whack. Which makes me wonder about 25 hits/day. WTF.
as a severe, self medicating adhder who mainlines caffeine weed and nicotine all day every day, this was my immediate thought. i’m also particularly fond of e but have struck a much more reasonable abuse of it than this human.
