I guess it's not just the West Coast that's run flat out of LSD. Here's an interesting item from a Dallas/Fort Worth site:

A freshman University of Houston student is in jail, accused of dealing millions of dollars worth of LSD from his dorm room....

Police sources say it was from his dorm room where he was allegedly selling hundreds of thousands of hits – that's drops of liquid L.S.D.

LSD was a drug that was prominent during the 1970s and early 80s.

You got that, folks? LSD really didn't attain prominence until the 1970s. Meanwhile, I can see finding it very difficult to complete my studies with thousands of hits - that's drops of liquid L.S.D., people - sitting around in my dorm room. Of course, it'll be even more difficult to complete studies from jail...

Erowid recently posted a scan of a lovely historical artifact: a flier from back when MDMA was legal, and info was being passed around about its potential therapeutic use. This particular flier, provenance apparently unknown (Erowid simply describes it as a "1980 flyer"), describes various techniques for leading MDMA sessions, and ends with the always accurate reminder: "There are no casual experiments." Amen.

As a regular reader of the Wired science blogs I don't know how I missed this one. Apparently those intrepid stoners over at Harvard Medical School just can't be bothered to quit hitting the bong during fMRI scans...

Not that I've ever considered this myself, but Wired News is reporting on some fairly ill effects from long term nitrous oxide use. For instance, one dude in Taiwan who used some indeterminate amount of nitrous every day for ten years got himself into all kinds of trouble:

In November 2003, the Taiwanese man's sense of touch became so faint that he could barely handle chopsticks. Even worse: he felt sensations similar to electrical shocks in his neck and legs.

At Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Chia-Yi Lin, Kwong-Kum Liao, and their colleagues examined their patient with an MRI scan. Part of his spinal column had degenerated. That was no surprise since laughing gas interferes with the production of myelin, a fatty coating that surrounds nerves and helps them send signals.

In the January 2007 issue of Clinical Toxicology, Lin and Liao explained that the gas inactivates vitamin B12 and the junkie was already running low on that nutrient. Daily doses of the gas for ten years worsened his dietary deficiency, leading to the severe neurological damage.

Doesn't that just sound delightful? But wait - there's more!

The following September, a correspondence to the Medical Journal of Australia described a 20-year-old woman that developed paralysis in her legs after inhaling ten to twenty canisters of whipped cream propellant per day for almost two weeks....

Blood tests showed that her kidneys were failing, she was anemic, and her vitamin B12 was very low. With such a complicated set of symptoms, the doctors were unsure of what was wrong. As they sat their patient up to take a spinal fluid sample, her heart rate slowed to a deadly crawl. Responding quickly, the physicians revived the imperiled woman with CPR and transferred her to an intensive care unit.

Michaela Cartner, a doctor at Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, said in her report that the patient recovered partially after receiving doses of vitamin B12 and the amino acid methionine. Both of those chemicals helped to rebuild the damaged myelin coating around her nerve fibers. Seven months later, and after an aggressive rehabilitation program, the unfortunate girl could walk again.

I know no one out there has any daily nitrous experience to contradict these medical reports... right? Right??? Ahem, all I mean to say is, wow, hey, look out, kids! I'll spare you the obligatory "no laughing matter" joke, but just this once.

Hey, what do you know? The Supreme Court kind of actually gets it with regard to the disparities in cocaine sentencing laws:

The Supreme Court on Monday said judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.

By a 7-2 vote, the court said that a 15-year sentence given to Derrick Kimbrough, a black veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.

"In making that determination, the judge may consider the disparity between the guidelines' treatment of crack and powder cocaine offenses," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion.

In other news, the skies above Washington, D.C., opened up with glorious rainbows, unicorns appeared on the White House lawn prancing and flitting about, and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin was seen smoking a pipe as he strolled down the sidewalk next to the Reflecting Pool, muttering to no one in particular, "It's about God damn time."

Sorting through some old material in my archives, I came across this Baudelaire quote that I believe Gnat originally forwarded to me... it kind of lights the way for me, in a strange fashion:

"One must be forever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will.'"

Speaking of old-school drug geekery, while I was in New York I met the author of WhiteWhale, a blog on psychedelic neuroscience. In the past few months there have been some interesting posts on the binding sites of LSD, unique serotonin sites in the claustrum and choroid plexus, as well as the effects of LSD on larval growth? Awesome...

In a recent online discussion, there was some talk about different grades of methamphetamine and when and where they were used, and what they were like, and someone wrote the following, which I have permission to adapt here.

Methamphetamine is one specific organic molecule, amphetamine is another specific organic molecule. The effects of the two are very similar, but the difference is easily noticeable if you do both of them on various occasions. The differences are probably mostly due to different time-course of activity (meth lasts longer) and different ratios of activity on the serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine systems.*

It is probably usually possible to tell the difference between the high of methamphetamine and amphetamine, all other things being equal, and possibly even all other things not being equal.

As others have mentioned, the quality of street drugs is very variable. I have heard there's a big difference in experience between crappy street meth and good street meth, and also a big difference in experience between good street meth and pharmaceutical-grade meth. In principle it is not all that hard for unofficial chemists to make extremely high quality products that should be essentially equivalent to pharmaceutical grade, but I suspect this doesn't happen very often. So most users can probably tell the difference between different levels of quality if they pay attention. In some cases it might be a big difference; I suspect that in some cases, the impurities in street meth make the high much more jittery and aggressive. The infamous usenet chemist POPi once wrote a bizarre, semi-coded message about the chemistry and subjective effects of various impurities, including ASCII art of anatomically-correct stick figures representing the different molecules and isomers. It was something to behold, that's for sure.

As a totally separate question, methamphetamine or amphetamine or most other drugs are usually used in the form called the "salt", as opposed to the "free base". The organic molecule by itself is the free base, since it is basic i.e. alkaline. (This is true for a whole class of nitrogen-containing organic molecules called alkaloids, which includes most, but not all, psychoactive drugs.) Some of these free base forms are liquid or non-water-soluble solids. Methamphetamine, amphetamine and MDMA are non-water-soluble liquids in free base form, so all of them are commonly formed into a salt by reacting with some kind of acid (not the drug). The most common acids would be hydrochloric acid (HCl) or sulfuric acid (H2SO4) but others will be used in various cases due to availability or other idiosyncratic reasons. So, for example, most of the prescription amphetamine is in the form of the sulfate (i.e. the salt with sulfuric acid.) Most street meth or amphetamine or MDMA will probably be the HCl salt (which would usually be called the hydrochloride).

Writer, freak & outspoken crazy person Gregory Pleshaw penned an insightful essay for his self-published opus, The Collapse of Time. A few years back, when living in San Francisco's seedy Mission District, he became a man possessed, a man on a mission:

Last night, I crossed the line. I did the dirty deed. I just said no to just saying no, and I went out and bought myself a $10 rock of crack. It had been a long time coming. I wanted a rock of my very own, one I didn't have to share, one I could do all by myself in the kitchen, so I could experience the deviant thrill of it all, all by my lonesome.

Screw all this "is it spiritual or is it chemical?" talk -- It's not often that someone with such obvious (and recognized) literary skill dives to the bottom and lives to tell the tale. This one is up there with old Billy-boy Burroughs and Hunter S.

A heart warming tale of a boy and his first LSD bender. The unusual thing here is where it takes him. Funny, i think i had exactly the opposite reaction...