bbc.co.uk

Watched this interesting documentary with George Lamb about the legal high industry, their makeup and their effects (long term and short term).

Thought I'd share it with you guys. My own couple of experiences with legal highs (pills) were a number of years ago and both were pretty bad, ending with me being sick.

I imagine things have moved on. Manufacturers of them realising that if they change the chemical make up of an illegal drug by even one molecule effectively makes them legal.

There is an interesting interview with a drug analyst who said that because no one knows the long term effects of these new legal highs, he would be happier if people took drugs like MDMA because at least there is 20 years research on this.

A section on psychonauts was interesting too.

What are people's views and experiences in this area?

Take Meph, still legal

Really good programme but I thought the video at the end, the one he showed the psyconaut was just a scare tactic. For starters the video looked like it was made in the 70's or 80s and also had a air of government shock video about it.

mephedrone is wicked stuff like.

This is simply not true - MDMA was 1st synthesised in 1912 by Merk, not some backstreet chemist. A brief history can be foubnf here: en.wikipedia.org

did you also see where it said over the next 65 years his research was almost forgotten about

when it started to become popular as a street drug no-one really knew 100% of what the damage was going to be which is my point, everyone who took pills in the 80's and 90's really were guinea pigs.

Least with pills in the 90s majority had mdma tooo much greed now and you didn't need to be shoving 6 or 7 down as they were really strong now i ve given up hope of finding sweets as there just full of pip shit if it were nt for that bastard in n. z making bzp crap proper pills might be still bout today its all bout the plant feeder now (meph) lol stock up though as there soon start banning this i should think

Great documentary, really really interesting.

I've tried some legal stuff in the past but it was all totally useless, and after watching that I'd rather stick with the devil I know.

BTW - George Lamb is such a fittie! lol

He didnt do a huge amount of research on it past the actual synthesis and maybe a few tests on mice, rats and possibly a few humans.

MDMA was not properly tested until the 50s and even then again not a huge amount of research was done so little was known about it, obviously since then a lot more research was done on it.

Anyone whos really interested in this sort of thing should read Alexander Shulgins's books PiHKAL and TiHKAL for starters although there are a lot more better books out there and Shulgin only touches on MDMA a little throughout his research its still very interesting and there is a lot more on the research chemicals commonly used today most of which were discovered by him in the first place.

The first part of the books are his own autobiography, the second part the autobiography of his wife and the third part of the book a joint autobiography of their exploits and research over the years. The last part of the book is basically a chemistry book with all the synthesis's he carried out over the years in a step by step format including MDMA. However dispite containing this information the "recipes" he provides are probably above the average reader and thus only for informative purposes only and since publishing much simpler synthesis's using easier to obtain chemicals have been produced by other people although again they are still well above the skill level of most readers (including myself), Hell I only understand a fraction of what hes written in the second part of those books although its still pretty interesting to look at!

Merck in this context is a company, not a person.

any of you also had a fucked up bladder, like you wanna pee every five seconds but you cant ? also the fact you cant sleep for 24h :S Im happier with mdma but the market is dry at the moment :o(

hmmmm this was really interesting. very informative. x