Physical and metal impairment, and euphoria are mainly to what I was referring. In certain ways, alcohol is more dangerous as it can be consumed in such quantities that it kills you...pot can not. Pot can also be smoked from a bong, which if I am not mistaken, removes the smoke making less harmful than cigarettes. I can't really attest to the that as I don't do "the pot" (heheh I'm so not hip), and even if it is harmful in certain ways, it doesn't matter. The side effects are similar in terms of scope is more what I meant...it isn't as hard a high as something like cocaine. It is more "like" the high gotten from alcohol. Stronger slightly I would wager...but not by as significant a degree as heroin or amphetamines.

Nearly identical was probably a bad choice of words.

Realllllly slow vid - why make the title's so long? Still, I have the attention span of a hamster on amphetamines.

*ban

go peddle amphetamines somewhere else.

>> ^Constitutional_Patriot:
Cramer looks a little terrified there.. what's up with that eh?


The amphetamines must be wearing off.

I hate Conservatives. They're so ignorant and stupid.... especially when they're log cabin black/homosexual people. And by the way, I'd just like to thank the federal government for it's lower-schedule Amphetamine classification. Adderall is a wonderful drug to give children and believe me, 10 MG feels great for over 5 hours!

"One of my greatest desires is to see individuals, like you, fulfill their purpose in life. I hope, in these few days, that I can, in some way, inspire you in this life-long pursuit." - LakitaGarth.com

Chogster,
I didn't have time to watch it either, but I did anyway. This is a tough one. I'll try to keep it brief, but that may be hard.

On vitamins and minerals;
If you eat a healthy balanced diet (raise hands please)you get all the vitamins and minerals you need. That's SO not the case in many undeveloped countries, as they rarely eat balanced diets. Taking extra water soluble vitamins, i.e. Vit C, will not hurt you, but it will give you expensive urine. Taking extra fat soluble vitamins can be outright dangerous. Vit A is hepatotoxic in high doses. I recall seeing a patient with end stage liver cirrhosis from chronic cod-liver oil (rich in Vit A) ingestion (how someone can get addicted to that is beyond me.)

There is little credible evidence to prove "extra" amounts of vitamins, above what your body really needs, is of any benefit to your health. Selenium supplementation has been associated with decreased prostate cancer. (So has rapid turnover of spermatozoa and it's more fun than taking selenium.)

The problem with "natural supplements" is several fold. (1) They are still chemicals and, therefore, are not easily differentiated from standard pharmaceuticals, many of which come from plants as well. (2) There is VERY lax quality control in the production of many of these drugs. Assays on potency have shown up to a 100 fold difference between brands that supposedly have the same amount of drug in one pill. (3)Taken in excess, drugs like ephedra are dangerous. It's amphetamine. It will give you a boost in energy, but it also may give you a hypertensive crisis or a fatal arrhythmia.

Medicine is science, and like any scientific endeavor, the proof is in the pudding. There are very few credible studies that demonstrate much benefit to "natural supplements." One speaker in the video, Jim Turner, laments that some of these drugs fall victim to "systematic cause and effect mentality" of the pharmaceutical companies and their "huge, expensive studies." That statement is intellectually bankrupt and I don't think I have to point that out. It takes huge expensive studies to achieve the power of analysis necessary to detect a benefit a drug might have on a relatively rare condition. Say for instance, a drug reduces by 50% the incidence of a complication that happens only once in a thousand patients. You will need to enroll thousands and thousands of patients to reach a power of analysis that will approach statistical significance. It takes, on average, almost a billion dollars to get a typical pharmaceutical drug from synthesis to the US market and that's, in part, due to the rigorous process the FDA requires.

On antidepressants;
Eating right, getting enough sleep, regular exercise and playing in the sunshine are as effective as marketed antidepressants. The side effect of "activation" of SSRIs has been understated. Patients with bipolar illness, rather than typical depression, can experience mania or hypomania, with increased anxiety, racing thoughts and insomnia. That's not what a depressed person needs. While not proven, my personal opinion is that this heightened sense of anxiety may play a possible role in the risk of suicide. Please remember, mentally ill people can hide their illness well. Unforeseen suicides are not uncommon and it's easy to pin the blame on a new medicine, or some other unrelated factor.

I told you it would be difficult for me to be brief. I've practiced for 25 years now.
(1) The FDA is NOT suppressing effective therapies.
(2) All drugs, natural supplements included, should undergo systematic randomized prospective studies to assess their efficacy before being labeled as effective (sadly, that's not always the case)
(3) The drug companies are shamelessly pandering to the public and downplaying side-effects. They have been successful in creating a herd mentality in the U.S. of "I don't feel right, I need a drug." Direct advertising to the public should be BANNED.

Stereotypical PSA exaggeration, of course.

Paul Erdos is proof that not all amphetamine abusers are bad.

From http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/camp-campaign

Are you shocked yet? Relax, the camp is fake, but the campaign is real.

Last week YouTube popped up a new video for Camp Okutta, a children’s adventure camp just outside of Toronto. It opens with a promising young camp counselor, with a group of scared kids…

The counselor throws a stone onto a patch of grass. Nothing happens. He throws another. A mine explodes. The video is scary, at first you think it could be a real camp.

Fortunately, the camp does not exist.

Canoe.ca says “A Canadian charity is hoping to bring home the plight of war-affected children with a provocative new campaign that asks Canadians to picture their own children shooting AK-47s and walking across minefields.”

At the end, the video directs viewers to the camp’s website, which goes into more detail about what campers will experience. Children who are homesick or afraid are fed amphetamines and a “rudimentary mixture of cocaine and gunpowder.” On good days, they eat plain rice or scraps of food left behind by the camp’s leaders.

The campaign is meant to draw attention to the estimated 250,000 child soldiers worldwide, War Child Canada founder Samantha Nutt said. “What we were trying to do was to really bring the issue home to North Americans in a new and creative way that would ask the question, ‘If this was a Canadian context and these were Canadian kids, what would our reaction be?”’ she said.

“We accept it as part of life in other parts of the world, and yet it is totally abhorrent and totally unacceptable.”

Nutt described the YouTube video and Camp Okutta website as “100 per cent based in reality,” from the images of children detonating mines, to the use of AK-47s, which are considered the weapon of choice for child soldiers because “they’re lightweight and so easy to use,” she said.

After the first night the video had 5,000 viewers and is since up to over 20,000. Shows you just how well viral marketing works these days.

What do you expect when the judge is Jerry Garcia?

Seriously though, the cop is totally overreacting. It's still a crime, but a little pot (or a lot) isn't going to kill you. It's not like they laced his burger with PCP or amphetamines. Drugs are bad, mmmkay?

"I picked a helluva week to stop smoking/sniffing glue/taking amphetamines"

This is one of my favorite episodes to mock...I don't know why they didn't just go full-bore and put her on amphetamines or something of that sort. It just kind of insults the audience when you find out she's addicted to caffeine for Christ's sake.

The MLB and the Players' Union only have themselves to blame for the controversy; they could've hammered out a testing agreement decades ago, but didn't. Since there was no rule on the books, what Bonds got away with is to the letter, if not the spirit, of the rules. No asterisk necessary.

MLB only started testing for amphetamines (or "greenies", which players pop to get them through the long, grueling season) last year, and those have been around in baseball much, much longer than steroids have.

"Here at the Le Car test track, our frogs put these shorts through the most grueling maneuvers, as well as putting our driver's tolerance for amphetamines to the test..Thank you Roche Pharmaceuticals, for frying two legs with one skillet, and opening up your test facilities, to the Euro-diz, dizzy...shiz-nizzy......."

basically, yes, though it's a matter of perspective.

People seem to forget that by FAR the most dangerous and abused drug is alcohol. It does all of the bad things they claim that "hard drugs" do, and yet we ignore it all the time.

Yes, there are idiots our there that abuse amphetamines, just as there are idiots that abuse anything. As for screwing up communities, like most of the War On (some) Drugs, most of the problem is the fact that it's illegal and gangs/etc get involved.

Is it "addictive"? Yes, but no more than many other things people use all the time. Is it damaging if you abuse it? Yes, but so is everything else. I think it may surprise you how many people use such drugs - they are all around you, yet you don't see it because they are not idiots about it.

As for desoxin, my point was it's not "The Worlds most dangerous drug", as it's used therapeutically with a long history. It's nowhere close. Don't believe the propaganda. In the 80s it was "crack", now it's "meth". The name has changed, but the propaganda is the same.

/and by the way, morphine should be sold easily, for much the same reasons. Making it unregulated like it is now just forces it to the dangerous black market, and doesn't stop it's use.

BBC link...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6474053.stm


CURRENT DRUG CLASSIFICATION

Class A

Cocaine/crack
Heroin
Ecstasy
LSD
Magic mushrooms
Crystal meth (pending)

Class A/B

Amphetamines

Class C

Cannabis
Ketamine