Were you able to do anything about your employer? Like wrongful termination or discrimination?

7. Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug induced toxicity. A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana’s LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.

Source: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, “In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition” (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988,
p. 56-57. http://druglibrary.net/olsen/MEDICAL/YOUNG/young4.html

That description from a DEA judge would seem more like a non-value to describe no toxicity; not 1000 times to become lethal. Also, DMT is produced by our bodies, just like adrenaline, and therefore hard to regulate production.

One thing I would recommend for anyone who has to take a daily dose of anything that contains APAP is an accompanying daily dose of standardized milk thistle extract (80% sylmarin). It’s a gen-yoo-wine hepatoprotective agent. (A reputable source is key. Swanson Vitamins sells, IMO, the best standardized milk thistle product. Don’t get “whole” or “full spectrum” milk thistle, ’cause it’s crap.)

You don’t need to use the massive 10-13g doses that are required to counter acute conditions like mushroom poisoning, but 500-1000mg a day really does give the liver some much-needed assistance in countering the damage caused by chronic APAP ingestion.

It’s all such a puritanically neurotic regulatory clusterfuck. “Somebody somewhere might be getting high, so we’ll just increase your liver’s toxin load to ensure that everyone knows We Do Not Approve.”

Meanwhile: the USA consumes 99% of the world’s hydrocodone (the stuff in Vicodin and Norco). Perhaps Americans are just in more pain than the rest of the world, but the fact is that Abbott Labs, Watson Pharmaceuticals, et al. make a tidy profit on every pill, whether it goes to grandma for her hip or to some Bill Burroughs wanna-be in the East Village. I estimate the companies’ true level of interest in reducing the total number of opiate prescriptions to be somewhere around zero.

pharma markets all sorts of cures and preventions for lots of stuff. 

with regards to psychedelics… i can see the plausibility in your point

I’ve undergone some of the medieval tortures mentioned by roseviolet for both migraines and post-herpetic neuralgia (excruciating pain that lasts for months, sometimes years, after a case of shingles). One spinal injection left me bedridden for five days, curled into the fetal position, sobbing uncontrollably from pain and depression (the steroid apparently went straight to my brain and kicked my neurotransmitters completely out of whack). The “pain management” specialist I was seeing was of no help and finally told me to go to the ER, where they treated me as though I were a junkie and kept asking why I was crying. Gee, doc, sorry if I’m disturbing your calm, but you might be a bit distressed too if you’d felt as though you were undergoing unanesthetized surgery for 120+ hours straight.

Getting back to pain preventing function, the PHN eventually wound up getting me illegally fired for “unexcused” work absences that were, in fact, covered under both FMLA and ADA. I pray that the asshat who canned me someday undergoes the same unassuaged torture.

When I think of cultures that have lost their ability and/or freedom to live in harmony with themselves, each other, and the idea of existence, I think of their attitudes toward the psychedelic experience as a primary cause. And by that I don’t mean “let’s party and drop some acid”. But something more akin to rolling up one’s spiritual sleeves and examining and experiencing life/existence/non without the confines of preconceptions and prejudice.

Perhaps I’m a bit cynical regarding this, but why would for-profit pharmas ever want to cure anything? Wouldn’t it be better to maintain treatment indefinitely? Why not actually create, perpetuate, or worsen conditions that would compel us to seek treatments?

It’s likely because psychedelics could be more effective than most pharmaceuticals that they’ll continue to be illegal in most of the world. That they’re non-addictive seems enough to already eliminate their viability in for-profit enterprises. That they’re safer seems moot.

The L50 lethal dose to effective dose ratio is over 1000 times, that means THC would kill 50 of the test subjects when administrated over 1000 times the dose needed to get the desired effect.

BTW, the L50 lethal dose for LSD seems to be ∞ (infinity).  Same for DMT.  Seems that the stronger the trip, the safer it is!
Ain’t that something?

It takes a bit of time and effort, but it’s an accessible option for most.

I’d even offer that there’s a degree of satisfaction in the undermining of such a highly engineered corruption.

In the case of Vicodin et al., it could be far more than mere insult added to injury.

There have been reports of inadvertent overdose with OxyContin after health care practitioners crushed the drug in order to administer it to patients who could not swallow the tablet.

Tampering with tablets is also popular among individuals seeking OxyContin’s euphoric properties. By crushing and snorting, or dissolving and injecting, individuals received a much higher and immediate dose of oxycodone than they would if they swallowed the tablet whole.

The reformulated version of OxyContin is intended to prevent immediate access to the full dose of oxycodone via cutting, chewing, or breaking the tablet. Attempts to dissolve the tablets in liquid result in a gummy substance that cannot be drawn up into a syringe or injected. The new formulation of OxyContin reduces the likelihood that this drug will be misused and abused, although it can not completely eliminate this possibility.

The new formulation can still be abused or misused and result in overdose simply by ingesting or administering it in higher than recommended doses. Health care professionals need to remind their patients of the risks associated with using OxyContin not-as-directed.

This story does seem to suggest an alarming gap in terms of doctor/patient communication and follow up(if your doctor only knows that you died because a journalist calls him up to ask about it, there is a problem) though. That’s the part that really surprised me. 

The therapeutic index of opioids is pretty broad; they are actually quite safe as drugs go. Moreover, they’re the only thing that’s effective for severe pain.  Stirring up a moral panic about prescription drug abuse serves only to convert the War on Drugs into a War on Pain Relief. Most of the support of the “assisted suicide” movement comes from people who have seen loved ones doomed to months or years of intractable pain because doctors cannot prescribe effective doses of pain medications – the police know better than the physicians what patients need. Hysteria that “prescription drugs are worse than marijuana” will not help you get marijuana legalized; it will only condemn more patients to unneccessary ain and suffering.

And meds like Lortab and Vicodin are unspeakable fallout from the drug war. Unlike opioids, the acetaminophen that is in those has a very narrow therapeutic index – even a mild overdose condemns a patient to an ugly death from liver failure. But because of that, these compound formulations are deemed as “less risk of abuse” and considerably more widely prescribed than safer pain relievers. There are a lot of medical emergencies resulting from accidental and deliberate overdoses of Vicodin or Tylenol #3. This idea that “pain relievers are all right only as long as an effective dose runs a significant risk of poisoning the patient” is truly perverse and must be resisted.

Challenge accepted
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