3rd Family Member in 2 Years Just Had a Stroke...

And that's just my family, never mind all my friends and acquaintances who have had random serious heart problems & strokes under age 50.  I'm sure it's not COVID-related though.  Couldn't be.  

🤦🏻‍♀🇺🇲☣

What the Stars Say About YOU: A Rabbi's Take on Astrology

Random post, but:  I like this guy's take on the Zodiac signs.  I always thought of my sign as, shall we say, one of the more cocky/douche-y ones.  But the way he explains it makes it seem more well-rounded & likeable.  And I'm here for it.  (No, it's not Scorpio).  🦂🙅🏻‍♀

I took an (expensive-ass) astrology class back in the day but don't put any real stock into it as a science or anything.  Certainly wouldn't base my big life decisions on it.  But it's fun to think about in the way that Tarot cards or other New Age-y things can be in small doses.  I gravitate toward disciplines with neat, clear-cut categories like the 4 elements, the 4 seasons, 12 Zodiac signs, 8 planets (plus Pluto!), 7 chakras & so on.  Don't ask me why... probably something to do with my OCD-riddled brain.  So if that's your thing smoke a doob & check it out, ma'an.  If nothing else, homie Jacobson has a super calming voice that's nice to meditate or doze off to.  💤

Since I can't embed the playlist, here's a screenshot.  And here's the link.

...& a less conventional As(s)trology chart.  🍑

To My Worldwide Readers:

Shout out to my readers in Singapore, the Philippines & other countries with drug policies more psychopathic than even the United States.  I see you.  It's incredibly humbling that you consider my little blog a source of reliable drug information/entertainment, but I hope you'll continue seeking out a variety of sources for your drug info.  PubMed, Google Scholar, the Harm Reduction Journal at BioMedCentral & Erowid.org are all great resources.  If your gov't has them blocked, a VPN can bypass the block but choose your provider carefully to ensure privacy & security.  Stay up to date on nationwide & local laws so you know the legality and risks of what you're researching.  

Please be careful with your online & real-life OPSEC & consider moving somewhere more welcoming so your life isn't at risk or controlled by authoritarian tyrants.  NOBODY deserves to be beaten, killed or locked in prison for non-violent drug possession or dealing.  I know I complain a lot about our draconian drug laws in the U.S. but I can't imagine what it would be like to have to fear public caning(!!!) or being hunted down and shot in the street every time I ingested my daily dose of a non-prescribed medicine. That degree of belligerence, prejudice & sadism is beyond my level of comprehension.

Filipino citizens protest extrajudicial killings of drug users under Rodrigo Duterte

And for any smart asses wondering, no: that fear wouldn't deter me from using drugs in the 1st place.  My quality of life is just as important as the quantity of my years & I have none without the meds. I have 0 shame or regret because I harm no one.  So far, not even myself (22 years & counting).  If healthcare was affordable & accessible and the dosage of meds I needed was consistently available without having to jump through unbelievable (like, honestly I'd laugh if it wasn't happening to me because it sounds unreal) flaming hoops to obtain it, I wouldn't have to go this route.  But that's not the case so here we are.

It is quite possible to use drugs responsibly even in a prohibitionist hellscape without medical oversight, but you must be vigilant: of addiction, of adulteration, of all the bad things the government propagandists warned you about.  Because despite the overblown scaremongering, there IS some truth buried in the stereotypes & cliches, even if most of the danger comes from prohibition itself.  But those dangers are a medical issue, not a legal or political one.  Lawmakers, cops, religious zealots, corporate media, hysterical parents with no medical background & career politicians should have zero role in drug policy, the abortion issue or any other medical issue.  Those things should be left to scientists, doctors, nurses, specialists in their respective fields & others with relevant degrees & experience.  And even they must be vigilant to keep their personal moral beliefs OUT of it because these are issues of public health, not subjective morality. 

None of us is free until we're all free.  Drug use is a victimless act so long as consenting adult drug users make informed, thoughtful choices such as not driving intoxicated or exposing their children to drugs.  In no universe should the penalties for a "crime" be worse than the social effects of the crime itself.  Suicide is not a crime and if a person wants to kill themselves with drugs, that is their choice.  If someone wants to alter their consciousness with drugs, it's THEIR brain and body to do with as they please.  Taking their freedom or their very life for doing so is the real crime.  

The only person you control is YOU.  If you don't like drugs, don't consume them & leave the rest of us alone.  Better yet, create a society that people don't feel forced to drown their sorrows with hard drugs in.  That's where your power ends.  R.I.P. to everyone who died at the hands of these ruthless, punitive government thugs as well as all the precious people killed by the secondary effects of prohibition (cartel violence, drug adulteration, death in prison for minor drug offenses, etc).  Your lives MATTERED & you won't be forgotten.  The only thing tyrants like Duterte, Nixon, the Reagans, Jair Bolsonaro, Uhuru Kenyatta & every Singaporean president to sign off on drug executions will be remembered for is murdering their own citizens.  That and their dark, savage hearts.   

Vigil for intellectually disabled Indian-Malaysian man executed for drug trafficking in Singapore

[Review] - Star Stvff: Red Hecate Kratom

Vendor:  Star Stvff
Location:  Tyler, TX
Items:  Itravil, kratom, cannabis, misc. Rx meds.
Rating:  4.85 of 5 stars
Website:  shternshtopn.blogspot.com

Because car insurance is coming due this month (boo!) I only had enough extra dough for a small splurge this time around.  So I decided to pick up a batch of Star Stvff's Red Hecate kratom, which was only $20 for 15 grams compared to their much higher prices for pain pills.  Red Hecate is described as "A warm, hypnotic red strain that washes away anxiety & psychic tension with its soothing effects."  Yes please.  (I realllly wanted to snatch up that Super Skunk or Chocolate Thai but it'll have to wait.  Hopefully no other greedy gus gets to it first).

Hecate (Εκάτη), Goddess of the Underworld and daughter of Perses & Asteria, is the ruler of the night, of magic, witchcraft, the moon & knowledge of herbs/poisonous plants.  After a trial with this potent & tranquilizing strain of kratom, I'd say it's a fitting name. 🪄 🌖 🌿

15g Red-Vein Kratom

I stick to red-vein strains as the others are way too jittery & make my heart pound without exception--I've never had a white or green-vein kratom strain that didn't.  I much prefer the opioid-like effects of reds.  While they don't have photos for all the strains on the website, Star Stvff assures me that their kratom strains are the actual correct colors and are dried using the proper process to create the corresponding effects, i.e. a "red-vein" isn't a bright green powder, etc.  This matters because, contrary to popular belief, it's not the vein color that determines the effects but the drying method.  Drying method changes the final color of the powder too, either leaving it a bright green hue ("white/green-vein" strains) or turning it various shades of brown ranging from light-medium brown ("red-veins") to deep chocolate ("Bentuangie").  So if you get a so-called 'red-vein' strain that's bright green in color, it's not being marketed correctly & will likely feel more speedy like a green or white.  (That's if you can tell any difference between the colors--not everyone can).

I received my pack 3 business days after ordering which was damn good considering it's the post-holiday season & weather has been shitty.  It comes in a stealthy but plain envelope with a taped & sealed Mylar bag inside just like the weed I got last time.  Therein lies the kratom.  Just for fun I throw the bag on the kitchen scale to see if it's a full 15g and lo and behold it's 18.6g counting the bag (which weighs 1.6 g on its own)!  So a tiny bit overweight.  

Lovely chocolate brown powder

The product is medium-dark brown, finely-ground & smells like Play-Doh.  Yummo.  I drink my kratom as a tea with the grounds left in, usually chased with plain water because I'm gangsta like that.  (I have a cast iron stomach and have learned to hold my breath/not taste things as I'm chugging, though there is a bitter aftertaste).  No measuring of the dosage with kratom--I just throw in a couple spoonfuls and drink until I've had enough.  Not recommended for obvious safety reasons but my tolerance is relatively high & I'm a slow sipper.  

It doesn't take much to start feeling that familiar 7-hydroxymitragynine warmth & itch.  I keep sipping a bit longer until I get the wobbles which I haven't had in ages.  Woops.  Time to lie down.  Needless to say this is a potent sample, maybe the strongest I've had since 2017?  In fact it's taking me back to the Golden Era (2016-2017) of Reddit vendors when Canopy's Red Hulu & Red Maeng Da were king... old heads know what I'm talkin' about.  Nothing else stands out besides the potency which is overwhelming tbh.  I end up taking a Zofran for nausea & feel much better but yikes.  So much for that "cast iron stomach".  Maybe I need to re-evaluate my habit of not measuring doses.   😶

Future trials are much more pleasant with smaller doses & a fuller stomach.  The description on the website is 100% accurate:  Red Hecate IS amazing for pain relief & evening use and washes away the day's tension--just don't overdo it.  I'd recommend it to anyone who loves classic opioid-like effects in their kratom as opposed to strains that feel more like a caffeine rush, i.e. green- and white-veins.  Of course everyone's different & reacts uniquely to each strain so it may blow you out of the water or be a dud.  Only 1 way to find out, just learn from my mistake & start with a conservative dose.  I'm currently a daily kratom user and wasn't expecting that.

Overall I give Star Stvff's Red Hecate kratom 4.85 of 5 stars for potency, shipping time, weight & accuracy of product description.  You can definitely find cheaper kratom out there but you aren't likely to find anything stronger in this year of our lord, 2024.  Treat yo'self.  

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Truer Words...

 "I don't get along with self-help bookworms
Had a ring of 'em around me and they all took turns.
With looks of concern while taking what they could get
Some parasitic bloated tick opportunistic BULLSHIT."


Sage Francis feat. Andy K. -- I Trusted You

Captagon, Take Me Away

There's a new (read: old) drug threat allegedly turning already-seething Middle Eastern men into Hulking supersoldiers, used by both ISIS and Hamas in their recent brutal attack on Israeli music festival-goers.  It's called fenethylline, brand name Captagon, media name "Jihadi Nightmare Drug." This amphetamine-type stimulant has got Western journalists' panties in a major twist.  Let's try to deconstruct this terrorist-fueling murder pill in the most dry & boring way possible, shall we?   


Fenethylline Farmacology

Captagon--a member of the cathinone family along with khat & mephedrone, was commercially produced and sold until the 1980s, when it was banned due to fears of its 'highly addictive nature'.  Prior to this it was prescribed as a MILDER amphetamine alternative for kids with ADHD, then called "hyperkinetic disorder of childhood", as well as narcolepsy & depression--the exact same conditions Adderall and other amphetamines are prescribed for today.  Captagon has the benefit of not increasing blood pressure/heart rate as much as the amphetamines, yet for some inexplicable reason it was chucked into Schedule I in 1981 despite low rates of abuse.  Today Syria produces the bulk of the Earth's supply at around 80%. 

Well these look legit. 🙄  "Captagon" pills sold on the black market.

Exotic = Dangerous?

Opioid Rx limits for cancer patients in S. America

Different stimulants (and drugs in general) are legal & prescribed in different countries.  In the stimulant department, the U.S. has Adderall, Ritalin & Benzedrex while Mexico has clobenzorex (no relation to Benzedrex), Mazindol & fenproporex.  The U.S. historically had very liberal opioid prescribing practices and kratom is currently available OTC in most states with NO federal age requirements to purchase, but in Argentina it's banned entirely & opioids can only be prescribed for 10 days consecutively... even in cancer patients.  In the UK it's customary for patients getting endoscopies and colonoscopies to do so without sedation--a practice that makes most Americans shudder.  Who's right and who's wrong, and who decides? 

And just look what drugs we've chosen to fully legalize:  alcohol & tobacco, two of the most carcinogenic, chronically damaging substances in existence.  Alcohol's one of only a handful of substances that can cause fatal withdrawals & the ONLY recreational substance that causes mental retardation and a whole "syndrome" (FASD) in fetuses.  It's a Group 1 Carcinogen that causes around 13 types of cancer as well as a unique form of dementia and of course, liver damage that can be fatal.

Tobacco was known as far back as 1987 to be as hard to quit as heroin, amphetamine & cocaine.  That's to say nothing of its toxicity to the cardiovascular system, lungs & its potential emerging role in causing schizophrenia.  It also causes a number of deadly cancers including cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, lung, pancreas, colon, bladder & cervix among others.  And that's not even touching on all of our Rx drugs that have been recalled or withdrawn from the market over the years:  fenfluramine (the "fen" in Fen-Phen); Vioxx, Darvocet, phenylpropanolamine, Zelnorm & many, many more. 

Alcohol & tobacco are Group 1 Carcinogens: the most dangerous kind.

Today amphetamine, methamphetamine (brand name: Desoxyn), phenmetrazine, benzphetamine, cocaine & methylphenidate are Schedule II Controlled Substances in the U.S:  tightly controlled but deemed to have legit medical uses. Compare these to Cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms & peyote--all Schedule I federally and deemed to have zero medical use and dangerous addictive or toxic potential.  So keep that in mind when judging the drugs other countries decide to keep legal, k?  

But back to Captagon:  Today, many counterfeit drugs and drug combos are sold as this highly sought-after pill, including amphetamine + caffeine or, less often, meth + ephedrine.  This can result in unpredictable effects since these drugs are obviously not Captagon and drug combos are risky in & of themselves.  When asked to describe Captagon's effects, one soldier described it thusly:

"You feel physically fit.  And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them." 

Yikes.  But wait.  Amphetamine-type stimulants have been used in warfare going back to WWII when Japanese kamikazes took large doses of IV meth before suicide missions to give them that extra "oomph," and Hitler's Western Front soldiers received over 35 million methamphetamine pills (brand name: Pervitin) from April to July 1940.  The Fuhrer himself was known to start the day with a hefty injection of meth plus oxycodone and other various and sundry drugs/supplements, as did JFK.

Benzedrine tablets sample (copyright Museum of Health Care)

And can't forget the Americans, who were sucking on Benzedrine inhalers around this time and popping "pep pills" aplenty.  Benzedrine sulfate tablets were issued by military doctors to soldiers, military pilots and any civilian housewife with a headache who wanted to lose a few stubborn pounds.  Indeed, America in the 1940s and '50s had a prescription speed problem on par with the Rx opioid problem of the late '90s/early 2000s. There were even injectable methedrine (methamphetamine) vials of liquid that could be purchased OTC!  Of course the pendulum swung the other way and it was all banned, creating the crystal meth market we have today.  Because of course it was.  But for a while these drugs were considered miraculous and harmless.

 

OTC Benzedrine inhalers containing amphetamine-soaked cotton rods

Illicit Captagon is now Syria's #1 export, far exceeding all legal exports with hundreds of millions of pills being seized at ports in Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy & others.  High-quality Captagon pills sell for up to $14 while low-quality ones go for about a buck--quite the difference.  Captagon has been seized as far West as France & Germany and as far East as Malaysia.    

What It All Means

I guess the big question is:  so fucking what?  How is this drug any different than the hundreds of other black market drugs that've come and gone throughout the years, rising and falling in popularity due to supply & demand and the changing trends?  If it's less likely to cause cardiovascular damage than regular amphetamine, doesn't that make it LESS dangerous to the user overall? 

Once again, the only real problem is its prohibition and the fact that criminals with evil intentions control the profits and supply.  If governments hadn't put it in Schedule I in the '80s, Syrian warlords wouldn't be getting rich from it now and tainting the supply with meth, ephedrine and god knows what else.  And it likely wouldn't be as available to already-angry ISIS/Hamas soldiers looking for an excuse to get fucked up and rape/pillage.

All the effort & money wasted by Western intelligence tracking this stupid cause is just that--a waste.  There would BE no black market in which drugs funded terrorism if they were legalized & regulated by said governments.  But these 3-letter agencies have to justify their existence somehow, so we keep doing it the stupid way year after year, decade after decade while people suffer and die needlessly.  Fine, just don't expect us to swallow your endless flood of yellow journalism & fear-mongering about the latest demon drug or its Satanic peddlers.  We're sick to death of hearing it--aren't you tired of reporting it, merely swapping out the names of drugs while keeping the headlines & bodies of the story the same? 

Let me help you out:  Drugs exist in every corner of the globe, some you've never heard of, but they mostly belong to one of a handful of categories:  stimulant/empathogen, depressant, hallucinogen/dissociative, opioid, deliriant or cannabinoid.  People take them for a variety of reasons but when they abuse them it's usually to escape environmental problems or situations in which they feel helpless and hopeless:  poverty, stress at work/home/community, traumatic memories, untreated mental illness or physical pain/illness.  If you live in a war torn region like the Middle East, it's not hard to see why one might wanna alter or escape that reality unless you're just being intentionally dense.  With stimulants like Captagon or Adderall in the States, people often take them as performance-enhancers or to work longer hours (yay capitalism!)  Not exactly shocking that soldiers would use them on the battlefields to increase alertness & precision.  Our soldiers did for a long, long time & it wasn't a scandal.

I was just searchin' for an image of Rx Captagon, Google.  Control yourself.