Been reading a fascinating and quite disturbing article about the deadly new street drug nicknamed “bath salts”.

So yes, brain science. I am intrigued by this drug because its horrible effects are so strikingly like a genuine, normally occurring psychopathology. It is like snorting psychosis, and I cannot help but wonder if by understanding this drug better, we might end up understanding psychotic pathologies better.

Plus, the article has a lot of interesting information about how different drugs work that I did not know before. (That is the problem with getting one’s information by grazing rather than pursuing knowledge more systematically. )

For instance, I did not know that what an amphetamine does is that it stimulates your brain cells to release their supply of dopamine, whereas a drug like cocaine raises your dopamine levels by keeping your brain cells from re-absorbing the dopamine after it has been released via what is know as “re-uptake”.

And suddenly, I know what re-uptake is, and hence, have a clue to what the Paxil, which is an SSRI, or Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, is doing for me. It is keeping my brain cells from sucking the serotonin back into themselves quite so fast, and so it’s raising my brain’s serotonin levels in a safe and controlled way, instead of just dumping a bunch of serotonin into my system and causing a lot more problems than it solves.

So now I know more about what is happening in my brain. Keen gear.

“Bath salts” are not keen gear at all. In fact, I am not sure why anyone would take them, given what I have learned from the article so far. The title of the article is The Drug That Never Dies, and that refers to the fact that people who have taken this drug continue to be agitated, paranoid, flushed, and hallucinating for as much as two weeks after initial dose.

There is no high in the world that is worth going through the hell of violent insanity, with the real danger of you being a threat to yourself and others and sometimes in truly horrifying ways. It seems to me to be about the worst experience you could have. Totally not worth it.

So I can only assume that as information about the drug spreads, demand will dwindle rapidly. I mean, sure, there are a lot of dumb people out there who are perfectly willing to ingest all kinds of dangerous chemicals in order to get high, but even pretty stupid people will be reluctant to do a drug that will give them the worst trip possible for weeks at a time.

Even the really young ones, who often have trouble believing bad things can happen to them.

The drug actually works like taking cocaine and meth at the same time. It both stimulates the release of dopamine and blocks re-uptake, which as the article says, is like turning the faucets on full in the sink while plugging the drain. No wonder its effects are so dramatic and horrible.

And the worst part is that something about the nastiest of the ingredients in “bath salts”, a chemical called MDPV (short for methylenedioxypyrovalerone), is that it binds to the parts of the brains cells it effects, which is why its effects can lasts so long.

I feel bad for this drug’s hapless victims. I can only speculate as to what kind of long term psychological effects it has on people. Spending days or even weeks in Hell cannot be healthy for a person’s psyche. These people have gone someplace that none of us ever want to go, and have seen things none of us ever want to see.

And quite possibly, have done things they will then have to live with once they recover from the drug’s effects. I am not sure what sort of counseling you can give these people. Especially since there is a very good chance that they have permanent brain damage. Talk about a mistake you live with for the rest of your life. What a total nightmare.

So like I said before, hopefully word about this shit’s bad effects will spread amongst the recreational drugs crowd and that will curb its use. There will always be people willing to try anything, and there is nothing you can do about that. But the drug world operates like any other branch of capitalism, and drugs compete with one another for the drug user’s dollar. So as long as there are safer highs (from like, literally every other drug out there… this shit makes meth look like decaf), that will limit the damage that “bath salts” can do. Hopefully.

Not that I am exactly fully conversant in drug lore or part of that culture at all. I mean, I am on a lot of drugs, but they are all boring prescription drugs for legitimate medical purposes. None of them could be considered “recreational”. And because I am on all these drugs, and am frankly not that strongly assembled upstairs in the first place, I am kind of reluctant to mess things up any further anyhow.

Plus, I am positive I have just the kind of weak, sensitive, and escapist mindset that would make me a prone candidate for addiction. Hell, I almost got addicted to gambling, and that is not even a drug. I am just glad I figured out that I liked gambling too much before it was too late.

So for me, the world of recreational drugs is basically marked Don’t Go There. I have enough problems keeping my marbles in without sending some recreational chemical in there to mess things up. Sure, it is always possible that a good acid trip might be just what my psyche needs to clean out the crap and deal with a whole lot of unresolved emotions all at once.

But it might also leave me way crazier than before, and that is the last thing in the world I need.

So I will stick with he drugs that make me saner.

They might not be as much fun, but they are a way better idea.