Comment by dynm

I agree that the gin->mean, whisky->emotional, etc, is all bunk. But I'm still convinced there's a link between alcohol and violence. If nothing else, the lowered cognitive function and reduced inhibition would mean more opportunity to be angry, and less self control.

Like, a drunk person might misinterpret someone accidentally bumping into them as aggression. And would be less likely to suppress the urge to respond in kind.

You are probably right in your assertion regarding alcohol, however I suspect it may be possible that there are other compounds unique to various flavors of liquor which may influence the overall effects in various ways. These compounds may not be perceptably psychoactive on their own.

The same goes for strains of marijuana, beyond THC and CBD other psychoactive compounds are inconsistently present with uncertain psychoactive effects (if any). Further there may be complex nonlinear interactions (e.g. two compounds produce no effect but adding a third can change the experience, particularly if you consider reaction products from combustion).

In any case the uncertainty is good for marketing.

> One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks.

These are the theories mentioned in the article referenced in the comment you replied to. It might be the meth itself. Gin, whiskey, and tequila are different colors, and it's not because they are compositionally identical.

> Look at the moral panic over Four Loko. The same cocktail of ethanol and caffeine has been consumed as amaro and coffee by rich women since time immemorial. Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.

You’re not entirely wrong, but a splash of liqueur into a small cup of coffee is pretty different from dissolving caffeine pills in tall boys of malt liquor.

> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible. The stories themselves create the cultural preconditions around encouraging more self-destructive behavior among users. <

What about krokodile?

Did they separate the culture link from a potential genetic link? Maybe the association exists in a culture because it is a real effect, it just differs between groups.

> It’s all ethanol

I used to believe that. It seemed obvious to me and a phd chemist friend of mine that - as you say - the different reputations were a cultural/social creation. The drink itself was just different amounts of ethanol.

Then one day that chemist friend of mine decided to get a bottle of Hornitos Reposado. We usually preferred a good bourbon or weird herbal stuff[1]. We drank most of the bottle, but that wasn't unusual for us at the time[2]. We were intending on a normal evening of video games. MTG, and/or VtES. Instead... we ended up spending the evening having the stupidest, most aggressive, pointless, childish, "macho" argument of our lives. It was shockingly out of character for us. The amount of ethanol consumption wasn't large, and we drank it at a normal rate. Both of us had been a LOT drunker in the past. The only significant difference was our unusual choice of tequila.

While I agree that the cultural preconceptions are probably responsible for most of the effect, there is at least some truth behind the reputations of different types of alcoholic beverages, because the actual drink isn't just ethanol. The different brewing/distilling/aging processes produce different amounts congeners[3][4]; their psychological effects might be small, but small effects amplified through social mechanisms are how "culture" is created.

> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible.

Hear, hear!

> moral panic over Four Loko ... amaro and coffee

Yah, people have probably started putting whisky (Irish or otherwise) in their coffee the morning after they invented the whisky. Also, you probably have to drink the entire giant can of Four Loko to get the same caffeine in a typical cup of coffee.

> Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.

It's disturbing how often this kind of bs ends up just being a fancy form of racism/sexism/${targeted_group}ism

[1] e.g. Pernod, Herbsaint, Chartreuse

[2] Yes, we were regularly drinking WAY too much. 375ml/day/person minimum. WAY WAY WAY too much...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congener_%28beverages%29 "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)."

[4] Also, the different amounts of sugars means different effects on bloodsugar/insulin/etc. The resulting effects are probably complicated and difficult to explain, but their contribution to the different reputations might be larger than we expect.

Yeah it's all very straightforward when you look at usage patterns. Often meth abusers will smoke multiple points across a day (a point = 100mg). As a result they stay awake for days straight, don't eat, and often will engage in enormously risky sexual behavior (this is the dirty secret of AIDS btw...it arose in the context of the "party and play" gay subculture where people would smoke meth or other drugs and have sex for hours and hours and hours straight with many, many different partners...but I digress)

The infamous "meth mouth"? That's caused by not sleeping and by just overall letting one's life go to shit. Amphetamines do suppress saliva production, so they aren't great for teeth, but it's 95% the lack of sleep and other associated behavior patterns.

I've taken pharmaceutical adderall (which is 75% d-amp and 25% l-amp btw), and pharmaceutical dextroamphetamine (100% d-amp), and illicit, presumably cartel-sourced, and presumably very pure d-methamphetamine. When taken orally, d-meth is, in my opinion, simply a superior ADHD drug (it is much more dopaminergic than amphetamine, yet causes less peripheral stimulation, so you get a much more favorable ratio of positive cognitive effects to negative peripheral effects).

However, the moment someone starts taking (especially smoking, since the RoA of any drug makes a massive difference in addiction, doubly so for meth) hundreds of milligrams, it becomes a completely different drug. It becomes super deleterious to health through the sleep deprivation and risky behaviors alone. Furthermore meth has a unique property that amphetamine apparently doesn't, which is that it can become directly neurotoxic in large doses (meth has some serotonin release, like a much, much weaker form of MDMA, whereas amphetamine has virtually none, so it's possible that that's the mechanism). This is why in the research literature there's a lot about methamphetamine "neurotoxicity", but the papers conveniently omit that if taking oral doses comparable to what's given for ADHD, it's not neurotoxic whatsoever (and frankly may be neuroprotective, especially against traumatic brain injury).

So yeah, your analogy to Adderall is spot on. I've often seen people derisively refer to Adderall or other amphetamines by saying "we're basically giving kids meth!". Which is true in a sense, except it's really the other way around: meth is really not very different from Adderall. If someone were to smoke 100mg+ of amphetamine, their body would break down the same way it does in a meth user, except possibly for the direct neurotoxicity effect I mentioned.

This "new meth" thing seems like a PR push by government contractors. It's redolent of the UK "skunk" scare (it's not the pot you used to smoke, mommies and daddies - it's special pot that will definitely make your children think they can fly and jump out of windows, and become prostitutes to pay for more.)

> When you take the normal dose (10-30mg) it can cause some euphoria but for the most part it helps you focus, gives energy (makes you more happy, talkative.) But when it is abused (60+mg) it can cause serious psychosis with all kinds of mental side effects.

Background: I'm prescribed 20mg/day of extended release Adderall, via a legitimate ADHD diagnosis. If we take the article's "meth is 2x as potent as Adderall" statement at face value, that would mean I'm taking 10mg equivalent of meth per day.

Now, since part of the reason I take this medication is to remember to take my medication (a joke, yes, but not without its kernel of truth!), I've accidentally double dosed myself before. I've also done the same previously when I was prescribed instant release Adderall. In either case, I've never experienced anything like a euphoric high, but I have experienced the kind of "uselessly driven"/tweaker sort of side of it. And, let me tell you, I do not like it when that happens. Although I'm in no hurry to find out, I honestly find it hard to imagine what the high must actually be like in order for people to voluntarily subject themselves to the negative effects of this drug. And, I don't even exceed the therapeutic range when this happens!

I wish there was some way to actually understand why people abuse meth without actually smoking meth myself, which I'm unwilling to do, for obvious reasons.

Another factor is just sleep deprivation. It's been shown that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of mania, hallucinations and psychosis. You force someone to stay awake long enough, they will inevitably act crazy. Amphetamine users tend to go on binges and stay awake for days. Keep taking drugs until they pass out from exhaustion.

Maybe it doesn't cause permanent psychosis but people do become psychotic due to it and need to spend the night cooling off in the psych ED.

You are severely underestimating the power of these drugs. Anyways, most people do and usually find out the hard way.

you might enjoy this then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

> I'm not a chemist, but would we expect both isomers to break down under heat the same way? Or is the l-meth potentially being converted to something different than d-meth when smoked?

Methamphetamine is very, very stable. It stays as methamphetamine when it's vaporized, regardless of whether we're talking d-meth or l-meth.

> There doesn't seem to be debate that P2P processes create l-meth and d-meth, and that l-meth was less common in earlier versions.

Not quite. p2p done naively creates racemic meth, yes, but the modern methods, which have been used for years, purify that to enantiopure d-methamphetamine. They do this by bubbling d-tartaric acid through the racemic mixture, which separates the two enantiomers thus yielding the desired pure d-meth.

Furthermore, historically racemic meth was much more common. AFAIK the infamous "shake and bake" technique creates racemic meth. I do know that there is a pseudofed route that yields d-meth, but I think it's different than shake and bake. So don't quote me on this paragraph, but at a minimum we know that in the last several years, almost all meth seized in the US is highly pure/potent d-methamphetamine. There is less l-meth than ever.

> I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.

On the contrary, the evidence is so weak that we literally can discard that l-meth is involved. First of all l-meth is better studied than you say. I would bet to approve the l-methamphetamine-based vics vapo inhaler they had to at least do animal models with large amounts of pure l-meth.

Second of all, and this is what blows the giant hole in your argument, there is no surge of l-meth. There is less l-meth than there has ever been in the history of methamphetamine.

Thirdly - this ties into the second point - you seem to thikn that getting racemic methamphetamine is something particular to the p2p method. It's not. As a general rule, synthesis of any compound yields the racemic version (if we're talking a compound with two enantiomers). This is definitely true for meth, where almost every method yields racemic meth. AFAIK there's a pseudoephedrine route that yields straight d-meth, but like I mentioned above the current state of the art is just to do a big p2p synth route and then separate out the d enantiomer specifically.

OP is debunking the same claim you are.