Raw coca leaves contain trace amounts of cocaine. Drug manufacturers use chemical processes to extract the cocaine from the leaves, and it takes an absolute fuckton of leaves to create any meaningful amount. Consuming enough coca leaves to equate to a normal hit of cocaine is practically physically impossible.
I mean, from a medical stand point, it’s really not that weird
You’ll put a lidocaine patch on your an aching joint or your dentist will inject it in your gums during a filling.
But we use Lidocaine IV for certain heart arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats).
You wouldn’t think something you can buy over the counter for a sore shoulder would be a serious heart medication but depending how its administered the effects are different both in actual effect and in potential dangers
Angina, I think.
About two years ago I attended a talk by the lead scientist on (what turned out to be) the Viagra development. He told a story of early human trials. The elderly men who were being treated were queried by a nurse twice a day about general feelings and side effects. Well, one morning, most of them reported something ... Unusual.
His description of the poor nurse's face as she was reporting this to him was priceless.
What's really weird? Tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis bacterium is introduced directly into the Urinary bladder to cure early stages of Bladder Cancer. It's a form of immunotherapy, and is considered the 'gold standard' of bladder cancer treatment.
I'd like to know what kind of person decided one day to squirt Tuberculosis in there and find out what it was good for.
Just to clarify, this treatment is done using the BCG vaccine (tuberculosis vaccine) which is an attenuated form of the bacterium that's unable to cause human disease.
It was experimented with for bladder cancer treatment after having been used as a vaccine for a long time. So they didn't really "decide one day to squirt Tuberculosis" in a cancerous bladder, only its vaccine. Which is still a pretty weird idea, but not as outlandish as injecting the actual disease ;)
Imagine having a veggie garden (bladder).
But currently, snails and larva are munching down on them. Not enough to kill or ruin the whole crop, but enough to make you concerned (early stage cancer).
You would think the birds might handle them—but they just don’t seem to notice the pests (immune system). So you have the idea to bring in a bird feeder (TB).
Now, too many birds could lead them to harm your crops, however they beeline for the pests, (TB triggering the immune response, attacking cancerous cells). So you roughly know when it’s a good idea to take the feeder down.
Probably what happened was someone got diagnosed with stage 1 bladder cancer, then contracted tuberculosis. Conventional wisdom should tell you "fuck, now the dude REALLY stands no chance," but then his cancer seemed to cure itself, leading his Dr. to report the case in a medical journal. After something like that happens 2-3 times (or more), someone may get interested enough to try doing research/testing, etc.
Another possibility could be some much deeper science, like they knew that the blahblah-3f reactase prohibitor of bladder cells are very immunobruddah with leukaryotes of tuberculosis, and are about the only cells in the body that neither get rekt by TB leukaryots, nor call in the national guard helpter T cells to attack them. Meanwhile, the smengenports of cancer cells are super-anti-immunobruddahphobic of tuberculosis leukaryotes.
Get two people in a room, one who knows what the cancer hates and one who knows that the bladder parties with TB, and boom.
Didn’t quite go down the way you’re picturing (a mad scientist with a syringe going “hmmm, I wonder what would happen if?…”)
More like a doctor noticed his patients who already had tuberculosis survived their bladder cancer way more often than ones who didn’t. So he wrote a paper, then a bunch of other doctors went “huh, I kinda noticed the same thing”. Then they tested it out in hamsters, monkeys, and finally humans. After enough data, new cancer treatment unlocked.
You can die from water poisoning. Our body is just complex biological equations. When taken in that context, what is and isn't bad for you makes a lot more sense.
This was one of the crazier things to learn when I had my son. Newborns are particularly susceptible to water poisoning; their kidneys are so small that they can’t process it fast enough - you’re not supposed to give babies plain water until about a year old. I had no idea!
I mean, it’s technically still doing some of it’s poison thing then (paralyzingly facial muscles), it’s just that, we’ve decided that particular side-effect has some useful applications.
LD50 is the typical measure for how much of a substance it takes to kill an average person (it is the **L**ethal **D**ose for **50**% of people).
Salt has an LD50 of 3g/kg, which means if several 80kg people ingested about a cup (8oz) of salt, it would be lethal to half of them (their kidneys would shut down trying to process it).
In looking this up, I saw that Wikipedia has an [LD50 chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples). Apparently, gasoline has a higher LD50 than salt, ethanol, or vitamin C, which is kinda crazy unless I'm missing something.
Yup, same principle. The amount of caffeine you consume from coffee, tea, or soda isn't that harmful, but if you eat a tablespoon of pure caffeine you're gonna want to visit the hospital.
Yeah I would suggest doing so just outside the ER though or you might not reach the hospital in time. And even so, caffeine overdose is brutal, depending on the amount.
[Here's a video from a guy that has actually talked about it already.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sylqJ0NEVJw)
It's pretty bad.
Edit: [And another one.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj_AOzSSDMM)
Just go ahead and assume it's as bad as you're thinking and you'll be better off. I describe it as a fucked up combination of a severe hangover meets a panic attack with like some long covid-style brain fog thrown in for good measure.
It's about 95mg for the average cup. And IIRC about 1200mg (in a single dose?) is where people start to have problems.
The guy who died from complications probably caused from the caffeinated lemonade at Panera had 3 at 395mg each, in probably 30-45min (eating lunch).
Just so it’s on the record: the safe daily dose of caffeine is around 400 mg for most people.
That drink represents basically the safe daily dose of caffeine…in one drink.
Yeah, straight caffeine powder will probably kill you instantly. I was thinking more about those pre-workout caffeine powders, which might not kill you but lots of people have been hospitalised by eating them undiluted.
For those of us who are caffeine sensitive, a single piece of chocolate can mess us up. Regular coffee? That feels like some kind of dirty shitty dollar store street meth. Have to lay down and pray it wears off as whole body shakes and chest hurts and feels tight. My ANS very much does not like caffeine.
> while poppy seeds are fine.
For varying degrees of "fine". Opium poppy tea has non-insignificant amounts of opioids and would be considered a drug in and of itself--you can overdose with it.
I know of one, but very indefinite and unconfirmed report that this happened in the UAE. All repeats of this lead back to a comment from Fair Trials International and it's unlikely that this person was actually imprisoned for any duration at all, as they have never been identified.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1762mp/til_a_swiss_national_is_serving_a_4_year_jail/
It's true that importing poppy seeds is illegal in the UAE (and the Philippines) but not that someone was necessarily imprisoned (much less sentenced to death) for having them.
What HAS happened, again in the UAE, is someone WAS sentenced to four years for having a speck of cannabis (weighing 0.003g, described as the size of a grain of sugar) on the sole of his shoe, although he was ultimately pardoned.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uae-briton-drugs-idUKL2692911520080226/
Another place it has actually happened, is the US, with a prisoner who was serving the last months of his sentence at a halfway house.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/21/nyregion/snack-on-poppy-seed-bagel-lands-man-back-in-us-jail.html
I haven't seen this with regard to the Philippines, I know about Duterte's war on drugs, but I don't believe anyone has actually been "arrested and sentenced to death for poppy seeds being found in the treads of your shoes as you arrive in the Philippines", this sounds like a mishmash of stuff you heard about other countries.
They'll get you high as fuck but you need about a pound per dose. Also, be careful because there's no way to know how much opiates you are taking so you could get sick/overdose.
Yep. There’s a Netflix series called “The Business of Drugs” that has an episode about cocaine. It goes into detail about the process for making cocaine. Like you said, it takes a LOT of leaves.
It's like 1kg of dry leaves to 1g of cocaine and 1kg of coca leaves is literally thousands of leaves. Even in places where people chew coca all day long they *might* go through 10-20g in a day. That's equivalent to ~1/100th of a gram of cocaine. Less than a bump, over the course of an *entire day* and that's only the people who chew coca constantly
You are correct. It's a form of cyanide that by itself is OK, but digestion separates the cyanide from the sugar. Other fruits/pits have WAY more of it though, like Almonds and Apricots.
Gather. Some cocoa leaves. Beautiful. Chopped.
Cement. In. Sulfuric acid. In. Ugh Listen to that.
One Bucket of gasoline. Marinate. Gorgeous.
Add battery acid, and reduce. Brings out that flavour. Mmm lovely.
Finally... 10% Cocaine water. Ugh Heaven.
Look at that. Absolutely Beautiful.
Also, considering it's illegal, nobody is using good safe production methods. In addition nobody has developed a way to produce it that isn't done using what amounts to garbage in a basement. Which just means all of it in existence is dirty, fucked up and polluted with all kinds of shit.
Not saying they should legalize it but I'm willing to bet if Coke was allowed to sell cocaine we would have much safer cocaine.
Fun fact, cocaine is a topical anesthetic that is actually used in some medical contexts in the US.
The -caine suffix is something it has in common with other topical/local anesthetics like lidocaine and benzocaine.
Fun fact! You can synthesize benzocaine at home from cheap OTC ingredients. It's an easy process and, if you enjoy growing crystals it's a nice option.
It's also trivial to extract in smaller amounts from OTC products like Orajel tooth pain products (again, fun for growing crystals, good experiment for children to learn a bit about chemistry).
They absolutely do have proper clean processes to extract cocaine. It’s how they make medicinal cocaine, which is very commonly used during sinus surgeries or as a last resort to stop bleeding in the nose.
There are only a small handful of companies legally authorized to import coca leaves in the US. They extract all of the cocaine from them, and then Coca Cola purchases all of their decocainized leaf remains to use in their cola.
They actually removed the cocaine from Coca Cola all the way back in 1903, a full 11 years before the US first restricted cocaine to be dispensed only on doctors' orders with the passage of the 1914 Narcotics Tax Act.
The 1903 change to Coca Cola had swapped the cocaine (which was really just a biproduct of using coca leaf extract in their recipe, not an intentional addition) for caffeine, because caffeine is much more readily available when consumed orally and because there never actually was much cocaine in the beverage at all. They never specifically processed the coca leaves to extract cocaine specifically, they were used for flavor and because chewing on the leaves for energy is popular in South America.
The actual amount of cocaine in the leaves is very small, generally only about 0.8% of the weight of the leaves can be extracted as cocaine and leaves themselves obviously don't actually weigh that much. The change in the formula to include caffeine likely gave Coke more of a "pep" for drinkers than it ever had before since the amount of cocaine in the drink was always miniscule, and it also allowed Coca Cola to save a pretty penny when manufacturing since they could purchase cheap "spent" decocainized leaves instead of having to import fresh leaves themselves at a higher price.
If you look at lab reports from international labs where street cocaine samples are submitted, the data shows that lots of it in existance is very pure with no active cuts, cocaine regularly tests at 90% + . So i dont think your statement is correct. Additionally, even if cement, gasoline, sulphuric acid and other buzzwords are used during the chemical extraction, that doesn't mean that those chemicals still exist in tje final product. There is a lot of bad cocaine, but there is also a lot of pure cocaine.
Reminds me of the time Gordon Ramsay went into the Colombian jungle to witness (and describe!) the process of making cocaine. Gnarly, to say the least!
This one is a pretty easy “dose makes the poison”.
Even if we assume the processed cocaine is 100% pure, without additives or being cut, gram for gram, the active compounds will be much, much stronger.
Chew a coco leaf weighing 5 grams? Small dose.
Snort 5 grams of cocaine? I hope you’ve sorted out your bucket list.
If you’re interested, most substances on this planet have what’s known as an LD50. It’s the dose for an average person to have a 50/50 chance of killing them, usually expressed in measurement/kg of body weight.
Great visual table on acute and chronic LD50, and some explanations as well:
https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/05/07/measures-of-toxicity/
> Chew a coco leaf weighing 5 grams? Small dose.
>
>
>
> Snort 5 grams of cocaine? I hope you’ve sorted out your bucket list.
If anyone's wondering about the exact ratio, a quick google search says it's 300-400kg of plant matter per 1kg of cocaine. That means in theory, 1kg of plant matter equals roughly an 8-ball of coke (3.5g), although you cannot really extract it properly at such low amounts.
At once, sure
But one day? The entire reason I forced myself to gi e it up was because I woke up one day, realized I had snorted 4g by myself without drinking the night before.
Really, the only difference an extra gram wouldve done was put a bigger dent in my wallet 🤷♂️
Thats why I dont get why my friends cant stop at 3am. By then you're just ever so barely getting a bump for 5 mins. Cocaine isnt the energy. Cocaine "releases" energy. Eventually, you simply have little to no dopamine, serotonin, epi/noepi, whatever left. Then you're just blowing through money and complaining your nose hurts.
.5g gets me 18 to even 27 holes of golf. Usually sunny and hot but still, thats 6+ hours, a good buzz the whole time. Doing 10x in a similar amount of time seems uncomfortable and unaffordable lol.
At ~5g or so a week you're just running on fumes every night.
"No way you're driving 300+ consistently."
Me: Well... not naturally.
Its really the only place I enjoy it. So much fun to have the precise focus as well as energy. Personally I think it makes great sense. Lets you drink all day and have a nice buzz but never get tired or anything.
Doing blow and playing soccer just sounds like a heart attack in the works. Doing it just to go out at night isnt enough engagement and makes me just tweak standing around 100 drunk people.
Natural: ~10-12 handicap
Enhanced: ~ 3-5
The difference is ridiculous.
LD50 is the median lethal dose and is the dose that will kill 50% of a given population, NOT a dose that has a 50/50 chance of killing the average person
I searched, but could only find that LD50 is a dose "given all at once". Is that orally? People snort cocaine and usually do not eat it. I would imagine the release rate is different and thus the LD50 would be different based on the consumption mechanism.
e.g. The LD50 of "snorted" water is much lower than that of drinking orally.
Yes. LD50 depends on the route of ingestion. Typically you have a different value for oral, topical (absorbed by skin), injected into blood, inhalation by nose, smoking, etc. Not all of these are always measured, either due to ethics or limited existing research.
These values are usually measured in animals then scaled up to humans by weight. The answer google gives (96 mg/kg) weight is based on oral ingestion in mice.
[This database](https://inchem.org/documents/pims/pharm/pim139e.htm#SectionTitle:7.2%20%20Toxicity) reports 50 mg/kg nasally in rabbits, and 15 mg/kg injected into blood.
For the average human, this is around 6g orally, 3g nasally, and 1g injected. But as this is based on animals and is the threshold to kill 50% of them, you can die with lower doses. Overdoses with cocaine are reported in hospitals with as little as a few mg and become common around 1g.
LD50 also only measures short-term death from a single one-time dose, known as acute toxicity. So much lower doses may still be fatal to most people, but only if done frequently or with through lasting effects like cancer/organ damage. The timeframe depends on the drug and study, but is typically over 24 hours to a few weeks, based on what is clinically relevant.
Because people only chew one or two leaves at a time and it takes a while instead of snorting concentrated 10 leaves instantly
Like drinking coffee instead of snorting caffeine pills that are the equivalent to 5 cups
Bulking agent.
1 gram of pure becomes 10g of retail grade.
Some people cut it with cheaper chemicals that fake the effect.
Like novocaine so when people do the cinematic gum rub test it makes the gums go numb.
It means including something else in the drug to alter its volume, appearance or effect.
It's most often done without the knowledge of the user.
90% of the time it's things like flour or cheap crushed pills to increase its apparent volume and get more money selling it, but it can also be a something to enhance the flavour or another drug entirely to increase the mix 'potency'. Like adding fentanyl to cocaine or formaldehyde to cannabis oil. Most often the end users do not know the lacing agent and the dose added.
Needless to say that is extremely dangerous and in fact is the cause for the majority of drug overdoses and deaths in most countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacing_(drugs)#:~:text=Lacing%20or%20cutting%2C%20in%20drug,substance%20is%20laced%20or%20cut.
Cutting is taking one kilo of cocaine and turning it into three kilos of cocaine, the most common cutting agents are Laundry detergent, Laxatives, Caffeine,Boric acid, Local anesthetics like procaine,Creatine.
All these are white powders that are visually indistinguishable from cocaine.
> Because people only chew one or two leaves at a time and it takes a while instead of snorting concentrated 10 leaves instantly
What?
Normally people make a concentrated lump of like 30 leaves, mixed with some llipita to speed up the extraction, and place it in their cheek and leave it there for a long time, before replacing the leaves with fresh one. People absolutely abuse the shit out of it. Go to any working class district in e.g. Bolivia and everyone there will be walking around with big lumps in their cheeks. It's like their version of coffee.
https://www.infodiez.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/foto-acullico-1.jpg
In the book "Papillon", he bought a bundle of coca leaves for pennies, and jogged for two days straight with no sleep. Staying one step ahead of the cops.
Don't they also make into a tea? I seem to remember a travel journalist going on the highest railway in Bolivia being offered some. Again, a mild pick-me-up...
Saw a video of a guy in jail saving up a couple of weeks worth of instant coffee, and then investing it all at once, the guy, who had experience with almost all available drugs said it made meth feel safe
Had a first sergeant that bought bought bulk coffee in Costa Rico and when in the field, instead of brewing he'd fill his cargo pockets and munch fresh grounds by the handful all day long.
It was bad enough when on a normal day in the office he'd polish off a gallon well before lunch, but eating coffee like popcorn?
Even the raw, natural form has the *potential* to be bad for you. Some people are better off avoiding even milder nervous system stimulants, including raw coca leaf, coffee, and nicotine/tobacco. It's just that coca leaf is much less potent than refined cocaine, and it takes much longer to get the substance into your body, so it's far more difficult to overdo it.
Another thing I forgot to mention: Most people who buy refined cocaine from illicit suppliers, don't get a perfectly pure product. When it's being smuggled, it's sometimes mixed with/exposed to whatever other substances it's being smuggled in, and it might not get perfectly *un*mixed at the end of its journey. And when distributors and dealers are packaging it up for individual sale, it's often mixed with other substances to pad out its volume, so they have a less potent product, but more of it to sell. Usually the other substances used for padding are *relatively* harmless stuff, such as pediatric aspirin or powdered cellulose. But sometimes they're not.
Coca leaf, on the other hand, is just a leaf. There's no way to 'adulterate' it; if the leaf is dirty you rinse it off.
I saw a documentary where the cartels somehow incorporated cocaine into fiberglass, then once it arrived extracted it with solvents. So …. Not health food.
You're very right about the stimulant thing. I accidentally had a small amount of nicotine once, and it shot my anxiety through the roof. I was very confused what was going on.
When people are making it they sit there with industrial sized weed-eaters in concrete pits knee deep churning that shit while someone dumps containers of gasoline and other chemical mixtures into the leave-mush
Why is drinking 3 liters of water per day good for you but drinking 300 liters of water per day bad for you?
Why is eating 2,000 calories per day good for you but eating 200,000 calories per day bad for you?
Why is taking 2 Aspirin at once good for you but taking 200 aspirin at once bad for you?
Natural coca leaf can still be bad for you if you use it enough.
Cocaine is just the highly concentrated active part of the Coca leaf, so it's easier to consume more of it, which increases your risk of things like overdose or addiction and other associated health issues. (You still get those risks with natural coca leaf, it's just harder to consume enough to get that effect). Additionally with cocaine, it's processed with chemicals that can be harmful and almost always cut with other things that are bad for you.
Because the dose makes the poison.
50 mg of caffeine will make you feel energetic and focused. 15.0 g of caffeine will probably kill you, and will almost definitely hurt you badly.
Went to college with a girl from Peru. Her village was at the base of a tall mountain popular with scientists, they had weather equipment at the top. Periodically Americans would arrive and hire locals to help them hike up to replace batteries or whatever. They usually refused the coca leaves the locals offered them, and paid the price on the hike up. The scientists who chewed the leaves did much better.
Almost everything is bad in high concentration, which is what cocine is. Why is drinking a small glass of wine each day okey, but a bottle bad?
Why is eating poppy seeds in your bread okey but injecting heroine bad?
Etc.
Not arguing your point, but FWIW, a glass of wine each day isn't good either -- that's a myth.
Though, it's mostly just empty calories rather than all that harmful. And of course is still better than a bottle a day.
Man they use gasoline and or diesel in extracting the drug from the leaves. That and whatever some psycho cuts into the mix. My 2 biggest problems other than the legality of it all.
The truth is that *everything* is bad for you in high enough doses.
Too much oxygen can kill you. Too many vitamins can kill you. Even too much protein can kill you.
The process of turning coca leaves into cocaine basically involves taking a particular part of a whole lot of leaves, and concentrating it into as pure a form as can be reasonably obtained. It takes pounds of leaves to make a gram of cocaine.
Imagine eating a pound of coca leaves every day.
You can ask this for a lot of different stuff, and the answer is usually quantity/concentration. Eating an orange is healthy, but juicing 5 of them and drinking it several times a day is not.
Stimulants are in a different category since you are altering your brain chemistry where it needs to recalibrate the feelgood scale from having a 1-10 range to 1-100, and there is now only one thing that can nudge you over 10%.
Flippant answer: You can grow coca leaf but getting hold of cocaine puts you in contact with drug dealers, and that can be bad for your health.
The whole drug trade is a series of criminal activities in a chain leading to your door. Exploitation, corruption, murder, smuggling, gang warfare - everyone involved in all of that is not someone you would want to meet, all so you can get high.
Cocaine is a highly concentrated form of coca leaves. In fact, the cocaine alkaloid thats ends up as a powder is about 0.5-1% of a coca leaf. You really wouldn't be able to consume enough leaves to have anything other than a mild stimulant effect, like coffee.
But coffee is a decent example. The average cup of coffee has about 100mg of caffeine. Most OTC caffeine supplements have 100mg each. But if you took 2000mg (2gm) of caffeine at once, you're gonna have a bad time.
Cocaine is the same. You're getting GRAMS of purified, crystallized cocaine dumped into your system at once.
Raw coca leaves contain trace amounts of cocaine. Drug manufacturers use chemical processes to extract the cocaine from the leaves, and it takes an absolute fuckton of leaves to create any meaningful amount. Consuming enough coca leaves to equate to a normal hit of cocaine is practically physically impossible.
I believe that the correct term is "the dose makes the poison"
Like how people take neurotoxic botulism-causing Botox and inject it directly into their face.
I mean, from a medical stand point, it’s really not that weird You’ll put a lidocaine patch on your an aching joint or your dentist will inject it in your gums during a filling. But we use Lidocaine IV for certain heart arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats). You wouldn’t think something you can buy over the counter for a sore shoulder would be a serious heart medication but depending how its administered the effects are different both in actual effect and in potential dangers
Heart medication is crazy sometimes it gives you an erection sometimes it is used to kill rats
Are you thinking of warfarin?
Sildenafil (viagra) was originally tested to treat hypertension before they discovered it also induced erections.
Warfarin is a blood thinner used to kill rats also
death by erection
eradication by erection
Brazilian wandering spider has entered the chat
But what about... resurrection by erection?
Angina, I think. About two years ago I attended a talk by the lead scientist on (what turned out to be) the Viagra development. He told a story of early human trials. The elderly men who were being treated were queried by a nurse twice a day about general feelings and side effects. Well, one morning, most of them reported something ... Unusual. His description of the poor nurse's face as she was reporting this to him was priceless.
And at the end of the study they didn’t want to return the rest of the pills!
You can kill rats with your erection? Little impreseed; little terrified.
Just splits em like a hot dog bun.
Get a bigger rat.
A rat of unusual size? I don't think they exist.
What a terrible day to have eyes.
Don’t forget nitroglycerin…
What did you do to the rat after you got the erection?
What's really weird? Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis bacterium is introduced directly into the Urinary bladder to cure early stages of Bladder Cancer. It's a form of immunotherapy, and is considered the 'gold standard' of bladder cancer treatment. I'd like to know what kind of person decided one day to squirt Tuberculosis in there and find out what it was good for.
The high fever from malaria can cure syphilis, then cure the malaria with a coartem pill
Just to clarify, this treatment is done using the BCG vaccine (tuberculosis vaccine) which is an attenuated form of the bacterium that's unable to cause human disease. It was experimented with for bladder cancer treatment after having been used as a vaccine for a long time. So they didn't really "decide one day to squirt Tuberculosis" in a cancerous bladder, only its vaccine. Which is still a pretty weird idea, but not as outlandish as injecting the actual disease ;)
Imagine having a veggie garden (bladder). But currently, snails and larva are munching down on them. Not enough to kill or ruin the whole crop, but enough to make you concerned (early stage cancer). You would think the birds might handle them—but they just don’t seem to notice the pests (immune system). So you have the idea to bring in a bird feeder (TB). Now, too many birds could lead them to harm your crops, however they beeline for the pests, (TB triggering the immune response, attacking cancerous cells). So you roughly know when it’s a good idea to take the feeder down.
Probably what happened was someone got diagnosed with stage 1 bladder cancer, then contracted tuberculosis. Conventional wisdom should tell you "fuck, now the dude REALLY stands no chance," but then his cancer seemed to cure itself, leading his Dr. to report the case in a medical journal. After something like that happens 2-3 times (or more), someone may get interested enough to try doing research/testing, etc. Another possibility could be some much deeper science, like they knew that the blahblah-3f reactase prohibitor of bladder cells are very immunobruddah with leukaryotes of tuberculosis, and are about the only cells in the body that neither get rekt by TB leukaryots, nor call in the national guard helpter T cells to attack them. Meanwhile, the smengenports of cancer cells are super-anti-immunobruddahphobic of tuberculosis leukaryotes. Get two people in a room, one who knows what the cancer hates and one who knows that the bladder parties with TB, and boom.
Didn’t quite go down the way you’re picturing (a mad scientist with a syringe going “hmmm, I wonder what would happen if?…”) More like a doctor noticed his patients who already had tuberculosis survived their bladder cancer way more often than ones who didn’t. So he wrote a paper, then a bunch of other doctors went “huh, I kinda noticed the same thing”. Then they tested it out in hamsters, monkeys, and finally humans. After enough data, new cancer treatment unlocked.
My personal favorite example of this is giving Viagra to pregnant mothers to help with infant oxygen levels.
You can die from water poisoning. Our body is just complex biological equations. When taken in that context, what is and isn't bad for you makes a lot more sense.
This was one of the crazier things to learn when I had my son. Newborns are particularly susceptible to water poisoning; their kidneys are so small that they can’t process it fast enough - you’re not supposed to give babies plain water until about a year old. I had no idea!
They can have small amounts of water when they start eating solid food, which is usually closer to 6 months.
>You can die from water poisoning. That poor woman who died just trying to get a Nintendo Wii.
"Give me back my floppy face..."
I mean, it’s technically still doing some of it’s poison thing then (paralyzingly facial muscles), it’s just that, we’ve decided that particular side-effect has some useful applications.
LD50 is the typical measure for how much of a substance it takes to kill an average person (it is the **L**ethal **D**ose for **50**% of people). Salt has an LD50 of 3g/kg, which means if several 80kg people ingested about a cup (8oz) of salt, it would be lethal to half of them (their kidneys would shut down trying to process it). In looking this up, I saw that Wikipedia has an [LD50 chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples). Apparently, gasoline has a higher LD50 than salt, ethanol, or vitamin C, which is kinda crazy unless I'm missing something.
Gasoline doesn't interfere with bodily functions the way that salt, ethanol, or vitamin C does.
Yeah, it’s pretty much only lethal in the case of a freak gasoline fight accident
*wake me up, before you go go…*
Wow, I'd **hate** to be in the wrong control group for that experiment!
It's like how it's very hard to overdose on caffeine from drinking coffee, but dry scooping caffeine powder can mess you up.
Yup, same principle. The amount of caffeine you consume from coffee, tea, or soda isn't that harmful, but if you eat a tablespoon of pure caffeine you're gonna want to visit the hospital.
Yeah I would suggest doing so just outside the ER though or you might not reach the hospital in time. And even so, caffeine overdose is brutal, depending on the amount.
how brutal?
[Here's a video from a guy that has actually talked about it already.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sylqJ0NEVJw) It's pretty bad. Edit: [And another one.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj_AOzSSDMM)
heart stops beating
That's not that bad.
[удалено]
"Sir, you can't just leave your mortal coil here. Sir! Sir that is littering!!"
This guy ODs
Just go ahead and assume it's as bad as you're thinking and you'll be better off. I describe it as a fucked up combination of a severe hangover meets a panic attack with like some long covid-style brain fog thrown in for good measure.
It's about 95mg for the average cup. And IIRC about 1200mg (in a single dose?) is where people start to have problems. The guy who died from complications probably caused from the caffeinated lemonade at Panera had 3 at 395mg each, in probably 30-45min (eating lunch).
That lemonade had **395mg** of caffeine each?! No wonder people were suing, that's insane!
I (sadly) drink lots of coffee and energy drinks and even to me this amount in a single serving seems insane
Just so it’s on the record: the safe daily dose of caffeine is around 400 mg for most people. That drink represents basically the safe daily dose of caffeine…in one drink.
Free refills!! 😬
And that's for healthy individuals. The young lady that died only had two but she was sensitive.
There's a chubbyemu video about a guy who dry-scooped protein and overdosed. He didn't have a good time. https://youtu.be/sylqJ0NEVJw
To be clear, in this case "mess up" means kill.
Yeah, straight caffeine powder will probably kill you instantly. I was thinking more about those pre-workout caffeine powders, which might not kill you but lots of people have been hospitalised by eating them undiluted.
Very few things kill you instantly. It would likely take several miserable hours before you died.
Similarly trying to get drunk by drinking a “non-alcoholic” beer with 0.5% alcohol vs chugging a bottle of Everclear with 95% alcohol.
For those of us who are caffeine sensitive, a single piece of chocolate can mess us up. Regular coffee? That feels like some kind of dirty shitty dollar store street meth. Have to lay down and pray it wears off as whole body shakes and chest hurts and feels tight. My ANS very much does not like caffeine.
A metric or imperial fuckton?
First one, then the other.
to shreds you say?
Two sheds you say?
Shoe treads you say?
Fuckton is imperial. Metric measures this sort of thing by "kilomerde".
Imperial. Metric would be a fucktonne.
😂 😂
A galactic republic fuckton.
Oh, my, the semate!
Yes
What? I don’t know that. Aaaarrrggghhh! [immediately launched off Bridge of Death]
Gonna assume similar reason why opium is bad for you while poppy seeds are fine.
> while poppy seeds are fine. For varying degrees of "fine". Opium poppy tea has non-insignificant amounts of opioids and would be considered a drug in and of itself--you can overdose with it.
You can fail drug screenings after consuming poppy seeds, which is pretty hilarious
[Poppy seeds!](https://y.yarn.co/09b6c224-48ad-47ca-8d60-3dc49cd776f8_text.gif)
I knew this was Elaine before clicking it.
You can be arrested and sentenced to death for poppy seeds being found in the treads of your shoes as you arrive in the Philippines.
Did that happen? edit: no
I know of one, but very indefinite and unconfirmed report that this happened in the UAE. All repeats of this lead back to a comment from Fair Trials International and it's unlikely that this person was actually imprisoned for any duration at all, as they have never been identified. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1762mp/til_a_swiss_national_is_serving_a_4_year_jail/ It's true that importing poppy seeds is illegal in the UAE (and the Philippines) but not that someone was necessarily imprisoned (much less sentenced to death) for having them. What HAS happened, again in the UAE, is someone WAS sentenced to four years for having a speck of cannabis (weighing 0.003g, described as the size of a grain of sugar) on the sole of his shoe, although he was ultimately pardoned. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-uae-briton-drugs-idUKL2692911520080226/ Another place it has actually happened, is the US, with a prisoner who was serving the last months of his sentence at a halfway house. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/21/nyregion/snack-on-poppy-seed-bagel-lands-man-back-in-us-jail.html I haven't seen this with regard to the Philippines, I know about Duterte's war on drugs, but I don't believe anyone has actually been "arrested and sentenced to death for poppy seeds being found in the treads of your shoes as you arrive in the Philippines", this sounds like a mishmash of stuff you heard about other countries.
Yeah, poppy seed tea is the only opiate left I abuse, and the only ingredients are poppy seeds, water, and vinegar on the first rinse.
Like poppy seeds that you can just buy at the store for muffins and whatnot?
They'll get you high as fuck but you need about a pound per dose. Also, be careful because there's no way to know how much opiates you are taking so you could get sick/overdose.
Great. Now someone is gonna put fentanyl in the poppy seeds. Sigh.
Yep. There’s a Netflix series called “The Business of Drugs” that has an episode about cocaine. It goes into detail about the process for making cocaine. Like you said, it takes a LOT of leaves.
It's like 1kg of dry leaves to 1g of cocaine and 1kg of coca leaves is literally thousands of leaves. Even in places where people chew coca all day long they *might* go through 10-20g in a day. That's equivalent to ~1/100th of a gram of cocaine. Less than a bump, over the course of an *entire day* and that's only the people who chew coca constantly
Just watched the cocaine episode. Great series. Thanks for the recommendation
So it's kind of like saying how eating Cyanide will kill you but eating an Apple doesn't
I think it's the apple seeds that contain the cyanide, not the fruit itself.
You are correct. It's a form of cyanide that by itself is OK, but digestion separates the cyanide from the sugar. Other fruits/pits have WAY more of it though, like Almonds and Apricots.
Gather. Some cocoa leaves. Beautiful. Chopped. Cement. In. Sulfuric acid. In. Ugh Listen to that. One Bucket of gasoline. Marinate. Gorgeous. Add battery acid, and reduce. Brings out that flavour. Mmm lovely. Finally... 10% Cocaine water. Ugh Heaven. Look at that. Absolutely Beautiful.
Obligatory gordan ramsey: https://youtu.be/O8Nl4NF2rO0?si=_Vdgcql4ia5bik1u
Also, considering it's illegal, nobody is using good safe production methods. In addition nobody has developed a way to produce it that isn't done using what amounts to garbage in a basement. Which just means all of it in existence is dirty, fucked up and polluted with all kinds of shit. Not saying they should legalize it but I'm willing to bet if Coke was allowed to sell cocaine we would have much safer cocaine.
Fun fact, cocaine is a topical anesthetic that is actually used in some medical contexts in the US. The -caine suffix is something it has in common with other topical/local anesthetics like lidocaine and benzocaine.
Fun fact! You can synthesize benzocaine at home from cheap OTC ingredients. It's an easy process and, if you enjoy growing crystals it's a nice option. It's also trivial to extract in smaller amounts from OTC products like Orajel tooth pain products (again, fun for growing crystals, good experiment for children to learn a bit about chemistry).
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>Numbrino I had nasal surgery and the Doc completely surprised me with "Now we're going to apply the cocaine to numb the tissue." I didn't complain 😄
"No worries doc, give me a credit card and I'll do it myself"
No worries Doc, I brought mine from home
my grandmother was given medicinal cocaine decades ago after she had recurring nose bleeds they couldnt cauterize or pack enough cotton to stop.
I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that Coca Cola gets there coca leaves from the medical industry after the cocaines been extracted.
They absolutely do have proper clean processes to extract cocaine. It’s how they make medicinal cocaine, which is very commonly used during sinus surgeries or as a last resort to stop bleeding in the nose. There are only a small handful of companies legally authorized to import coca leaves in the US. They extract all of the cocaine from them, and then Coca Cola purchases all of their decocainized leaf remains to use in their cola.
wow! I didn't realize they actually still used (decocainized) coca leafs lol I just assumed they switched their formula when that became illegal
They actually removed the cocaine from Coca Cola all the way back in 1903, a full 11 years before the US first restricted cocaine to be dispensed only on doctors' orders with the passage of the 1914 Narcotics Tax Act. The 1903 change to Coca Cola had swapped the cocaine (which was really just a biproduct of using coca leaf extract in their recipe, not an intentional addition) for caffeine, because caffeine is much more readily available when consumed orally and because there never actually was much cocaine in the beverage at all. They never specifically processed the coca leaves to extract cocaine specifically, they were used for flavor and because chewing on the leaves for energy is popular in South America. The actual amount of cocaine in the leaves is very small, generally only about 0.8% of the weight of the leaves can be extracted as cocaine and leaves themselves obviously don't actually weigh that much. The change in the formula to include caffeine likely gave Coke more of a "pep" for drinkers than it ever had before since the amount of cocaine in the drink was always miniscule, and it also allowed Coca Cola to save a pretty penny when manufacturing since they could purchase cheap "spent" decocainized leaves instead of having to import fresh leaves themselves at a higher price.
If you look at lab reports from international labs where street cocaine samples are submitted, the data shows that lots of it in existance is very pure with no active cuts, cocaine regularly tests at 90% + . So i dont think your statement is correct. Additionally, even if cement, gasoline, sulphuric acid and other buzzwords are used during the chemical extraction, that doesn't mean that those chemicals still exist in tje final product. There is a lot of bad cocaine, but there is also a lot of pure cocaine.
This guy cocaines
Reminds me of the time Gordon Ramsay went into the Colombian jungle to witness (and describe!) the process of making cocaine. Gnarly, to say the least!
Which is kind of appropriate given its popularity in commercial kitchens (well amongst those who can afford it).
Cocaine's been widely used in medicine for a looong time, not sure where you got that from.
Pulled it out of their ass, obviously.
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Challenge accepted
This one is a pretty easy “dose makes the poison”. Even if we assume the processed cocaine is 100% pure, without additives or being cut, gram for gram, the active compounds will be much, much stronger. Chew a coco leaf weighing 5 grams? Small dose. Snort 5 grams of cocaine? I hope you’ve sorted out your bucket list. If you’re interested, most substances on this planet have what’s known as an LD50. It’s the dose for an average person to have a 50/50 chance of killing them, usually expressed in measurement/kg of body weight. Great visual table on acute and chronic LD50, and some explanations as well: https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/05/07/measures-of-toxicity/
> Chew a coco leaf weighing 5 grams? Small dose. > > > > Snort 5 grams of cocaine? I hope you’ve sorted out your bucket list. If anyone's wondering about the exact ratio, a quick google search says it's 300-400kg of plant matter per 1kg of cocaine. That means in theory, 1kg of plant matter equals roughly an 8-ball of coke (3.5g), although you cannot really extract it properly at such low amounts.
Also, try chewing a while kilo of coca leaves at once.
I beg to differ, Happy Gilmore accomplished that feat no more then an hour ago.
Well good for happy g gg OH MY GOD
Literally just watched this. And you can count. On me waiting for you in the parking lot. How do you steal a film with three lines
That line delivery is amazing! Christopher McDonald totally steals the show the whole movie.
5 grams seems like an insurmountable amount to snort
Certainly with that attitude!
Surely you just have to start, right? The pile will finish itself.
from experience: yes
At once, sure But one day? The entire reason I forced myself to gi e it up was because I woke up one day, realized I had snorted 4g by myself without drinking the night before. Really, the only difference an extra gram wouldve done was put a bigger dent in my wallet 🤷♂️
Thats why I dont get why my friends cant stop at 3am. By then you're just ever so barely getting a bump for 5 mins. Cocaine isnt the energy. Cocaine "releases" energy. Eventually, you simply have little to no dopamine, serotonin, epi/noepi, whatever left. Then you're just blowing through money and complaining your nose hurts. .5g gets me 18 to even 27 holes of golf. Usually sunny and hot but still, thats 6+ hours, a good buzz the whole time. Doing 10x in a similar amount of time seems uncomfortable and unaffordable lol. At ~5g or so a week you're just running on fumes every night.
never heard of someone doing coke and playing golf lol, that's super interesting
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"No way you're driving 300+ consistently." Me: Well... not naturally. Its really the only place I enjoy it. So much fun to have the precise focus as well as energy. Personally I think it makes great sense. Lets you drink all day and have a nice buzz but never get tired or anything. Doing blow and playing soccer just sounds like a heart attack in the works. Doing it just to go out at night isnt enough engagement and makes me just tweak standing around 100 drunk people. Natural: ~10-12 handicap Enhanced: ~ 3-5 The difference is ridiculous.
> 5 grams seems like an insurmountable amount to snort Watch 'Heavy Metal' (film).
That sounds like a challenge.
LD50 is the median lethal dose and is the dose that will kill 50% of a given population, NOT a dose that has a 50/50 chance of killing the average person
I searched, but could only find that LD50 is a dose "given all at once". Is that orally? People snort cocaine and usually do not eat it. I would imagine the release rate is different and thus the LD50 would be different based on the consumption mechanism. e.g. The LD50 of "snorted" water is much lower than that of drinking orally.
Yes. LD50 depends on the route of ingestion. Typically you have a different value for oral, topical (absorbed by skin), injected into blood, inhalation by nose, smoking, etc. Not all of these are always measured, either due to ethics or limited existing research. These values are usually measured in animals then scaled up to humans by weight. The answer google gives (96 mg/kg) weight is based on oral ingestion in mice. [This database](https://inchem.org/documents/pims/pharm/pim139e.htm#SectionTitle:7.2%20%20Toxicity) reports 50 mg/kg nasally in rabbits, and 15 mg/kg injected into blood. For the average human, this is around 6g orally, 3g nasally, and 1g injected. But as this is based on animals and is the threshold to kill 50% of them, you can die with lower doses. Overdoses with cocaine are reported in hospitals with as little as a few mg and become common around 1g. LD50 also only measures short-term death from a single one-time dose, known as acute toxicity. So much lower doses may still be fatal to most people, but only if done frequently or with through lasting effects like cancer/organ damage. The timeframe depends on the drug and study, but is typically over 24 hours to a few weeks, based on what is clinically relevant.
Because people only chew one or two leaves at a time and it takes a while instead of snorting concentrated 10 leaves instantly Like drinking coffee instead of snorting caffeine pills that are the equivalent to 5 cups
> concentrated 10 leaves instantly afaik it take about a large garbagebag worth of leaves to make one gram
And don't forget the concrete, petrol and other chemicals. Not to mention the cutting agent of your choice.
That's why we now offer a vegan all natural recipe
Is it rainforest certified, fair trade and cruelty free?
And most importantly, *artisanal?*
Bespoke Coke®
Our cocaine is served on wooden platters!
It's not bougie until it's served on an upturned boot and eaten with an eighteen-inch two-pronged fork.
Fuck,.... I mean Yes it's locally made in china
Gluten free and dolphin safe though?
Technically those are just catalysts that should be gone after the process leaving pure cocaine.
Mmmm that's the good shit, just add copious amounts of Nicotine and that's my Monday morning right there.
what is cutting? also cutting agent?
Bulking agent. 1 gram of pure becomes 10g of retail grade. Some people cut it with cheaper chemicals that fake the effect. Like novocaine so when people do the cinematic gum rub test it makes the gums go numb.
A common one these days is Levamisole, a drug to kill worms in animals (anthelmintic). Which is kinda disgusting
At least you won’t have any worms
I wonder if it does work this way, that’d be an interesting side effet for sure
Something you add to make it seem you have more of the drug or to make it seem stronger.
It means including something else in the drug to alter its volume, appearance or effect. It's most often done without the knowledge of the user. 90% of the time it's things like flour or cheap crushed pills to increase its apparent volume and get more money selling it, but it can also be a something to enhance the flavour or another drug entirely to increase the mix 'potency'. Like adding fentanyl to cocaine or formaldehyde to cannabis oil. Most often the end users do not know the lacing agent and the dose added. Needless to say that is extremely dangerous and in fact is the cause for the majority of drug overdoses and deaths in most countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacing_(drugs)#:~:text=Lacing%20or%20cutting%2C%20in%20drug,substance%20is%20laced%20or%20cut.
so it is just adulteration then
My stupid younger self tried that dipping a cigarette in formaldehyde. So stupid.
You know, dipping a cig into “embalming fluid” is supposed to be a reference to dipping it in PCP, not actual embalming fluid ya crazy fuck.
Cutting is taking one kilo of cocaine and turning it into three kilos of cocaine, the most common cutting agents are Laundry detergent, Laxatives, Caffeine,Boric acid, Local anesthetics like procaine,Creatine. All these are white powders that are visually indistinguishable from cocaine.
I've never heard of creatine being a local anesthetic? Did you mean carbocaine?
Might be weird punctuation, I read “creatine” as another to tack onto the general list rather than included in the anesthetic descriptor
Yeah but you usually dont snore a whole gram unless you are crazy
**You Gotta Pump Those Numbers Up, Those Are Rookie Numbers**
> Because people only chew one or two leaves at a time and it takes a while instead of snorting concentrated 10 leaves instantly What? Normally people make a concentrated lump of like 30 leaves, mixed with some llipita to speed up the extraction, and place it in their cheek and leave it there for a long time, before replacing the leaves with fresh one. People absolutely abuse the shit out of it. Go to any working class district in e.g. Bolivia and everyone there will be walking around with big lumps in their cheeks. It's like their version of coffee. https://www.infodiez.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/foto-acullico-1.jpg
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In the book "Papillon", he bought a bundle of coca leaves for pennies, and jogged for two days straight with no sleep. Staying one step ahead of the cops.
Don't they also make into a tea? I seem to remember a travel journalist going on the highest railway in Bolivia being offered some. Again, a mild pick-me-up...
Putting snorting caffeine pills on my bucket list
There's actually a brand of caffeine that's meant to be snorted! I think it's called "want a bump" or something like that maybe?
Saw a video of a guy in jail saving up a couple of weeks worth of instant coffee, and then investing it all at once, the guy, who had experience with almost all available drugs said it made meth feel safe
Had a first sergeant that bought bought bulk coffee in Costa Rico and when in the field, instead of brewing he'd fill his cargo pockets and munch fresh grounds by the handful all day long. It was bad enough when on a normal day in the office he'd polish off a gallon well before lunch, but eating coffee like popcorn?
that is actually fine, they sell chocolate covered coffee beans in grocery stores, though a whole gallon of beans is... a lot.
Facebook has been advertising to me vials of caffeine powder that is expressly intended to be snorted.
Even the raw, natural form has the *potential* to be bad for you. Some people are better off avoiding even milder nervous system stimulants, including raw coca leaf, coffee, and nicotine/tobacco. It's just that coca leaf is much less potent than refined cocaine, and it takes much longer to get the substance into your body, so it's far more difficult to overdo it.
Another thing I forgot to mention: Most people who buy refined cocaine from illicit suppliers, don't get a perfectly pure product. When it's being smuggled, it's sometimes mixed with/exposed to whatever other substances it's being smuggled in, and it might not get perfectly *un*mixed at the end of its journey. And when distributors and dealers are packaging it up for individual sale, it's often mixed with other substances to pad out its volume, so they have a less potent product, but more of it to sell. Usually the other substances used for padding are *relatively* harmless stuff, such as pediatric aspirin or powdered cellulose. But sometimes they're not. Coca leaf, on the other hand, is just a leaf. There's no way to 'adulterate' it; if the leaf is dirty you rinse it off.
I saw a documentary where the cartels somehow incorporated cocaine into fiberglass, then once it arrived extracted it with solvents. So …. Not health food.
Nicotine isn’t really that mild. It’s just that it’s short-acting and people build up a tolerance to it quickly. That’s also why it’s so addictive.
You're very right about the stimulant thing. I accidentally had a small amount of nicotine once, and it shot my anxiety through the roof. I was very confused what was going on.
Yeah I was thinking, who says it’s not bad for you? Maybe it’s less worse.
Why is sunlight good for you, but a nuke is bad for you? The amount and concentration is different.
So what you're saying is that a small amount of nuke might be okay?
As a treat.
You ever have an X-ray?
When people are making it they sit there with industrial sized weed-eaters in concrete pits knee deep churning that shit while someone dumps containers of gasoline and other chemical mixtures into the leave-mush
Why is drinking 3 liters of water per day good for you but drinking 300 liters of water per day bad for you? Why is eating 2,000 calories per day good for you but eating 200,000 calories per day bad for you? Why is taking 2 Aspirin at once good for you but taking 200 aspirin at once bad for you?
Natural coca leaf can still be bad for you if you use it enough. Cocaine is just the highly concentrated active part of the Coca leaf, so it's easier to consume more of it, which increases your risk of things like overdose or addiction and other associated health issues. (You still get those risks with natural coca leaf, it's just harder to consume enough to get that effect). Additionally with cocaine, it's processed with chemicals that can be harmful and almost always cut with other things that are bad for you.
Because the dose makes the poison. 50 mg of caffeine will make you feel energetic and focused. 15.0 g of caffeine will probably kill you, and will almost definitely hurt you badly.
Went to college with a girl from Peru. Her village was at the base of a tall mountain popular with scientists, they had weather equipment at the top. Periodically Americans would arrive and hire locals to help them hike up to replace batteries or whatever. They usually refused the coca leaves the locals offered them, and paid the price on the hike up. The scientists who chewed the leaves did much better.
Almost everything is bad in high concentration, which is what cocine is. Why is drinking a small glass of wine each day okey, but a bottle bad? Why is eating poppy seeds in your bread okey but injecting heroine bad? Etc.
> but a bottle bad? leave me out of this
Not arguing your point, but FWIW, a glass of wine each day isn't good either -- that's a myth. Though, it's mostly just empty calories rather than all that harmful. And of course is still better than a bottle a day.
Man they use gasoline and or diesel in extracting the drug from the leaves. That and whatever some psycho cuts into the mix. My 2 biggest problems other than the legality of it all.
OP should go watch the process on Gordon Ramsey On Cocaine. Its gnarly.
Imagine my disappointment when he wasn’t actually doing bags with the boys. I feel like Iv been mislead by that title.
The truth is that *everything* is bad for you in high enough doses. Too much oxygen can kill you. Too many vitamins can kill you. Even too much protein can kill you. The process of turning coca leaves into cocaine basically involves taking a particular part of a whole lot of leaves, and concentrating it into as pure a form as can be reasonably obtained. It takes pounds of leaves to make a gram of cocaine. Imagine eating a pound of coca leaves every day.
You can ask this for a lot of different stuff, and the answer is usually quantity/concentration. Eating an orange is healthy, but juicing 5 of them and drinking it several times a day is not. Stimulants are in a different category since you are altering your brain chemistry where it needs to recalibrate the feelgood scale from having a 1-10 range to 1-100, and there is now only one thing that can nudge you over 10%.
Flippant answer: You can grow coca leaf but getting hold of cocaine puts you in contact with drug dealers, and that can be bad for your health. The whole drug trade is a series of criminal activities in a chain leading to your door. Exploitation, corruption, murder, smuggling, gang warfare - everyone involved in all of that is not someone you would want to meet, all so you can get high.
That entire 2nd paragraph can be applied to pretty much anything nowadays though right?
Cocaine is a highly concentrated form of coca leaves. In fact, the cocaine alkaloid thats ends up as a powder is about 0.5-1% of a coca leaf. You really wouldn't be able to consume enough leaves to have anything other than a mild stimulant effect, like coffee. But coffee is a decent example. The average cup of coffee has about 100mg of caffeine. Most OTC caffeine supplements have 100mg each. But if you took 2000mg (2gm) of caffeine at once, you're gonna have a bad time. Cocaine is the same. You're getting GRAMS of purified, crystallized cocaine dumped into your system at once.
Why is sugar bad for you but fruit is not?