Party Vibe

was good for the first few times then becomes a fucking nightmare way too quickly; it was always (at least for my generation) a poor substitute for MDMA or normal amfetamine type stimulants. Particularly rough on the body and mind for the comedowns, worse than the illegal drugs; and the way younger people binged on it in the UK was a bit scary and may have set back the causes of anti-prohbition for a few years – as it also scared a lot of young people away from drugs of any kind and has made todays youngsters more anti-drugs even if they aren’t as openly judgmental about drug users. I would not want it again if it became legal tomorrow TBH and some drugs at class A are IMO less harmful long term than this stuff.

the fallout and casualties from it reminded me of things I witnessed in 1990-1992 but speeded up into about 6 months before it all went to shit.

Worst part of it was the only reason the stuff became popular where I live was that we had loads of good MDMA and other party drugs but people were bingeing on them and landing up in hospital (both emergency dept and mental health units) so a clampdown happened with cops, border force and SOCA (now NCA) and loads of dealers got nicked…

@Requiem 596437 wrote:

Think it was Professor David Nutt that said it caused deaths from cocaine overdoses to drop by 20% while it was legal and it was actually developed as a treatment for addiction.

unfortunately these ODs tend to happen amongst younger men age 15-50 and we are expected to take these risks and in Britain no one cares about us if we drop dead other than our immediate families; especially if we live in cities/towns where there are a lot of “surplus young men” wihout jobs, families etc.

with mephedrone the effects of overuse/addiction are rarely fatal (unless someone gets so depressed they commit suicide but that happened with MDMA, amfet and other party drugs too) but really frightening to parents, teachers etc and it heavily impacted middle class young people in more affluent areas. I’ve personally seen old skool hippies turn into reluctant supporters of prohibition because their own kids got too much into mephedrone.

Professor Nutt is no doubt correct and TBH the rough times and scares it gave to many young people didn’t kill them or cause permanent damage and has made them more self aware of the risks of drugs; but I don’t think mephedrone has done a lot for the cause of tolerance in the UK.

yes it was the Sun and they did exactly the same with the acid house scene and its associated drugs from 1988 onwards.

However (it may have also been that drugs were harder to get then for an average teen and therefore and taken less regularly) the panic didn’t build up quite so quickly (and the papers jumped the gun on acid house; the drugs did not become easily available until 1990/91). You could not legally get on the Internet until 1991 and it was not commercially available until 1994; let alone purchase drugs online.

What is particularly bad in the UK is the papers often overplayed the risks from inaccurate evidence whilst at the same time Coroners who know the Press are always looking for a story and we have less privacy laws than say NL or DE who want to try and protect the reputations of middle class families did not record a lot of early xtc-related fatalities as such; they would put down “heart failure/multiple organ failure” on the death certificate of the young person. There is nothing wrong or illegal if the Coroner is a proper medical Doctor and not just a lawyer; and the bulk of Coroners in city/town areas are doctors.

I think that for instance PMMA pills were killing people 20 years ago but this secrecy stopped the warnings being circulated as widely as they should. It is difficult for Coroners as they are or have been the family doctors for some areas but like any other healthcare professional they have a duty to try and stop people dying from preventable causes whilst at the same time wanting to preserve patient confidentiality – but this only applies to patients who are alive or who die through natural causes! Legally the public interest overrules individual privacy laws in UK and Coroners do now report everything honestly; one particularly brave doctor in SW England was prepared to stand up to a grieving parents and argue the case for full disclosure as it is often beneficial to other families and the public as a whole (this applies to other incidents such as road traffic collisions).

@p0ly 596447 wrote:

Drone is not nice, and caused me the worst depression after a binge. It’s not good stuff. 5 weeks of lethargy and crying, never got that from overdoing MDMA or Speed or Coke or Opiates or Ketamine etc…. and believe me I’ve overdone all these drugs at one point. Cathinones seem to have serious negative mental health effects compared to other popular drugs.

that is exactly what I noticed happening when the stuff became popular. Although I never had side effects that bad I know people who did or near enough and a lot of the drugs help charities were overrun with cases round here.

The other bad side of it is I noticed it created a fuckload of wannabe plastic gangsters and greedy little shits who would do stuff like burgle houses in areas what previously had zero crime rate to fund their habits when the stuff was legal and pocket money prices; others created street dealing networks and started fighting and robbing one another (for a legal commodity!) because they didn’t want to look “nerdy” buying it off the Internet.

Although it didn’t hit the older generation quite as hard (because most of us had already been used to dealing with rough comedowns from old skool pills) it wasn’t without ill effects like that chap you mentioned previously and I can see why cops etc got worried as it was creating a resurgence in drug use amongst my generation who had mostly been calming down. OK I will admit it got me back into music and mixing (although I am rediscovering being able to do this with no or less drugs like I did when I was 15) and other creative stuff but the side effects got way too much.

Unfortunately I think that stuff was contaminating the MDMA and pills before it became a legal high and will always now find its way back into them due to its cheapness and being class B rather than A (at least here; in NL it would be harddrugs and the penalties are worse for selling contaminated pills which is why they have less problems).

@p0ly 596482 wrote:

It’s a shame to see it happen, but we watched his dad die of hard drugs so I guess it’s normalised for him, his mum also is an ex crack/heroin addict. He’s totally against those drugs yet drone seems to have fucked him worse than the crack/heroin addicts I see.

I’ve seen that too; its worse when I realise these addicted parents are my age and they too have parents and relatives who despair at what has happened; even though many of those parents are the original 1960s hippy types.

Consider all the senior cops, healthcare workers, councillors and local govt politicians who have now seen this across two or more generations – that impacts on what music events get licensed/tolerated (if any) and the level of controls of young people on the streets or in their leisure time.

here in the East I’ve seen about 7 music venues and many more events crews close down (the last venue in Ipswich that hosts anything like a “proper” EDM event closed at end February) and its all because of Police and NHS concerns over health and safety of participants due to the drugs culture and the costs of dealing with it. They either refuse the event a license or put extra cost recovery procedures in place to force the promoters to pay.

All we have left here is Latitude and even that can be sketchy for what is in reality a festival for posh families and their 6th form or uni age kids (there have been rapes and all sorts there) has a fuck load of cops everywhere, both Suffolk and Metpol….

I don’t think this zero tolerance reduces the number of hard drug addicts all that much but their numbers are declining anyway whereas drone etc is seen still as “party” drugs and taken alongside the “night time economy” stuff linked to music events and venues -what they have done in Suffolk it does seem to reduce the pressure on the blue light services at weekends; they also have to look after a lot of elderly people who have medical emergencies in a time of economic depression so I can see why the wider population of EA (who are not anti-fun or music) vote for these sorts of clampdowns.

Even Amsterdam is following Suffolk’s policies in Ipiswich albeit to a lesser extent (they don’t however have a problem with cathinones as they tolerate the proper party drugs to a greater extent, which British people are too stubborn to accept)