________ ________ ________ 2018-01-29 / \/ \/ / \ / __/ /_ _/ I'm probably overdue for an update on the / _/ / / stupid things I'm doing to my wetware huh? \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_ / \/ \/ / \ Firstly, despite my good results going / _/ /_ _/ cold turkey from caffeine and codeine back /- / _/ / before I started the microdosing, both have \________/\________/\___/____/ crept back in. Caffeine I didn't really put up much of a fight against and I'm back on my energy drink shit. I'm not real fussed about that, caffeine really does no harm unless you try to quit it, then it fucks with you for fun. Codeine I did try and fight, mostly because it IS bad for you but also because it's a chore to get but it did creep back in, although not as much as before. Addiction is what it is, I suppose and God it's just so comfy. Fun times ahead for that though, the drug is changing schedules from February 1 and will now require a prescription instead of pharmacist approval. If you'll indulge me a sec, let me tell you how fucking dumb that decision is: really fucking dumb. The crux of the argument for that decision was that codeine can cause dependence, and its misuse has led to addiction and even death. While may be true, you can not argue that something needs to be removed because it's "addictive" when cigarettes and alcohol are still on the shelves. At all. Fuck off. Likewise, the statistics on deaths caused by codeine are pretty sketchy, it seems to be based on any death coded T402 which seems to be catch-all for any opioid that isn't methadone or heroin - the majority of which are prescription drugs already, adding one more prescription to the pile is not going to make any kind of dent in this. The statistics I've seen also do not seem to contain any circumstances of death; whether the deceased was a long-time user, or just a person with a headache that didn't know what they were doing. Whether they had solely taken the drug or whether they were also drinking or on other medication that may have caused complications. They're also backing up the decision with a lot of poorly researched stuff about codeine being useless in small doses and other pain killers being more better but it's all bunk. Even the pharmacists themselves are calling bullshit on all this but the government is determined to go ahead with it. Australia does pride itself on poorly planned knee-jerk policy. Anyway, enough legal drugs, let's talk about how the microdosing is going. Wait, one quick aside; there's a legal (read: not illegal) analog to LSD that quite a few microdosers in the States are using, that I'm curious about. Science upon science. Australia's analog laws are really tough though so here it's subject to the same restrictions as any other psychedelic drug. Ok so it's been up and down. I continued with the 60ug blotters while I could and it was pretty great. I fiddled with my dose a little bit but ended up sticking with a microdose around ~15ug. Then I made three mistakes. The first mistake was after I was unfortunately not able to get any more of the blotters I was using, or even any other under-dosed blotters so I ended up fishing around for something else and got clumsy. I got 135ug because they seemed good but the vendor wasn't one I'd used before and I didn't bother to test them properly before using them. They haven't been very good and I've gone from the microdosing feeling good-to-too-good to being either bad or nothing. Frustrating since this shit isn't cheap but I guess I should be thankful it wasn't worse. My second mistake was thinking the 135ug blotters would be easy to work around, the plan was to dilute it and dose from the solution but the volumes are so low and it's so fiddly. The only way I could get it to work was to REALLY dilute it and hold a big ol' blob of water in my mouth for whoever knows how long. It wasn't really practical without getting some proper equipment to measure and dispense things. I addressed the issue with the big blotters by revisiting the idea of a microdosing nasal spray, it was actually pretty easy to do; I took an almost- empty medicinal nasal spray, cleaned it out and filled it with diluted tabs. My third mistake came in trusting the measurements on the bottle which in hindsight really is a "what the fuck was I thinking?" moment. The label on the bottle said the medicine contained 10ml and "60 sprays" and I trusted it blindly, making my solution based on those measurements to deliver ~7.5ug of drug per spray. I was way off. Thankfully way on the low side otherwise that first dose would have been quite interesting but as it was, I got nothing. At the time I still trusted the new doses I'd got so I assumed my math or measurements were wrong and tried to suss it out. I ended up trying my best to measure just how much liquid is being delivered per spray, again trying to measure frustratingly small volumes with big, clunky equipment. I think I got close to accurate but it's still pretty sketchy. In the end, because of the frustration with getting the doses right I started skipping days and when I wasn't noticing any difference that's when I started to get a bit concerned about the quality of what I was dosing with. On top of that, throw in the chaos of the holidays and the pressure at work over the last couple months leaves me feeling like I'm sort of at an impasse, at least until I can take the time to find a new supply that I trust and revisit the measured spray properly. EOF