More emergencies than heroin, more arrests than cocaine. Why haven't you heard of this drug?
More emergencies than heroin, more arrests than cocaine. Why haven't you heard of this drug?
Just 1 millilitre too much can trigger an overdose. We went to a music festival to learn how the "blowouts" hitting Australian hospitals start.
There's people who haven't heard of GHB? Most people know it as rape date drug or something similar.
I had a look at the other names it's known by but nah, never heard of it.
The media used to refer to it as grievous bodily harm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ZFEhBPS9E
I remember it being sold in the 90s as a “designer drug” called “Grievous Bodily Harm”.
Every few years, it is re-marketted as a new designer drug to be fashionable. These Drug dealers are nearly as dishonest as Real Estate Developer and Tech Bros.!
I picked up some G the other week. My dealer described it as a renovator's delight with native AI integration.
I took heaps of G back in the day. Good fun. Follow the rules.
No Alcohol.
Wait at least two hours before re-dosing.
When starting creep up to work out your allowed dose, eg, try 2ml, nothing, wait two hours (use a timer), try 2.5ml, nothing, wait 2h+, try 3ml, etc. Most of the girls I was hanging with were about 2ml, most of the guys 2.5-3ml. It took me a while because I was 4ml, but I'm a big dude. Some people seemed to have some tolerance or susceptibility, maybe start with 1ml if you're a smaller stature person.
You can't take more to get higher, you'll just od, it's a very binary effect. Adding another 0.5ml to see what happens is where you get in trouble. If it's happened and you're G'd, that's your dose.
Repeat the dosage testing process with new batches.The effect itself is like being drunk, euphoric and HORNY. I stopped taking it because I was single and it was simply frustrating.
They used to give out "Say no to G" stickers at warehouse parties. Ravers would en masse slap them on people being stretchered out by paramedics.
Sounds amazing. Half a ml away from an overdose to feel as if you're drunk.
Yeah so if you're taking anything potent you should dilute it first. A dose is like 1-3 g with 7 g onwards becoming extremely dangerous.
Like alcohol you it varies based on body mass/stomach content/fatigue/random biological factors. Like only someone with a deathwish would start a night of drinking by skulling half a bottle of vodka you absolutely should not be ingesting unknown fluids you got off some random (that are hopefully dyed to prevent confusion with water/make dosing someone's drink harder) at a dose you expect to be near heavy.
In a sane world you would get like 3 packs of 1 g doses or something with childproofing. Those doses would be diluted in a larger volume of fluid. We don't live in that world so it's about as predictable as random homebrew moonshine.
As always if someone is going to take drugs they should get them tested (cantest in the act will do it if you live there), have a sober friend, and be in a safe location.
"To feel as if you're drunk" is an unfair appraisal of what being G'd feels like. I should've said it's one of the many enjoyable intoxicants that man has discovered. Half a ml is only perspective. No one is free pouring g hoping to get the correct dose, use a 5ml graduated syringe. Have you seen the amount of fentanyl it takes to kill someone, half a ml of fent would kill lots and lots of people.
I remember going to a doof in gippsland in 2010 (noise poison) and cops were searching cars on the way in (unusual for the party size) because another doof at the same site 2 weeks prior had a violent incident that was blamed on GHB. It had a bad reputation amongst people I knew at doofs.
Yeah, I love drugs and all, but this seems like too much math to do when I'm trying to get messed up. I can track X amount of drinks per hour easier.
This article is scaremongering nonsense. GHB is a very safe drug by almost all metrics. It's endogenous so no allergies, it doesn't damage organs, it is not particularly habit forming, it is relatively short acting, it doesn't cause confusion about the world/erratic behaviour/psychosis. The one real risk is that it's a respiratory depressant and that it's LD 50 is only a few tens of times a standard dose rather than the millions of like LSD, putting it in the same category as alcohol there.
In a regulated market deaths would be a rarity, as it stands it's mostly people polydrug using who get hurt.
Fucking media in this country I swear, we need proper regulation and education if we want to save lives.
The one real risk is that it’s a respiratory depressant and that it’s LD 50 is only a few tens of times a standard dose
The article claims it's much closer than that:
Experts and festival-goers agreed on the likely cause of GHB's disproportionate overdose burden.
"As little as 1 millilitre difference can tip you from what you're looking for to what you're not looking for," Daniel Fatovich, chief investigator of EDNA, told Hack.
I tried to find some stuff to back this up. The "therapeutic index" is probably what I'm after (ratio of effective dose to dangerous dose), despite this technically not being a therapeutic use.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8843350/ - The narrow therapeutic index of GHB renders its use hazardous with poisoning or toxicity not uncommon with small titration of doses.
Thats... annoyingly nonspecific. A number for the T.I. would be a good educational tool.
This paper claims its around 5:1 to 8:1:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462042/ - Mortality rates after abuse of GHB are high, because there is only a narrow safety margin between a recreational dose and a fatal dose, which is only 5:1 to 8:1 [4-8]. Accordingly, accidental poisoning after recreational use of GHB is not uncommon as evidenced by admissions to hospital emergency departments for treatment [9, 10] and during forensic medical investigations of drug intoxication deaths [11-14].
Someone else in the comments here mentioned that the recreational dosage for different individuals varies, if that's true then it could make this worse.
polydrug using who get hurt [...] education if we want to save lives
Agreed. Most people don't understand what's in pills they have bought or the interactions with alcohol.
interactions with alcohol.
dose is about 0.5 g for "a standard drink" type level. Usual recreational doses are 2-4 mg. About the same number of doses as alcohol for getting drunk.
Unconsciousness starts becoming likely around 7 g. severely depressed breathing around 10 g. Death gets dramatically more likely (although it's easy enough to keep someone alive with care). It's all in roughly the same ballpark as alcohol, just alcohol tends to make you upchuck the stuff that would fuck you.
Black market random dilutions are dangerous especially when mixed with alcohol. The real danger is dosing too much 1,4 butanediol which is a prodrug and so has a delayed effect. Obviously if people are given something different to what the expect that almost always massively increases risk.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This March, a survey of drugs detected in Australian wastewater sparked familiar headlines: "meth up, alcohol down", "heroin's a big hit".
The annual study by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) ignites fresh debate among commentators every year, but according to its own principal advisor on drugs, Shane Neilson, it's not a perfect picture of what's happening in the illicit market.
GHB is a clear, flavourless liquid that induces euphoria and relaxation in small doses, earning a subculture of users among the rave and chemsex communities.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, attendees at a Victorian music festival early this year were well aware of the threat posed by GHB overdoses, repeating one word for the symptoms that can follow:
"I used to work in King St in Melbourne and you see people blowing out every weekend," he told Hack, referring to a night club area in the CBD.
The effort worked: Dr Caldicott and other experts agreed that GHB overdoses fell in the late 2000s as understanding of its risks grew in the community.
The original article contains 1,438 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
A preemptive reminder for anyone not familiar:
It is against the community rules to promote anything that is illegal in Australia.
You are welcome to discuss the article and illicit drugs but not in a way to promote them for recreational use (exceptions can be made where there is scientific consensus).
Why the clickbait? Just put the name of the drug in the title
“One millilitre — less than half a soy sauce fish — can be the difference between a safe dose of GHB and an overdose.”
I never use these soy sauce fish anyway, so I’m good.
Anyway, isn’t this shit the same stuff as the date rape drug and the stuff you could easily get from those sticky bead kids toys ?