Safety being both a major problem with illicit drugs and a major concern of rationalists, this raised an eyebrow. The simplest explanation is that the people concerned with safety aren't the people using psychedelics and that I underestimated the availability of psychedelics through whatever the normal drug-buying channels are (and perhaps self-experimenters overstate the precision of the doses?), but I'm curious about other possible explanations. Assuming commonality, which I do not take for granted, the two most plausible explanations I came up with were:
Is there a rationalist Bear (preferred name of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another early psychedelicist who started weird and became extremely weird) out there? As I understand it, synthesizing LSD requires serious know-how and equipment, but there are surely rationalist synthetic chemists and perhaps one is willing and capable.
Dark-web sales and purity testing labs? That meshes with the techno-libertarian side of things, but I have no idea how those labs operate and I'm guessing buying drugs online practically requires you to commit a federal crime in the US, which is a pretty big hazard.
I'm guessing the simplest explanation is the correct one, to the extent that there's a connection between rationalists and psychedelics, in the first place, but if someone actually knows, I'd rather know than guess.
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Notes -
I have no deep up-to-date knowledge of this subject, particularly none applicable in the West. Read Gwern on this topic and dark markets more generally, if you want. That said, if I were interested in microdosing, I'd have
looked for shops with high reputation and indication of sourcing from guys who have the technical chops, on Hydra or whatever is the current mainstream platform. This is easy in major Russian cities due to the availability of poor, high-IQ chemists and badly supervised professional equipment, so e.g. phenethylamines are a solved problem. I suppose in the West it should be easier still. For LSD, there can't be that many reputable producers, but I'd guess the competitive pressure has fixed global supply, with consistently glowing reviews. (I remember my junkie friend talking about voidgoblin of something; keep such friends around if only for darkmarket questions, this isn't like Amazon where you can kind of afford atomization).
bought hardware for dosing and storing sensitive chemicals, such as precision scales, amber glass vials, I don't know.
thought about diluting the dosage appropriately to increase the precision of distributing it. E.g. assuming away some inconvenient complications that I advise people look into themselves, LSD should be soluble in distilled water and pure ethanol (for preservation against microorganisms), and it's a heck of a lot easier to measure milliliters than micrograms. For something like 2C-B, decent scales from Aliexpress should do it but you can also mix it with some inert substance like sugar.
But ultimately, what you need is not objective measurement but reproducibility of trials. Your individual sensitivity determines the dose you'd desire to administer (provided microdosing does anything of value) – and you will have to approximate it by trial and error.
Re: crime and law: lol. lmao. Of course it is a hazard. Knowledge of this will also make you paranoid under the influence. The risk can be minimized but not eliminated.
Pinging @JhanicManifold.
Lol, I guess I have been writing a lot about how to get various psychedelics, peptides, and semaglutide.
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