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Discussion => Drug safety => Topic started by: jpisbetterthanme on February 05, 2012, 06:34 am

Title: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 05, 2012, 06:34 am
Ahoy -
I'll be brief: What does 1mg of a powder look like?

Yes it's a very bad idea to try to eyeball 1mg. But if you were going to do it . . . How would you ?

Divide a relatively small amount of something into A THOUSAND PARTS. Go!

Possible answer: divide it in half over and over again.


Alternate hypothetical situation: add X.X digital scale. So then you could measure 0.1g ...... Divide it into A HUNDRED PARTS GO.




Ok. So 1mg. Thats dumm. But I'd eyeball an 8th of weed... Once you get down into mg.... How many mgs are reasonable to try to eyeball?



PS It's really hard to write a forum posting and count out complex time signatures at the same time ... And thats why John Petrucci is so much better than me.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: 328502E on February 05, 2012, 06:44 am
It depends on how accurate you need your eyeballed dose to be.  I've done it several times for an allergy test.  Also, it helps if you are good at eyeballing and you have seen that amount of powder before, since they have different densities.  So - if you know what 5 mg of a specific powder looks like, it's easier to do than picking up an unknown powder of unknown density and trying to find 5 mg. 

At the 1 mg range, it isn't at all smart to eyeball if you can't handle getting, say, 5 mg instead of one.  Which rules out pretty much everything you'd want to eyeball 1 mg for except for allergy tests.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 05, 2012, 07:39 am
What kind of ballpark amount are we talking about here though? When I think about mgs I think they must be SO small - is 1mg the size of three grains of sand or is it the size of a match head as so many people seem to say?

I know it's not a match head ... Maybe better to ask: what does a match head weigh? Order of magnitude is really what I'm wondering . . .
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: 328502E on February 05, 2012, 05:12 pm
What kind of ballpark amount are we talking about here though? When I think about mgs I think they must be SO small - is 1mg the size of three grains of sand or is it the size of a match head as so many people seem to say?

I know it's not a match head ... Maybe better to ask: what does a match head weigh? Order of magnitude is really what I'm wondering . . .

This is difficult to answer.  Based on the powder's density, it can vary a fairly good amount.  But as a ballpark answer, it's about one grain of sand.  But again, don't divide anything potent into a bump about the size of a grain of sand and do it.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: v01d on February 05, 2012, 10:59 pm
Density is a huge factor. If you took 1 mg of one powder and put that much of another powder it could be 5 mgs. You should NEVER be eyeballing some with a <100 mg dose. If you must dose it with volumetrics.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 06, 2012, 05:28 am
Thank'aya for giving me some kind of basic order of magnitude... I suppose its true that eyeballing <100mg is a bad idea. I was really just wondering what dosages under that looked like, regardless of density. I mean obviously different XYZ has different density but .......Not *really* when you're talking about something that small, you know? It's not like 1mg of Powder X looks like a grain of sand and 1mg of Powder Y is as big as a Buick . . . .


That kinda leads me into an underlying question: is a 1mg dose even ... uh.... lacking a better word (fuckoff it's Super Bowl night, of COURSE I'm drunk.....) .... Takeable ?

Here is FOUR GRAINS OF SAND now .. .. . . .. . SNORT THEM! !! !  ?

I get that much caught in my friggin nosehairs, knaw'meeean?




This all just makes me think of the first time I decided to weigh "2mg" Xanax bars and each of them was like 250 pounds, lol . . . .. Even 100mg of Powder XYZ is a ridiculously small amount.



So then how the fuck do people take things in doses of like .... idk, 5, 10 mg ?  ?



/// stares angrily at my X.XX digital scale (which I obviously don't own, cus that would be illegal or sumshit  :o ), mumbling Hare Krishna about some jibbajabba or other ///



/// gets angry at all other inanimate objects in the room ///


/// breaks keyboard in rage so I can no longer ty
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: v01d on February 06, 2012, 06:12 am
Quote
That kinda leads me into an underlying question: is a 1mg dose even ... uh.... lacking a better word (fuckoff it's Super Bowl night, of COURSE I'm drunk.....) .... Takeable ?
Most people would use volumetrics. For example:
You dissolve 1000 mgs of 25i-NBOMe HCL into 1000 mls of water and every ML of water is 1 mg. Then you could take that and use it nasally in a spray perhaps. Or use it bucally.

Quote
This all just makes me think of the first time I decided to weigh "2mg" Xanax bars and each of them was like 250 pounds,
The majority of that weigh is binder(the stuff that makes a pill solid and pressable).
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 06, 2012, 06:28 am
I thought about dissolving but that doesn't always work .... Take the her'ron for instance. Dissolve 100mg her'ron into 100mL water and use as a nasal spray or in your cheek or what have you? I ... don't think that would work?

I'm not sure what it would work with and what it wouldn't. Coke? Yeah I've heard of that  .. Her'ron? Needs heat to dissolve, then solidifies again pretty quickly, right? So you'd just get a precipitate? .... Meth? I hear that doesn't work like at all..

In short, from what I understand it doesn't work with most of the Powdered Baddies, except for the llello  ... And from what I've heard it doesn't feel like a coke high at all but just kinda numbs your nose ...


....Volumetrics was a looooooong time ago :   What would I even look up to figure out if it would work for something not usually taken under tongue / in cheek ... ? Water solubility?
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: 328502E on February 06, 2012, 06:52 am
I thought about dissolving but that doesn't always work .... Take the her'ron for instance. Dissolve 100mg her'ron into 100mL water and use as a nasal spray or in your cheek or what have you? I ... don't think that would work?

I'm not sure what it would work with and what it wouldn't. Coke? Yeah I've heard of that  .. Her'ron? Needs heat to dissolve, then solidifies again pretty quickly, right? So you'd just get a precipitate? .... Meth? I hear that doesn't work like at all..

In short, from what I understand it doesn't work with most of the Powdered Baddies, except for the llello  ... And from what I've heard it doesn't feel like a coke high at all but just kinda numbs your nose ...


....Volumetrics was a looooooong time ago :   What would I even look up to figure out if it would work for something not usually taken under tongue / in cheek ... ? Water solubility?

The word you are looking for is heroin.  That's what it's called.  Diacetylmorphine is fine too.

If you are looking for something to dissolve, you are indeed looking for solubility.  Different substances have different solubilities in polar / nonpolar liquids.  If you are looking for a route of administration...look up the bioavailability of a substance.  Different substances are more effective taken one route than another.  For example, injected heroin is more effective than insufflated (snorted).

Volumetrics is NOT a long time ago.  It is becoming more and more prevalent as people synthesize more and more potent drugs.  It is becoming quite popular and is useful to be able to do accurately and consistently.

If you wanted to divide a powder into, say, 500 mcg amounts you could not eyeball it.  There are several ways you could do it - one is getting an accurate microgram scale.  These are expensive.  Another is to measure it volumetrically and evaporate / simmer off the liquid, leaving the crystal / powder behind.  And yes, you can insufflate or sublingual 1mg.  It gets attached to the mucus lining of your nose and dissolves, eventually entering your blood stream.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 06, 2012, 06:14 pm
Ehh I may have been a bit unclear. Let me clarify.
1- "Heroin:" I call it her'ron because I'm ridiculous. Her'ron her'ron her'ron! :D
2- Solubility: Obviously if you're looking to dissolve something, solubility is where you'd start, but her'ron won't dissolve in water unless you add heat. That's some other thing.. A thing we call " ____ what ____" ?
3- Volumetrics WAS a long time ago for me : ) ...As was all chemistry. I just meant I learned about it in college, which was a long time ago. And I gave up before I got into organic chemistry, so my knowledge is limited at best (could you tell? :) ) ... Pretty sure adding heat to dissolve heroin falls into the organic chemistry region since the molecule is all carbon rings but .. Again I have no idea what I'm talking about, and it's compounded by having no idea what I'm talking about in talking about what I have no idea what I'm talking about ..... That was the longest sentence I've ever typed  :o
4- ROA : Oral bioavailability for her'ron is somewhere around 33% if I remember correctly, with insufflation being around 55% (I'd look up the exact number but LAAAAAAAZY); however, that wasn't what I was really wondering about. The bioavailability for other ROAs are all higher than oral, but oral supposedly lasts the longest? I've heard that a few times from different people I've talked to about this - if you weren't looking to get high but to actually use the heroin as a medication for treating pain, wouldn't oral be the best ROA? My logic is that the higher bioavailability is what gives the rush, and that the first pass metabolism takes a long time so you get the dose spread out over a long period of time. Am I way off?
5- Taking 1mg: of course it's possible in that it will work. I was thinking about the logistics. Again the big question here is that I have no clue what 1mg of anything looks like. If it is one grain of sand, that could just get stuck on your finger and dropped on the ground before you got it in your cheek or under your tongue or whatever.. Anyhow with drugs that you'd be measuring in small amounts on that order of magnitude, you'd be actually measuring closer to ~10-15mg. If you had an  X.X scale you could measure out 0.1g and start dividing it in half. Really you'd be alright dividing it only three times in that case: 100mg > 50mg, 50mg > 25mg, 25mg > 12.5mg ...
^^ That sounds so logical to me that I have trouble seeing how it could be a bad idea (aside from "doin drugs is dumm")

Yet on some gut level it seems like it probably is ... but why?   /// boggle ///
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: ianfleming on February 06, 2012, 06:58 pm
I just use simple math to mesure out my dose (because I do not have a Mg scale).
100mg 2c-i mixed with 20 CCs of a 50/50 ethanol/water mixture will be 5mg per CC (or 5mg per Ml)
This can be extracted with a syringe or anything that measures Milliliters and dosed perfectly into a shot glass (at which point I mix it with tea).
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 06, 2012, 07:47 pm
@ (Sir?) Ian Fleming -
1- It is awesome that your name is Ian Fleming and you take your drugs Stirred......

2- Why ethanol? That's the kind of answer I'm looking for - there's a reason you mixed it with ethanol instead of just pure water. What chemical property of 2ci made you do that?

3- ... Ian Fleming was knighted wasn't he?
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: ianfleming on February 06, 2012, 08:21 pm
Quote
@ (Sir?) Ian Fleming -
1- It is awesome that your name is Ian Fleming and you take your drugs Stirred......

2- Why ethanol? That's the kind of answer I'm looking for - there's a reason you mixed it with ethanol instead of just pure water. What chemical property of 2ci made you do that?

3- ... Ian Fleming was knighted wasn't he?
Niiice.
Your the first person to realize where my name comes from.

I use ethanol because my drug of choice, 2c-i, tend to create a suspension in water. But, in ethanol I can get it to mix evenly and perfectly. Therefore I use cheap 100 proof corn whiskey (locally produced, lab ware, moonshine). This way I can get a near perfect dose.
2c-i clumps up in (distilled) water, at least in my experience and dosent mix well.

The only other thing that I would advise is if you do this my way, or are ever mixing a drug with a drink. Make sure not to use anything acidic or basic (like lemonade). as I fear that this may weaken or change the drug.
(you never know, it could affect it)
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: 328502E on February 06, 2012, 10:11 pm
Ehh I may have been a bit unclear. Let me clarify.
1- "Heroin:" I call it her'ron because I'm ridiculous. Her'ron her'ron her'ron! :D
2- Solubility: Obviously if you're looking to dissolve something, solubility is where you'd start, but her'ron won't dissolve in water unless you add heat. That's some other thing.. A thing we call " ____ what ____" ?
3- Volumetrics WAS a long time ago for me : ) ...As was all chemistry. I just meant I learned about it in college, which was a long time ago. And I gave up before I got into organic chemistry, so my knowledge is limited at best (could you tell? :) ) ... Pretty sure adding heat to dissolve heroin falls into the organic chemistry region since the molecule is all carbon rings but .. Again I have no idea what I'm talking about, and it's compounded by having no idea what I'm talking about in talking about what I have no idea what I'm talking about ..... That was the longest sentence I've ever typed  :o
4- ROA : Oral bioavailability for her'ron is somewhere around 33% if I remember correctly, with insufflation being around 55% (I'd look up the exact number but LAAAAAAAZY); however, that wasn't what I was really wondering about. The bioavailability for other ROAs are all higher than oral, but oral supposedly lasts the longest? I've heard that a few times from different people I've talked to about this - if you weren't looking to get high but to actually use the heroin as a medication for treating pain, wouldn't oral be the best ROA? My logic is that the higher bioavailability is what gives the rush, and that the first pass metabolism takes a long time so you get the dose spread out over a long period of time. Am I way off?
5- Taking 1mg: of course it's possible in that it will work. I was thinking about the logistics. Again the big question here is that I have no clue what 1mg of anything looks like. If it is one grain of sand, that could just get stuck on your finger and dropped on the ground before you got it in your cheek or under your tongue or whatever.. Anyhow with drugs that you'd be measuring in small amounts on that order of magnitude, you'd be actually measuring closer to ~10-15mg. If you had an  X.X scale you could measure out 0.1g and start dividing it in half. Really you'd be alright dividing it only three times in that case: 100mg > 50mg, 50mg > 25mg, 25mg > 12.5mg ...
^^ That sounds so logical to me that I have trouble seeing how it could be a bad idea (aside from "doin drugs is dumm")

Yet on some gut level it seems like it probably is ... but why?   /// boggle ///

2- It'd be called insoluble, because it isn't soluble.  Again, different substances have different solubilities in different things.  Something that isn't soluble in water may be very soluble in ethanol, acetone, toluene, etc.

4- Bioavailability is how much of the actual product gets into your bloodstream, not how fast it acts.  The rush is mostly by how fast the concentration increases, not how much overall gets into your blood.  For onset, generally it goes IV > Smoking (throat) > IM > smoking (lungs) > insufflation > rectal > sublingual / buccal > oral.   I'm not exactly sure on the order there, but that's about it.

As far as the best RoA - it depends on what your goal is.  If you continuously smoke heroin in small amounts for a long period of time, the high will be stronger and last longer than if you took it orally.  The bioavailability is higher, so more gets into your system.  The downside to this is you have to smoke several times, which can be time consuming.

5- It isn't about whether you know what it looks like - it's if you have 1mg, you can definitely insufflate it.  You can't really move it around, you have to do it on whatever surface it is on.  Position straw (being careful you don't exhale), then inhale.  Another option is licking your finger, placing it on the powder, then putting your finger back in your mouth.  Generally though, it'd just be easier to volumetrically dose it and put the liquid in your mouth.

Do NOT measure 0.1g on a X.X scale and attempt to divide it in two.  First of all, a X.X scale isn't necessarily accurate to the tenth of a gram - it's very possible you measured 0.3g and it's showing 0.1.  Generally it's a safe bet that if you subtract an order of magnitude to a scale, it's accurate.  Additionally, you cannot accurately divide a pile in two.  It might be possible to divide 100mg in two and get 45mg and 55mg, but when you start getting into smaller and smaller piles it becomes increasingly difficult to be accurate.  Powders are also not necessarily of an even density.  You might end up with two piles of identical volumes, but a mass significantly off (from large shards, clumps, etc). 

I have a mg scale (it'll read 10.000g for a 10g weight) and I don't trust it to measure anything smaller than 50mg (0.050g).  Even at 50mg, I make the assumption that the amount of powder actually there is somewhere between 0.040 and 0.060g.  So if I wanted to get a 1 mg dose of a powder, I would measure out 0.100g, dissolve it in 100ml of water, then measure out 1ml (I can do this accurately with syringes accurate to 0.00005 litres).  That way, I know the dose I am actually getting is somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1mg - good enough for me depending on the substance in question. 
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: Angelology on February 06, 2012, 10:52 pm
Ahoy -
I'll be brief: What does 1mg of a powder look like?

Yes it's a very bad idea to try to eyeball 1mg. But if you were going to do it . . . How would you ?

Divide a relatively small amount of something into A THOUSAND PARTS. Go!

Possible answer: divide it in half over and over again.


Alternate hypothetical situation: add X.X digital scale. So then you could measure 0.1g ...... Divide it into A HUNDRED PARTS GO.




Ok. So 1mg. Thats dumm. But I'd eyeball an 8th of weed... Once you get down into mg.... How many mgs are reasonable to try to eyeball?



PS It's really hard to write a forum posting and count out complex time signatures at the same time ... And thats why John Petrucci is so much better than me.
I can eyeball weed like no other, But I couldn't tell the difference between 1 and 4 grams of powder.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: jpisbetterthanme on February 07, 2012, 03:50 am
@ ianfleming
1- Re: your name: I'm sharp like that!;)

2- Re: forming a suspension:  Interesting. But how did you know adding ethanol would prevent that from happening? It seems like there'd be more to it than simply looking up the solubility of 2c-i in ethanol, because if it were completely soluble in ethanol you would just use that ... Unless you are just adding water for palatability or something.



@ 328502E
1- Re: YOUR name: Wh.... Explain?

2- It isn't insoluble though, is it? Because you add heat to it and ... it dissolves.

3- Compulsion makes me include this number too =P

4- Two things- First, wow I thought rectal was just under injection. I had no idea it was so low on the scale. Second, interesting about smoking (throat) vs smoking (lungs) with IM in between. You're talking about the amount absorbed in the throat and the amount absorbed in the lungs, right? Or is there some way of smoking where it doesn't get into your lungs ..?

5- Good point on the scale.. It's true your scale could be just plain wrong and it shows 0.1 when it is really 0.3, but it's also true that it could be totally correct and still show 0.1 for both 180mg and 105mg (if it doesn't round up). The reason I intentionally overlook these things is that the goal isn't actually 1mg. That is irresponsible, though, if you're talking about something the size of a grain of sand.

And yeah you can insufflate 1mg, but you can technically insufflate 1 microgram or 1 nanogram of something too; it'd just be really, really, really, REALLY impractical. Is it totally impractical to snort 1mg? I'm just thinking of times where I've had a quarter gram of cocaine or something split between a few people and it would be like maybe a line each, and a small one at that. But still a significant portion of the bag (e.g., not 1/250th...)

I guess the point to take is that volumetrics is the only way to do this.

And also, an X.X scale is fucking worthless, lol....



@ Angelology
I think you meant you can't tell the difference between 1mg and 4mg (if you can't tell the difference between a gram and 4 grams, I've got a bridge to sell you . . . . ). That said... Yeah, point. But I was thinking I'd be able to do it on a digital scale without much problem. However, the experiences I have looking at 0-100mgs of powder come from crushed up pills, and that isn't ever anywhere near accurate. The biggest offender I know of is Xanax... But they all do it, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyone know of any pills that are pretty accurate? Obviously they all have binders and stuff (Xanax is mostly chalk, from what I hear) but surely there's gotta be one out there that's pretty close?
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: ianfleming on February 07, 2012, 07:18 pm
Quote
2- Re: forming a suspension:  Interesting. But how did you know adding ethanol would prevent that from happening? It seems like there'd be more to it than simply looking up the solubility of 2c-i in ethanol, because if it were completely soluble in ethanol you would just use that ... Unless you are just adding water for palatability or something.
I used a 50/50 mix because it's what I had on hand.
If I had had 98% pure (ethanol cannot be made purer than that) I would have used that.
I always mix it with a drink for palatability.
Title: Re: Eyeballing
Post by: 328502E on February 07, 2012, 08:05 pm
@ianfleming - Yes, you can produce ethanol in > 98% purity.  While it is difficult to go above 95.63% (this is the azeotrope for water-ethanol), there are drying agents that can be used to get a higher purity.  It is generally expensive.

@jp -
2 - It is insoluble at one temperature and soluble at another.  If I recall my chemistry correctly, this is actually true for ALL substances.  There is a temperature zone that stuff is soluble in, and if you go above OR below this zone it is insoluble.  However, it is often the case that a liquid would turn into a gas or solid before you exited this zone.  I can try and look up a name for this for you if you would like to further read into this topic.

4 - When you smoke something, there are two ways it can enter your body.  It can either be absorbed through your throat (I believe heroin is this way) or it be be absorbed through your lungs (weed).  This is why you get a rush from crack and not something like weed (as dramatically).  Crack is absorbed rapidly through your throat, while weed is absorbed slowly through the lungs.  It's quite a large difference - I think throat is something like 15 seconds, and lungs is 5 minutes.  Also, I'm talking about the onset duration, NOT the bioavailability. 

5 - There is a difference between accuracy and precision.  Scales are precise to their last sig fig, but not necessarily accurate.  If you weigh two things, and one weights 5.4 grams and the other 5.8, it is reasonable to say that they weigh 0.4 grams different, but NOT that one weights 5.4 grams and the other 5.8 (one may weigh 5.2g and the other 5.6).

The problem with dealing in such small doses of a powder is that there is a large loss whenever you attempt to move it.  The surface area to mass ratio is high, so wind may blow it away, you may leave some in the baggy, etc.

What do you mean pills that are accurate? Every pill to my knowledge is combined with a binder to hold it all together, else it crumbles extremely easily.