Thanks to all who helped by donating, spreading the word, or working on the site! Erowid got 1,240 donations in September, the most ever in a single month. We’re still finalizing some of the donations, there are always some that get reversed and have to be removed, but we probably have a few mailed-in checks that haven’t gotten into the number either.
Median donation size was, once again, $10. 316 donations on the last day of the drive and 779 donations in the last five days.
A couple more folks have stepped up and added to our matching drive. Today we got an additional $2,500 in matching funds. Right now, at midnight west coast time, we have $17,002 in matching funds and have used about $7,000. We’re hoping maybe to get another couple thousand in backing over the next few days, but it will be a stretch.
But, a longer stretch is to keep building momentum with next Friday as our end date.
Most bitcoin donations to Erowid come in very small amounts and not super often. But, ever September, I need to have a daily tracking of incoming bitcoin donations to keep our daily September Drive numbers accurate.
Otherwise, there’s no reason to do day-to-day tracking of bitcoin donations. But, each year it seems each system I use to do server-side pull and parse of bitcoin donations into our contribution tracker change format or meaning. And again this year.
After some very generous folks contributed 45 bitcoin donations yesterday, it became clear that I needed to stop entering them manually into our contribution list and had to update the importer. So, this year, I’m using the JSON output from :
http://webbtc.com/address/
It took me a few hours of figuring out the differences between the different formats I’d been reading.
So, that makes 65 bitcoin donations so far in September. Hurray!
Huh?
Researchers and the drearily uncreative folks at ScienceDirect tell us that those teens who have access to illegal drugs in the home from their parents are more likely to have tried them before those young people who do not get the drugs from their parents’ stash.
Odds ratio for using Cannabis or “Other Drugs” was about 2, meaning that people who reported having “illegal drugs easily available” in the home were twice as likely to have tried cannabis or illegal drugs compared to those who said that illegal drugs were not “easily available” in their homes as teenagers.
Overall, I was expecting to hate the article but think it’s pretty decent. But it’s incessantly annoying to read summaries of research findings, like Science Direct’s, that do not describe the magnitude of the effects nor how well known the finding is. What every summary of this should say is “the following is what everyone knew ahead of time and this is the first step in trying to sort out exactly how all the variables are associated in the populations we study.”
One thing that the summary didn’t highlight is that just being male had about the same effect size: around twice.
If that seems interesting to you, then you might want to read this crap:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160729110923.htm
Or the abstract and paid article in this low end journal “Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse”. The journal isn’t even index by PubMed. 🙁 At least their publisher can afford a DOI subscription.
Erowid Ref 9080 or http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1067828X.2015.1103346
They keep having to move domains, but the full article is available via Sci-Hub.
Summary: Added a new field “Date Published” to Experience Reports and moved all code over to use that instead of “Date Reviewed”. If anyone sees errors in the Experience Vault lists or What’s New, please let me know.
tl;dr
Changes to the Experience Vaults are hard because I wrote the code for almost all of it back in 2000 and then a major update in 2004. All written in ancient Perl that’s extremely fragile and a pain to set up as a development environment. On the plus side, it mostly works.
As a preliminary step towards a couple of other new features for crew and public, yesterday I added the very obvious “date published” field. We’d been skating by using Reviewed Date (the date that the first reviewer edited the report and marked it ready to be live) as the date published. But there are lots of reasons why one doesn’t want to have a single value for editing history and publication date. So, editing history is now properly just editing history and we don’t have to jury-rig and falsify the editing date in order to have the date of publication be correct. woo. :]
Date published is now the primary sort.
It’s a tiny update, but because of the complexity and fragility of the old code, the perl library I chose to use was failing in weird ways and it took five hours to debug to the point where I realized I could solve the problem by moving the logic out into a separate library (namespace) and it all magically just started working.
In reading a recent paper by Schifano F, Orsolini L, Papanti D, Corkery J, we ran across their ridiculous term “e-psychonauts” from this and a previous paper.
It’s always sad to see people writing new articles, especially medical or anthropology papers that pretend that the use of electronic communication is somehow noteworthy or aberrant. It is not.
Vulnerable subjects, including both children/adolescents and
psychiatric patients, may be exposed to a plethora of pro drug web pages, from which unpublished/anecdotal levels of knowledge related to the NPS are typically provided by the ‘e-psychonauts’ (e.g. drug fora/blog communities’ members; [124]).
That refers back to a a paper from 2015 by the same authors.
The authors define the term in their abstract:
Within online drug fora communities, there are some educated and informed users who can somehow provide reliable information on psychoactive compounds and combinations. These users, also called e-psychonauts, may possess levels of technical knowledge relating to a range of novel psychoactive substances (NPS).
And then go on to tout how excitingly new the idea of “e-psychonauts” is, despite the idea of online drug geeks being not remotely new by any reasonable standard. Not new to published articles, not new to published medical articles, not new to agencies funding massive “web surveillance”, not new to the mega mainstream media scare machinery, not new to anyone.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper represents the first systematic study aimed at providing a description of e-psychonauts, which may be of some use in prevention activities.
Demographics of online drug geeks? Not new. Perhaps it’s just a simple indictment of the “authors’s knowledge” and the knowledge of the article’s unnamed reviewers and editors.
The term “e-psychonaut” seems like it could be useful to mean psychonauts who are using new electronic psychoactives, such as electroceuticals, mind machines, transcranial magnetic stimulation, direct neural stimulation, or the like.
But, no, these authors and the terrible editors who helped them foist the term into the medical literature, seem to have missed that very approximately 100% of the adult populations under 60 years old in advanced countries now use “computers” or “electronic devices”. [To be clear, I know that it’s not actually 100%, it’s more like 90% of adults in the US under 60 years old, but virtually everyone /has used/ the internet.]
Perhaps in the 1990s it might have been helpful to distinguish between “psychonauts” who used electronic communication and those who did not. But in 2016? Not so much.
We appreciate that the authors and the low-end journals they publish in are willing to use Google to learn about “novel drugs” like 2C-B. But it really seems depressingly quaint in 2016.
As one indication of how well edited their papers are, in reading through them, I noticed this excellent reference in the opening paragraph of their 2015 paper “Ectasy.org [sic]”, cited to “Ectasy.org. www.ectasy.org (accessed Jan. 22, 2014).”
Oops. Don’t they use spell check? Regardless of spell check, getting through publication with a sad typo in the opening paragraph indicates bad things about the publication’s editorial process and overall quality. In case it’s not clear, that’s a typo for Ecstasy.org. Ectasy.org is a long-squatted typo domain with no content.
Since all of our HTTPD traffic is forced SSL, valid credentials are required to prevent visitors to Erowid.org and EcstasyData.org from seeing a very nasty error message when trying to access the sites. With an expiration date looming, it was time to renew Erowid.org’s low-end SSL certificate. Why low end? Because we consider the browser certificate authority to be an illegal global racket.
First, the good news. Check out our “A” rating from Qualys SSL Labs:
We mostly achieved this a couple of years ago when our sysadmin team worked to eliminate all of the basic problems, like removing support for dangerously weak encryption ciphers and forcing more secure handshake methods. But, if you look at the Qualys report, you’ll see that our server doesn’t allow the known-broken encryption algorithms.
And, as of today, we’re trying out a 4096 bit key. Many of the sites I looked at suggested that the CPU load cost of doing the key negotiation wasn’t worth the extra security, but JL, our main sysadmin, said we should give it a try. We’ll watch the server load over the next week or two, but right now it seems fine.
As far as the rant about the global criminal conspiracy that is the certificate authority, well, I will leave that to others. To be clear, I think it’s all a money scam, facilitated by the browser folks.
We choose to buy a cheap chained certificate because of the usurious pricing of the better, greener, happier certificates. They punish us by making the URL bar not as pretty and also making the certificate viewing experience worse. Despite the CSR having all the right info, the $50-100 per year wildcard-SSL certs don’t display our organization name or location properly. Pay $200-1000 per year and, with no additional security, we would get a happy-looking green bar and Erowid displayed in the browser URL bars.
Snake oil forever.
As I was searching for an example of an expensive green bar, I discovered that trying to view the front page of CNN via SSL resulted in terrifyingly bad browser behavior. It looks like a hijack (MTM) or just fails.
In early 2015, Erowid joined EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere campaign, because we believe that, today, virtually no communications should occur online in clear text. It is a sad statement about humanity that most of us, including institutions handling sensitive data about us, still use unencoded plaintext email that requires no warrant and is, essentially, a public broadcast.
P.S. In an insanely conspiratorial way, I believe that the NSA and other anti-public-crypto agencies have worked to torpedo efforts over the last twenty years to get email more secure. In the United States, a fig leaf of privacy is enough to trigger Fourth Amendment protections.
It’s nice to see the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), use the harm reduction message: “Start Low. Go Slow.” The concept nor phrasing are new, but we don’t know of any federal government education programs that have used this sane approach wording before. Anyone know of any government programs that have used “Start Low, Go Slow” before?
One of the thing that stands out to us as problematic when encouraging our species and societies to have balanced views about psychoactives, and is part of the reason that the public policy is a rolling global disaster, is that most data published about harms is selectively chosen for greatest impact.
Some authors published a complete summary of all “all cases presenting at the emergency department (ED) of the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, between October 2014 and September 2015 with acute toxicity due to self-reported recreational drug use or with symptoms/signs consistent with acute toxicity.”
It is unfortunately, from our view, that they did not also then include in their analysis presentations related to pharmaceutical drugs, but this is a great start.
Their summary speaks for itself, but imagine a world where all major hospitals published anonymized case data and we could get this type of summary every year?! It’s just too much to imagine that we might base education, expectation, and public policy on real world understandings of that relative magnitude of harms, rather than the most recent scary news story or the grieving parents of a tragic fatality.
Their paper is not as extensive as it could be and we’d really like to see a matrix table of what drugs were found combined with other drugs. Also, the authors did not have the ability to detect or identify new synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists.
About a third of the cases were “related to” cocaine and a third “related to” cannabis. The next most common self-reported substances were heroin, benzodiazepines, MDMA, amphetamine/meth, unknown, and then opioids (excluding heroin and methadone).
Perhaps the biggest question is how good their detection / analysis is. Would they be able to detect MXE or deschloroketamine or other really new substances if they had been present?
http://bmcpharmacoltoxicol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40360-016-0068-7 [ Erowid Ref ]
Background
Although the recreational use of psychoactive substances is common there is only limited systematic collection of data on acute drug toxicity or hospital presentations, in particular regarding novel psychoactive substances (NPS) that have emerged on the illicit market in the last years.
Methods
We included all cases presenting at the emergency department (ED) of the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, between October 2014 and September 2015 with acute toxicity due to self-reported recreational drug use or with symptoms/signs consistent with acute toxicity. Intoxications were confirmed using immunoassays and LC-MS/MS, detecting also novel psychoactive substances.
Results
Among the 50’624 attendances at the ED, 210 were directly related to acute toxicity of recreational drugs. The mean patient age was 33 years and 73 % were male. Analytical drug confirmation was available in 136 cases. Most presentations were reportedly related to cocaine (33 %), cannabis (32 %), and heroin (14 %). The most commonly analytically detected substances were cannabis (33 %), cocaine (27 %), and opioids excluding methadone (19 %). There were only two NPS cases; a severe intoxication with paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA) in combination with other substances and an intoxication of minor severity with 2,5-dimethoxy-4-propylphenethylamine (2C-P). The most frequent symptoms were tachycardia (28 %), anxiety (23 %), nausea or vomiting (18 %), and agitation (17 %). Severe complications included two fatalities, two acute myocardial infarctions, seizures (13 cases), and psychosis (six cases). Most patients (76 %) were discharged home, 10 % were admitted to intensive care, and 2 % were referred to psychiatric care.
Conclusion
Most medical problems related to illicit drugs concerned cocaine and cannabis and mainly included sympathomimetic toxicity and/or psychiatric disorders confirming data from the prior year. Importantly, despite the dramatic increase in various NPS being detected in the last years, these substances were infrequently associated with ED presentations compared with classic recreational drugs.
After a phone call with an expert earlier this month where Earth was reminded how few people understand the more technical options in the Experience Vaults, we decided to try adding a button to the bottom of search results and lists to show Cellar reports.
So, now viewing search results lists will tell the reader whether there are matching results in the Cellar:
Search Experiences for 1,4-Butanediol
Before this week, the “Show Cellar” button only showed up if there were no reports matching a given search. There has always* been an Advanced Search option to include Cellar reports in a search, but very few people used this option.
We’re not 100% certain this is a good idea, because we don’t want to highlight Cellared reports too much. We don’t want to shame authors for writing reports our triagers and editors consider below our cutoffs, nor do we want people to have to slog through reading reports that are considered to contain data but have some serious problem that caused them to be relegated to the Cellar.
