Esoteric Chemicals, Greedy Drug Dealers, Bath Salts, Bastards, Bass

Let me tell you a little about my timeline. Being a convicted felon sucks balls, and it makes you very leary, if you have a half of a brain in your head, about doing anything that might land a person back in prison in the first place. So, in my timeline of existence, I have always been very fortunate to either be myself, or be close friends with a few people whom are very plugged in to the cutting edge of chemical technology, and therefore were using (in my non-human research, of course) many, many of these things that the whole nation suddenly was introduced to in the last few years.

Methylone, in particular, which was great for making sand castle glue in my research, but was apparently ALSO a potent agonist/analogue that substituted for MDMA, was often one of the main ingredients in bath salts. Regardless, though, as it would happen, a random stranger told me, (and I checked it out, he is right!) that Methylenedioxy N Methacathinone, along with MBDB, and several other substituted cathinones were around for a long, long time.We were first introduced to them, and importing them from out of the country for personal sandcastle preservation use back around Y2K. For years & years it was a wonderful secret that we introduced to all sorts of great and responsibly deserving people. We knew from previous experience that the moment somebody thought they could get away with marketing these substances was going to be the beginning of the end. It also, to me, violated the cardinal sin: DO NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF COMMUNITY SECRETS FOR PERSONAL GAIN. Which is precisely what the bath salt bastards did.

The previous experience we were familiar with dates way back to the 90s and early 2000s....

We were bringing 5-MEO-DIPT and 5-MEO-DMT to raves (to use as glowstick effects enhancer) such as Minneapolis'  "Stairway to Headphones" and Milwaukee's NYE Drop Bass Network shows as far back as 1996. When I got out of the Gulag in 1998, after serving time for possession of LSD, I had two UA tests a week for a year, and another 1 every week for the NEXT year.... Thats a lot of pissing in cups. As a result, I turned to some things which didn't turn up in your urine. Ironically, LSD was one of them, and the other was GHB. So enamored with GHB were we (as an ingredient in candlemaking) that it became a huge thing that we turned all sorts of people onto back then as well--And at this time, it wasn't even a known issue, and was perfectly legal. Then, shortly after we started making our own, recipes began popping up on this primitive thing called the internet, and a few places even started selling kits to make GHB with the two main ingredients, so all people had to do was order, follow instructions, and voila! ---- And wouldn't you know it, it couldn't have been SIX MONTHS later that date rapes and irresponsble use of this interesting inebriant (for some people! I used it to make candles.) was all over the news, and congress passed an emergency scheduling to outlaw it almost AT ONCE it seemed like, and added the extra harsh punishments that go with the label "DATE RAPE DRUG" additionally tacked on. We heard about Congress having scheduled a date a few weeks out to have a hearing on emegency scheduling GHB. So, naturally, what we did (a friend and fellow candlemaking enthusiast) and I ordered (2) 5-Gallon drums of Gamma-ButyroLactone from ACROS chemical in order to ensure that if they cut of the supply chains, we'd be good for years and years to come. However, this was our first taste of suspicion being proven right: That when people try to use advantageous legal loopholes for personal profit, it nearly ALWAYS will ENSURE that you're ultimately going to alert Congress to something that they wouldn't have otherwise been aware of. 2C-B was one of the earliest victims to this...The "Herbal Nexus" that was sold in the triangle shaped boxes back in the rave shops in the 90's....There was nothing herbal about it. Those pills were real 2C-B, but the problem was that they were only 5mg each..... and so you had to eat a whole box to wig balls.

Of course, some people probably ate 5 whole boxes, and brought the house down going apeshit loon-style, because it was 1999 when Congress did their emergency 2C-B scheduling, and took from us one of the VERY best and most special entheogen allies ever discovered.... 2C-I and 2C-E do not hold a candle to 2C-B (in using it in molding religious-use incense sticks together of course).

Basically, congress has been burning up the best and brightest chemicals around at a breakneck pace. Up next? I can almost guarantee before the year is out that there will be an nBOME ban for all the nBOME series substances that David Nichols geniusly added to the compendium of knowledge.... But too much irresponsible use has certainly ensured that it will not last either. Possibly the same tale with Methoxetamine. Its a Ketamine analog that I understand is just TOO unique not to have somebody ruin it for everyone else.

Its a sad state of affairs when EVERYthing you once relied on as your secret arsenal is just burnt up item by item because some people got greedy and ruined it for the rest of us. This is why, if you're out there Bath Salts Producers, and conceivers of the idea: a big, hearty FUCK YOU, from the rest of us who went years, decades even, without shitting where we eat (to quote the luminous Ween, of course), and who relied on the things you got taken away in no time flat for all of us, for good. Please have some foresight and anybody planning to release some new "bath salts with the few remaining good empathogen analogues: FUCKING STOP IT!

(And, for posterity, in my age, a hearty "Get of my fuckin' lawn too, you sons of bitches!")

Conservative Economics 101: Compare EVERYTHING, including US Fiscal policy, to the way your household finances work.

For all the people who claim we, as a country, shouldn't be borrowing more money right now at basically 0% interest rates, in order to kickstart the economy, update our highways, put in a national fiber optic high speed internet network backbone, and other huge, shovel ready type projects to put the whole nation back to work.... And who make this determination that can't afford the debt we have already, by making comparisons between the USA's "dire" fiscal situation to somebody's household finances who have similar levels of debt, obligations, and revenue only shows people that DO understand the big picture better how far off-base and ignorant to reality you really are.

People who make this, and similar arguments completely ignore several important factors. I will stick with the home-finance analogy to put it in perspective. How is that a household still couldn't afford to manage their debt, even with as high as it would be compared to the household's income, when the following are still true, nonetheless:
 
A) This household holds the keys to its own income. In a pinch, Congress can vote to give the US a pay raise. Sure, its through higher taxes, which give most of you heart attacks, because you completely ignore the much, much higher tax brackets that were the norm for the vast majority of our nation's history. --But whether its through tax increases or not, the fact remains that for the analogy to hold, you have to grant that the person who takes care of this "household's finances" can decide how much income they make. This alone makes the typical household analogy moot. But lets go on anyway.

B) The fiscal head of this household is ALSO allowed to decided what bills they will have. Besides the servicing of the debt, and entitlements, ALL other spending is technically voluntary. So a huge chunk of the budget can be altered as needed if push came to shove. Sure it would hurt a lot of people, industries and businesses--particularly the republican war machine and defense spending, which is 100% voluntary and mostly unnecessary--but the fact is, we can decide that we don't need a lot of these bills if, once again, push came to shove.

C) ...And Finally--this is the elephant in the room. What person who has the legally sanctioned, and totally law abiding right to print as much money as they want, *out of thin air* still CAN'T AFFORD a mortgage payment and can't afford their household debt?

I understand the dynamics involved with fears of inflation that make these points a little more complex and sticky then I've maintained in just a few paragraphs.... But everyone who tries to pretend that its as matter-of-fact simplistic so as to be able to think of the US budget in terms of their own household budget, as a means of determining whether they are qualified to assess our fiscal policy, is rally just showing their amateurish grasp of economics. Whats worse, is to further try to instill the same conceptual ignorance in others by using folksy, down-home analogies that put things in terms of mortgages, and bill-paying, and credit card bill affordability! This is the CONSTANT problem in the conservative/tea party argument about how the USA can't afford ANYTHING, and we need to SLASH SPENDING so much it further harms the economy, and so on and so forth.

There is no easy analogy for understanding world economics by comparing it to your household finances, or your kid's lemonade stand, or anything else. Economics as they pertain to a country with a budget of our size is a subject that resides in a class all its own. It cannot be simplified to simple, 3rd grade level comparisons.