Remember sitting in 10th grade health class and listening to the “sex ed” unit that was mostly just scary stories about all the STDs we could get? Before they told us about condoms and pills, the teacher, guided by an outdated textbook and restricted by the concerned parents on the school board, told us all that the best way to avoid STDs and pregnancy was to not have sex.
They honestly believed that advice was helpful.
As numerous national studies easily found on online—try the Advocates For Youth website—will attest, abstinence-only education doesn’t work.
Not everybody will have premarital sex, but most people will. And these individuals will be able to live healthier, happier, maybe even longer lives if they have access to information about contraception.
The same philosophy should be applied to drugs. It’s only natural for humans to want to explore their mind and experiment with altered states. You can tell a health class full of kids not to touch drugs, but you’d be wasting your time.
Some of those kids will never try drugs, but most of them will in some way.
When we as a society can sum up our official attitude toward mind-altering substances as drugs are bad, we can expect to see more tragedies like the accidental overdose that took place on this campus in January.
Triston Harvey’s death was caused in part by an NBOMe overdose. The NBOMe class of drugs includes a variety of synthetic hallucinogens. They mimic the effects of LSD and are much cheaper to produce.
But there’s a very big difference between NBOMe and LSD: LSD is just about impossible to overdose on. While a dose of 50-150 micrograms or less will bring on the visuals, altered sense of time and altered thoughts “Lucy” is famous for, you would have to take 100 to 200 times that amount to actually overdose—the exact amount is not known because the problem is so rare.
NBOMe is effective in similar doses, but it takes much less than 100 times a normal amount to overdose. While LSD if far too expensive for a poor college student—or even an average, employed middle-class adult—to overdose on, it’s not hard to buy enough NBOMe for a potentially deadly trip.
The obvious, safest solution for someone determined to explore hallucinogens is to take LSD and never touch NBOMe. The stumbling block, at this point, is the ambiguity of the black market.
It’s impossible to say for sure that Harvey thought he was taking LSD, but we do know that in the past five years, many young people around the globe have lost their lives because they thought they were taking LSD when in fact, they were ingesting NBOMe.
If our society could take a more reasonable, more responsible, more adult stance on drugs, we could focus more on harm reduction and fewer people my age would be needlessly dying.
If someone had told Harvey that drug kit tests were readily available on Amazon, he might still be alive. If someone told him that LSD glows under a black light and NBOMe does not, he might be returning for the fall semester.
But nobody told him those things because the politicians and school boards and teachers responsible for his education thought drugs are bad was a more valuable lesson than actual science and unbiased information.
