CRAZIEST Drugs You Never Knew Existed

Kind: captions Language: en An opioid a million times stronger than morphine. A drug that warps your hearing, turning your favorite song into pure sonic torture, and a mysterious substance turning American teens into paranoid wrecks. Today on the Infographic Show, we're looking at even more of the craziest drugs you didn't [music] know existed. Number 11, ALD52. When you read a review of a drug and it says, "Woke up in hospital," it's probably a good idea to give that one a hard pass. But not every drug taker in the world reads the reviews. ALD-52 was first developed by Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist famous for giving the world lysurgic acid dethylamide or LSD, a drug that's become the inspiration for fantastic music [music] and lifelong paranoia and panic attacks. And Hoffman didn't stop at LSD. In [music] 1957, part of his work dabbling with strong psychedelic drugs led to his synthesis of ALD52. Unlike LSD, [music] this one didn't become part of the counterculture. It wasn't until 2016 that it started hitting the streets. It's often been said that it's similar to LSD, but it hasn't been studied much, so it remains mostly an unknown [music] quantity. Even the chemist Alexander Schulen, who labed pretty much everything, didn't have much to say about ALD52. So, that leaves it to pioneering American teenagers to give us the lowdown. And there [music] are plenty of them around, such as the user who said his trip on the drug wasn't anything [music] like his experiences with LSD. He said it was much stronger, leading to him puking and quote, "Violently rolling around on the hardwood floor of my dorm, legitimately believing I might die." The next thing he knew, he said he woke up in the hospital with no shoes, phone, or wallet connected to an IV and an oxygen mask. He's not the only person online who said ALD52 is a different kind of beast to LSD. It might not be as visual, but it certainly messes with your mind. Just ask the guy in the Uber traveling through what he believed was a desolate, almost post-apocalyptic cityscape, being taken to a concentration camp in a quote, [music] "Whit's only totalitarian state under Russian control." And this is just the beginning. Number 10, 4 accomp. The drug known as 4 acco DMT was another concoction synthesized by Albert Hoffman. That was back in the 1960s, but it's still around in the 2020s. often sold as synthetic edible magic mushrooms. In terms of the law, it still exists in a gray area. But in terms of the streets, that gray area is a kaleidoscopic wonderland that in some cases can take on the appearance of hell. It hasn't been studied much, so the comparison to mushrooms is at best very weak. Users say a dose of 4 ac hits the body hard. Unlike with mushrooms, you can get yourself into a state of feeling extremely physically wired, which comes with the downside of wanting to throw up your guts. One guy said that he was pretty much an expert when it came to magic mushrooms. He ingested about 18 mg of 4 acco DMT crystals in a [music] glass of water, and the first thing that hit him was quote, "Unbearable nausea." Not a good start. He went to lie down on his bed, now shivering as if he were freezing cold. His heart was pounding, but the worst thing was that his head was twisting around like the girl from The Exorcist. The reason is he had taken a drug that is known as a serotonin psychedelic. In other words, it affects the amount of serotonin in your brain. One of the possible side effects of such drugs is what's called the head twitch response or HTR. Obviously, this wasn't a good trip for the guy. Still, another user wrote online, "I went from living a nightmare to one of the best times in my life." It seems that for some users, they enjoyed what they called a certain kind of rebirth, the death of their ego. But it came at a cost. As all dedicated trippers will tell you, sometimes you have to take a detour through hell to achieve the wonder of psychedelic enlightenment. A major setback is that sometimes [music] you make it to the hell part and then that's it. You stop. And if you think it's all about giggles and tracers, think again. Okay, now for a drug with a lethal nickname. Number nine, a [music] torphine. Who wouldn't be up for a drop of death? Sometimes called M99, it is a very strong synthetic opioid, anywhere from 1,000 to 80,000 times more potent than morphine, according to studies with lots of heroic rodents, cats, dogs, and monkeys. RIP guys, America's least favorite drug, fentanyl, is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. But ephine is on a different level. In fact, it comes with a warning label that whenever it's being used by professionals, they should have an antidote nearby. It won't penetrate the skin, but when something the size of a speck of dust can kill you, it could get into a cut or in your mouth. Just ask the 30-year-old African game farmer who accidentally pricricked himself with an atorphine- loaded needle. Luckily, his wife had some nlloxxone, the reversal agent. She slammed on the accelerator and had him in a hospital in an impressive 12 minutes. And the study that detailed the story wrote, "On admission, the patient was comeomaoscyanotic [music] and making no respiratory effort at all." And that is with the antidote. The good news is he regained full consciousness after 12 hours and was able to carry on his job of breeding wild beasts for wealthy westerners to assassinate. That's what a torphine is usually used for, animals, often very big ones. Fire a loaded dart at a rampaging rhino and suddenly it's in opioid heaven looking like it just scored a bag of San Francisco's finest fentanyl. Just 2 to four milligrams and your average rhino is nodding off. So how come humans haven't started hitting M99? We seem to hit everything else. Number eight, opioid analoges. M99 isn't even the strongest opioid. Somewhere on the list of the hardest hitters is one that you might have heard of. Carfentinyl. A fentanyl analog that like M99 should only be used in veterary medicine, we said should. A few years ago, there were reports of Americans dropping dead after accidentally consuming cocaine or heroin that the dealers or traffickers had strengthened [music] by adding tiny amounts of this drug. At 10,000 times stronger than morphine, when it was introduced to the world in 1974, no one ever thought that humans would one day start abusing it. That basically means that a tiny grain can turn euphoria and relaxation very quickly into respiratory depression, brain damage, and death. The bad news is that the back alley chemists in countries such as Mexico have been able to buy the precursors, often from China, and make this stuff in their kitchens. Obviously, for a seller, the smaller the better. The really bad news is that dozens of analoges have been found in [music] drugs names that you've never heard of like mythoxy acetal fentanyl, fanylfentinyl, and acetal fentanyl. And they've all been linked with fatal and non-fatal overdoses. But then there's 14 [music] mythoxytopin, and it's stronger than all of them. It's usually a mere 500 times more potent than morphine, but it takes top place on the potency list because if [music] injected into the spine, it is a mind-boggling 1 million times stronger than morphine. Number seven, Dura. In the US, there's been cases of kids sipping tea and falling down dead. And we don't mean iced tea. They drank Dura tea, a kind of brew that comes from one of the Dura plants. What you might have heard called moonflower or devil's weed. It's free. It grows everywhere. So, why not? Well, there are a million reasons why not, such as those two teenage boys in Texas who had a few beers in 1994 and then thought they'd try out some gyms [music] plant, a detour plant. They went to sleep in the desert and they never woke up. [music] That same year, an 18-year-old took some Molly and decided to top it up with some detour seeds. He tripped for 36 hours straight [music] and almost died. The CDC wrote about 14 people, eight male and six female, who ended up in the ER after getting down with gyms. They each turned up at the hospital with massive [music] black pupils. Some of them agitated, some puking, some incoherent, and some hearing and seeing things. Three ended up in intensive care. Humans have actually been taking Dura for millennia. It's been used [music] to assassinate enemies, for trippy rituals, and it was connected to witches in medieval Europe. These days, [music] it's more likely to be used to control people when they're being robbed, or to essentially paralyze them, after which very bad things happen. After a hit, in just 30 to 60 [music] minutes, you can be out of action for one to two days, or you can die. Getting high on something that's [music] been used to assassinate and paralyze people probably isn't a good idea, especially [music] when you've been educated about the dosage by some guy on TikTok. Okay, now let's talk about holes. Very deep [music] holes. Number six, toletamine. Another word of advice is if a drug is usually used to take down a cow or maybe even a polar bear, it's [music] probably quite potent for humans and it should be handled with care. That's what a veterinarian found out in China in 2008 after he'd been eating from his patients [music] stash, his animal patients. He'd been hitting the zolotil pills, which are a combo of the tranquilizer zazipam, and the disassociative anesthetic tletamine. The latter type of the drugs is popular among humans because they produce feelings of not quite being in your own body. In low doses, you can feel very [music] spaced out, dreamy. The stresses of life fade off into the background. In high doses, you can go into a black hole, which you don't always come out of. [music] The most abused of the dissociative drugs is ketamine, which can send you down a so-called K-hole. These can be nightmarish, like being plunged into the abyss, a kind of living nightmare. Other abused dissociative drugs are fencyine, aka PCP, [music] and in the past, chloroform, the stuff that people applied to handkerchiefs in the movies to knock people out. Before that, the [music] dissociative of choice was ether, known to sometimes cause sudden sniffer death. So, dissociative [music] drugs are strong, and that includes toletamine. In Taiwan, a vet ended up with a movement disorder after abusing toamine. Then there was the 30-year-old employee [music] at the local zoo who was found unconscious on the job due to her secret tletamine addiction. But as you'll now see, backstreet chemists have been busy making very powerful dissociatives just for humans. Number five, Arlylohexamine. Arl cycllohexylamine is a designer drug, just one of many that like tletamine or PCP offers euphoria mixed with dissociative effects. This is not the same kind [music] of intense euphoria a person might get from heroin or cocaine. It all comes wrapped up in a blanket of weirdness. That's because they block NMDA receptors which are important for learning, memory, and sensory processing. So you and your sense of being kind of breaks apart and it leaves you floating in a neverworld that can be ethereal, cosmic, and hellish. Or as one [music] person put it, a vacuum of existential destruction. One of the most used in this class is methoxetamine or MXE. Users snort or eat the crystals, [music] which depending on the amount can be pleasant to absolutely insane. A guy online described his trip as my neighborhood was being invaded. The sound I was hearing [music] was the sound of spaceships approaching. They had arrived and they were wreaking havoc on the people in the houses around me. The earlier communication I had been getting via my computer was the aliens attempting to warn me. So too much and you might be transported to another reality and it's not always a nice one. Another user said, "I was transported into the Mhole dimension. The fluidity of normal human waking life had completely dissolved. I became one with hell. [music] A sense of normality was gone, and I was experiencing a spinning train wreck of [music] confused psychosis." British researchers in 2015 said there had been plenty of MXE deaths. But since most of the time other drugs were involved, it wasn't easy to gauge just how dangerous this one was. As for this next drug, [music] the insanity is unlike anything else we've heard. Number four, disopropylamine. If you take a hit of disopylamine or DIP, you might not hallucinate visually at all. Your sight could be completely normal. Your mind might feel fairly sober, but your hearing, your hearing is next level messed up. You could be listening to a friend and it suddenly feels like their voice has been mixed in a synthesizer. One user said after he took DIPT, he felt quite normal in terms of what he saw and how he was thinking, but he was surprised because he was expecting a very strong trip. But then things got very weird. Everything he heard was distorted. He explained in terms of auditory effects, we felt like we had entered [music] this demonic parallel universe where people had no souls. Music sounded terrible. Everything was flat and out of tune. This guy and his friend were big fans of the band Gorillas, but under the influence of DIP, their music was unbearable. Everything was out of key. The songs weren't linear, like they've been shredded and spat out of a broken virtual reality machine. Another user had more positive things to say, [music] explaining that when he played one of his favorite songs, Queen's Bohemian Rap City, it sounded different, but he actually enjoyed it. The strangest thing is that he said his [music] cat's meows sounded robotic. When his answering machine went off, he and his friend laughed since the voices on the other end were unrecognizable. Okay, so who do you think would love to get their hands on a powerful and weird substance like this? You guessed it, those drugloving boys from Langley. The CIA. Number three, AMT. The CIA's drug experiments in MK Ultra didn't just involve LSD. They also gave people opioids, barbituates, amphetamines, dissociative drugs. You name it, they tested it. They went as far as creating a fake company in the Peruvian jungle where under the top secret MK search they tried to find the strongest drugs in existence. Records show that under the front company Amazon Natural Drug Co. or ANDCO, JC King, the former head of the AY's Western Hemisphere division, shipped hundreds of crates filled with hallucinogenic plants back to the CIA. One man who was used in these tests, a US soldier, said he was given something and he hallucinated for 6 days. We won't ever know exactly what the CIA administered to men when they were subjected to what were called terminal interrogations. The agency destroyed the vast majority of documents relating to those programs. But it wasn't all about making people into killers. The CIA also worked on persuading prisoners to spill the beans. And what better way to do that than to make them feel all loved up. We're not sure if the CIA used MDMA, but we know for sure it dabbled with AMT or Amethythylryptamine, which is quite similar to MDMA, but more lethal. Once used in the Soviet Union as an anti-depressant, it's what's known as an intact drug, meaning a drug that can create feelings of emotional openness. But AMT could also be very toxic, [music] and in high doses, it could be deadly. Still, it made a comeback in the 1990s. Sold on the streets under the names of Trip, ET, Love Pearls, and Love. It's still around now with Gen Z users saying it's kind of like E, but much more psychedelic. Many users talk about the beauty, the openness, the sheer love that they felt for everything. But others talked about intense visuals, paranoia, or very hard physical trips that ended up in the ER. There's a good reason it was banned. Number two, 25i NBOME. 25I NBOME is often sold as an alternative to LSD. Except, well, it's nothing like LSD. Known on the streets as NBOM, Solaris, Smiles, it's one of the NBME family, known for neurotoxic and cardiotoxic activity. Unlike LSD, it can waste your physical body. And as for the mind, it's like walking through a minefield of delusion and paranoia. There are plenty of reports of people dying after hurting themselves during what's known as excited delirium. People have literally freaked out and jumped out of windows. Some users online talk about being covered in imaginary bugs, completely losing their minds, with one guy saying that it was like nuking his sanity when tripping became psychosis and delirium. Then you have comments such as, "I woke up the next day in intensive care [music] and the paramedics thought that I would either die or wake up with permanent brain damage. The [music] drug is a mind shredder that can easily cause hypertension, tachicardia, elevated white cell count, scary muscle contractions, rabdtomyolysis, and acute kidney injury. The list goes on and on. The chances of adverse effects is high, too high to risk experimenting with the stuff. LSD and psilocybin or mushrooms can be hard work, but they can also be very therapeutic if taken [music] sensibly. But a lot of the new synthetics on the black market are just way too dangerous to mess with, such as this next one. Number [music] one, AIHP. Bath salts are the cheapest, dirtiest, and most mind-melting way to escape reality. These synthetic drugs known as cathones [music] act like stimulants, similar to ecstasy or speed. But they don't just hype you up, they shatter your grip on reality. Think full-blown paranoia, hallucinations, [music] and psychotic breaks. Some users have even leapt from buildings, convinced that they were being chased [music] by cops or worse, while bugs crawled beneath their skin. It is not a trip. It's a nightmare. That's not an exaggeration. It's what often happens with strong bath salts such as MDPV, aka monkey dust, a drug currently making waves in the UK. But you might have heard of that. So, let's introduce you to alpha pyroladino isohexanopenone or [music] APIHP. With this, you can go from intense euphoria to just two or three days of severe paranoia, anxiety, and very scary hallucinations. That doesn't happen to all users, but people who have hit this stuff often say that [music] they completely lost their marbles. Just a bump can cause heart pain, severe agitation, seizures, hypothermia, and muscle death. The fact is, the purity of the batches currently on the streets is so varying that your expectation of euphoria can quite easily become straight jacket madness. And studies show that even though users of the drugs like this know it's killing them and driving them to paranoid psychosis, they just can't stop taking them. This is called compulsive redosing. If you go online, you can listen to people who say that even though they were driven to delirium, they just couldn't stop. How will cannabis survive the apocalypse? Did William Shakespeare smoke a bull before he wrote a play? Why do you get the munchies after toking? Which presidents liked to get dank on their downtime? And can you smoke so much weed that it kills you? These are 50 chronically insane facts about weed. Fact 50. Cannabis is believed to be one of the earliest plants to be cultivated by humans. Mentions of it have been found in writings from as far back as 3,000 BC and possible evidence of cannabis use has been identified in Neolithic archaeological sites that are over 10,000 years old. Most of the early evidence of cannabis use comes from Asia with prehistoric cannabis residues and hemp fiber imprints having been found across China, Japan, India, and the Middle East. Historians believe that these ancient cultures used the plant not just for its psychoactive properties, but also to make rope, clothes, shoes, paper, and even as a food source. Fact 49. Have you ever wondered where the word marijuana actually comes from? Well, ther