Like Fluoride or Oxygen.
Just about anything including water or salt
Not just about. Literally everything is lethal at a high enough concentration.
LD50’s are fun!
Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.
Paracelsus, 1538
The word for poison in German is Gift?!
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”). The original meaning “gift” has disappeared in contemporary Standard German, but remains in some compounds (see Mitgift). Compare also Dutch gift (“gift”) alongside gif (“poison”).
Well that’s dumb.
“gift” means both “poison” and “married” in swedish. languages are fun :)
Some people would not see a difference in those words, so why not use the same and decide on context xD
The first part of the question asks what is safe in small amounts
I thought about this a bit and concluded that it only applies to physical materials and forces.
For example: There certainly are lethal ideas, but most of them are not, and much like bosons they can overlap, so filling a person with multiple copies of the same (benign) thought has a diminishing effect.
But yeah, anything physical has a lethal concentration.
I love nerds.
Weed. A gram will get you high. A woolpack full of it can crush you like a grape if falling from the hay loft.
woolpack From Middle English wolpak, wullepak, equivalent to wool + pack. A bag of wool, traditionally weighing 240 pounds.TIL, Thx
Woolie Nelson
According to people I know, I’m only ok in small doses.
Then they leave.
So you’ve never had so far the opportunity to test whether or not you are lethal at higher doses ?
I think we have a volunteer
Panadol / Paracetamol / Tylenol / Acetaminophen / C8H9NO2 is exceptionally easy to overdose on. I’ve done it accidentally a couple of times. It causes liver damage at even lower overdoses, you really don’t want that.
The maximum dosage is 1g every 4 to 6 hours, maximum total 4g a day. I am no doctor but I strongly recommend 6+ hours between doses (I set a timer) and I try very hard to not get to 3g or above per day. It’s even worse that plenty of medications just throw it in to the mix casually.
Unfortunately as the only first line of defence I have against pain, I cannot avoid it altogether. Redflags for me were light abdominal pain and yellowing of skin under eyes. Plus fatigue, but that’s normal in my world.
I accidentally overdosed on acetaminophen after a surgery once. Doctor forgot to tell me (or I was still high when he told me) he gave me acetaminophen during/after the surgery. I thought I still could take up to 4g that day. A few hours after the surgery, the pain started to kick in so I took some acetaminophen. Ended up vomiting uncontrollably.
Can you not use ibuprofen?
Sadly no, the entire NSAID class are off the table. I’m one of the “lucky” few who gets one of the rare but serious side effects.
Took a Hazmat class today and the big thing they drilled into our heads was “Everything is toxic at scale.” So make anything you want and there is an IDLH concentration.
Age
I think this is one of those “any amount is bad” things.
Optimal age to be is blastocyst. It’s just downhill from there.
To quote, poorly from memory, the wisdom of Silenus “The best fate for a man is to never have been born at all, the second best fate is to die quickly.”
Ain’t that the truth lmao
Botulism can kill you, botox can kill your wrinkles.
And your migraines!
It’s been said a lot that light alcohol consumption is actually good for your health, but this is not actually true. It improves some health outcomes but the benefits are outweighed by the risk. There is no safe amount of alcohol consumption.
Hilarious how the alcohol lobby scratched around for years looking for a good news story about alcohol and came back with some weak sauce link between red wine and heart disease. Meanwhile, 50% of reported sexual assaults are linked with alcohol. Probably more like 80%. How is alcohol legal and LSD is a schedule 1 substance? There is no lethal dose and has been discovered as a treatment for resistant depression and PTSD, OCD, etc. Our drug laws are completely wack.
The real elephant in the room is alcohol is much more destructive and just as addictive than measurable controlled doses of opoids, and also equally if not more destructive than stimulants like amphetamines and cocaine. It’s basically the worst drug in every metric. If every alcoholic got their drinks replaced with MS Contin and or weed, the strain on the health system would be much less. Not to mention all the other negative externalities related to alcohol intoxication.
I say all this as someone who drinks. I am going to ensure my child is aware of all the negatives at an early age and be open to discussion about substances. People either like or dislike alcohol, and the people who like it have no self control. It’s a stupid drug, I wish I was never introduced the way I was.
Don’t even get me started on the alcohol companies producing alcoholic mountain Dew, freeze pops and Sunny D… and they have the gall to ban flavored vapes haha.
I have a feeling that alcohol will come to be viewed in a similar way we now look at religion. It’s a cultural artefact from an ignorant time. It serves some purpose and there is a basic utility but overall it has a toxic effect. I hear that research is ongoing to find a credible alternative molecule without the deleterious health outcomes.
Western society has a generally incoherent and childish attitude to substances. Some are viewed as evil e.g. heroin but when this drug turns up in a therapeutic setting, it inexplicably becomes medicinal i.e. diacetylmorphine, which is the acceptable face of heroin, used for terminal cancer treatment.
No substance should be viewed as either panacea or disaster. They are tools that we can use when the time and place is appropriate. We ought to educate ourselves and have honest conversations. Prohibition is getting in the way of this effort and it must go. In it’s place we install education, healthcare and hygiene for the mind.
Happy to find a fellow psychonaut. What’s your next project in this area? I am considering a psychedelic voyage to the Netherlands.
Haha, I am a bit on the older side and basically have took all my trips. I have a hallucinagen stash for every couple years with my wife, but that’s about it. I have tried almost everything at this point.
I would like to take one of those camel desert treks, where before bed you get to smoke opium and then cuddle with a camel for warmth while you sleep. That sounds like the best nights sleep possible… Although it’s relatively weak opiate, opium is supposedly a very unique high compared to other opiates. My uncle did it decades ago and he said it was one of the best times of his life. Unfortunately there are few countries that offer the experience, and a few of them are going through very dangerous internal strife. (I mean the countries don’t support the drug use, they just turn a blind eye)
I’ve had a few trips over the years but never used them in a therapeutic setting. My mental health has become more fragile as I’ve got older and I took up meditation over the last year in an effort to improve it. They say that meditation works by stilling something called the Default Mode Network and psychedelic drugs also work on this process in your mind but in a completely different way. The plan is to take a Heroic Dose of mushrooms (people say 5g of dry shrooms) and then do an assimilation session afterwards. The session is guided by an experienced person.
Your camel adventure sounds great but all the camels I met so far have been hella grumpy. I would be worried that they were going to bite me for snoring too much. Well, that’s what my wife does.
Yep and plenty of folks wanted to believe it.
Did anyone not know this at this point? I’m still gonna drink.
dying is a pretty big red flag, you ask me.
Okay. Do you think dying is a pretty big red flag?
Everything. Literally everything can be fatal in large enough quantities. Quote from one of my chemistry professors: “there are no lethal substances, only lethal doses”
Remember the Wii craze in 2007? There was a radio competition called Hold Your Wee for a Wii in which the contestants had to drink throughout the day without going for a piss. One died.
I remember. I didn’t think it was possible before then.
Yeah same, it was madness
“The dose makes the poison” -some old dude that like found the pharmaceutical industry
Everything is good in moderation. Even drinking too much water can lead to death.
Water. You need it to live, but you can also drown in it or even drink too much and dilute your blood and die.
Yeah this just goes to show how the answer to OP’s question really is “everything.”
My medication. Lithium in small exactly precise doses according to each individual is helpful. But we have to take blood tests to check the toxicity.
We have to stay hydrated and be really careful if we are sick or vomiting
A warning signs is shaking (I tests my hands regularly), nausea and outcome is dying. Ha.
Bipolar?
Yes
Acetaminophen/Paracetamol. The safe therapeutic dose is very close to the toxic dose. While most people don’t intentionally overdose, at least not for treating illness symptoms, the problem arises when they take multiple medications that all contain acetaminophen, following the label for all of them can easily net you a toxic dose.
Chubbyemu video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSqrCgFMsCI
Some good fan service in that video
There are lots of things that our body needs in really small doses. But anything above can be lethal.
Some things needs to be in really specific compounds. Like chrome we need really small dose of Cr3+ but Cr6+ is carcinogenic.
