Nobody is perfectly healthy. We all need drugs. Sometimes a combination of drugs. We get them from drug dealers.
Your indoor drug dealers — the ones who wear white lab coats, take payment by insurance, and operate under florescent lights — know about drug combinations: which drug combos are synergistic and heighten each other’s effects, which combinations you gotta be careful with. And which can kill you. They have apps and charts and books on it.
Your outdoor drug dealers, the ones who wear tie-dye shirts, take payment in beer, and operate under overpasses, don’t got jack. They’ll tell you that dilaudid and Benadryl will send you flying, or molly and caffeine is deadly, or Budweiser and vicodin makes Calculus II tolerable. This is how people aspirate and croak.
Well, the outdoor drug dealers are catching up in knowledge.
Read this amazing chart. It has twenty-five of the most popular scheduled drugs listed. Your safer drugs, like LSD, mushrooms and DMT, are on the top and left, and your more dangerous drugs, like opioids and benzos, are on the bottom and right.
Trace the columns and rows to find information on how safe, when combined, the drugs are. That’s 600 different interactions.
In the upper right corner of this chart is the key. Yellow squares warrant caution. Orange squares mean the combination is unsafe. Red squares mean it’s downright dangerous.
For example, mixing cocaine with alcohol is unsafe. Mixing opioids with benzos (for example, heroin with klonopin) is dangerous.
To see what, exactly, the negative effects can be, check out the individual drug entries on TripSit. They made the chart. A few other organizations, like DanceSafe can help you figure out what's really in your molly and which drug combos are dangerous.
But this chart has a fascinating twist. Your DARE officer is going to hate this, but this chart doesn’t just show you what’s dangerous — it shows you what might be awesome.
The dark green squares show which drugs combination boost each other, while also being low-risk. These are “synergistic” combinations, i.e., heightening, while still posing a low risk to your physical health.
It’s mostly the natural, hippie drugs, like DMT and mushrooms, that are low-risk, and low-risk when combined. So LSD plus MDMA (“candyflipping”)- for example, is a music festival highlight, and listed here as “synergistic and low-risk.”
Low risk means physical low risk. High doses in the wrong situations, of course — like with strangers, or in public, in jail or on a bicycle — can wreck your head and ruin lives.
But there are 145 drug combinations listed as synergist and low-risk. That’s 145 fascinating and illuminating and relatively safe ways to flunk out of school. One hundred forty five psychologically traumatizing ways to pass a 10-hour workplace seminar.
And, maybe, 145 astonishing ways to change your life.
That’s because some of these combinations are known to be more than just excellent fun. For example, as the chart shows, when you take an antidepressant called an MAOI and ingest the natural psychedelic DMT, it’s not only synergistic and low risk, it’s called ayahuasca, and it can cure depression, drug addiction and acedia.
This chart has another interesting feature. It shows which drug combinations are merely boring. The light green squares show which combos are low risk but don’t add anything to the other. And the blue squares show drug combos are also low risk, but where each effects blunt the other. So alcohol, despite its wide use, actually dampens the effects of things like mushrooms or mescaline.
Caveat tripper, of course. This chart is mostly crowdsourced; it’s based on what trippers say happened to them; there aren’t many placebo-controlled, double-blind scientific studies here. Actual results may melt your face.
Also, the chart is extremely limited. It doesn’t show most legal drugs, which can be more dangerous than the illegal drugs. Talk to your doctor. (Seriously. Talk to her. She won’t snitch. Mine is extremely cool about this stuff.) And combine all this with the deep resources of Erowid, reddit and Wikipedia. And, please, please, please think real hard before you drink ayahuasca by yourself, or candyflip during a job interview, or hippieflip at the edge of the Grand Canyon.
But marvel at this chart as another amazing thing the Internet has brought us. It’s more proof that outdoor drug dealers can be nearly as responsible as the indoor drug dealers. And it’s more proof that regular drug users are doing work the government tried and failed to do, by showing which drugs, and drug combinations, are actually dangerous and can hurt us, and which drugs, and drug combinations, might actually help people live meaningful, enjoyable and purpose-driven lives.
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