Combinations - drug dosages depend on what ?

[Ximot]

body weight?
--a factor for some drugs like ketamine or alcohol, for instance, but not others, e.g. not for paracetamol it seems

tolerance?
--depends on the drug a lot.

sex?
--m/f/... (to do with body fat and metabolism and...?!)

individual differences in sensitivity
-- (due to enzymes or whatever?)

food intake prior, obviously...

I especially welcome people's experiences on which drugs' dosages are affected by body weight and which ones aren't. Particularly keen here on RCs, but any info welcomed.

peace
ximot

[Triple7]

they also depend on race.. several medical/pharmpacy R&D companies have started to take this into account in their research.



soooooooo.. complicated everything!! =)

[matti_2003]

Many people think that size has a big influence but iv been told that the bigger the persons build can give more effects that someone who is small. Iv been told that this is the case with GHB. anyone any personal experience

[enquirewithin]

Are not attitudes and expectations important too, especially with psychedelics?

[Adultswimmer]

Many factors contribute to the result. Age, sex, weight, metabolism, etc are pretty well known and can easily be factored in. I was interested to see someone post about ethnicity. I had read an article years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine about that. It caught my eye because it said from the study, Native Americans had the highest tolerance and Asians had the lowest. My father is half Choctow and has an extremely high tolerance to any substance. I inherited that and so did my borthers.

My mother, on the otherhand, will get tipsy if she smells a glass of wine from across the room!

It's always best to start very low and increase. Never good to start high and wish you could decrease. I know it can be hard to do that when you only have a certain amount but you always have to have a trial first.

Even then, it can sneak up on you. This one woman who has ingested many different substances and is opiate tolerant, drank some poppy tea one summer. A nice mild effect that lasted several hours. Over the summer, she increased the amount with no bad effects except once she got a severe headache. It went away in a few hours.

Then all of a sudden, one evening a wave of nausea hit her so strong that she almost didn't make it to the bathroom. Long story short, EMTs were called and she ended up in the hospital. Diagnosis: food poisoning. That was the end of poppy tea for her.

Reputation Comments on this post:

informative post

[Ilsa]

there are genetic factors that must be taken into account as well as the other relevant aspects already discussed.

alcoholism is, in part, a heritable trait, at least one gene (to my limited knowledge, it's probably safe to say that more have been identified) and its interactions with other genes appear to confer a predisposition to alcohol dependence in certain individuals.

another example would be the flushing that occurs when individuals with a mutation in the acetaldehyde dehydrogenase gene, resulting in a build-up of acetaldehyde, one of the most toxic break-down products of alcohol (ethanol).