POV you’ve got a gram of your favourite powder to share between you and your 6 friends at a festival, but your milligram scales ran out of batteries and you don’t have any caps. You think you might be able to eyeball 100mg if you’re lucky, but our experience is that luck isn’t good enough when it comes to getting your dose right.

All is not lost! If you have a one litre drink bottle you can use that for volumetric dosing.

Volu-what?

Volumetric dosing is where you add a known mass of dry substance and dissolve it in a known volume of liquid. When you measure out a smaller amount of the liquid once everything’s been dissolved, you can use that to measure how much of the dry substance you’re getting.

By the numbers

Let’s say you have a gram of MDMA and you want to dissolve it in a litre of water.

1 gram = 1,000mg
1 litre = 1,000mL

This gives you a solution of 1mg of MDMA per 1mL of water. If you divide your water bottle by 10 it’ll give you a 100mL. Because we know that the concentration is 1mg/1mL, we can safely say you have 10 x 100mg doses in your 1L bottle.

The maths is mathsing

Once you know what 100mg looks like you can figure out how much you want to take from there. If there are 7 of you having 100mL doses that’ll be 700mL drunk with 300mL left over. If you’re all going to redose later there’ll be enough left for each of you to take a 40mL boost.

However it’s not just a case of chucking your gram bag in a bottle of water and knocking it back. If you do this the active ingredient won’t have had time to dissolve. Your MDMA will be sitting on the bottom of the bottle like a gritty, gross-tasting surprise trip to A&E. Meanwhile, the top of the bottle will only have water and disappointment.

Wait for it to dissolve properly. This can take a few minutes, so taihoa and let the fluid do its work. Five minutes of waiting is better than a cardiac event. Even then it’s best to give the bottle a good shake before dishing out everyone’s dose (just make sure you’ve got the lid on tight before you shake).

Maths? In MY festival?? It’s more likely than you’d think

If you don’t have a nice round number like a gram or a litre you can still figure out your volumetric dose.

Tripsit has a super useful calculator where you can plug your numbers in and it’ll give you how many mg of substance per mL of fluid you have. Once you know what your mg/mL rate is you can pour out as much liquid as you need to get your preferred dose.

Volumetric dosing vs. chocolate chip cookie problem

If you’ve had a harm reduction conversation after getting your drugs checked you might have heard the drug checker talking about the chocolate chip cookie problem. This is where the active ingredient in a sample isn’t spread evenly, so you wind up with little nuggets of active ingredient surrounded by non-active filler, like chocolate chips in a cookie.

Keeping your stuff dry makes you more likely to encounter the chocolate chip cookie problem, especially if you’re using tabs of LSD to microdose with. Not all tabs have their LSD applied equally, and trying to accurately measure a dose of something you can’t actually see on a small tab is hard.

Dissolving your substance means that the active ingredient is spread evenly through your liquid, so you’re more likely to get the right balance between the chocolate chip and the cookie dough.

Read more about volumetric dosing for LSD at The Third Wave website

Things to remember

LABEL YOUR BOTTLE
Seriously.

Make sure you can clearly see the difference between your regular drinking water bottle and your dosed water. Don’t skull from the wrong bottle first thing in the morning when you wake up parched and find out the hard way on the drive home. Also, clearly labeling your bottle will keep anyone else drinking from it by mistake.

Permanent marker isn’t always permanent.

We’ve found that if you get sweaty you can wipe the ink straight off the plastic bottle and then you’re dealing with Schrödinger’s molly water and the only way to be sure is to shake the bottle and have a taste.

You can get around this by covering your writing with clear tape. This keeps your sweat off the ink and keeps your label in place.

What can you dissolve?

While volumetric dosing is mainly useful for substances you take orally like MDMA, LSD, and 2C-B, you can also use it for sniffable substances, like cocaine. The jury’s still out as to whether taking ketamine orally is low risk in a recreational setting, so we recommend sticking to what we know is low risk and snorting your ket.

Also give your body a good break between ket and more ket, because tolerance to ket is easy to build, and ket bladder is both real and super painful. We recommend a break of at least 2 weeks.

Read more about ketamine-induced crystalline gastritis in The American Journal of Gastroenterology

If you’re dissolving MDMA or cocaine

• Make sure you use water, juice, or something similar.
  We recommend you don’t use a caffeinated beverage because mixing stimulants can lead to overamping if you’re not careful
• Definitely avoid dissolving either of these substances in alcohol.
  Both cocaine and MDMA are stimulants, and alcohol is a depressant, so you won’t feel the effects of the alcohol you’ve drunk, despite it still hitting your body. And if you want to take another dose of whatever you’ve mixed, you’ll need to drink whatever it’s been mixed with. To give you an idea, a 100mg/mL dose dissolved in alcohol is
  • 1 standard glass of wine
  • ⅓ of a standard can of beer or cider
  • 3 and ⅓ shots of spirits

  This is pretty low risk if you’re using a low-alcohol beverage, but you’ll need to be mindful that alcohol is still doing things in your body, even if you can’t feel it, so having another drink isn’t a good idea. This can mean re-dosing later in the night might be off the cards.
  Read more about how MDMA and alcohol interact in our blog
  
  Cocaine and alcohol combine in your liver to make cocaethylene. This feels like a more intense cocaine experience, but it also hits your body a LOT harder and stays in your system a lot longer. This increases the likelihood of cocaine’s risks happening, mainly

  • Heart attack
  • Liver damage
  • Overamping

  Read more about what happens when you have cocaine while drinking

• Remember to wait for it to dissolve properly.
  Like we said before, if it doesn’t dissolve properly your substance will settle on the bottom of the bottle and the chocolate chip cookie effect we mentioned earlier will come into play.
  • Whoever’s first will get cookie dough and disappointment.
  • Whoever’s last will get ALL of the active ingredient.
    If you’ve put a whole gram in your bottle, all of that hitting all at once will definitely put you at risk of a cardiac event.
  • Always shake the bottle before measuring out your dose, just in case.

If you’re dissolving LSD

• Use distilled water or clear alcohol. Tap water can degrade your LSD
• If you’re microdosing, use a clearly marked 1mL syringe to measure your dose
• If you’ve got leftovers, wrap the bottle in tinfoil or keep it in the fridge. Keep it out of sunlight as that will degrade your LSD.

If you’re dissolving 2C-B

• Use a mix of distilled water and clear alcohol or distilled water alone.
• Like LSD, sunlight will degrade your 2C-B so keep it out of the sun.