What this site is, and how to read it

CH3CH3 is a harm reduction reference. It exists because the things a person actually needs to know before, during and after taking a drug — what the compound is, what it does, what it must not be combined with, and how much of that is genuinely known — are spread across papers, forums and pages that tend to either moralise or sell you something.

We are trying to do neither. The working assumption here is that people take drugs, that telling them not to has never once changed that, and that the useful thing to do is make the accurate information easier to find than the inaccurate information.

How the site is arranged

Everything sits in a tree, and each level answers a different question.

• Subjects — the broad classes. Opioids, psychedelics, stimulants, benzodiazepines, dissociatives, cannabinoids, and so on.
• Families — chemical groupings inside a subject: the mitragynines, the substituted phenethylamines, the 2C series. This is where compounds that behave alike sit together.
• Molecules — one compound. Structure, formula and identifiers, where a public record exists for them.
• Sections — the parts of a molecule's page: General, Dosage, Legal, Interactions, Chemistry, Harm Reduction and others. Interactions is on by default for every molecule, because combination risk is the single most consequential thing this site can get right.

You can read down that tree, use search — which covers areas, posts, comments, people and chemists at once — or open Node View, which draws the same tree as one navigable web: scroll to zoom, click anything to open it.

What the badges mean

A post marked official was written and reviewed by the site, and it sits at the top of its section. Everything else was written by a member, and is labelled with who wrote it. Both are worth reading; they are not the same kind of thing, so they do not look the same.

The small grey line on each card counts what is actually inside it — families, molecules, credited chemists, posts. Zeroes are not shown. A card that says nothing has nothing in it yet, and we would rather admit that than pad it.

Where numbers come from, and where they do not

Most of the compounds catalogued here are research chemicals with no published human data. For those, this site will not print a dose. Not a range, not a threshold, not a duration.

That is a deliberate refusal rather than a gap we have not filled yet. A plausible, confidently-formatted milligram figure for a compound nobody has studied is the one mistake here that gets someone killed, and it looks exactly like good information. Where the data does not exist, the page says so and explains what dosing without a reference point actually involves — which is the harm reduction content in that situation.

Where published human data does exist, the page will say that too, and cite it.

The chemists

Molecules have people behind them, and the chemists section is where they are. Credit there is split four ways — first synthesis, discovering what a compound does, isolating a natural product, and popularising something someone else made — because collapsing those into one verb produces confident falsehoods. MDMA was first made in 1912 by a chemist who never found out what it was, and died in the war.

What this site will not do

• No sourcing, no vendors. No vendor sections, no vendor ratings, no links to sellers, and no "community" that is a vendor directory wearing a hat. Do not ask, and do not post it.
• No private messages. There is no DM system and there will not be one. It is the feature that turns an information site into a marketplace, and it cannot be moderated at our scale.
• No tracking. No analytics, no third-party scripts, no ad network. Images posted here are served from our own storage — a remote image would report every reader's IP address to whoever hosts it, which on this subject is a safety problem rather than an annoyance.

The full statement of that is in Legal.

If something here is wrong

Tell us. There is a report control on every page, and the moderation queue is read. Being corrected is cheaper than being wrong in public about a subject where wrong has a body count.

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The picture strip on this section's page is the site itself — screenshots of the pages this post describes, each one linking to the live page it shows.