I loved drugs.
Written October 2009
I was just a little kid when I first became interested in drug. I remember one of my grade five or six friends told me that you could crush up a tablet of ASA and snort it, because it was LSD, because LSD is also called ACID, and the generic name of Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid, so if you just remove the “acetylsalicylicâ€, you would be left with just the acid, which you could take and get extremely high, and you will feel like you can fly. My friend said he knew about a guy who took too much of this acid and jumped out of the window and almost died, and of course I believed him.
That was where this twisted affair first started. I wanted to see fantastical things to; I wanted to feel like I was flying and all that. But a kid growing up in a Mennonite village to two loving and religious parents in rural South-central Manitoba in the eighties I did not really have access to drugs, and I never really was exposed to the wider world. Being extremely shy and quiet, very withdrawn and almost totally unsociable, my exploration of drugs was restricted to the reading and learning about all the different aspects of psychopharmacology. As a child I read the encyclopaedia from A to Z several times through, just picking and choosing which articles I found most interesting. This was my real education, much more interesting than the drivel they were teaching at school, which was just not in depth enough, or so I felt. This was before were my family had a computer, and there was no World Wide Web. The library was another source of drug information, although I did not really find any decent books describing illicit and recreational drugs, the drugs I wanted to use and misuse. My mom’s sister was a nurse, and had a copy of a used CPS – compendium of pharmaceuticals and specialties, the Canadian version of the American PDR, for the most part. This heavy tome contained hundreds of drug monographs of most all the major drugs used in medicine at that time. I read, and reread the monographs of various narcotics, trying to decipher the meaning of words and phrases such as mu receptors, agonists and antagonists. And I did not understand why things such as euphoria, sedation, and sleepiness, were listed as side effects. These effects to me seemed like the reason for taping them. I did not understand why everybody was not taking them all the time. Such amazing things existed and most people did not use them? I could not understand why people would allow themselves to be depressed or anxious or angry when there were medications that could instantly transport a person into a world of euphoria and happiness. Did nobody realize how useful it would be if we all could just go to the store and buy all the drug we needed to help us get through this miserable life.
Right now I am smoking methylenedioxypyrovalerone. MDPV. I put about 20 to 50mg on a small stash of marijuana and then smoked it.
After about twenty to thirty minutes of just bliss and euphoria arises, and subsides, and the feelings and the whiteness gets really intense, the computer monitor glows likes a nuclear fire. The sky blackens as the sun sets. Street lights become large balls of fire burning 30 feet above the ground just outside my windows, as woozy drivers zip by on the slick city streets, going 70, 90 km/h. Some mornings, as I wake to the hum of traffic, I lie still thinking of just how close those rushing tons of metal are to me. My skull just 30 feet diagonally from their front bumper, with only a thin plane of glass, and the fact that 15 of those 30 feet are vertical protecting me from their maniacal actions. In the summers when it was far too hot, I would sit in my apartment baking, cooking, frying from the heat in my far too uncool place, I would fantasize about throwing things out the bedroom window, the office window, the living room window, my only windows, and out into the passing traffic below. Make those oblivious freaks aware of me once and for all. My microwave entering their car through the windshield at whatever speed they have chosen to annoy me at.
Then my mind begins to wander into more and more strange terrain as synapses misfire. I begin to get psychedelic-like effects. Partially due to sleep deprivation, partly from the 400 mg of dextromethorphan I took an hour ago, ironically taken because I was getting worried that I might just be far too high. To make matters worse (which is what I usually do to the things that matter), I also took my evening dose of moclobemide. So now I had the added potentiation of an MAO Inhibitor onboard. Like cranking up the amplifier when the speaker is already turned up to eleven. I seem to be just begging for a serious complication of drug abuse, although I explain my actions to myself in terms of exploration and discovery of new worlds.
I spend the night lying in bed. Brilliantly wide awake, my muscles twitching, my mind a blur of euphoria, dysphoria. I manage to use some meditation techniques, focusing on my breathing and being in the present moment, to stop the negative thought cycles and to quash self reinforcing patterns of negativity. I even manage to get 3 and a half hours of sleep, or was that just a blackout. No, it was some form of sleep.
- - -
Now, I am just sobering up after smoking my way through a gram of MDPV over a too short time span. I was worried that I had overdosed by an extreme amount, luckily not a lethal amount. I lost control, and kept on pushing the dosage ever higher, wanting to find out what would happen, purposely oblivious to the fact that the level of substance was quickly building up, consuming this drug far faster than I could metabolize it. I allowed myself to ignore what I knew about toxicology and pharmacology and . I got caught up in the euphoria that smoking MDPV produced, much like the euphoria from smoking crack. I am sure I burnt out half my brain last night, the way my mind was racing – I felt like I relived every hurtful and awful experience in my life, all sorts of lost and fragmented memories of the past rising to the surface, dredged up by the storm raging in my mind. I had a lot of psychedelic effects, oceanic awareness, ego distortion and ego death. I felt like a spectator watching my mind rewire itself, hebbian processes of separate neural circuits combining following the maxim “neurons that fire together, wire togetherâ€, at the same time it seemed like a great global trimming of old associations was going on, or was it not a trimming of but a reinforcement of counterproductive associations. Associate my love of my parents with some sort of oedipal complex, or anger at my mom’s mental illness a reflection of my anger at Di’s mental illness. We marry our mother’s, it seems, although my mom was not a drug addict, she has many of the same dysfunctional ways of thinking that characterize the disordered personality of an addict.
I was enjoying sprinkling a soft white coat over a small amount of marijuana in my small glass water pipe, using it without water and in a manner more reminiscent of smoking a crack pipe. Oh, the various methods of consuming drugs, subtle differences in the technique, different drugs must be vaporized in various manners depending on their stability, melting points, and how easy they are to vaporize. Cocaine freebase with bicarbonate of soda (crack) is one of the nicest forms of cocaine as far as smokeable stimulants go. It is fun to sit around the table, smoking 100 to 200 mg chunks every ten or fifteen minutes, just going up and down, up and down, all night long, up and down the ladder of euphoria and withdrawal.
The first time I took MDPV I thought it was a relatively mild stimulant. That was before I took my first dose. I don’t know how I came up with that opinion of it. And for some reason I understood it to be a benign and non malignant substance, a healthy alternative to crack. I snorted a little bit of it (and realized it was incredibly potent) and then smoked an even larger amount, wanting to get that instant onset of action that comes with such a method of administration.
Faster than injection, the drug takes hold of me, and I twist and turn in my seat as the bliss rushes through my body. This is pure ecstasy, soft and warm and loving and kind, the soft white smoke pours out of my mouth as I exhale white puffy clouds of happiness.
I realize now that this is not a mild stimulant in any manner of the word. This drug has taken total possession of my awareness and I succumb to its favours, its flavours. And although I had experienced moments of extreme terror and paranoia after the first two days of heavy use, involving the police and my family in my delusion ravings which I blamed on my mental illness, I somehow believe that I can overcome such problematic side effects by more carefully controlling my dosage – even as I reload my pipe with an overdose of 200 mg of MDPV again, to smoke now to try and give me the strength to take hold of the excessive stimulation, like taking more of the stimulant will calm me down. This drug is extremely moreish.
I am at a very strange point in my life. At the age of 32 years old I went back to school to learn how to weld, so that I could support myself by getting a job as a welder. That was 8 months ago, I have another month and ½ left in the course, but I am on summer break now, school is closed down over July and August. I have no visible means of support, but am getting buy on my employment insurance payouts, and slowly spending the last little bit of the money from my pension. I talked to one of my fellow students this afternoon over the floor, and he told me how he had not heard anything back after having handed out over seventy resumes. With the global recession in full swing, many shops have laid off large numbers of welders, and there is now a glut of experienced, good welders looking for work, all of which are competing against me for a precious few positions. Another good reason for me to reconsider going back into pharmacy, the career I spent five years in university studying hard to learn all about drugs for. There is a lot more work in the pharmacy field, the wages are much, much higher, I am experienced and know my stuff. The real question is – just what do I have to do to regain my license, and would it be possible to find a position in which I could work without having to face to much temptation, could I keep my head clear enough and my myself sober enough to summon the self respect I would need to return to such a position.
Another thing that is never far from my mind is the fact that my dad had Mantle Cell Lymphoma. Although he feels physical mostly okay, there is a 4.5 centimetre growth remaining sitting in his lymphatic system in the vicinity of his stomach. 4.5 cm is a little smaller than the 6cm it was before chemo started in January. It has been knocked down a little by 6 cycles of R-CHOP, his chemotherapy regimen.
I was living with my parents the summer when my dad’s dad, my grandpa, began to die from cancer. I watched as my dad struggled to come to terms with his father’s rapidly progressing illness. In September I went back to school, and being young and extremely self centered, unable to deal with all the feelings and emotions I was experiencing at the time, I stopped checking in with my dad as to he was doing. I wanted to live my own life, begin my own great adventure; I was oblivious to the pain and struggles that my dad was trying to work through as he watched his father writhing in pain in his bed. I was happily unaware of what was going on in my father’s life and my grandpas dying at the time, as I had selfishly withdrawn back inside myself, living my life entirely in my head. I relished the beautiful pain of my own mental illness, as only a masochist can, believing that this period of blackness in my life would give provide me with a source of anguish and despair, from which I could draw inspiration to write truly haunting and depressing tales of misery and suffering as even back then I wanted to be a writer. I did not want to realize the depth and breadth of emotions that were washing over my dad, as my grandpa’s cancer swept through his lungs and his body..
intervention…
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