Methamphetamine

I don’t know what to expect. I’ve had it before and it’s been good, but sometimes it’s been better than others. Furthermore, my memory of speed is polluted with the memory of other similar drugs that have a “speedy effect’ but are not technically speed. Drugs like BZP, and Ritalin (methylphenidate), caffeine and Red Bull (if you can call that last one a drug - but why not?). Also, I have tried a drug called adrafinil, which is in the nootropic or ‘smart drug’ category. Nootropics are not really a speed in that they don’t give you much of a physical feeling of energy - at least not the sort of nervous energy that speed can give you, but rather a type of mental energy, a mental clarity. Nothing is forcefully sped up, but the drug allows the brain to work more efficiently so you feel the feeling of things going faster because your thoughts are able to progress from one to another faster than they would usually be able to go, and therefore, you move faster toward your end goal - psychologically speaking that is. Physically, you are able to move faster on adrafinil because your brain controls your physical actions, and a brain on adrafinil can make decisions about which physical movements to make in less time. I’ve always wondered though about these fantastic rushes I heard of people getting from speed. Heroin at its best has given me some pretty fucking fantastic rushes but definitely not the sort I would imagine you would get from speed (methamphetamine). Heroin covers us in warmth and peace, and makes us feel as though there is a wall that separates everything in the universe that can or has caused us hurt. Speed, I imagined, would be a bolt of lightning to the brain, a physical connection to my higher power outlet, an instant rejuvenation and a feeling of invincibility.

Well, it sort of was like that. I didn’t know how much I should have, so I left it up to my patron.

How about a fifty bag? “Sounds good to me”, I said to him. And then he left me alone with my rites.

As I said, I didn’t really know how much I should have. I may not have known much about speed, but I could see that  this stuff was pure. The word at the local needle exchange was that there was a lot of pure stuff around, and this looked like it. I was pleased about this for two reasons: firstly because pure speed is strong speed, and secondly because pure speed is easily dissolved in water with no need for anything like citric acid or even heat. I had to be careful because I knew that even though the amount I had was a tiny volume, I didn’t know how strong it was. In the end I went for the whole amount at once. I was pretty sure I would want to have all of it and I could always stop half way through injecting it and see how I felt.

I tipped the bags contents out on to the spoon I had prepared and added about half a milliliter to the bag to wash any residue out. A quick stir to make sure all of the drug was dissolved and it was ready to draw into the syringe. I dropped a little bit of a wood-fiber filter into the spoon and drew the clear liquid into the syringe. And then I was ready to fly.

As I readied my tourniquet I couldn’t help but feel nervous. Not so much that anything bad would happen but that not enough would happen. I wanted to be impressed by a shot for once, instead of what I have felt the majority of times I have injected any drug – disappointed and pissed off! I slid the 27-gauge stainless steel needle through the scar-hardened skin of my inner arm and felt the release as the pick entered the vein and the blood within it. I removed the tourniquet and began to slowly but steadily depress the plunger so the 1.5 milliliters of fluid started to leave the plastic chamber and enter the chamber of my flesh. I got to the halfway point and took a quick status check – ‘any sensations?’ ‘Any lightness beginning in the head?’ ‘No, well let’s continue. (I hope this stuff is bloody well going to work!) So I keep pushing the plunger down until the chamber is empty. Then, as I usually do, keeping the needle in the vein I draw a half ml of blood into the syringe with the theory in mind that it will wash any remaining amount of the drug out of the syringe and into the bloodstream. Then I sit back and wait for the drug to hit – but there is nothing… oh, wait! There’s something. My chest is expanding. There is a warmth spreading from my chest up the back of my neck and rippling through my scalp. It’s getting stronger. It’s not stopping! OH MY FUCKING JESUS CHRIST!! THIS IS FUCKING FANTASTIC!!!! It feels like the fog is lifting and my brain is all of a sudden alive again. I like this and want more.

Are You A Lifer?

I have been on methadone for for about 6 months now, and I was on dihydrocodeine (DHC) for about 3 months before that. This is the second time I have been on methadone and I can't say when I'll get off it - whether it will be 6 more months or 6 more years is a mystery to me. Like the author of the trip report below, I too feel there is an inevitability to my drug use. The knowledge of the effects of drugs is not something I can just forget - it is burned into my brain forever. Isn't it understandable that knowing such blissful feelings are available to me through the use of these substances, I would want to continue to make use of that gift of the earth?
 Of course as time goes on I learn to be more controlled and become more disciplined in living true to my value system. I have learned that along with the pleasure comes the pain but opiates make the pain a little easier to bear and the pleasure a little brighter and more...pleasurable!  This article puts my thoughts on the subject into words in a highly skilled manner. Enjoy!

What Has Two Years of It Gotten Me?

Methadone

DOSE:

150 mg

oral

Methadone

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

Hello. I want to start off saying that this is not a negative review of methadone. Most reviews I've seen of people who have taken methadone are non-tolerants who've tried it once and abhor it, and I find that a vast majority of people don't really know anything about it. Most people know something, but its usually not much. I thought that it would be nice to have someone with a bit of experience with methadone. Now it can, just like any other substance, do as much harm as it can good. I've been taking methadone through a local maintenance program for over 2 years now, and I've consumed a varitable mountain of methadone pills. And I'm at the same place I started out. I sit here now sick with anticipation and also drug withdrawl. You see I'm not the ideal maintainance patient, as there are days that I take more than I am supposed to. I am alotted 150 mg every day of the week, and, since I've been going for so long, I go to the clinic once every two weeks, get a dose there, and they bottle up the next 13 days and allow me to take it home. Which for me is a mixed proposition. 

Methadone is an opioid (synthetic opiate) first synthesised and manufactured by the German Army in World War II because of their lack of a sufficient supply of opium. Its been used here in state approved and closely watched 'methadone clinics.' It is tyically given to someone coming off heroin or morphine, although it can be used for any opiate addiction, from codiene (weak opiate) to dilaudid (strong opiate). Don't let those labels fool you, the weakest opiate in the world is just as addictive as the strongest. And the clinic is completely volunteer. I have to go in there myself and ask for help, the courts won't tell me that I have to go. Most drug treatment programs actually do not use methadone, some are dry-out places with no drugs, others will provide you with some benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs). 

When I started the methadone program back in november of 2001, I had been using morphine (primarily), heroin, and occasionaly oxycodone when nothing else was available. I would steal my family's prescription painkillers, or anyone else's for that matter; but mostly I just bought drugs from friends. When I admitted myself, I was desperate for any drug at all. The morphine supply just dried up where I was living, and I figured I might as well get the state to sponsor my addiction. Who wouldn't want a legal drug addiction? Like I said, I was desperate for anything that would quell this horror that continued to rise up inside of me when I wasn't on opiates. I started out just taking one or two hydrocodones two summers before, when I was still in high school, and even before that I was drinking bottle after bottle of Robitussin (the first 'drug' I ever did), sitting in my room by myself, listening to music for hours, just enjoying 'the feeling.' I knew as soon as I first tryed opiates, when I was drinking some of my little brother's prescription cough syrup (with hydrocodone), which I thought had the same active ingredient (dextromethorphan, an opiate relative, but completely non-opiate in its actions) as OTC Robitussin. 

I knew as soon as the feeling started to hit me, 15 minutes after I downed 2 ounces of 'M-End Solution' (I think that was what it was called), that it was something very different, but so much better, than what I had been taking. I thought 'I don't know what I took, I could die.' but the opiates had already captured my love and affection. I was happy as a clam, but in an extremely subdued fashion, realizing that if I did this every day, my life would be a wonderful journey, without pain or sorrow, where I could be the person I've always hoped I could be. 

Looking back, being free from the bonds of pain hasn't been exactly what I thought it would be. I started taking 30mg of methadone my first day at the clinic, and I was in awe of its power. Now, somedays I cut into my doses for the rest of the two weeks and take sometimes up to 400 miligrams, and I still get high. I think that crap about methadone patients not getting high is a total lie. True, I don't get as high as I did when I would put a needle in my arm, but even with my 150mg dose, i feel serene and the world looks beautiful. But the last time I took any methadone was Saturday night, so I'm sitting here sweating and shaking wishing that tomorrow morning was here. My clinic day is Wednesday (tomorrow), and I can go as soon as it opens at 5:30 am. I have some xanax and klonopin on me, just in case things get too hairy before then, I can take one of those and sleep the rest of the night off. And when you're as dope hungry as I am, waiting is almost impossible. Time drags and drags, and I can't find anything to take my mind off my own stupid suffering that refuses to let up. 

But even with this pain, which I continue to cause myself week after week by digging into my methadone reserves, I'll concede that it has been great, but it is deffinately bitersweet in many ways. I used to absolutely love music, art, my wife, but being on as much methadone as I am, my emotions are dulled to a point where I finally feel like they can't overwhelm me, but I lose the feelings of happiness and joy. I also lose most of my ability to be empathetic, and I can't understand what others are feeling. These dull brown eyes just look coldly from my face, overrun by that emotional apathy I used to find so appealing. I just don't care anymore, as long as I can get my methadone and no one stands in my way. My wife doesn't even know I'm on methadone, and I continue to keep it from her because I am afraid she will ask me to stop taking it. And I love her so much, but when given the choice, my answer would be obvious. And I don't want to have to choose methadone over her, so I just keep lying. Lying about where I'm going at 5:30 in the morning, lying about where the $77 a week just to pay for the methadone is going, I even lie about why somedays I just keep nodding off, and then somedays, I just lie in bed all day, tossing and turning, my skin crawling off my body, just existing in what I feel like is my punishment for getting to feel so good so much of the time. 

And if there is one thing I believe in, it is balance in this world. To get high, you gotta get low, to feel pleasure, you must experience an inverse amount of pain. 
I was naive in thinking that I could fight that balance, by feeling good all the time, without even looking down from my tall tower in the clouds to even consider what was happening outside this body. I cannot escape that one truth. I know that now. But now I'm stuck here, almost 2 and a half years on methadone. And I know that I'll be on this for life. For me, there is no other way. I've tasted what life can be like, and how am I supposed to turn back now? I've found a cure for lonliness, for sorrow, for boredom. I can't turn back now. So consider what I've said before you follow the path I've taken, and the path countless others before me have traveled. I have found that there really is no way back. 

Exp Year: 2003	ID: 31219
Gender: Male
Added: Sep 12, 2006	Views: 32392

gh

Retrieved from: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=31219

Why do people use drugs?

The question of what motivates drug use is an extremely difficult question to answer. Maybe because there are many different correct answers.
 In the study of behavior psychologists distinguish between 'positive reinforcement' and 'negative reinforcement'. A lot of people think of negative reinforcement as punishment, but they are actually quite different concepts. In positive reinforcement a stimulus is presented when the desired behavior is emitted (or performed) in order to reinforce the behavior by rewarding it. In negative reinforcement the same thing is happening - a behavior is rewarded in order to reinforce that behavior and therefore lead the animal (or human) to be more likely to perform the behavior in response to a given stimulus. However in the case of negative reinforcement an aversive stimuli is removed as a reward for the emitted behavior. So in both cases there is a reward but in negative reinforcement the reward is the removal of something unpleasant. An example of negative reinforcement in humans is the putting up of an umbrella. Doing so is rewarded by stopping the rain falling on your head. This is negative reinforcement.
 In the case of drugs there has been some debate over whether the drug taking is positively or negatively reinforced. Do people take drugs because the are rewarded with a high or because they a rewarded by the removal of depression, anxiety, or other unpleasant emotions? What if it is both? One could argue that the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement are not very useful. In any situation of reward with something there is also something taken away. If I give a dog a biscuit I am also removing hunger. If I open an umbrella the rain stops falling on my head but I also gave myself a dry space under the umbrella. I am sure there are many other examples that you can think up.
 It is not my intention to answer the question of whether these concepts are useful but just to share the idea with you. It is another way of highlighting that to find the answers to the drug problem we must think outside the box and question everything that we assume to be true. The toolbox we have had in the past has not been able to solve much but I believe we now have the tools required - The Internet and and open mind.

Making a Resource for All

Just a quick note to anyone who accidentally finds this site.

I am trying to add more content and hope to bring you some significant changes soon. What I would really appreciate from you guys is some feedback. What do you want to see? What did you like and want to see more of? Is there an aspect of drug use that you are struggling to find info on? The answers to these questions and any thing else you would like to share - maybe a personal story? Please share your thoughts with me on anything. shoutatthesky@hotmail.com

Look forward to hearing from you!

Legalize ALL Drugs?

In 2001 Portugal abolished all criminal penalties for "personal possession of drugs - including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine". So what has the result of this course of action been? Well of course the society has collapsed, all civil order has evaporated, and crowds of bleary eyed, AIDS-infected, psychotic and violent youths roam the streets raping old ladies and torturing animals??? Well that may be the case in the nightmares of the right-wing prohibitionists but the truth is something else entirely.
 The result of Portugal's change of philosophy has been lower rates of drug use, dramatically lower levels of infection of the HIV/AIDS virus and higher numbers of addicts in treatment. Not to mention huge monetary savings from not putting so many people in jail. The money saved has been directed toward funding the higher levels of treatment.
 It would be my prediction that in the long term the effect on the crime rate will be significant as far fewer people are having to engage in criminal activity to fund their habit. There will be fewer unplanned pregnancies and lower rates of venereal diseases. Fewer drug users will need treatment for things such as abscesses, infections and other health problems associated with injecting with poor technique, reused needles, and unhygienic or poorly lit injecting environments. Not to mention less people dying from overdose. The list of benefits is endless.
 Due to my own history I tend to focus on the issues relating to the injection of illicit narcotics. The next logical step in my mind would be to work on getting rid of another common risk to injecting drug users - unclean gear. To achieve this a legal supply network needs to be set up to supply clean, pharmaceutical grade drugs to users. This system would also go a long way to removing funding, and therefore power,  from the hands of criminal organisations.
 An interesting contrast to Portugal is the failed policies of the United States of America. With 5% of the worlds population but 25% of the worlds prisoners they show the rest of the world that having some of the world's harshest sentences for drug crime does not equate to lower use. I like this little factoid from a recent Time Magazine article on Portugal's drugs policy - "Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana". 

 Which ever way you look at the argument it is clear that it is time to look at doing things a little differently than just punish, punish, punish, and hope it goes away.

To check out the Time article click here

Earthquakes in Godzone?

On the 22nd of February, 2011, an earthquake struck the New Zealand city of Christchurch. The quake measured 6.3 on the Richter Scale, yet because it was only a few kilometres deep and right beneath the city it was far more damaging than the 7.1 quake that struck Christchurch in September of last year.

An iconic landmark of Christchurch is the cathedral. The spire of which lies scattered on the ground with an estimated 20 people crushed beneath it. A common sentiment expressed in the wake of the quake is 'let us thank God for saving us' and I have to wonder 'what is wrong with these people'? They really didn't get saved, they just didn't get killed. And if they were saved - from a collapsed building for example - then it wasn't a god who did the saving, it was the combined work of hundreds of highly trained Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) personnel, or in many cases everyday citizens who happened to be in the right place to be able to help. To give credit to some supernatural being who in thousands of years of human civilization has never once given humanity concrete evidence of her existence is just ludicrous. By that rationale God made her own house fall down causing the deaths of 20 of her most ardent admirers not to mention making a hell of a mess on her floor. Oh, and making sure no one will be going to church for the next couple of months!

 I would question why a benevolent god would allow such things to occur. Freewill! God gave us freewill when Eve ate the forbidden fruit - at least that's the story. But if we didn't have freewill before that event then it must have been God's choice for the fruit to be eaten because Eve didn't have the freewill to make those kind of choices. Anyway that is the most common reasoning I have heard from Christians - that God doesn't make these things happen and neither does he stop them because after we gave up our freewill (that we didn't really have) then God no longer intervened in the affairs of the world, he merely oversaw things running on the divine version of auto-pilot. Looks like the plane is headed for a bit of turbulence Jesus H!

I don't think I'll be heading to Christchurch for a while. On top of the privations of a shaken up and seriously damaged city there are all these nutters running around. First the Christians, then the scumbag looters showed up (at the home of a trapped woman whose family were out standing vigil at her collapsed workplace), and now this crazy pederast fuckwit Ken Ring who is scaring a large number of frightened, fragile, albeit not very intelligent people who are living through the trauma that is their life in post-earthquake Christchurch by saying he predicted this quake and he thinks another one will hit on March 20. This guy usually sticks to predicting the weather - something most people would not be surprised to find that the forecast was wrong about - but now he is talking about people's lives. He is saying he can predict earthquakes based on the movements of the planets (particularly the moon) and the corresponding actions of the tide. I would hesitate to call what Ken Ring does pseudoscience because it would be more accurate to call it 'Lucky Sometimes Correlation Identification' or maybe just 'bullshit'. One of the first things every scientist learns is 'correlation does not equal causation'. This means that because two events happen at the same time that fact is no reason to believe that one caused the other or vice versa. For example - every morning at 8:05am when I get in my car to go to work the weather forecast is playing on the radio. If I was Ken Ring (The Moon Man) I would say that my getting in my car caused the weather forecast to play on the radio - but of course that is absolutely absurd. By claiming there will be an earthquake in Christchurch he can't help but be right because there are a lot happening every day beneath NZ (over 4500 just in the Canterbury region in February). Instead there is a far more common force at work - Greed. This sick cunt just wants to drum up some publicity to sell a few more of his books and what better way than playing off peoples fear. I'm off to pray to God for deliverance!

To Chch Residents - I will not pray for you but I am thinking of you and doing what I can to help. The things that make Chch a great place are not the buildings and the roads but the hearts of the people and the natural beauty. Those things can be hurt but they are not destroyed. You guys will get over this. For some it may mean moving to another town or city and if that is the case for you then I will fully support your decision. There is no rush. Take all the time you can to heal and recover. 

Your friend, Lucien

Nietzsche

Here is a couple of quotes from two of my favourite literary stars.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” - Aldous Huxley