Drugs! Thread!

[Baphomette]

I just had like an accidental 90 hour binge. On coke. Which I had previously not cared for(I'd do it if someone gave it to me, but I never felt the urge to get any). This shit was different, though. I only meant to stay up one night and through a weird and random series of events, I have been awake since 8:00 Friday morning, and it is now 2:00 Tuesday morning. I think that I just had my first ever hallucination in my life though so I'M OUT. Lol. I'm finishing this blunt and then my ass is going to bed. I ain't fucking with that.

That really, really, really, really doesn't sound like coke.

[elevenism]

I finally quit when the paranoia and self-consciousness consumed me...natch

Why does this happen to a handful of us? If i had never got that way, my life would likely have been a hell of a lot less hazardous. And also, is "natch" a regional thing?
Never heard it in texas, hon.

[allegro]

Why does this happen to a handful of us? If i had never got that way, my life would likely have been a hell of a lot less hazardous. And also, is "natch" a regional thing?
Never heard it in texas, hon.

Regarding natch: Its origins in jive talk from 1945. Many remember it being used frequently in the "Archie" comic books. It's used quite often in journalism.

Regarding your first question: About 99% of my pothead friends from the 70s stopped smoking pot entirely due to paranoia, overall unpleasant self-absorption, and laziness. Out of all of those I know who quit, none of us have any real desire to smoke any again, even though we have the financial ability to do so. Also note that the majority of us who quit did not move on to other substances but I see your point; however, pot is not without its drawbacks. It is definite a habit-forming drug not without negative affects. After I started smoking pot while in 9th grade, my GPA went from about a 3.8 to, um, I don't remember anything after that. I don't remember many of the concerts I went to. I either slept through most of high school or skipped. I was able to pass classes solely due to my ability to take tests. But I was never really "present" for 3 full years of high school. Which was fine; I didn't want to be there, anyway. But it sure as shit changed the trajectory of any college possibilities, and I was too high to know the difference. I understand this isn't as bad as being in a gutter with a spike in your arm, but being clean and in school is probably a better option, natch.

[elevenism]

Regarding your first question: About 99% of my pothead friends from the 70s stopped smoking pot entirely due to paranoia, overall unpleasant self-absorption, and laziness. Out of all of those I know who quit, none of us have any real desire to smoke any again, even though we have the financial ability to do so. Also note that the majority of us who quit did not move on to other substances but I see your point; however, pot is not without its drawbacks. It is definite a habit-forming drug not without negative affects.

Oh i absolutely agree that smoking grass has its drawbacks. i was definitely addicted to it, unhealthily obsessed with it, and i'm sure it stunted my ambition. it also tends to kind of, how you say, blur physical reality?
That being said, the drug with which i promptly replaced it, alcohol, was just such a violent nightmare that nearly took my life fairly regularly, and if i could have avoided it all by smoking weed, i certainly would have.

But that's where things get strange. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. Until rather suddenly i didn't.
It's like you said, but i would combine the first two to form paranoid self absorption and add in this bizarre process of unavoidable self examination and self doubt. that's MOSTLY what the "high" suddenly started making me feel.

The strange thing is that damn near everyone i've ever chilled with on any kind of regular basis still smokes religiously. I'm always, always the odd man out. Shit, this even includes my father and my wife when she can get it.
So i've always wondered what changed, because the people i know who have quit (and didn't quit for the sake of achieving full on sobriety) cite the same reason, the same change in sensation.

I have a theory, and without going into too much detail and making this post that much longer, i think that it may have something to do with transitioning into adulthood and a mindset of at least some responsibility, success vs failure, the self actualization gap-like "the future" was suddenly and intensely NOW, and i was no longer able to like "space out" or "vibe out" or whatever.

Or maybe i just became a square overnight :P

[allegro]

@elevenism : I don't know, maybe it is a personality thing. I have ONE friend from back in the day who still smokes weed, my best friend since 7th grade, and she and her husband still smoke it in addition to alcohol. The have a pretty fancy bar in their basement and they're really social and have parties that include an ice vodka luge. We are all in our 50s. I don't want to seem like an Old Fart, here, but WTF.

Whenever I go back to Detroit and go out with them, they have a one-hitter and they hit it in the car first and ask me if I want any. I don't even have any wine, first, anymore. I guess I don't need a "helper?" I don't like crowds so sometimes then I have a glass of wine but CHRIST for me a hit of pot would make it WORSE. I think it's just a personality thing, my friend is not very philosophical, either, where some of us would be EXHAUSTED contemplating how the TV works by staring at static snow while fucked up on weed, this friend, equally fucked up, was just laughing at us.

My mom smoked a lot of pot back from the 60s and through the 70s and even SHE says she could not smoke it now unless she was home alone in a safe environment.

Yes, it's like pot suddenly BAM sticks you inside this terrible bubble of self-doubt and paranoia. There are cops everywhere, everything you say and do is under a negative microscope, you're having those constant "conversations" with yourself in your head, it is NO FUN. I think it is a combo of abuse and length of use combined with personality.

This video has been posted before by @Fixer808 , and I have watched is TOO MANY TIMES and I LAUGH EVERY TIME because for me it is SO FUCKING TRUE.

[allegro]

@elevenism : Okay, I think I found a potential answer, here: BRAIN CHEMISTRY.

Edit: this is wild, because my Mom was just asking me the other day why somebody like her can't use marijuana for anxiety (she has terrible anxiety problems and is on Lexipro) because pot actually makes her anxiety WORSE. The above article seems to answer that question and addresses how to deal with it.

TBH, I have done a few hits of it with my aforementioned friend a few times in the last 10 years; and I was smart, only taking one hit, and one hit is enough to provide a fairly mellow buzz for a lengthy period of time where I can be an "observer" of my surroundings and enjoy it without backing into my own head. But, even then, it wasn't something where I said "wow, I have to go purchase this" or where I wanted to do it again.

[elevenism]

that louis ck thing made me laff so much too when i watched that show, and yes, that is PRECISELY how i feel and act.

Edit: @allegro , i want to try some CBD like it talks about in that article. CBD is legal even in tejas, and my brother claims it doesn't get you high in any way, but DOES combat the anxiety. Although my brother probably doesn't remember what not being stoned is like. He's in it to win it, started smoking it when he was 11 and now he's like 34 and lives in denver, mostly because he was tired of being fucked with for his "medicine." (i know it can be good medicine, mind you, but that motherfucker just loves to be high )

[elevenism]

Sorry for double post, but my dear friend is suffering from what increasingly looked like terminal cancer that has gone from liver to bones to pancreas...i thought he was fucked a long time ago. And my brother made him a batch of the oil that that dude Rick Simpson calls "Phoenix Tears (aka just fucking hash oil i THINK.)
At any rate, he's on the upswing! He did that in desperation, and i'm not saying that the hash oil was what caused the rebound, but now, i can't say it isn't either.

[allegro]

that louis ck thing made me laff so much too when i watched that show, and yes, that is PRECISELY how i feel and act.

Edit: @allegro , i want to try some CBD like it talks about in that article. CBD is legal even in tejas, and my brother claims it doesn't get you high in any way, but DOES combat the anxiety. Although my brother probably doesn't remember what not being stoned is like. He's in it to win it, started smoking it when he was 11 and now he's like 34 and lives in denver, mostly because he was tired of being fucked with for his "medicine." (i know it can be good medicine, mind you, but that motherfucker just loves to be high )

I was around 13 the first time I smoked pot, and I used to smoke a LOT of it, too. But, ugh, no thanks. I'd live in bed, LOL.

Low-THC and high-CBD, that makes sense. if we are already prone to anxiety, that's why the THC makes us MORE anxious (per that article). Yeah, I'd like to try the high-CBD, too.

[elevenism]

I was around 13 the first time I smoked pot, and I used to smoke a LOT of it, too. But, ugh, no thanks. I'd live in bed, LOL.

Low-THC and high-CBD, that makes sense. if we are already prone to anxiety, that's why the THC makes us MORE anxious (per that article). Yeah, I'd like to try the high-CBD, too.

Fuck, i want the ALL CBD, NO THC.
You can PUNISH me by making me smoke weed. Making me spend an hour stoned is worse than a day in jail.
I remember chilling with my brother back when i was coming home from a concert and i had been doing heroin/coke shots and my brother knew.
And he brought out a little bong and fired up some white widow. I didn't want it but he REALLY wanted me to try it.
Two minutes later, he's like "damn, tyler, those hard drugs have you all bugged out! Fuck that!"
And i was like "no...it's the weed." :P

Pretty fucking ironic, considering.

[DigitalChaos]

I have the same high school story as allegro, except I was completely sober. I graduated with the lowest possible GPA that allowed me to pass. I only ever took tests and did no homework, except where a couple assignments were required for that sweet D-.

Weed and other shit came after college, because fuck what everyone else thought was socially acceptable.

After ~5 years weed slowly started producing general anxiety in most situations. It's exacerbated by situations that I generally dislike anyway... usually related to being around humans, especially. I still use it on occasion, but 90% is for sleep. If I time it right, it's great. If I time it poorly, I'll just stay up for an extra 3-4 hours thinking about all the things I have been neglecting for too long (retirement funds, etc). The advancement in small vaporizers and reliable extracts has made it much more reliable to use for sleep purposes.

[elevenism]

for another dose of grass related irony, i surely would have eventually encountered "natch" had i not quite literally fucked off journalism school and my first and last 2 paid newspaper jobs, one college and the other for a dallas suburb's paper, quite literally because of pot and to smoke pot and because all i cared about was pot when i was 19.

[allegro]

for another dose of grass related irony, i surely would have eventually encountered "natch" had i not quite literally fucked off journalism school and my first and last 2 paid newspaper jobs, one college and the other for a dallas suburb's paper, quite literally because of pot and to smoke pot and because all i cared about was pot when i was 19.

Well, and it's not something you run into just as a writer but also by reading a lot of journalism. It's not something that is typically spoken, but read via journalism, especially music journalism. I was something of a music journalism addict while growing up, so it was just a normal part of my inner vocabulary. Like, see the headline of this article from Creem Magazine written by Cameron Crowe in July 1973. I had a Creem subscription as it originated in Detroit.

But I digress ...

[elevenism]

@allegro it's obviously swingin' hepcat talk lost on me.
i don't even want to smoke any grass!

[DigitalChaos]

I always just assumed natch was short for naturally. I never considered the history.

[allegro]

I always just assumed natch was short for naturally. I never considered the history.

It IS short for "naturally" but every word (or colloquialism) has a history (etymology).

@elevenism : It's funny, my Mom always called it "grass" and she'll still say stuff like "how much does a 'lid' of grass cost, now?" and we always laughed at her when we were young because nobody in my generation said that, we always called it "pot" and only her generation called it a "lid" I don't even know what the fuck a "lid" is, honestly. Cheech and Chong know, though.

[elevenism]

lolz @allegro me and my brother have always called it grass.
it's funny to say "wanna smoke some graaaasss maaan?" lol i just realized that cheech and chong are the REASON that sounds funny to us.
Fucking timeless.
Verbiage i find to be timeless in general, however. At one point, my boss/dear friend (who is now just dear friend) was absolutely CERTAIN i was making fun of his age by saying groovy because he was like 15 years older than me or something. But we, i and the people i grew up with, still fuckin said and say groovy.
Cheech and Chong are timeless as well.
Doesn't a lid have something to do with a frisbee lid?
Or maybe that was wrong. I remember when, with smack, this new crew we met was asking us how many "points" we wanted and told us that a "point" was fifteen dollars. We were confused, and like WTF, we want like half a gram or 3 twenties. Because, see, WE called syringes "points" avidly. We were trying to figure out how much we usually put in a shot, or more importantly, how much THESE fuckers put in a shot-a point must be a "point full."
But they were talking about .1 gram and trying to rip us off.
Points for the triple entendre, drug story because drug thread.

[allegro]

LOL, yeah, so many drug terms, I dunno what most of them mean!

Lid, I have NO idea ... I think there are a ton of ideas as to its origin, obviously a "lid" of some kind.

It's funny because in my time of smoking pot, we bought everything in the quantity of an "Oh Zee" and now that's so fucking expensive (and UNNECESSARY) that's mostly used if you smoke too much or if you're a dealer.

[elevenism]

See @allegro you call 3 "friends" and see if they want a quarter, buy your Oh Zee, and you got a free quarter!

One thing that cracks me up is when i was a kid, half the shit we got was "hydro" or "redhair" or "creeper."
And we repeated it to the people who smoked it with us and they were like, oh, word! And they repeated it.
This was the time period when we would like walk over to some "drug dealer's" house (a guy who did the 3 quarters trick every few days) and bought a skimpy ass quarter (of low quality grass) through his bedroom window. It was awhile before we even figured out what it was a quarter OF, especially with terms like dime and nickel.
And THAT guy? He was fucking groovy.
We also say Hepcat, btw.

Then i smoked actual hydro at like 20 and laughed and laughed.
it turned out that the "hydro" i smoked as a kid just wasn't like mexican dirt weed.

[allegro]

See @allegro you call 3 "friends" and see if they want a quarter, buy your Oh Zee, and you got a free quarter!

EXACTLY!! I never did that but I know people who did. (They were the people I was buying it from, LOL.)

We were smoking good Colombian gold and we wouldn't touch Mexican or anything else but now a lot of this West Coast hydroponic pot is 1,000 times better than the "great" Colombian pot were were getting for 40 bucks in the 70s.

I had a client who was growing that hydroponic shit in his basement with these grow lights and shit, and he said the buds were the size of his fist, but he had to have all these FANS and shit because he said you could SMELL this shit from, like, a BLOCK away, hahahahahahaa!

A "dime" was $10 dollars worth of weed and a nickel was $5 dollars worth ... natch.

[elevenism]

I had a client who was growing that hydroponic shit in his basement with these grow lights and shit, and he said the buds were the size of his fist, but he had to have all these FANS and shit because he said you could SMELL this shit from, like, a BLOCK away, hahahahahahaa!

A "dime" was $10 dollars worth of weed and a nickel was $5 dollars worth ... natch.

Quite naturally, but when i was a kid, that made me think a quarter was ALWAYS $25 and not 1/4 of an ounce.
BTW, i guess living down here in texas as the cartels rose made weed cheap, because we got (and still get) good regular weed for $60 an oz. 90 an oz for "popcorn (midgrade)" i know all this shit because all my exies loved weed more than they loved me (one of them even told me if she had to choose one or the other, well, lets just say i'm damned glad i didn't marry HER.)

As far as the smell, one day my dad (who is a long haired guitar playing biker, and pretty damn hip) came home INFURIATED that my brother and his friend were just straight up smoking pot in the house.

He was smelling an qp of hydro through a tupperware! FROM OUTSIDE THE ROOM! They had to show him and let him try it to prove it to him, lololol.
it does STANK.

yeah the weed my brother has been smoking since about 2001 all looks like it was grown in outer fucking space.

[allegro]

when this shit GROWS, it smells like CAT PEE from a MILE AWAY!!!

[Amaro]

@DigitalChaos @allegro @elevenism

I'm well on board with your current feelings towards weed (what a nice read to wake up from a nap to). I could go deep into my response or come up with analogies on what it feels like on bad weed highs (I'm extremely self-aware naturally, and thanks to weed for the extra boost for a lifetime), but the point has really been summed up on this page.

Good god, I was in HELL on New Years. I took 4-5 hits off a joint...none y'all want to know my thoughts that night. I had enough experience and awareness to eventually remember to get AWAY and lie the fuck DOWN, and be alone. It's the only way to *help* mentally stabilize. Reduce stimulation. I have had absolutely zero desire to get high ever since (and that feels really, really good to mean that), except I will someday try a true, no-BS CBD strain (I've tried capsules before, and they do do something for anxiety). My change of moods sober are very real, and tend to take work to get through; a bad mood sometimes a good friend can barely help get me out of, needless to say weed can go fuck off.

Bless you, and bless Louis. I died.

[elevenism]

@DigitalChaos @allegro @elevenism

I'm well on board with your current feelings towards weed (what a nice read to wake up from a nap). I could go deep into my response or come up with analogies on what it feels like on bad weed highs but the point has really been summed up on this page.

Good god, I was in HELL on New Years. I took 4-5 hits off a joint...none y'all want to know my thoughts that night. I had enough experience and awareness to eventually remember to get AWAY and lie the fuck DOWN, and be alone. It's the only way to *help* mentally stabilize. Reduce stimulation. I have had absolutely zero desire to get high ever since (and that feels really, really good to mean that), except I will someday try a true, no-BS CBD strain (I've tried capsules before, and they do do something for anxiety). My change of moods sober are very real, and tend to take work to get through; a bad mood sometimes a good friend can barely help get me out of, needless to say weed can go fuck off.

your battle plan if you ingest marijuana is the same as mine. PRECISELY what i do in fact, @Amaro
get to my bedroom QUICK.
tell the wife i am trying to sleep because i am questioning all kinds of shit about our relationship and my worth if she is in the room.
for me it is a vile fucking substance that induces a chemical nightmare.

My mood changes are awful and real too, even on 5 fucking psych meds including a generous helping of xanax and a beta blocker, both prn and anxiety specific, and the other 3 supposedly controlling mood changes including anxiety.
That bipolar ain't no joke! The struggle is real.

So yeah fuck weed (for me.)
The rest of you, however, "wave your spliff high, son, fuck the bullshit!"-B.Rhymes
And medicate to your heart's content.

[allegro]

On another stupid note: I remember the first time I drank more alcohol than I should have, I was with a friend who kept buying me Screwdrivers and we were dancing on a dance floor and sweating and I was young and not yet knowledgeable about guys being able to drink way more than females and just because it tastes like orange juice doesn't mean you aren't going to get really drunk from the vodka, and the next thing I knew, I was in the back seat of the car, while my friend was driving and another friend was in the passenger seat (I still don't know how my friend was actually NORMAL enough to drive) and I was looking out the window and thought to myself:

"Why are there TWO sets of traffic lights?"

And this totally perplexed me, two sets of traffic lights. Why??

Until it finally occurred to me that I was seeing double.

Uh-oh.

[elevenism]

@allegro , for me it was a bottle of grape mad dog 20 20. i was like WHOOOOOO this is great! and then i threw up so much that i just said fuck it and got in the shower.

[Sarah K]

That really, really, really, really doesn't sound like coke.

Which part? The hallucination bit? I just heard something... twice. That was enough to make me tap out. I've always avoided drugs that induce hallucinations. I don't think I would deal with it well at all.

[Khrz]

That really, really, really, really doesn't sound like coke.

On the other hand that sounds like long term sleep deprivation.

[Sarah K]

Yeah. That's the conclusion that I came to after I like... slept. And thought about it.

I haven't been up for days on end since I was probably 25 or so.

[Baphomette]

Which part?

The length of time you stayed up.