Drugs/alcohol-experiences and observations.

Did you ever scratch music on the chin, and then try to convince it not to follow you home?

Music peed on my porch once, and then got scared by the cat and went home.



(People vary widely, as does their tendency to get hung up on certain drugs, or not. I've seen some people toy with supposedly dangerous drugs and turn away from them, others spend their whole lives dropping cash and time on "soft" drugs. Gotta know what you can handle, and what you're willing to risk, just like anything else in life. Now where's my damn podium?)

Yes - in India. My travelling companion and I managed to be given a small amount in exchange for a few smokes, from a guy about to return to the UK because his 6 month tourist visa was about to expire.

I smoked it with friends in joint form (not in a pipe) on a rooftop above Paharganj (spelling may be wrong - the main bazaar in New Delhi). It was a very relaxing experience, though I didn't hallucinate.

What I clearly remember is getting into bed at the end of the night and being incapable of any effort whatsoever. It was all I could do to remove my shorts and throw them to the end of the bed!!!

Not interesting enough to repeat, frankly.

KP, yr spelling is right !! You have been to paharganj ?? Interesting place innit ?

I did opium once and wrote this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Hang on a sec, that was Coleridge....I must have been really high.

I want to thank everyone for their responses.

Personally I think I may have an addictive personality, but it never extended to alcohol-a drug I believe is one of the most dangerous known.

I'm glad I got out of that world, and I'm gonna stay out of it. Doing so also removed a lot of deadbeats from my life.

Well done Wilso !!!

And, if you want to be really picky about things, it was laudanum he was on.

How about absinth, it's legal in small amounts now, or at least percentage wise. It seemed to have inspired the great composers, writers and painters of old.

From what I hear, it's not the same thing as it was. Either that or a lot of people are going to be going blind soon...

I've got an addictive personality, i suppose--but PD's got a point about preferences. In the early 1970's, after i got out of the army, "downers" were very popular, but i never saw the attraction. "Getting stupid" was not my idea of recreation.

I've done "shroom," peyote and lysergic acid hundreds of times. That, and reefer, have had a profound effect on my memory. I would say that in my early 20's, i had what one would call a "photographic" memory. Although my memory is still seemingly better than that of others around me, the degradation is noticeable to me, it is significant, and i began to notice it in my 40's, before one might suggest that age is the main factor. I believe that alcohol has such an effect, as well as reefer, because the rate at which my memory has been failing me slowed down noticeably in my mid-40's, during which time i lost interest in alcohol and gave it up. (Which is also more reason for me to point to what PD wrote about preferences for drugs--when i lost interest, i didn't need AA to wean myself from the booze.)

All of this is anectdotal, of course, but, given the buzz kill a lab setting would imply, i can't think of any reasonable manner to compile meaningful statistics on the effect of long-term illegal drug use.

Just to add to the interesting anecdotal evidence I think pot has decimated my memory.

Thujone is a monoterpene convulsant(see: neurotoxic insecticide) ... with no psychoactive properties .. you're better off dosing than drinking that, especially if you consider the brain-damaging effects of alcohol with thujone.

If you're set on giving it a whirl ... may as well buy the herb yourself (which is easy to do), fill up a bottle of vodka with fennel and aniseed and wormwood, et voila.
If you want an authentic tasting, high quality, cheap, and 'effective' Absynth, buy a Bottle of Pernod and add wormwood essential oil to ~10mg/L. Normal absynth was 75-85% but diluted 50% when consumed; so drink pernod+wormwood undilluted for proper strength.

Not my cup of tea but nonetheless ...

It always cracks me up to read clinical literature about the effects of, say, LSD, especially from decades past. Doctors would give somebody a massive dose of acid, stick 'em in a sterile room with no distractions and nobody similarly stimulated to talk to, and then report that the subject was agitated and paranoid. Well, no ****, Sherlock...

heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .

that one really cracked me up . . .

Well, then, some really funny stuff about experiments on GIs came out after the Freedom of Information act was passed. Real knee slappers...

You mean Ricaurte and McCann aren't credible?



</sarcasm>

I was going to ask "who?", and did a quick search. Don't know enough about them to comment, but their retraction in "Science" (first two paragraphs above) bodes ill...

I was referring to experiments with various psychoactives performed by the military on unwitting soldiers after WWII (frequently headed up by defected -- not defective -- NAZI scientists, it is rumored). Not a good time to volunteer to be an army lab rat...

The Drinkometer....
http://www.iondesign.net/drinkometer/
Test how much you've drunk over a lifetime.
I'm at the Homer Simpson level.
How about you???

You guys have really tried a lot of stuff

Me, I got a limited experience.

Very little alcohol, and recreational use of mariguana (down from about once a week as a teen, to 2-3 times a year as an adult) and hashish (down from every day stuff in my 20s to zip).
Peyote juice, once, with little effect.
Benzedrine and other speed, some time in my teens.

As a nicotine addict, I find pot and hash very little addictive. But, of course, I've seen several people go from there to hard drugs to death.

My social experience is that prohibition hangs heavy into forming addicts. Typically, a lot of friends would smoke once in a while -or daily- and do our things amongst our extended bunch. But when someone of our group started to hang out with people he had nothing in common with, but the drugs, we realized he had been hooked.
Why did he hang out with those birdbrains? Because drugs were not always available.
And yes, this guy -who has had a few mushrooms, but smokes pot daily for 30 years- has now some noticeable memory and concentration problems.

As for pleasure, I find there is a qualitative difference between hashish and mariguana, in favor of the former. We'll be back later... if the thread keeps going.