Club drugs
Jack Marx
July 13, 2006 10:10 AM
Drugs are fun. They are certainly other things, too, like deadly, illegal and inconveniently priced, but that so many people tend to go back for more would seem to betray an association between drugs and amusement. This inconvenient fact is left out of the anti-drug scriptures, and when a young man discovers it independently, feeling excellent as opposed to miserable and sick and in a hospital or a gutter covered in bruises and vomit, he tends to dismiss all previous warnings as the products of minds who didn't know what they were talking about (I know at least one such case, intimately). Which is why we're not addressing health issues here - they are well known and come slowly but surely, finding the rapacious drug user as surely as poverty finds the gambler - but rather the tedious, embarrassing and downright revolting aspects of recreational drugs use. Such things matter to some people, particularly those without a care in he world. Yesterday it was pot, the homebody's drug, and tomorrow it's heroin, the dead body's drug. Today, it's the 'club drugs', a term resented by people who take drugs in clubs, as it presumes people who take drugs go to clubs and vice versa.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Those who complained yesterday about the lack of statistical evidence to 'back up' this exercise should be aware that statistics on boredom, humiliation and revulsion are currently, as always, out of print. Also, all persons quoted are genuine (it has not been difficult finding folk willing to talk on this issue) and if names have been changed it will be obvious.
SPEED
Speed keeps you awake and makes you excited, even if there isn't much worth staying awake for and little to get excited about. On any reasonable amount of speed, sleep can only be achieved in the short term by loading up on tranquilisers, which is a dodgy practice and arguably defeating of the original purpose. The most common negatives of speed are the products of resulting sleep deprivation rather than the constituents of the drug itself - inability to concentrate on anything complex or worthwhile, unfortunately coupled with an obsessive determination to do just that. The result is that one spends inordinate amounts of time concentrating on laughably trivial pursuits.
In 1993, Stevie Wright told me of a time when he injected speed instead of his drug of choice, heroin, by mistake, and spent the next day cutting the lawn in the front garden, a job he'd been avoiding for months on account of having no lawnmower. By the end of the day, he had completed the task with the aid of a pair of scissors.
Freelance music writer Scott Duggan has a similarly tawdry and heartbreakingly familiar recollection.
"Speed makes you horny but no more attractive to the opposite sex. So my way of dealing with this was always to dive into pornography. I used to just use magazines and, because of the mildly hallucinogenic properties of methamphetamine, I could make eye contact with the 'girls' and could completely fall into the world on the page. I spent whole days in there without a break and, as I was masturbating, I often did myself a bit of short-term damage to the outer layers of skin, which of course I wouldn't realise until a day or two later. I also noticed - although usually only because someone else would point it out to me - that this created it's own BO smell that was hard to get rid of or cover up for a day or two."
The advent of the Internet, a pornographic 'horn of plenty' for those with the patience to "search", has presented new opportunites for similarly-minded individuals.
Perhaps the greatest untold story about amphetamines is their ability to convince the user that it's all a well-kept secret - that nobody knows the user is using but the user. Like some pre-school kid's 'invisibility cloak', amphetamines, in fact, play the loneliest joke on the user himself, convincing him that the grinding of teeth, fidgeting, sweating, licking of lips and boundless enthusiasm for the otherwise insignificant goes unnoticed by those in front of him. Folks won't call you on it at the time - people are basically courteous and discreet when it comes to such matters, and usually too embarrassed - but the fact you are broadcasting your drug of choice at all times is one you can depend upon, and the true extent of your own self-betrayal, if it ever reveals itself to you, will come years after the damage to your reputation has been done.
COCAINE
The old saying goes that "coke is God's way of telling you that you earn too much money". Coke's idiotically expensive for what it does and is the only drug whose market price seems to follow the CPI with any accuracy (these days a gram will cost you anything from $250 to $350). It would be worth it, of course, if the drug was reasonably pure, but by the time it gets from the 'plantation' to you - a trip that sees it sifted through a hundred taxing hands - the difference between cocaine and garden-variety speed is marginal.
Nevertheless, it tends to work, in that it keeps you up all night and in a bad mood the next day. Cocaine can make the user feel very talkative, interested and interesting, no matter what is being discussed or by whom. The net effect of this is that one is always in grave danger of becoming extremely boring, the inner 'good vibes' reporting to the user that the exact opposite is taking place.
Cocaine turns most men into lecherous sleazebags, once again painting a mental self-portrait imbued with the sophistication of Connery's James Bond. Should a female acquiesce to the coke user's bug-eyed, leering advances, for some reason (probably cocaine, too, as it tends to make females a little friskier than normal), it won't take long before she discovers she's backed the wrong horse.
I know a few who have claimed that both coke and speed assist them physically as well as jacking up the libido, but they would say that. I find the majority more believable and in keeping with my own agonising recollections.
"I don't think I ever got a proper erection on amphetamines," says Scott Duggan. "But I don't think I've ever wanted to have sex so badly as when I was on cocaine either. I don't know anybody who claims differently and if they do they're full of shit. There was about a year there where I was actually going home alone every night on purpose ...I actually blew girls off because I knew what was going to happen and I couldn't handle the embarrassment. So, instead, I'd opt for my stash of pornography..."
Because of the money to be made, cocaine attracts a more serious criminal element than pot or speed - a world the casual user can easily blunder into.
"People don't realise either how easily you become a dealer without realising it," says Beltheduz, a one-time dealer of cocaine, speed and pills. "You start getting stuff from your own dealer and then people you know start asking if you can get it for them. So you get sick of paying for the cabs just to get everyone else what they want, so you start charging them for your time, which is reasonable anyway. Then you start asking people if they want some because you're going to get some for yourself, so in a sense you become a pusher. Then you figure you might as well get your own huge supply, cut down the cab trips and tax people for your trouble. Bingo, you're a dealer, when all you really started out doing is favours for your friends.
"I was a dealer for about a year until things got really heavy. After doing a deal for a shitload of cocaine in the toilets of a pub I accidentally dropped almost a whole pound into a toilet bowl. I was holding this brick in my hand one second and the next it just crumbled and melted through my fingers. I owed thousands of dollars to some really heavy dudes, and there were guns flying around and everything. I actually had to move cities and I cleaned up not long after that."
ECSTASY
It's a wonder the term 'ecstasy' is still tolerated by users of 'ecstasy', for today's 'Gary Ablett' (if I may use a most appropriate piece of Cockney rhyming slang) can be any combination of MDMA, ketamine, methamphetamine, caffeine, psuedoephedrine, assorted 'research chemicals' and neutral binders, the latter probably taking up the bulk.
When I first took ecstasy in 1988, I thought I'd discovered the world's most spectacular drug, and for a few years it appeared I might have. It was years ago, after about the 10th successive tablet that didn't work at all, that I gave up the dreadful, night-wrecking pursuit of that which appeared to no longer exist, and thus ecstasy is the first drug that literally bored my own enthusiasm out of me. I had a theory at the time - born, no doubt, from a certain degree of poly-drug psychosis - that the police had flooded the market with harmless pills to thwart the dealers and consumers at once. But they needn't have bothered - in the case of ecstasy, both dealer and consumer have combined to create the world's most effective 'placebo effect'.
Ecstasy folklore is awash with theories that seek to excuse the drug for being useless. One shouldn't drink orange juice if one intends to take ecstasy, as vitamin C "blocks the receptors"; several years of even casual ecstasy intake leads to almost complete tolerance; the first pill usually doesn't work, but the rush will be stronger on the 'third or fourth" - all bunk, authored by either the dealers or those who suffer 'downer denial', a delusion peculiar to clubbers who can't cope with the idea of a night going south for anyone in the group. An excellent explanation for how MDMA works, and why such legends are nonsense, can be found here (courtesy of Emanuel Sferios and DanceSafe).
The price of ecstasy alone tells you a lot - selling for between $50 and $80 in the late 80's, 'ecstasy' is now considered excessive if it markets for anything approaching the lower of those extremes, most pills going for around $30 today, while the cost of the chemical manufacturing of MDMA couldn't conceivably have plummeted accordingly. A casual glance at Pillreports.com (Australia region) would seem to suggest most pills at least check out, but a closer look at the comments posted over recent months suggests a growing concern in the community as to the veracity of many of the 'reviews', the implication being that dealers are using such well-meaning forums as publicity for lousy product. In any case, what seems to pass as a "medium" rating routinely carries comments like that posted by "addzup" on May 18, 2006:
"think these are the best going round at the moment droped 7 last sat and had a mad nite out."
Call me old-fashioned, but if you need seven of them what you have there is a rip off.
The fact is, with so many 'brands' of unquantifiable ecstasy, the temptation for dealers short on cash and chemicals to wheel out a batch on the lonely pill press must be too great to bear. A one-time ecstasy and amphetamines dealer (who naturally doesn't wish to be named) tells of easier grafts in this gullible market.
"There are lots of tricks dealers use. I tried to never be an arsehole but sometimes things were just a bit tight and the people buying were just too stupid to let get away. I used to drive around and meet people at their place or at the pub or whatever, because it was safer for me, but also so I could pull the old swifty if I had to. If someone rang at three in the morning as they often did, out of it, and asked for, say, six pills, I'd turn up with two and a gram of heavily-diluted cocaine, saying I was sorry but that's all I had, offering it to them for a 'bargain' price. They'd say, 'OK', because at that point they'll take whatever they can get. Too easy.
"Some people I know once made a killing selling some actual pharmaceutical pills as 'ecstasy'. The tablets had three threes imprinted on them ("333"), so they told these suckers that they were "demi-devils", which sounded pretty convincingly sexy. In fact, this was some sort of tablet that makes you sick if you drink on it (probably disulfiram), so all these people paid for ecstasy and got agony instead. Months later, one of the guys who sold them actually had some idiot come up and ask if he was getting 'any more of those half-devils'. He nearly laughed his guts up on the spot."
Tomorrow: heroin, and I'll include meth, as it seems to share alarming similarities with smack.
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
