yardbirdrc
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2011
- Messages
- 160
(Cocaine / ~150mg) - First Experience - "Gemstar Razor, The Fruit of My Labor"
Date: August 29, 2014
Time: 11:00pm - 3:00am
Drug: Cocaine Hydrochloride
Dose: ~150mg
Cocaine is a very bizarre substance on just about every front. For one, it is a tropane alkaloid and it looks very much unlike modern pharmaceutical stimulants when drawn out on paper. It comes from a plant that can only be grown in one part of the world, is extracted with gasoline in makeshift jungle laboratories, and then travels through a largely exploitative and often murderous network of organized crime before reaching high-level suppliers in the US. From there it trickles down through several levels of distribution, almost all of which step it into the ground with anything from aspirin to deworming powder until it reaches you, the end user, as a 20 to 40 percent purity mess of powders and - here's the crazy part - you pay a bunch of money for it. It has a very strange cultural footprint - often straddling the line between the soft, social drugs and the darker waters of habitual "fix" type drugs. Then there's the glamour associated with it, and it's function as a status symbol. From the outside it's hard to understand why people would want to spend exorbitant sums on such a short lasting and inconsistent drug when there are now much more effective and long-lasting inducers of euphoria and excitement readily available. That's sort of where the mystique comes from - by all accounts cocaine should be extinct in this day and age. It's quite possibly has the lowest cost/benefit ratio of any of the commonly abused drugs - and yet it is still massively popular in some circles. Naturally the only conclusion is that there is something beyond logic to cocaine - something ineffable that justifies all the trouble that goes into getting it up your nose.
I first saw cocaine in high school at my pot dealer's apartment. He and his friend were doing lines off a cd case and rubbing the residue on their gums. They offered me some and I passed it up. I had done plenty of reading about cocaine by that point and, at the time, I had very little interest in trying it. I suppose part of me feared addiction because up until that point the only drug I had any appreciable experience with was marijuana, but beyond that I simply wasn't that intrigued by the purported effects. After that day cocaine was a very infrequent thing for me to see even through college, popping up at a concert or frat house here or there. I still never partook - still no interest.
A couple of years ago I met Lou and we quickly became friends. Most of the people I regularly associate with have moderate to extensive experience with the more exotic brain candies, but a few good friends stayed firmly in the "weed only" camp. Lou was one of those people - any mention of psychedelics was met with uncertainty and aversion. However, the curious thing about Lou was his strong desire to one day try cocaine. This was largely because it was the one drug his mother forbid him to try. "Cocaine is the biggest lie of your life", she warned him, but this only stoked Lou's interest.
With Lou's birthday approaching, his partner Sarah reached out to me about potentially acquiring some cocaine. They had suggested this before but I had always been hesitant. I guess this time I figured that if they were bent on doing it anyway, I might as well do the legwork to make sure they did it safely and had some rough idea of what was actually in the bag. While I was at it I figured I might as well try some myself. The opprotunity to do world class cocaine isn't one that strikes often - if I'm going to have an experience with cocaine it might as well be this one.
A couple of weeks later I had acquired, for an exorbitant price even by cocaine standards, some extremely pure fishscale cocaine, a test for cocaine purity, and a test for common cocaine adulterants. The results of the tests confirmed that the cocaine was of "very high" purity, with a 90% or higher cocaine content. There was a slight cut that appeared to be aspirin or tylenol, but it may also have been bezocaine. That test was a little hard to read - at the very least it seemed clear that we didn't have to worry about levamisole. All in all it felt like this would live up to our expectations of relative safety and high quality.
We had planned to take the cocaine on Saturday with Lou, but on Friday night we found ourselves quite deep into some tequila and the idea arose that a little cocaine might be just what the doctor ordered to continue our night of partying. "Just one bump, it'll wake us right up." It was hard to argue with Alfred on this point, he was back in town for the weekend from Texas and a carpe diem mentality was very much in play.
We had been advised to start with 20 to 30mg lines, but I was relatively apprehensive and personally started with 10mg. With one quick gesture the fluffy white powder was in my sinuses, blessing my olfactory capacities with hints of gasoline and horseradish. It was by far the most pleasant thing I had ever snorted. Soon I felt a slight numbing in the back of my throat, but it was much less pronounced than I was imagining. The numbness spread to my tongue when I licked the public transit card I used to chop the lines out.
After that first line the effects were relatively subtle. I was on the decline from 5 or 6 shots of tequila earlier in the evening, and the lethargy from that seemed to immediatley disappear. I stood up and started walking around, mildly dancing to the background music. It was probably about 2 minutes before I decided I would be doing more cocaine that evening. I hadn't even approached the euphoria I had heard so much about, and yet the famous more-ish nature of this drug was already making itself abundantly clear.
We proceeded to do 5 or 6 more lines that evening, all between 15 and 30mg. The subtle energy grew and grew until we were all talking as fast as possible, as much as possible. I noticed that, very much unlike MDMA, I was mostly interested in talking about myself and things that I was interested in. I often found myself talking over people (and being talked over), and simply listening to what other people were saying in order to find points that I could expand upon relevant to my own experience. It simply felt good to talk, I suppose, so I wanted to do as much of it as possible. Meanwhile there was a very subtle bright glossy sheen to everything and a strong positive mood push.
The prospect of doing more cocaine was always present in the back of my mind, and this was something that I had anticipated and fully embraced. I've taken a few of the classical "addictive" drugs at this point, and I've had no problem abstaining from them while outside of their influence. However, while on these drugs, I do have a tendency to get bingey. For this reason I take precautions about the frequency and context of their usage. This is especially true of opiates, MDMA and alcohol. Cocaine was perhaps the strongest example of this I've encountered, I was ready for more every 15 minutes to half hour.
Towards the end I began to experience some really thrilling, almost orgasmic physical sensations. A friend in the room who had experience with cocaine explained this was likely because I was finally surpassing the effects of the alcohol. What about cocaethylene? Who knows, who cares. My arms and face were tingling like a hard cock and my brain felt a little bit like there was a cool breeze blowing through it.
After about 2 hours of good clean euphoria I began grinding to an anxious, squidgy halt. This was only about a half hour after my last line. I was crashing, and this was a first for me from any drug. My whole body felt tight and edgy - this filled me with paranoia about my health. I don't know if you've ever read the wikipedia article for cocaine but it's pretty depressing and intimidating. What if my heart stopped? Sodium channels? I found my leg incessantly bouncing up and down and my fingers tapping a scattered tune out on the arm of the chair. I realized that I was probably doing this the entire time but by this point there was no more euphoria to distract me from these peripheral symptoms.
We decided to venture across town to get some etizolam from my girlfriend's house who was out of town at the time. I wouldn't necessarily recommend driving on cocaine but I certainly felt capable of it at the time, and thus I trusted that Kyle was capable as well. We each did one more line before departing. By the time we returned home I was certainly feeling the crash in full force - that last line only prolonged the inevitable without adding much in the way of a high. It was painfully obvious how people become addicted to this drug - it's so deliciously bingeworthy and the negative aftereffects are so immediate and so extreme. As I was crashing I was constantly aware of how I still had plenty of cocaine in my vial and how just one line of that would, at least momentarily, relieve me of my discomfort. But, at least in this instance, willpower prevailed and with a little benzo (err, "thio") assistance I was able to weather the descent. Trying to imagine a life lived within the rollercoaster ups and downs of cocaine was a depressing exercise. So was considering the cold hard fact that the money I had spent on this drug had almost certainly, in one way or another, found its way into the hands of murderers.
2mg of etizolam later I was able to sleep around 5am. I woke up feeling fantastic - something I didn't expect. As the day ground on I became a little tired at most, but certainly none of the soul crushing depression of an MDMA hangover. Ah, MDMA. I certainly prefer it to cocaine overall, and so I decided that it might be a better option for Lou's birthday. There were several people visiting from out of town and a little emotional outpour seemed approrpiate - definitely not something for which cocaine was useful.
The experience of acquiring and consuming cocaine made me think a lot about addiction. I think there are really three main things to keep in mind with dealing with substances that possess this quality.
1. Never take the drug as a way of coping with negative after-effects induced by the drug itself. Put simply, embrace the binge and know when it stops. Be conscious of diminishing returns, and realize that you must pay for great pleasure with some amount of pain and discomfort. What you are about to experience is finite, and in no way can it last forever. Understand all of that intimately before embarking.
2. Never associate the drug with any sort of pattern. Never say to yourself "Thank god it's Friday, on Fridays I snort oxycodone". Even more importantly never say to yourself "I'm sad. When I'm sad I snort cocaine." By establishing the drug as a consequence of some particular scenario you are dooming yourself to habit. Instead understand the drug's action, understand that when you feel like you need it is precisely when you need it least, and understand that unlike psychedelics these are (generally) not tools - they are playthings. Don't fall into a ritual of using them in some vain attempt to fix problems. Use them randomly, infrequently and with caution.
3. Perhaps the most nebulous but most important: know what you personally are susceptible to. Know where your holes are as best as you possibly can so that you can avoid filling them with substances. If you deal with a lot of emotional pain or mood swings on a regular basis, it's probably best that you avoid the emotional deadening effects produced by opiate drugs. If you feel like your life lacks excitement, or if you often feel bored, you probably shouldn't be messing around with cocaine or MDMA. Unfortunately for a lot of people it's hard to really understand where those holes are until it's too late. I feel fortunate that I was able to experience these drugs in my mid 20's after years of self-analysis under the tutelage of various psychedelics. If I had, as a 15 year old, accepted that line of Cocaine I was offered in high school I worry that things might've gone differently.
For the record, Lou did get to try the cocaine the following night and did enjoy it. He and Sarah had 2 or 3 good sessions with it before their vial ran out. Me? I managed to somehow lose what I had left after that first night - or it was stolen, not really sure. Maybe when we move out of our house it'll turn up and we'll all have one last hurrah.
Date: August 29, 2014
Time: 11:00pm - 3:00am
Drug: Cocaine Hydrochloride
Dose: ~150mg
Cocaine is a very bizarre substance on just about every front. For one, it is a tropane alkaloid and it looks very much unlike modern pharmaceutical stimulants when drawn out on paper. It comes from a plant that can only be grown in one part of the world, is extracted with gasoline in makeshift jungle laboratories, and then travels through a largely exploitative and often murderous network of organized crime before reaching high-level suppliers in the US. From there it trickles down through several levels of distribution, almost all of which step it into the ground with anything from aspirin to deworming powder until it reaches you, the end user, as a 20 to 40 percent purity mess of powders and - here's the crazy part - you pay a bunch of money for it. It has a very strange cultural footprint - often straddling the line between the soft, social drugs and the darker waters of habitual "fix" type drugs. Then there's the glamour associated with it, and it's function as a status symbol. From the outside it's hard to understand why people would want to spend exorbitant sums on such a short lasting and inconsistent drug when there are now much more effective and long-lasting inducers of euphoria and excitement readily available. That's sort of where the mystique comes from - by all accounts cocaine should be extinct in this day and age. It's quite possibly has the lowest cost/benefit ratio of any of the commonly abused drugs - and yet it is still massively popular in some circles. Naturally the only conclusion is that there is something beyond logic to cocaine - something ineffable that justifies all the trouble that goes into getting it up your nose.
I first saw cocaine in high school at my pot dealer's apartment. He and his friend were doing lines off a cd case and rubbing the residue on their gums. They offered me some and I passed it up. I had done plenty of reading about cocaine by that point and, at the time, I had very little interest in trying it. I suppose part of me feared addiction because up until that point the only drug I had any appreciable experience with was marijuana, but beyond that I simply wasn't that intrigued by the purported effects. After that day cocaine was a very infrequent thing for me to see even through college, popping up at a concert or frat house here or there. I still never partook - still no interest.
A couple of years ago I met Lou and we quickly became friends. Most of the people I regularly associate with have moderate to extensive experience with the more exotic brain candies, but a few good friends stayed firmly in the "weed only" camp. Lou was one of those people - any mention of psychedelics was met with uncertainty and aversion. However, the curious thing about Lou was his strong desire to one day try cocaine. This was largely because it was the one drug his mother forbid him to try. "Cocaine is the biggest lie of your life", she warned him, but this only stoked Lou's interest.
With Lou's birthday approaching, his partner Sarah reached out to me about potentially acquiring some cocaine. They had suggested this before but I had always been hesitant. I guess this time I figured that if they were bent on doing it anyway, I might as well do the legwork to make sure they did it safely and had some rough idea of what was actually in the bag. While I was at it I figured I might as well try some myself. The opprotunity to do world class cocaine isn't one that strikes often - if I'm going to have an experience with cocaine it might as well be this one.
A couple of weeks later I had acquired, for an exorbitant price even by cocaine standards, some extremely pure fishscale cocaine, a test for cocaine purity, and a test for common cocaine adulterants. The results of the tests confirmed that the cocaine was of "very high" purity, with a 90% or higher cocaine content. There was a slight cut that appeared to be aspirin or tylenol, but it may also have been bezocaine. That test was a little hard to read - at the very least it seemed clear that we didn't have to worry about levamisole. All in all it felt like this would live up to our expectations of relative safety and high quality.
We had planned to take the cocaine on Saturday with Lou, but on Friday night we found ourselves quite deep into some tequila and the idea arose that a little cocaine might be just what the doctor ordered to continue our night of partying. "Just one bump, it'll wake us right up." It was hard to argue with Alfred on this point, he was back in town for the weekend from Texas and a carpe diem mentality was very much in play.
We had been advised to start with 20 to 30mg lines, but I was relatively apprehensive and personally started with 10mg. With one quick gesture the fluffy white powder was in my sinuses, blessing my olfactory capacities with hints of gasoline and horseradish. It was by far the most pleasant thing I had ever snorted. Soon I felt a slight numbing in the back of my throat, but it was much less pronounced than I was imagining. The numbness spread to my tongue when I licked the public transit card I used to chop the lines out.
After that first line the effects were relatively subtle. I was on the decline from 5 or 6 shots of tequila earlier in the evening, and the lethargy from that seemed to immediatley disappear. I stood up and started walking around, mildly dancing to the background music. It was probably about 2 minutes before I decided I would be doing more cocaine that evening. I hadn't even approached the euphoria I had heard so much about, and yet the famous more-ish nature of this drug was already making itself abundantly clear.
We proceeded to do 5 or 6 more lines that evening, all between 15 and 30mg. The subtle energy grew and grew until we were all talking as fast as possible, as much as possible. I noticed that, very much unlike MDMA, I was mostly interested in talking about myself and things that I was interested in. I often found myself talking over people (and being talked over), and simply listening to what other people were saying in order to find points that I could expand upon relevant to my own experience. It simply felt good to talk, I suppose, so I wanted to do as much of it as possible. Meanwhile there was a very subtle bright glossy sheen to everything and a strong positive mood push.
The prospect of doing more cocaine was always present in the back of my mind, and this was something that I had anticipated and fully embraced. I've taken a few of the classical "addictive" drugs at this point, and I've had no problem abstaining from them while outside of their influence. However, while on these drugs, I do have a tendency to get bingey. For this reason I take precautions about the frequency and context of their usage. This is especially true of opiates, MDMA and alcohol. Cocaine was perhaps the strongest example of this I've encountered, I was ready for more every 15 minutes to half hour.
Towards the end I began to experience some really thrilling, almost orgasmic physical sensations. A friend in the room who had experience with cocaine explained this was likely because I was finally surpassing the effects of the alcohol. What about cocaethylene? Who knows, who cares. My arms and face were tingling like a hard cock and my brain felt a little bit like there was a cool breeze blowing through it.
After about 2 hours of good clean euphoria I began grinding to an anxious, squidgy halt. This was only about a half hour after my last line. I was crashing, and this was a first for me from any drug. My whole body felt tight and edgy - this filled me with paranoia about my health. I don't know if you've ever read the wikipedia article for cocaine but it's pretty depressing and intimidating. What if my heart stopped? Sodium channels? I found my leg incessantly bouncing up and down and my fingers tapping a scattered tune out on the arm of the chair. I realized that I was probably doing this the entire time but by this point there was no more euphoria to distract me from these peripheral symptoms.
We decided to venture across town to get some etizolam from my girlfriend's house who was out of town at the time. I wouldn't necessarily recommend driving on cocaine but I certainly felt capable of it at the time, and thus I trusted that Kyle was capable as well. We each did one more line before departing. By the time we returned home I was certainly feeling the crash in full force - that last line only prolonged the inevitable without adding much in the way of a high. It was painfully obvious how people become addicted to this drug - it's so deliciously bingeworthy and the negative aftereffects are so immediate and so extreme. As I was crashing I was constantly aware of how I still had plenty of cocaine in my vial and how just one line of that would, at least momentarily, relieve me of my discomfort. But, at least in this instance, willpower prevailed and with a little benzo (err, "thio") assistance I was able to weather the descent. Trying to imagine a life lived within the rollercoaster ups and downs of cocaine was a depressing exercise. So was considering the cold hard fact that the money I had spent on this drug had almost certainly, in one way or another, found its way into the hands of murderers.
2mg of etizolam later I was able to sleep around 5am. I woke up feeling fantastic - something I didn't expect. As the day ground on I became a little tired at most, but certainly none of the soul crushing depression of an MDMA hangover. Ah, MDMA. I certainly prefer it to cocaine overall, and so I decided that it might be a better option for Lou's birthday. There were several people visiting from out of town and a little emotional outpour seemed approrpiate - definitely not something for which cocaine was useful.
The experience of acquiring and consuming cocaine made me think a lot about addiction. I think there are really three main things to keep in mind with dealing with substances that possess this quality.
1. Never take the drug as a way of coping with negative after-effects induced by the drug itself. Put simply, embrace the binge and know when it stops. Be conscious of diminishing returns, and realize that you must pay for great pleasure with some amount of pain and discomfort. What you are about to experience is finite, and in no way can it last forever. Understand all of that intimately before embarking.
2. Never associate the drug with any sort of pattern. Never say to yourself "Thank god it's Friday, on Fridays I snort oxycodone". Even more importantly never say to yourself "I'm sad. When I'm sad I snort cocaine." By establishing the drug as a consequence of some particular scenario you are dooming yourself to habit. Instead understand the drug's action, understand that when you feel like you need it is precisely when you need it least, and understand that unlike psychedelics these are (generally) not tools - they are playthings. Don't fall into a ritual of using them in some vain attempt to fix problems. Use them randomly, infrequently and with caution.
3. Perhaps the most nebulous but most important: know what you personally are susceptible to. Know where your holes are as best as you possibly can so that you can avoid filling them with substances. If you deal with a lot of emotional pain or mood swings on a regular basis, it's probably best that you avoid the emotional deadening effects produced by opiate drugs. If you feel like your life lacks excitement, or if you often feel bored, you probably shouldn't be messing around with cocaine or MDMA. Unfortunately for a lot of people it's hard to really understand where those holes are until it's too late. I feel fortunate that I was able to experience these drugs in my mid 20's after years of self-analysis under the tutelage of various psychedelics. If I had, as a 15 year old, accepted that line of Cocaine I was offered in high school I worry that things might've gone differently.
For the record, Lou did get to try the cocaine the following night and did enjoy it. He and Sarah had 2 or 3 good sessions with it before their vial ran out. Me? I managed to somehow lose what I had left after that first night - or it was stolen, not really sure. Maybe when we move out of our house it'll turn up and we'll all have one last hurrah.
