washingtonbound
Bluelighter
As I sat in a shoddy Mexico city hotel room with a hooker who’d accosted me earlier, I contemplated the meaninglessness of my existence. She pulled a meth pipe out of her bag, and offered to blow the smoke in my mouth after she took a hit, which I obliged. After repeating this a second time, I realized I didn’t have a condom. This seemed to piss her off, and for whatever reason, the high was more philosophical and sex wasn’t at the top of my priority list. Shortly afterward she left, and I continued to lay there engaged with aimless thoughts that seemed a lot more profound than they would’ve in a sober state.
I wondered how long I would flit around Latin America, chasing women and drugs, before everything would fall apart in front of me. For the past five years, I’d alternated from living with family, working trivial, worthless jobs, to saving up a few grand and running for the hills. My first rodeo was in 2019 to Medellin, Colombia, during which I nearly overdosed and wound up back in Florida with a hefty case of drug induced psychosis.
I didn’t always envision my future this way. I naively thought at one point that I would have some kind of career in media, but after different drug addled incidents took me out of college on three separate occasions, I sort of gave up on this altogether. I never liked living in the US either; I hated the police, the GMO food and the soulless atmosphere. So I decided to leave the matrix and find my own purpose in life.
After about a month in Colombia, the familiar sense of nihilism crept over me once again. I realized how much of the population lived in a constant state of desperation, which became more evident the further you ventured from the tourist areas. People warned me not to accept drinks from any strange girls in bars, as that could result in you waking up with none of your belongings and no recollection of how it happened. Putting scopolamine in an unsuspecting foreigner’s drink was apparently the method of choice for these “ladronas” as they’re called in Spanish.
Luckily I didn’t meet a fate like this, but drugs still caused me to deteriorate over the course of my month there. I started out smoking weed, sniffing cocaine and drinking casually with some locals at a skatepark near my hotel. I knew a good outcome wouldn’t come from this, but continued this “social activity” regardless. Maybe I could’ve walked away from that, but after I started buying clonazepam and mixing it with coke alone in my hotel room, it was game over.
One day I decided to venture to Parque Arvi, a tourist attraction located on the outskirts of the city. I sniffed coke inside the cable car on the ride up the mountain, and observed that many people lived in homes made out of plastic. A simple thin piece of sheet metal for a roof appeared to be a commodity for some. This disturbed me, and I decided to sniff more coke as a result. When I arrived at Parque Arvi I was anxious, paranoid and still rattled.
On the way back to the hotel I ended up taking a bit more clonazepam than I was used to and railed a few lines when I arrived. I felt my heart skip several beats, and was convinced it was game over. Why was I doing this to myself? Was my fate really to die in a shoddy Colombian hotel, cracked out on some dope I bought from thugs at a skatepark? It seemed like self destruction was as automatic to me as breathing, although breathing might not have been in the cards for me anymore after this.
Coming down off this binge, I began getting really agitated by the idea I was being taken advantage of by people at the skatepark who saw me as a gringo piggy bank. Further thought led me to realize only one of the people there could even remotely be considered a friend. Everyone else was just happy that the dumb white guy would buy anything that was offered. Therefore, in a cracked out state, I ventured to the skatepark and vehemently spoke my mind in broken spanish. Before anyone could respond I skated off, and didn’t venture there again. In retrospect I’m lucky not to have been beaten to a pulp for that incident.
Shortly afterwards, I began slipping into psychosis. The way I understand it is that after a certain point, my brain becomes too stressed from drugs and miserable experiences and just decides to shut off. It’s like some kind of dissociative defense mechanism. In this half-cocked psychotic state, I decided to venture to the Amazon to “cleanse myself” with a shaman. Somehow I managed to take a plane to Cali, then caught a bus to the Colombia-Ecuador border. From there I caught a flight from Quito to Lima, and then a five AM flight to Iquitos after spending a few hours in a shanty hotel. I have no idea how I managed to travel there in such a messed up state, I suppose manic determination to take ayahuasca played a part in it.
Iquitos proved to be the biggest rat hole I’d seen in my life. No one seemed to have a problem with the mounds of feces and trash piled up everywhere, as well as the horrifying smell. The cheap gasoline used by the tuk-tuks added an extra layer of stench to the piles of waste, making for an almost unbearable odor at certain times. Still, I was determined to see a shaman, and therefore jumped at the first opportunity I heard someone advertising it on the street. This was going to be a cleansing spiritual journey, or so I thought. Except no one would want to work with a psychotic gringo as I’d soon find out.
The people who’d been advertising it took me to a falling apart shack on the river. The shaman sat there with shorts and no t-shirt smoking a cigarette. The first thing he did was hold two skulls up in front of me, real skulls, not some thrift store replicas, in order to gauge whether I would work better with a female shaman (abuelita) or male (abuelito). If this sounds really out in left field, all I can say is there’s a very different culture in the jungle. Since I grabbed more firmly onto the male skull, he said I would work with him. But after realizing how far gone I was, he decided against working with me at all. His excuse was that I appeared to practice “black magic.” From that point, I began wandering around Iquitos in an extremely psychotic state, escalating in intensity.
Several times I stepped in shit, and constantly had to run from stray dogs. At one point I decided to go for a dip in the river, which was also filled to the brim with waste. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up with some kind of horrible disease. I can only imagine what locals thought of me wandering aimlessly around the city, far gone enough to even swim in the polluted water. For whatever reason, I had an uncontrollable urge to move around, much to my detriment. Had I not injured myself shortly after this, god knows how long I would’ve remained there, half starved and completely out of it.
Eventually, one of the nasty stray dogs almost got to me and I ended up getting chased off a balcony. With a fractured rib cage and split open eyebrow, I took the most painful, bumpy ambulance ride to the hospital, if you could call it that. All they did was stitch my eyebrow up and said I’d need to go back to the US for surgery on my ribs. After a few days, my Mom arrived and I was put on a flight to Miami. I hardly remember this, and the worst was yet to come as I was transported to the psych ward right after having surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Now I would be in for a paliperidone shot, and two months of ensuing anhedonia and misery.
This hellish cycle had been going on for five years. After barely managing to finish my freshman year of college, I had my first psychotic break during the summer of 2014. Over the course of that year I dabbled in drugs, mainly psychedelics, but ironically what broke me was weed. Smoking high potency concentrates each day started causing major mood swings, and over the summer something just snapped. I can still remember the night it happened, smoking with my friend and then falling when I got up to use the bathroom. Everything suddenly became extremely vibrant and it felt like I was having an acid flashback. Something genetically just switched, and now I’d be on the road to many further episodes of psychosis.
After being hospitalized for psychosis twice in the summer of 2014, my parents sent me to an intensive treatment facility in Chicago. In order for me to receive any further support from them for college, I had to go through with it. What transpired were three of the most miserable months of my life. The people running the pathetic excuses for “therapeutic” groups had no business being in the field whatsoever. It became bad enough for some people that a few suicide attempts occurred during my stay. Unfortunately this would not be my last experience in a place like this, but thankfully I was able to resume college in the fall of 2015.
I can’t say what exactly drove me to continue obliterating myself with drugs, but the itch that never seemed to go away was still there when I returned to college. I studied abroad at the University of Brighton in England and as fate would have it, a few weeks after arriving, I ran into an old hippie peddling LSD, DMT, and ketamine. Of course, I had the bright idea of combining all three of them during a long weekend, resulting in immediate psychosis. After a couple days wandering around, waking people up in their dorms and being about as disruptive as possible, I was hauled off to the psych ward. As I would soon find out, the UK takes their basket cases a lot more seriously, and it wouldn’t be as simple as getting doped up for a few days and then released. I ended up being stuck in the dungeon for three months, injected with zuclopenthixol, and returned home to Florida a total zombie. You would think this would scare me away from engaging in further binges, but the first thing on my mind was where to score some acid to counteract the effects of the horrible injection I received.
Shortly after returning home, the rabbit hole of my substance use continued at a greater speed when I found out how to order stuff off the dark web. During this time, AlphaBay was the market of choice and it seemed to have everything, from heroin to DMT to steroids. Feeling like a kid in a candy store, I began ordering as many different substances as possible. Still writhing from the effects of the zuclopenthixol shot a month later, I ordered some 2CB to counteract it. This helped somewhat, although the effects from the 2CB were blunted. A couple weeks later it seemed my brain was fairly back to normal and I continued ordering anything under the sun.
I had the bright idea of trying heroin, and ordered a small bag to test the waters. I snorted it, vomited shortly thereafter and felt minimal euphoria. I repeated the process with the same result, and decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. This was a godsend, because who knows how much further things would’ve unraveled if I developed a heroin habit on top of everything else.
It was surreal to find myself sitting in a taxi, doing my best to get by on high school level Spanish, and somehow managing. I explained to the driver that I wanted to find an affordable hotel near a skatepark: una hotel economica cerca de la parque patineta por favor, I babbled. Remarkably, he understood me well enough and ended up dropping me at a place called “Hotel Villa Real,” a couple blocks away from the Estadio district, where the park was located, along with many restaurants and bars catering to tourists. Even more unbelievable to me was the fact that the hotel cost a mere twenty dollars a night, which would be impossible to find in the states.
So here I was, trying to make my way in Medellin and figuring I’d leave the US in the rearview for good. Little did I know, my addict mind would not let me off that easily and I would soon unravel in a horrifying way. Medellin is about the worst place to be for someone with a drug problem, as the readily available vices can bring the worst out extremely quickly. And this is precisely what happened.
My first evening there, I made my way to the skatepark, ready to take in all my new environment had to offer. The first person to greet me was a homeless coke addict, offering to sell me a gram. The atmosphere at the park was both exciting and anxiety inducing at the same time, because of the amount of thugs roaming around. I obliged the homeless guy’s offer, and put the white in my nose immediately.
Most people seemed genuinely curious to meet a foreigner, and I wished I was able to communicate more fluently in Spanish. I could only really manage a few words before the conversation would go stale due to my lack of proficiency. So I sat around snorting white with fellow skaters and street thugs, exchanging minimal dialogue. I was both enchanted and put off by this atmosphere.
Before long, I was buying a gram or two of coke each day from the same homeless guy who’d accosted me on the first night. This escalated into buying clonazepam and combining the two on a semi regular basis. I found that the clonazepam mellowed out the white in a phenomenal way, and the effects were much more desirable than either one on its own. Struggling to communicate in Spanish at the skatepark got old, and I opted to indulge in this combo on my own in the hotel most of the time.
The ironic thing about Medellin was that it had the ingredients to be nirvana, however there were certain cultural elements I found repugnant. For instance, if I were to venture into one of the bars playing horrifying reggaeton beats, the bartenders would often warn me that the girls were “working,” and not to be too friendly with them unless I intended to pay for it. This was a stark contrast to the hookup culture in the US, where picking up was common. In a worst case scenario, tourists were drugged with scopolamine and robbed.
I eventually got lucky with a Russian tourist, although the experience was fairly underwhelming and before long I was sitting in the hotel snorting white and popping clonazepam again. My Spanish was not particularly improving, and I began feeling bored and apathetic.
My use of cocaine began to escalate and one evening as I headed for a hike in a park, I snorted more than usual and nearly had a full blown panic attack. My increased heart rate on the hike certainly didn’t help. On the ride back I contemplated how my skatepark “friends” were really just using me for money, and started to feel resentment. That night, I confronted them about it in broken Spanish as mentioned, and in retrospect I’m lucky I wasn’t stabbed and disposed of in the trash infested river that ran through town.
Shortly after my drug habit spiraled out of control, I embarked on my escapade to Iquitos. When I returned home I was whisked off to rehab, which was a repulsive, unbearable experience.
I returned to Medellin a year later and had more or less an identical experience, with the exception of getting locked inside many weekends due to bullshit covid protocols. The city was deteriorating due to an influx of Venezuelan migrants that brought more trouble than any contributions to the economy. I was nearly robbed by them on a few different occasions, and they hassled me for money constantly. I began to get sick of this and continued drugging myself out. I decided that Medellin was getting old once again.
I downloaded a couple dating apps and started looking around. I saw a lot of bullshit about girls calling themselves “Catholic” and “Family Oriented.” I couldn’t care less about that and realized they were likely playing that card for the low value gringos who were sexless in the states and hunting for someone to marry. They would likely then get a green card and bail on them entirely.
I got a girl over to my hotel at one point and asked her if she wanted some coke. She said “coca cola?” and that was the end of that. I was frustrated with my situation, and fried myself on cocaine, shrooms and ketamine.
Shortly afterwards psychosis set in again. This time was almost worse than the last and of course I wound up in a Florida psych hospital yet another time. I got a paliperidone shot that rendered me impotent, anhedonic, and nearly retarded for months. I had slurred speech and was concerned it would be permanent. I decided it was time to work on getting out of dodge again, and managed to get a crappy security job that allowed me to save a little.
Eventually I set my sights on Oaxaca, Mexico. This destination was intriguing because of the indigenous influence, and figured maybe I would try some plant medicine. Before long I was on a flight over there and quite excited for this new venture that wasn’t simply frying myself in Medellin. I stayed in a hostel the first night, didn’t care for the vibe and took off to a budget hotel. I ran into a younger kid skateboarding and wound up smoking some strong grass. As could be imagined, I became manic again.
In this case, I wasn’t out of it to the point where reality was lost. I was in a bizarre in-between stage where I was fried enough to be repugnant to others, but not quite enough to draw extreme attention to myself. Most of the time I stayed in the hotel room smoking cigarettes and proclaiming to myself to be a “shaman” because I bought san pedro cream from a corner store. This was not psychoactive, but maybe in my half cocked state I thought it was.
This bizarre cycle went on for quite some time. Eventually I began abusing pregabalin, known as Lyrica in the states, and this escalated my fragile state of mind, but luckily not quite into full psychosis. Then I was taking videos of myself popping pregabalin and smoking cigarettes, in a pathetic manner. Eventually I left Mexico and returned to Medellin. You can probably guess how that turned out.
I’ve tried to analyze what drew me to the excessive substance abuse that plagued most of my twenties. In high school, I was sent to a “troubled teen wilderness camp” and boarding school, which was fairly traumatizing. Two guys simply showed up at six AM and said: “You’re coming with us.” I really didn’t know what to make of this and before long I was stuck in the freezing Utah mountains. This was not a place you could escape from. I lost eleven months and the best part of my high school experience because of this, and returned home quite jaded and significantly more introverted. However, once I went to college several months later, I wasn’t quite as affected by it.
College seemed to be where things took a turn for the worst. I had a failed relationship with a girl that bothered me significantly and began going over the top with MDMA and acid. For whatever reason I didn’t seem to put two and two together that the comedowns, particularly from MDMA, were a major cause of my escalating fragile mood. I also was smoking THC concentrate or flower most days, sometimes both, and this was turning into a big issue as well.
The combination of the failed relationship, increasing drug abuse and an isolated situation at school was beginning to snowball. I was beginning to slide academically as well and was quite agitated by the “liberal arts” curriculum. My attitude was really beginning to deteriorate and I was failing to see the point of school, making friends or much of anything else. At this time I also began experiencing flashbacks of the wilderness camp and it began escalating in intensity. Whatever the cause was, when I returned home I was teetering on the brink.
One evening I went to smoke weed with my friend, returned to the house, and my Dad got in my face saying: “I know you’ve been smoking dope, bud,” with extra emphasis on the “bud,” and I just lost it. I screamed at him, calling him a worthless prick or something along those lines and stormed out of the house. I then returned to my friends, smoked more weed and that’s when the psychosis started.
A few days later, I became convinced that my consciousness was connected to a supercomputer, thinking heavily about being “in the matrix,” and escalating into increasingly bizarre theories and behavior. Although there is some validity to the matrix argument, once I began walking around in circles in the living room saying: “I am computer man, zero one, zero one,” the fire department was called and I was hauled off to the psych ward.
I sometimes wonder if I would have eventually slept it off and returned to normal. But instead I was traumatized further by the psych ward experience, where a lot of the “techs” as they’re called looked like gang members. I returned home a mess once again.
Another psychotic incident happened shortly afterwards and my parents began really getting on my case after that. I was told I would need to take lithium possibly for life, and also was strong-armed into taking other medications like olanzapine, which really made me miserable. I went through a plethora of different meds and nothing quite seemed to work out right. I questioned the bipolar diagnosis. Regardless of this, I was sent off to another treatment program that lasted roughly two months. During this time, I witnessed some horrific things, such as a few attempted suicides.
One guy I knew, who we’ll call Mark, had this extreme infatuation with a girl. Some drama came up between them, and it was revealed they were having sex, which was prohibited at this place. The combination of being roasted over the coals for having sex and the falling out of the relationship thrust Mark down a dark path. Next thing I know, he overdoses on purpose in the bathtub and was found by one of the workers. They kept things on the down low for a while and said that Kevin “just needed to take a break.” But of course there was gossip and everyone was privy to what happened.
I finally got out of this place and went to study abroad in the UK. In retrospect, I was quite privileged to be able to do this but didn’t realize it at the time. I did what I knew best and immediately made friends with whoever smoked the most weed. Maybe I could’ve gotten away with this, but before long, I’d found a nightclub frequented by acidheads. Some older hippie guy dropped acid on my skin one night and then it was game over. The following day I bought ketamine, DMT, acid and some speed paste. I proceeded to binge in my dorm room for one week straight, and lost my mind entirely. I began wandering aimlessly, waking people up in the middle of the night by buzzing their door, wandering around the soccer fields while they were practicing, and just being a nuisance in general. Before long I was whisked off to the psych ward there as well.
During the time spent in the psych ward, I learned that the UK forced certain people to get antipsychotic injections. There was no choice in the matter for certain people whatsoever. One guy I knew went into the ward voluntarily because he was homeless, and doctors deemed him to be schizophrenic and he was quickly put on an injection. In this case, they figured he was a lost cause and mandated him to get the injection every month. I was so scared of this that I immediately left the UK when I was released. Forget about school, I wasn’t going to risk any bullshit like that.
Shortly after this, I began buying drugs online with increasing frequency. I bought everything from ketamine to heroin to 2CB. Nothing was off limits. The only things I didn’t try were crack and meth. Obviously this wasn’t going to end well, and I revolved in and out of the psych ward. Some of them were worse than others. There were some rare instances where I liked some of the staff members and we would shoot the shit a bit. But it was never fun to get the injections or doped up on pills.
A couple years later I wound up in jail. I was high on ketamine and got sent to the Boone county lockup, which gave me the creeps. Because I was psychotic, I was put in the mental health pod where you were only allowed out for an hour a day. The worst part of it was, some weirdo would continually come up to my cell and proclaim he was bisexual and wanted to see my prick. This was repulsive enough and obviously I became sick of dealing with it fast. I’m also pretty sure the kid next to me was dealing with an older man raping him most nights because the old man paid the guards to let him in his cell. Needless to say this was a horrible experience and caused a lot of trauma.
Eventually, after this freak continued asking to see my prick, I told one of the CO’s I would kill myself. This resulted in me getting transferred to solitary confinement with nothing but a cheap blanket. There was no bed in this room whatsoever. I was stuck in there for three days before talking to a doctor and then transferred to the general population pod. In this pod were several rotten thugs that went on and on about gang bullshit. Eventually I became sick of this and asked to be transferred. Once again, I was confined to a cell for twenty three hours a day. After forty days I got out, and was transferred to a psych hospital, where I spent two months.
I have now been more or less sober for the past several months. To be honest, a lot of days it doesn’t feel worth it. There’s no high to look forward to or an intriguing altered state. However, it had to be done because withdrawals and comedowns were becoming unbearable. I might feel high for one hour only to be miserable for days or weeks afterwards. So I knew it had to stop, the last substances I cut out being marijuana and nicotine.
Who knows why my life has followed this trajectory. It feels good to share the trauma from all this crap to alleviate the mental burden. If this is intriguing to people to understand the mind of a substance abuser and sometimes psychotic person, I will continue to share it.
I wondered how long I would flit around Latin America, chasing women and drugs, before everything would fall apart in front of me. For the past five years, I’d alternated from living with family, working trivial, worthless jobs, to saving up a few grand and running for the hills. My first rodeo was in 2019 to Medellin, Colombia, during which I nearly overdosed and wound up back in Florida with a hefty case of drug induced psychosis.
I didn’t always envision my future this way. I naively thought at one point that I would have some kind of career in media, but after different drug addled incidents took me out of college on three separate occasions, I sort of gave up on this altogether. I never liked living in the US either; I hated the police, the GMO food and the soulless atmosphere. So I decided to leave the matrix and find my own purpose in life.
After about a month in Colombia, the familiar sense of nihilism crept over me once again. I realized how much of the population lived in a constant state of desperation, which became more evident the further you ventured from the tourist areas. People warned me not to accept drinks from any strange girls in bars, as that could result in you waking up with none of your belongings and no recollection of how it happened. Putting scopolamine in an unsuspecting foreigner’s drink was apparently the method of choice for these “ladronas” as they’re called in Spanish.
Luckily I didn’t meet a fate like this, but drugs still caused me to deteriorate over the course of my month there. I started out smoking weed, sniffing cocaine and drinking casually with some locals at a skatepark near my hotel. I knew a good outcome wouldn’t come from this, but continued this “social activity” regardless. Maybe I could’ve walked away from that, but after I started buying clonazepam and mixing it with coke alone in my hotel room, it was game over.
One day I decided to venture to Parque Arvi, a tourist attraction located on the outskirts of the city. I sniffed coke inside the cable car on the ride up the mountain, and observed that many people lived in homes made out of plastic. A simple thin piece of sheet metal for a roof appeared to be a commodity for some. This disturbed me, and I decided to sniff more coke as a result. When I arrived at Parque Arvi I was anxious, paranoid and still rattled.
On the way back to the hotel I ended up taking a bit more clonazepam than I was used to and railed a few lines when I arrived. I felt my heart skip several beats, and was convinced it was game over. Why was I doing this to myself? Was my fate really to die in a shoddy Colombian hotel, cracked out on some dope I bought from thugs at a skatepark? It seemed like self destruction was as automatic to me as breathing, although breathing might not have been in the cards for me anymore after this.
Coming down off this binge, I began getting really agitated by the idea I was being taken advantage of by people at the skatepark who saw me as a gringo piggy bank. Further thought led me to realize only one of the people there could even remotely be considered a friend. Everyone else was just happy that the dumb white guy would buy anything that was offered. Therefore, in a cracked out state, I ventured to the skatepark and vehemently spoke my mind in broken spanish. Before anyone could respond I skated off, and didn’t venture there again. In retrospect I’m lucky not to have been beaten to a pulp for that incident.
Shortly afterwards, I began slipping into psychosis. The way I understand it is that after a certain point, my brain becomes too stressed from drugs and miserable experiences and just decides to shut off. It’s like some kind of dissociative defense mechanism. In this half-cocked psychotic state, I decided to venture to the Amazon to “cleanse myself” with a shaman. Somehow I managed to take a plane to Cali, then caught a bus to the Colombia-Ecuador border. From there I caught a flight from Quito to Lima, and then a five AM flight to Iquitos after spending a few hours in a shanty hotel. I have no idea how I managed to travel there in such a messed up state, I suppose manic determination to take ayahuasca played a part in it.
Iquitos proved to be the biggest rat hole I’d seen in my life. No one seemed to have a problem with the mounds of feces and trash piled up everywhere, as well as the horrifying smell. The cheap gasoline used by the tuk-tuks added an extra layer of stench to the piles of waste, making for an almost unbearable odor at certain times. Still, I was determined to see a shaman, and therefore jumped at the first opportunity I heard someone advertising it on the street. This was going to be a cleansing spiritual journey, or so I thought. Except no one would want to work with a psychotic gringo as I’d soon find out.
The people who’d been advertising it took me to a falling apart shack on the river. The shaman sat there with shorts and no t-shirt smoking a cigarette. The first thing he did was hold two skulls up in front of me, real skulls, not some thrift store replicas, in order to gauge whether I would work better with a female shaman (abuelita) or male (abuelito). If this sounds really out in left field, all I can say is there’s a very different culture in the jungle. Since I grabbed more firmly onto the male skull, he said I would work with him. But after realizing how far gone I was, he decided against working with me at all. His excuse was that I appeared to practice “black magic.” From that point, I began wandering around Iquitos in an extremely psychotic state, escalating in intensity.
Several times I stepped in shit, and constantly had to run from stray dogs. At one point I decided to go for a dip in the river, which was also filled to the brim with waste. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up with some kind of horrible disease. I can only imagine what locals thought of me wandering aimlessly around the city, far gone enough to even swim in the polluted water. For whatever reason, I had an uncontrollable urge to move around, much to my detriment. Had I not injured myself shortly after this, god knows how long I would’ve remained there, half starved and completely out of it.
Eventually, one of the nasty stray dogs almost got to me and I ended up getting chased off a balcony. With a fractured rib cage and split open eyebrow, I took the most painful, bumpy ambulance ride to the hospital, if you could call it that. All they did was stitch my eyebrow up and said I’d need to go back to the US for surgery on my ribs. After a few days, my Mom arrived and I was put on a flight to Miami. I hardly remember this, and the worst was yet to come as I was transported to the psych ward right after having surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Now I would be in for a paliperidone shot, and two months of ensuing anhedonia and misery.
This hellish cycle had been going on for five years. After barely managing to finish my freshman year of college, I had my first psychotic break during the summer of 2014. Over the course of that year I dabbled in drugs, mainly psychedelics, but ironically what broke me was weed. Smoking high potency concentrates each day started causing major mood swings, and over the summer something just snapped. I can still remember the night it happened, smoking with my friend and then falling when I got up to use the bathroom. Everything suddenly became extremely vibrant and it felt like I was having an acid flashback. Something genetically just switched, and now I’d be on the road to many further episodes of psychosis.
After being hospitalized for psychosis twice in the summer of 2014, my parents sent me to an intensive treatment facility in Chicago. In order for me to receive any further support from them for college, I had to go through with it. What transpired were three of the most miserable months of my life. The people running the pathetic excuses for “therapeutic” groups had no business being in the field whatsoever. It became bad enough for some people that a few suicide attempts occurred during my stay. Unfortunately this would not be my last experience in a place like this, but thankfully I was able to resume college in the fall of 2015.
I can’t say what exactly drove me to continue obliterating myself with drugs, but the itch that never seemed to go away was still there when I returned to college. I studied abroad at the University of Brighton in England and as fate would have it, a few weeks after arriving, I ran into an old hippie peddling LSD, DMT, and ketamine. Of course, I had the bright idea of combining all three of them during a long weekend, resulting in immediate psychosis. After a couple days wandering around, waking people up in their dorms and being about as disruptive as possible, I was hauled off to the psych ward. As I would soon find out, the UK takes their basket cases a lot more seriously, and it wouldn’t be as simple as getting doped up for a few days and then released. I ended up being stuck in the dungeon for three months, injected with zuclopenthixol, and returned home to Florida a total zombie. You would think this would scare me away from engaging in further binges, but the first thing on my mind was where to score some acid to counteract the effects of the horrible injection I received.
Shortly after returning home, the rabbit hole of my substance use continued at a greater speed when I found out how to order stuff off the dark web. During this time, AlphaBay was the market of choice and it seemed to have everything, from heroin to DMT to steroids. Feeling like a kid in a candy store, I began ordering as many different substances as possible. Still writhing from the effects of the zuclopenthixol shot a month later, I ordered some 2CB to counteract it. This helped somewhat, although the effects from the 2CB were blunted. A couple weeks later it seemed my brain was fairly back to normal and I continued ordering anything under the sun.
I had the bright idea of trying heroin, and ordered a small bag to test the waters. I snorted it, vomited shortly thereafter and felt minimal euphoria. I repeated the process with the same result, and decided it wasn’t my cup of tea. This was a godsend, because who knows how much further things would’ve unraveled if I developed a heroin habit on top of everything else.
It was surreal to find myself sitting in a taxi, doing my best to get by on high school level Spanish, and somehow managing. I explained to the driver that I wanted to find an affordable hotel near a skatepark: una hotel economica cerca de la parque patineta por favor, I babbled. Remarkably, he understood me well enough and ended up dropping me at a place called “Hotel Villa Real,” a couple blocks away from the Estadio district, where the park was located, along with many restaurants and bars catering to tourists. Even more unbelievable to me was the fact that the hotel cost a mere twenty dollars a night, which would be impossible to find in the states.
So here I was, trying to make my way in Medellin and figuring I’d leave the US in the rearview for good. Little did I know, my addict mind would not let me off that easily and I would soon unravel in a horrifying way. Medellin is about the worst place to be for someone with a drug problem, as the readily available vices can bring the worst out extremely quickly. And this is precisely what happened.
My first evening there, I made my way to the skatepark, ready to take in all my new environment had to offer. The first person to greet me was a homeless coke addict, offering to sell me a gram. The atmosphere at the park was both exciting and anxiety inducing at the same time, because of the amount of thugs roaming around. I obliged the homeless guy’s offer, and put the white in my nose immediately.
Most people seemed genuinely curious to meet a foreigner, and I wished I was able to communicate more fluently in Spanish. I could only really manage a few words before the conversation would go stale due to my lack of proficiency. So I sat around snorting white with fellow skaters and street thugs, exchanging minimal dialogue. I was both enchanted and put off by this atmosphere.
Before long, I was buying a gram or two of coke each day from the same homeless guy who’d accosted me on the first night. This escalated into buying clonazepam and combining the two on a semi regular basis. I found that the clonazepam mellowed out the white in a phenomenal way, and the effects were much more desirable than either one on its own. Struggling to communicate in Spanish at the skatepark got old, and I opted to indulge in this combo on my own in the hotel most of the time.
The ironic thing about Medellin was that it had the ingredients to be nirvana, however there were certain cultural elements I found repugnant. For instance, if I were to venture into one of the bars playing horrifying reggaeton beats, the bartenders would often warn me that the girls were “working,” and not to be too friendly with them unless I intended to pay for it. This was a stark contrast to the hookup culture in the US, where picking up was common. In a worst case scenario, tourists were drugged with scopolamine and robbed.
I eventually got lucky with a Russian tourist, although the experience was fairly underwhelming and before long I was sitting in the hotel snorting white and popping clonazepam again. My Spanish was not particularly improving, and I began feeling bored and apathetic.
My use of cocaine began to escalate and one evening as I headed for a hike in a park, I snorted more than usual and nearly had a full blown panic attack. My increased heart rate on the hike certainly didn’t help. On the ride back I contemplated how my skatepark “friends” were really just using me for money, and started to feel resentment. That night, I confronted them about it in broken Spanish as mentioned, and in retrospect I’m lucky I wasn’t stabbed and disposed of in the trash infested river that ran through town.
Shortly after my drug habit spiraled out of control, I embarked on my escapade to Iquitos. When I returned home I was whisked off to rehab, which was a repulsive, unbearable experience.
I returned to Medellin a year later and had more or less an identical experience, with the exception of getting locked inside many weekends due to bullshit covid protocols. The city was deteriorating due to an influx of Venezuelan migrants that brought more trouble than any contributions to the economy. I was nearly robbed by them on a few different occasions, and they hassled me for money constantly. I began to get sick of this and continued drugging myself out. I decided that Medellin was getting old once again.
I downloaded a couple dating apps and started looking around. I saw a lot of bullshit about girls calling themselves “Catholic” and “Family Oriented.” I couldn’t care less about that and realized they were likely playing that card for the low value gringos who were sexless in the states and hunting for someone to marry. They would likely then get a green card and bail on them entirely.
I got a girl over to my hotel at one point and asked her if she wanted some coke. She said “coca cola?” and that was the end of that. I was frustrated with my situation, and fried myself on cocaine, shrooms and ketamine.
Shortly afterwards psychosis set in again. This time was almost worse than the last and of course I wound up in a Florida psych hospital yet another time. I got a paliperidone shot that rendered me impotent, anhedonic, and nearly retarded for months. I had slurred speech and was concerned it would be permanent. I decided it was time to work on getting out of dodge again, and managed to get a crappy security job that allowed me to save a little.
Eventually I set my sights on Oaxaca, Mexico. This destination was intriguing because of the indigenous influence, and figured maybe I would try some plant medicine. Before long I was on a flight over there and quite excited for this new venture that wasn’t simply frying myself in Medellin. I stayed in a hostel the first night, didn’t care for the vibe and took off to a budget hotel. I ran into a younger kid skateboarding and wound up smoking some strong grass. As could be imagined, I became manic again.
In this case, I wasn’t out of it to the point where reality was lost. I was in a bizarre in-between stage where I was fried enough to be repugnant to others, but not quite enough to draw extreme attention to myself. Most of the time I stayed in the hotel room smoking cigarettes and proclaiming to myself to be a “shaman” because I bought san pedro cream from a corner store. This was not psychoactive, but maybe in my half cocked state I thought it was.
This bizarre cycle went on for quite some time. Eventually I began abusing pregabalin, known as Lyrica in the states, and this escalated my fragile state of mind, but luckily not quite into full psychosis. Then I was taking videos of myself popping pregabalin and smoking cigarettes, in a pathetic manner. Eventually I left Mexico and returned to Medellin. You can probably guess how that turned out.
I’ve tried to analyze what drew me to the excessive substance abuse that plagued most of my twenties. In high school, I was sent to a “troubled teen wilderness camp” and boarding school, which was fairly traumatizing. Two guys simply showed up at six AM and said: “You’re coming with us.” I really didn’t know what to make of this and before long I was stuck in the freezing Utah mountains. This was not a place you could escape from. I lost eleven months and the best part of my high school experience because of this, and returned home quite jaded and significantly more introverted. However, once I went to college several months later, I wasn’t quite as affected by it.
College seemed to be where things took a turn for the worst. I had a failed relationship with a girl that bothered me significantly and began going over the top with MDMA and acid. For whatever reason I didn’t seem to put two and two together that the comedowns, particularly from MDMA, were a major cause of my escalating fragile mood. I also was smoking THC concentrate or flower most days, sometimes both, and this was turning into a big issue as well.
The combination of the failed relationship, increasing drug abuse and an isolated situation at school was beginning to snowball. I was beginning to slide academically as well and was quite agitated by the “liberal arts” curriculum. My attitude was really beginning to deteriorate and I was failing to see the point of school, making friends or much of anything else. At this time I also began experiencing flashbacks of the wilderness camp and it began escalating in intensity. Whatever the cause was, when I returned home I was teetering on the brink.
One evening I went to smoke weed with my friend, returned to the house, and my Dad got in my face saying: “I know you’ve been smoking dope, bud,” with extra emphasis on the “bud,” and I just lost it. I screamed at him, calling him a worthless prick or something along those lines and stormed out of the house. I then returned to my friends, smoked more weed and that’s when the psychosis started.
A few days later, I became convinced that my consciousness was connected to a supercomputer, thinking heavily about being “in the matrix,” and escalating into increasingly bizarre theories and behavior. Although there is some validity to the matrix argument, once I began walking around in circles in the living room saying: “I am computer man, zero one, zero one,” the fire department was called and I was hauled off to the psych ward.
I sometimes wonder if I would have eventually slept it off and returned to normal. But instead I was traumatized further by the psych ward experience, where a lot of the “techs” as they’re called looked like gang members. I returned home a mess once again.
Another psychotic incident happened shortly afterwards and my parents began really getting on my case after that. I was told I would need to take lithium possibly for life, and also was strong-armed into taking other medications like olanzapine, which really made me miserable. I went through a plethora of different meds and nothing quite seemed to work out right. I questioned the bipolar diagnosis. Regardless of this, I was sent off to another treatment program that lasted roughly two months. During this time, I witnessed some horrific things, such as a few attempted suicides.
One guy I knew, who we’ll call Mark, had this extreme infatuation with a girl. Some drama came up between them, and it was revealed they were having sex, which was prohibited at this place. The combination of being roasted over the coals for having sex and the falling out of the relationship thrust Mark down a dark path. Next thing I know, he overdoses on purpose in the bathtub and was found by one of the workers. They kept things on the down low for a while and said that Kevin “just needed to take a break.” But of course there was gossip and everyone was privy to what happened.
I finally got out of this place and went to study abroad in the UK. In retrospect, I was quite privileged to be able to do this but didn’t realize it at the time. I did what I knew best and immediately made friends with whoever smoked the most weed. Maybe I could’ve gotten away with this, but before long, I’d found a nightclub frequented by acidheads. Some older hippie guy dropped acid on my skin one night and then it was game over. The following day I bought ketamine, DMT, acid and some speed paste. I proceeded to binge in my dorm room for one week straight, and lost my mind entirely. I began wandering aimlessly, waking people up in the middle of the night by buzzing their door, wandering around the soccer fields while they were practicing, and just being a nuisance in general. Before long I was whisked off to the psych ward there as well.
During the time spent in the psych ward, I learned that the UK forced certain people to get antipsychotic injections. There was no choice in the matter for certain people whatsoever. One guy I knew went into the ward voluntarily because he was homeless, and doctors deemed him to be schizophrenic and he was quickly put on an injection. In this case, they figured he was a lost cause and mandated him to get the injection every month. I was so scared of this that I immediately left the UK when I was released. Forget about school, I wasn’t going to risk any bullshit like that.
Shortly after this, I began buying drugs online with increasing frequency. I bought everything from ketamine to heroin to 2CB. Nothing was off limits. The only things I didn’t try were crack and meth. Obviously this wasn’t going to end well, and I revolved in and out of the psych ward. Some of them were worse than others. There were some rare instances where I liked some of the staff members and we would shoot the shit a bit. But it was never fun to get the injections or doped up on pills.
A couple years later I wound up in jail. I was high on ketamine and got sent to the Boone county lockup, which gave me the creeps. Because I was psychotic, I was put in the mental health pod where you were only allowed out for an hour a day. The worst part of it was, some weirdo would continually come up to my cell and proclaim he was bisexual and wanted to see my prick. This was repulsive enough and obviously I became sick of dealing with it fast. I’m also pretty sure the kid next to me was dealing with an older man raping him most nights because the old man paid the guards to let him in his cell. Needless to say this was a horrible experience and caused a lot of trauma.
Eventually, after this freak continued asking to see my prick, I told one of the CO’s I would kill myself. This resulted in me getting transferred to solitary confinement with nothing but a cheap blanket. There was no bed in this room whatsoever. I was stuck in there for three days before talking to a doctor and then transferred to the general population pod. In this pod were several rotten thugs that went on and on about gang bullshit. Eventually I became sick of this and asked to be transferred. Once again, I was confined to a cell for twenty three hours a day. After forty days I got out, and was transferred to a psych hospital, where I spent two months.
I have now been more or less sober for the past several months. To be honest, a lot of days it doesn’t feel worth it. There’s no high to look forward to or an intriguing altered state. However, it had to be done because withdrawals and comedowns were becoming unbearable. I might feel high for one hour only to be miserable for days or weeks afterwards. So I knew it had to stop, the last substances I cut out being marijuana and nicotine.
Who knows why my life has followed this trajectory. It feels good to share the trauma from all this crap to alleviate the mental burden. If this is intriguing to people to understand the mind of a substance abuser and sometimes psychotic person, I will continue to share it.
