Morninggloryseed
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2000
- Messages
- 13,773
Behaviors That Brought Him To Iboga --Opiates, Amphetamine, Others - Experienced
This is part one of a story leading up to our subject's decision to purchase iboga for flooding and breaking open the head. Our subject has never glorified chemical dependency and some of the details here have never been shared with anyone. This story is not an attempt to scare others concerning their relationship with psychoactive chemicals. Indeed our subject has the strong conviction that people must be free to follow their own path, to discover for themselves if they are master of their domain.
Starring the Drugs In Part One:
Cannabis mostly daily from age 17-present but with some breaks lasting months and even a year once.
Opiates on a regular basis since age 14, on a daily basis since age 26. Currently clean but suffers from Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms.
Prescription Amphetamine (from a doctor) on a mostly daily regimen since age 17.
Featuring special appearances from:
Cocaine and Heroin, and the speed analogue 2-FMA.
Finally, are the benzodiazepines (as prescribed by the doctor) and a one liner from another speed analogue 4-FA.
And now, our feature article:
Note: This is written about an old hand bluelighter that is still prevalent in this forum, but we can't tell you who he is.
The story involves a guy who has been into plant teachers and entheogens since age 15, starting with pot and then morning glory seeds. He was a young hippy in the 90s, and walked the walk. But he also had a night life, and has been an opiate user since even before he grew his hair long and tripped on LSD to the songs of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. See before the awakening brought on by pot and psychedelics, he drank a half bottle of Phenergan/codeine when he was 14. Within a few minutes he felt a feeling of warmth, comfort, contentment, and peace that he never knew was possible.
That half-bottle got him higher on opiates than for all time ever after, and it clearly left a long lasting impression. He continued to use pills or syrup when he found them in his parent’s medicine cabinet from age 14, probably getting enough to take opiates a couple times a month. When he was 17 and started dating, he would be offered Percocet from other parents' medicine cabinets, and so had even more opiates at his disposal. In summary, this period is characterized by a young opiate chipper who also loved to smoke pot in the entheogenic tradition, and along the way had some growing and glowing experiences with morning glory seeds, mushrooms, and LSD. These trips were monumental events in his mid to late teens and they showed him information about his life and his place in the universe.
It bears mentioning that he was also was prescribed amphetamine since age 16 or so for “ADD”, and has had a script for it ever since to this day. He has mostly used his speed as directed, and does seem to function better with it. To be sure, he has gone periods without the speed (months at a time here and there, and a solid year after college graduation) but came back to it as he found he was more focused. He has only used black market meth a couple of times, when gifted with a sample from fellow drug nerds, so never got into methamphetamine as a hobby.
In addition to the sweet medicine cabinet nights which filled his desires for opiates, he would order pills off the web and then started to chip at least every other weekend pretty much steady from the time he was 18. He went to college to get his BA and graduated, kept the same girlfriend from age 17 (they lived together most of the time after he was 19), and so he reasoned his weekend flings with all things warm and fuzzy was not such a big deal. During and after college, he always had a job, the apartment he shared and seemed to be on a good road. His girlfriend was a fellow head who smoked pot with him and tripped and explored the inner universe, in fact they were both crazy psychonauts. The thing is, his girlfriend never used opiates, nor did she approve of his extracurricular opiate use. Maybe because he wasn’t an addict yet, wasn’t banging heroin at that time, and wasn’t involved with crime, she felt the opiates were annoying to her at best, as opposed to being a deal breaker. And this guy liked that that she did not use opiates and didn’t approve and he reasoned that may have kept him under control.
Of course, he eventually got in too deep with opiates when he was 26 and discovered poppy tea. Around this time he and the longtime girlfriend split. This breakup, and other life events, made him think he wanted to die; so he ‘choose’ to embrace the warmth opiates offered in the absence of love. In essence, our guy decided to live as an opiate addict as an alternative to suicide. He crossed the line from chipping without any physical addiction to daily use with withdrawals literally overnight. He reasoned it was better to be a junkie than a suicide statistic. That decision took him on a 10 year long, enslaving journey of “living for the warmth.”
He started with thrice daily pod tea (I estimate about 500mg morphine a day) for 3 years or so, then when that got too expensive and unreliable, he endured withdrawals from the opium that lasted far longer than he could stand and were more intense than any amount of knowledge could prepare him for, so when it got to be too much he took on 4 or 5 years of a doctor prescribed suboxone regimen. Moving from pods to suboxone caused him trouble sleeping, so naturally he was also put on prescription benzodiazepines. He has never abused his benzodiazepines, does not get any euphoric effect from them, but they do take the edge off the day. This guy does not like alcohol and has never been a drinker.
Anyway, after becoming a true opiate addict addicted to opium poppy tea at age 26 or so, he met a new girlfriend and she eventually moved in. He seemed to have a thing for girls who smoked pot with him and explored the psychedelics, but was not an opiate user. I guess our guy only likes opiophobic girls. His new love interest was very young and he was very naive. He told her that he would eventually quit and he probably even believed that himself. She stayed around for 7 years or so. This went a long way to making him reason that he was “ok” as an addict, and accepted this addiction as a condition of life.
He viewed his dependency on opiates as akin to taking an antidepressant, even reasoned it was his ‘life elixir.’ His steady career, social life, trips and vacations, love of recording music, and new girlfriend gave him much reason to think he could live that way forever. So we have established this guy has basically lived on a diet of amphetamine and pain killers (and later the benzos at night) for most of his adult life, his friends and family enabled him by accepting and tolerating his condition, and our guy really had no negative experiences to draw upon and convince him he should live a different way.
Our guy had a matter-of-fact view towards his poly drug addiction, saying “That’s the way God made me.” From the outside perspective, he was a pretty successful guy. He never was involved in crime to support his poly drug addiction, and rarely even used the black market, since he grew his own pot, bought his psychedelics online, or was gifted them from chemists and drug nerds, and had a doctor to take care of the rest of the drugs he needed.
Perhaps now is the time to mention that the guy also started uses needles (innocently enough) to take intramuscular injections his ketamine, DMT, DPT, etc when playing shaman. The needle use was a rare thing, and he wasn’t working with syringes to be ‘more of a druggie’…rather he truly found that certain tryptamines and ketamine worked best when taken this way for him. He always used clean needles and micro-pore filters for sterility, and never even dreamed of moving from muscle shots to something else. He was not your typical needle user I guess. Perhaps now it is also worth mentioning that he has tried cocaine hcl up the nose a couple times, muscle injection of cocaine a couple more times, and crack a time or two; but he never was a big cocaine fan until a 3 month fling with it, but more on that soon.
About two years ago, the guy found himself single again and unhappy about it. Soon after the second breakup, he was laid off from his job. He lost his insurance to pay for the suboxone, but qualified for unemployment and decided no big deal; he just had to move from suboxone to Kratom. Now that he was single, he actually had more money to spend on drugs, and being unemployed he had more time, and was free to sit around in his house all day and wallow in how shitty he believed life to be. Since he was getting enough cash from unemployment to still buy all the drugs he needed and more, he decided to have a special occasion and buy some cocaine.
Coke was nice for socializing or intimacy, but our guy was now alone, so he got the bright idea to IV the cocaine for a different experience and to make something new happen. Our guy clearly did not realize that he crossed a huge line in behavior that affected his relationship with psychoactives in a profound way. But our guy wasn't worried about that because he proceeded to have the most powerful rush from IV cocaine he ever had. It felt like an orgasm multiplied by an order of magnitude, it was almost too much to experience. He has no idea what he did would be so profound and powerful, it came as a total shock to our guy as he collapsed on his chair unable to contain his moans of hedonistic pleasure. He later said that smoking crack had nothing on IV coke, not even close. And snorting cocaine, that might as well be a different drug since it did nothing like what he felt. His apathy, work-free/guilt free income to pay for his drugs, and newfound willingness to IV his drugs, became what some call the “Perfect Storm.”
The gentleman our guy got cocaine from (and whom he had known a while) said there was an empty bedroom in his place and he needed a roommate, adding the rent would be cheaper for him. So our guy moved from his condo, into the house with his friend. But the new roommate neglected to mention that he had been using a lot of cocaine as of late, our guy never realized this important detail. The new roommate also neglected to mention that his cocaine supplier was taking the empty bedroom upstairs. With less rent to pay, sharing a home with a friend courting his girl 'crack', plus a new roommate who sold cocaine as a primary means of income, our guy knew his new living arrangement was going to be interesting. Both of his new roommates would share their cocaine in exchange for company. And when the free cocaine needed to be supplemented, the problem was solved by going back upstairs to buy a gram at an inhouse discount. The perfect storm moved over a war zone with a restive civilian population.
This guy spent the next three months going through about three kilos of Kratom, and spending time upstairs every day ‘hanging out’ with the dealer to get the free crack. Of course smoking crack was waste of his good time and since he was no sucker, so he would always excuse himself to convert the gifted rocks of crack into cocaine acetate suitable for IV injection. This worked out to about a shot or two or three a day (free of charge), and a gram a week extra to supplement what was free.
At first he could make the gram last a full week, but in no short time his arms were bruised and he eventually graduated to the ‘gram in a night’ status. He started using his prescription speed in a manor not approved by the doctor to fill in the times between the unspeakably intense IV cocaine injections he grew to worship. To him, IV cocaine was as intense a rush as DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, but hedonistically good instead of spiritually good. Like MDMA and DMT and 5-MeO-DMT rolled up into one, and then taken over by hedonism instead of shamanism. This guy became obsessed with what is called the “Bell Ringer” and reaching it was so deep and reinforcing. It did not matter that cocaine wasn’t psychedelic, it still was a powerful means of altering his world view and it felt like God giving him an orgasm. So to summarize this chapter, our guy was at near daily or daily IV cocaine, obscene dosages of Kratom (as needed), with prescription speed and the speed analogue 4-FA to cover the rest. And of course, pot and the benzo to sleep.
At the end of the three months and the new daily drug regimen, the gods of destruction exploded an atom bomb in the warzone when suddenly without warning, some heroin literally walked into his private drug den in the crack house. See, in all the years this guy was an avid opiate chipper, then opiate addict, he never knew anyone who did heroin. He never asked anyone about heroin because he enjoyed his poppy tea, or suboxone, and did not need to use heroin. But when the guy’s cocaine using roommate upstairs invited one of his old friends over that he had not seen in a while, the heroin came looking for him.
"Come and get your fix on at our crack house!" the cocaine-using roommate must have said to the heroin friend. So the heroin friend comes to hang out at the crack house.
Our guy was oblivious to all of this, and innocently on his bed watching Star Trek again (he loves that Captain Picard). Suddenly this dude stands there saying….
“Hey, I was told you might have an extra rig, I need to fix?” said the heroin user.
“Oh?” he said. “What are you looking to inject if I may ask?” said the subject of this story.
“Heroin.” said the heroin user with a look on his face that said “Duh!”
“I got a box of 100, so I’ll give you a whole bunch if you share a dose with me.”
“OK”
The heroin friend had some tar, and gave what seemed like a lot, more than our guy needed for what he was willing to start with. Grateful, he offered to share some pot with the heroin user to cover the rest of cost. After the heroin guy fixed and smoked some pot, he had places to go so they said their farewells. Now it was just a matter of preparing for his initiation into IV heroin.
"So this was how it would come to be?" he said to himself. Grabbed his trusty milligram scale and was very pleased when he saw around 100mg. Generous heroin guy!
He knew 3mg heroin = 10mg morphine and figuring tar was probably 20% to 50% pure, maybe more, but not likely….he weighed out 50mg feeling quite safe with that, and prepared a syringe for IV injection. He also decided to add 75mg cocaine hcl to the mixture because if you are going to IV heroin it’s silly to not just go ahead and not add the cocaine (this guy wasn’t stupid.) He prepared the drug that killed John Belushi, selected a good and bruised site, took the shot and proceeded to nod deeply. When he came out of the nod, he was impressed with the feeling; the cleanest opium-like high he ever felt. Heroin was ‘more to the point’ than poppy tea, morphine pills, or oxycodone, or anything else he had tried. It reminded him of his very first opiate high when he was 14 with the syrup, the one that he was trying to chasing ever since.
Regarding the nod itself, he really didn’t remember much and really didn’t think the rush was anything as good as the cocaine rush he loved. In fsct, he thought that nodding out seemed to deprive him of his IV cocaine orgasm. Other than that, heroin was a lovely opiate. So that night, the intensely opiated heroin initiate, so warm and fuzzy he was, relaxed and had a snack and a shower and then finished the other half of the heroin (this time without wasting cocaine) and passed out. He doubts anything was remembered of the second shot, he just passed out and drifted off into sleep. The next day, he really wasn’t sure about what he thought to his reaction to IV heroin. He always figured IV heroin had to be the best thing he would ever do, logical given his love of opium, but he wasn't that impressed. The poppies he would make tea out of made him awake, free to bask in the warm and fuzziness of it all. On opium, he could work, cavort with friends, make music, etc. This heroin was not a functional opiate at all, at least until the nod wore off, and it did not hold the same appeal to him as long lasting oral opiates. But it was definitely better than the Kratom so he wanted to get more.
The next day the heroin user was back at the crack house and this time he brought his girlfriend; they wanted to know if the new heroin initiate was doing anything. The new heroin initiate wanted to use more heroin so the three of them drove into the mountains. The nice heroin user and his girl shared some heroin and cocaine with him, and the three got to talking. The heroin user was homeless and to make money they both were ‘escorts.’ What’s more, they really needed someone to drive them around so they could make their ‘jobs’ in a timely fashion and told him they would pay in gas and smack if he agreed. Sure! Our guy also noted to himself that he would get a free education on the heroin scene and living on the streets of Denver. As the evening came, the three made their way back to the crack house and enjoyed the rest of the evening with heroin and cocaine and plans for the next day.
Early the next day, the three piled in the car and headed to Denver. The heroin user scored the Day’s worth of heroin and cocaine and he gifted our guy with 333mg very good coke, 200mg heroin, and 3 gallons of fuel for driving them around where they needed. They drove to King Sooper to get some food and syringes, and they asked our guy if they could go to the park to shoot up. Since our guy was not shooting and driving, and wasn’t wanting them to do it in the car, they dove to the park so the two got fixed. Our guy just at some kratom to keep withdrawal from showing, and the three walked around downtown looking at the bums and the Capital, and eventually they drove back to the crack house. The girl spent hours fixing herself up for an ‘service call.' Our guy told them to let him know if they needed another ride later, then excused himself to his bedroom, did a little heroin and went to sleep.
Surprise the next day when his cocaine using roommate woke him up to inform our guy that there was an eviction notice on the door. See, our guy's roommate had actually spent the rent money on cocaine, and had been given 30 days notice to vacate. In addition, the roommate said he had forgotten about the fact that nobody who lived there was on the lease, none of them were legal residents. Reality hit our guy as he realized he was living illegally in a property that was being used as a crack house. There were only 2 days left for him to get out.
Our guy tried to look for a new place with a 4th roommates not mentioned until now (the one sober man in the crack house, every crack house has one along with cable TV) and made plans to see some new apartments with Sober. However, that night heroin user and our guy stayed up too late on cocaine and heroin, and our guy did not make the appointments he had with Sober. Not having enough money to get a place on his own, and realizing the gravity of losing his shelter in his beloved Boulder Colorado area, our guy decided instead to buy 4 grams of heroin and kill himself. He had idealizing suicide for some time, and now it became clear how it could all happen.
"So this was how it would come to be?" he said to himself a second time in less than a week.
He arranged to meet his escort friends in the city and got the heroin, telling the escorts he would be leaving to be with his parents and he would miss them. They exchanged numbers and emails as if our guy actually planned on seeing them again, and he went on his way to prepare to die. He was going to process the shot using a huge 5ml syringe and drive into the mountains to take it all. He called his dad to say goodbye, that he was going on a trip. He called a childhood friend to say how grateful having him as a friend made him feel. That childhood friend took a similar call earlier in the year from someone who killed herself right after, and childhood friend knew what the fuck was up...and called out guys' father to warn him. Our guy's father called and begged him to come home and get clean. Our guy reluctantly agreed. So he packed his things, gassed up, went to King Sooper to buy some syringes, fixed in the car with some heroin and fell asleep for a few hours.
It was a 12 hr drive From Boulder Colorado to where our guy was going, and once he awoke from nodding out in the parking lot, he took some prescription amphetamine and drove a couple hours. When our guy stopped off for gas at a truck stop, he would pull to the rest area for another shot of heroin and then would asleep for a few hours. Once sober, he took some more prescription amphetamine and drove for a few more hours, and he rinse and repeated the whole way. All in all the 12hr drive took almost two days, and now here he was. He lost his home in Colorado and was an unemployed opiate addict back with his parents so he could ‘clean up.’
He had no idea how he would do this, or if he even wanted to. He just knew he didn't want to sleep in his car. Now he had tried to stop opiates with all seriousness 3 or 4 times before…once as long as 5 months in 2004, but the Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms were no joke and he could never sleep or relax, and always felt like he was old and dying, no strength the entire time. He always came back to opiates. Realizing that losing his home and having to return defeated to his parents was a heavy blow to absorb, he figured he would finish off the 4 grams of heroin in small daily dosages to keep withdrawals at bay, then switch back to Kratom and wean off. He went through all the heroin in less than a month, and after some discomfort became reestablished on kratom. Then, he weaned down from about a kilo a month to 4-5 grams (3 times a day) and stayed at that level for about 5 months.
During much of this supposed recover time, he was going crazy with boredom and adjustment. So to compensate, our guy started eating reckless amounts of the amphetamine analogue 2-FMA. Our guy found this speed was not 'clean and work' speed. It did not drive him to get out of bed. This speed was just a euphoric puddle, almost as reinforcing as cocaine. His dosages started with 50-60mg a couple times a day but in no time became 100-250mg every few hours until using a scale become a waste of time, so he would just spoon it out. A typical evening began by eating enough kratom as needed, then adding 1/4g to 1/3g of 2-FMA until it would burst capillaries in his eyes and make him think he was going to die. Our guy would pray at least once a night to God to let him live, and when his mind settled, he would always eat more kratom and 2-FMA and the process would repeat itself. 2-FMA was intensely euphoric and reinforcing for our guy, and life centered around this ritual every night. This insanity went on for months and our guys friends thought he was finally going to lose his mind or do himself in. Our guy also started to be aware of cognitive deficits, finishing sentences became hard, his speech was becoming slurred. He wasn't sure if it was from all this speed, or the sleep deprivation, and he really didn't seem to care. The way to adjust was to avoid the company of others so he would not have to talk. Out of sight out of mind, but everyone who still cared was thinking this stupid speed research chemical would be the end of him.
However as it goes, things have a way of working themselves out. Eventually unemployment benefits ended, so no more 2-FMA. Our guy knew it was time to deal with getting off the Kratom. He weaned down as much as he could and then stopped. The withdrawals were horrible to say the least, and lasted a couple of months leaving him in a broken state physically and emotionally. He stopped taking prescription speed during the acute phase of the withdrawal because he was stimulated enough.
He now is past the sickness, bus sleeps very little, sometimes is up for days. He does not mentally crave opiates, but his cells still scream for them like a person downing needs that oxygen. He realized one difference, he is now horrified at how he has lived the past 10 years, and ashamed for all the people he hurt and disappointed. As more time goes by, he sees the benefits of being sober but still has the demon in him. He did start back up on his amphetamine prescription because it gave him the energy he needed to shower, feed his pets, and maintain social demands, related to friends and his recording hobby. But he also realized that the speed and opiates kind of all fit together in his type of poly drug addiction. He maybe even thinks the pot does too, but had never considered speed or pot 'addictive.' Maybe they aren't (he says) but they all do fit into a set of behaviors that led him to daily opiate use, needle use, and finally giving up and wanting to die.
After years of thinking about it and months now of researching it intently, he has decided to flood his brain with iboga because nothing else has worked, and he is finally ready to quit. He is confident that because he endured the acute withdrawal from opiates (heroin to kratom to nothing) on his own, and is now in that post acute withdrawal phase, the root will work much better for him and he can focus on the big picture instead of just opiate withdrawal. He knows iboga will never 'cure him' of being a poly drug abuser but he is hoping for a 'level playing field' again, where his brain will be repaired from opiate receptor flooding and the PAWS which prevent him from sleeping, relaxing, much less taking a job, will go away. Then he believes will finally be on the right road, and will have a true chance to make the decisions in life that will lead him to elusive self contained happiness.
To be continued.
This is part one of a story leading up to our subject's decision to purchase iboga for flooding and breaking open the head. Our subject has never glorified chemical dependency and some of the details here have never been shared with anyone. This story is not an attempt to scare others concerning their relationship with psychoactive chemicals. Indeed our subject has the strong conviction that people must be free to follow their own path, to discover for themselves if they are master of their domain.
Starring the Drugs In Part One:
Cannabis mostly daily from age 17-present but with some breaks lasting months and even a year once.
Opiates on a regular basis since age 14, on a daily basis since age 26. Currently clean but suffers from Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms.
Prescription Amphetamine (from a doctor) on a mostly daily regimen since age 17.
Featuring special appearances from:
Cocaine and Heroin, and the speed analogue 2-FMA.
Finally, are the benzodiazepines (as prescribed by the doctor) and a one liner from another speed analogue 4-FA.
And now, our feature article:
Note: This is written about an old hand bluelighter that is still prevalent in this forum, but we can't tell you who he is.
The story involves a guy who has been into plant teachers and entheogens since age 15, starting with pot and then morning glory seeds. He was a young hippy in the 90s, and walked the walk. But he also had a night life, and has been an opiate user since even before he grew his hair long and tripped on LSD to the songs of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. See before the awakening brought on by pot and psychedelics, he drank a half bottle of Phenergan/codeine when he was 14. Within a few minutes he felt a feeling of warmth, comfort, contentment, and peace that he never knew was possible.
That half-bottle got him higher on opiates than for all time ever after, and it clearly left a long lasting impression. He continued to use pills or syrup when he found them in his parent’s medicine cabinet from age 14, probably getting enough to take opiates a couple times a month. When he was 17 and started dating, he would be offered Percocet from other parents' medicine cabinets, and so had even more opiates at his disposal. In summary, this period is characterized by a young opiate chipper who also loved to smoke pot in the entheogenic tradition, and along the way had some growing and glowing experiences with morning glory seeds, mushrooms, and LSD. These trips were monumental events in his mid to late teens and they showed him information about his life and his place in the universe.
It bears mentioning that he was also was prescribed amphetamine since age 16 or so for “ADD”, and has had a script for it ever since to this day. He has mostly used his speed as directed, and does seem to function better with it. To be sure, he has gone periods without the speed (months at a time here and there, and a solid year after college graduation) but came back to it as he found he was more focused. He has only used black market meth a couple of times, when gifted with a sample from fellow drug nerds, so never got into methamphetamine as a hobby.
In addition to the sweet medicine cabinet nights which filled his desires for opiates, he would order pills off the web and then started to chip at least every other weekend pretty much steady from the time he was 18. He went to college to get his BA and graduated, kept the same girlfriend from age 17 (they lived together most of the time after he was 19), and so he reasoned his weekend flings with all things warm and fuzzy was not such a big deal. During and after college, he always had a job, the apartment he shared and seemed to be on a good road. His girlfriend was a fellow head who smoked pot with him and tripped and explored the inner universe, in fact they were both crazy psychonauts. The thing is, his girlfriend never used opiates, nor did she approve of his extracurricular opiate use. Maybe because he wasn’t an addict yet, wasn’t banging heroin at that time, and wasn’t involved with crime, she felt the opiates were annoying to her at best, as opposed to being a deal breaker. And this guy liked that that she did not use opiates and didn’t approve and he reasoned that may have kept him under control.
Of course, he eventually got in too deep with opiates when he was 26 and discovered poppy tea. Around this time he and the longtime girlfriend split. This breakup, and other life events, made him think he wanted to die; so he ‘choose’ to embrace the warmth opiates offered in the absence of love. In essence, our guy decided to live as an opiate addict as an alternative to suicide. He crossed the line from chipping without any physical addiction to daily use with withdrawals literally overnight. He reasoned it was better to be a junkie than a suicide statistic. That decision took him on a 10 year long, enslaving journey of “living for the warmth.”
He started with thrice daily pod tea (I estimate about 500mg morphine a day) for 3 years or so, then when that got too expensive and unreliable, he endured withdrawals from the opium that lasted far longer than he could stand and were more intense than any amount of knowledge could prepare him for, so when it got to be too much he took on 4 or 5 years of a doctor prescribed suboxone regimen. Moving from pods to suboxone caused him trouble sleeping, so naturally he was also put on prescription benzodiazepines. He has never abused his benzodiazepines, does not get any euphoric effect from them, but they do take the edge off the day. This guy does not like alcohol and has never been a drinker.
Anyway, after becoming a true opiate addict addicted to opium poppy tea at age 26 or so, he met a new girlfriend and she eventually moved in. He seemed to have a thing for girls who smoked pot with him and explored the psychedelics, but was not an opiate user. I guess our guy only likes opiophobic girls. His new love interest was very young and he was very naive. He told her that he would eventually quit and he probably even believed that himself. She stayed around for 7 years or so. This went a long way to making him reason that he was “ok” as an addict, and accepted this addiction as a condition of life.
He viewed his dependency on opiates as akin to taking an antidepressant, even reasoned it was his ‘life elixir.’ His steady career, social life, trips and vacations, love of recording music, and new girlfriend gave him much reason to think he could live that way forever. So we have established this guy has basically lived on a diet of amphetamine and pain killers (and later the benzos at night) for most of his adult life, his friends and family enabled him by accepting and tolerating his condition, and our guy really had no negative experiences to draw upon and convince him he should live a different way.
Our guy had a matter-of-fact view towards his poly drug addiction, saying “That’s the way God made me.” From the outside perspective, he was a pretty successful guy. He never was involved in crime to support his poly drug addiction, and rarely even used the black market, since he grew his own pot, bought his psychedelics online, or was gifted them from chemists and drug nerds, and had a doctor to take care of the rest of the drugs he needed.
Perhaps now is the time to mention that the guy also started uses needles (innocently enough) to take intramuscular injections his ketamine, DMT, DPT, etc when playing shaman. The needle use was a rare thing, and he wasn’t working with syringes to be ‘more of a druggie’…rather he truly found that certain tryptamines and ketamine worked best when taken this way for him. He always used clean needles and micro-pore filters for sterility, and never even dreamed of moving from muscle shots to something else. He was not your typical needle user I guess. Perhaps now it is also worth mentioning that he has tried cocaine hcl up the nose a couple times, muscle injection of cocaine a couple more times, and crack a time or two; but he never was a big cocaine fan until a 3 month fling with it, but more on that soon.
About two years ago, the guy found himself single again and unhappy about it. Soon after the second breakup, he was laid off from his job. He lost his insurance to pay for the suboxone, but qualified for unemployment and decided no big deal; he just had to move from suboxone to Kratom. Now that he was single, he actually had more money to spend on drugs, and being unemployed he had more time, and was free to sit around in his house all day and wallow in how shitty he believed life to be. Since he was getting enough cash from unemployment to still buy all the drugs he needed and more, he decided to have a special occasion and buy some cocaine.
Coke was nice for socializing or intimacy, but our guy was now alone, so he got the bright idea to IV the cocaine for a different experience and to make something new happen. Our guy clearly did not realize that he crossed a huge line in behavior that affected his relationship with psychoactives in a profound way. But our guy wasn't worried about that because he proceeded to have the most powerful rush from IV cocaine he ever had. It felt like an orgasm multiplied by an order of magnitude, it was almost too much to experience. He has no idea what he did would be so profound and powerful, it came as a total shock to our guy as he collapsed on his chair unable to contain his moans of hedonistic pleasure. He later said that smoking crack had nothing on IV coke, not even close. And snorting cocaine, that might as well be a different drug since it did nothing like what he felt. His apathy, work-free/guilt free income to pay for his drugs, and newfound willingness to IV his drugs, became what some call the “Perfect Storm.”
The gentleman our guy got cocaine from (and whom he had known a while) said there was an empty bedroom in his place and he needed a roommate, adding the rent would be cheaper for him. So our guy moved from his condo, into the house with his friend. But the new roommate neglected to mention that he had been using a lot of cocaine as of late, our guy never realized this important detail. The new roommate also neglected to mention that his cocaine supplier was taking the empty bedroom upstairs. With less rent to pay, sharing a home with a friend courting his girl 'crack', plus a new roommate who sold cocaine as a primary means of income, our guy knew his new living arrangement was going to be interesting. Both of his new roommates would share their cocaine in exchange for company. And when the free cocaine needed to be supplemented, the problem was solved by going back upstairs to buy a gram at an inhouse discount. The perfect storm moved over a war zone with a restive civilian population.
This guy spent the next three months going through about three kilos of Kratom, and spending time upstairs every day ‘hanging out’ with the dealer to get the free crack. Of course smoking crack was waste of his good time and since he was no sucker, so he would always excuse himself to convert the gifted rocks of crack into cocaine acetate suitable for IV injection. This worked out to about a shot or two or three a day (free of charge), and a gram a week extra to supplement what was free.
At first he could make the gram last a full week, but in no short time his arms were bruised and he eventually graduated to the ‘gram in a night’ status. He started using his prescription speed in a manor not approved by the doctor to fill in the times between the unspeakably intense IV cocaine injections he grew to worship. To him, IV cocaine was as intense a rush as DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, but hedonistically good instead of spiritually good. Like MDMA and DMT and 5-MeO-DMT rolled up into one, and then taken over by hedonism instead of shamanism. This guy became obsessed with what is called the “Bell Ringer” and reaching it was so deep and reinforcing. It did not matter that cocaine wasn’t psychedelic, it still was a powerful means of altering his world view and it felt like God giving him an orgasm. So to summarize this chapter, our guy was at near daily or daily IV cocaine, obscene dosages of Kratom (as needed), with prescription speed and the speed analogue 4-FA to cover the rest. And of course, pot and the benzo to sleep.
At the end of the three months and the new daily drug regimen, the gods of destruction exploded an atom bomb in the warzone when suddenly without warning, some heroin literally walked into his private drug den in the crack house. See, in all the years this guy was an avid opiate chipper, then opiate addict, he never knew anyone who did heroin. He never asked anyone about heroin because he enjoyed his poppy tea, or suboxone, and did not need to use heroin. But when the guy’s cocaine using roommate upstairs invited one of his old friends over that he had not seen in a while, the heroin came looking for him.
"Come and get your fix on at our crack house!" the cocaine-using roommate must have said to the heroin friend. So the heroin friend comes to hang out at the crack house.
Our guy was oblivious to all of this, and innocently on his bed watching Star Trek again (he loves that Captain Picard). Suddenly this dude stands there saying….
“Hey, I was told you might have an extra rig, I need to fix?” said the heroin user.
“Oh?” he said. “What are you looking to inject if I may ask?” said the subject of this story.
“Heroin.” said the heroin user with a look on his face that said “Duh!”
“I got a box of 100, so I’ll give you a whole bunch if you share a dose with me.”
“OK”
The heroin friend had some tar, and gave what seemed like a lot, more than our guy needed for what he was willing to start with. Grateful, he offered to share some pot with the heroin user to cover the rest of cost. After the heroin guy fixed and smoked some pot, he had places to go so they said their farewells. Now it was just a matter of preparing for his initiation into IV heroin.
"So this was how it would come to be?" he said to himself. Grabbed his trusty milligram scale and was very pleased when he saw around 100mg. Generous heroin guy!
He knew 3mg heroin = 10mg morphine and figuring tar was probably 20% to 50% pure, maybe more, but not likely….he weighed out 50mg feeling quite safe with that, and prepared a syringe for IV injection. He also decided to add 75mg cocaine hcl to the mixture because if you are going to IV heroin it’s silly to not just go ahead and not add the cocaine (this guy wasn’t stupid.) He prepared the drug that killed John Belushi, selected a good and bruised site, took the shot and proceeded to nod deeply. When he came out of the nod, he was impressed with the feeling; the cleanest opium-like high he ever felt. Heroin was ‘more to the point’ than poppy tea, morphine pills, or oxycodone, or anything else he had tried. It reminded him of his very first opiate high when he was 14 with the syrup, the one that he was trying to chasing ever since.
Regarding the nod itself, he really didn’t remember much and really didn’t think the rush was anything as good as the cocaine rush he loved. In fsct, he thought that nodding out seemed to deprive him of his IV cocaine orgasm. Other than that, heroin was a lovely opiate. So that night, the intensely opiated heroin initiate, so warm and fuzzy he was, relaxed and had a snack and a shower and then finished the other half of the heroin (this time without wasting cocaine) and passed out. He doubts anything was remembered of the second shot, he just passed out and drifted off into sleep. The next day, he really wasn’t sure about what he thought to his reaction to IV heroin. He always figured IV heroin had to be the best thing he would ever do, logical given his love of opium, but he wasn't that impressed. The poppies he would make tea out of made him awake, free to bask in the warm and fuzziness of it all. On opium, he could work, cavort with friends, make music, etc. This heroin was not a functional opiate at all, at least until the nod wore off, and it did not hold the same appeal to him as long lasting oral opiates. But it was definitely better than the Kratom so he wanted to get more.
The next day the heroin user was back at the crack house and this time he brought his girlfriend; they wanted to know if the new heroin initiate was doing anything. The new heroin initiate wanted to use more heroin so the three of them drove into the mountains. The nice heroin user and his girl shared some heroin and cocaine with him, and the three got to talking. The heroin user was homeless and to make money they both were ‘escorts.’ What’s more, they really needed someone to drive them around so they could make their ‘jobs’ in a timely fashion and told him they would pay in gas and smack if he agreed. Sure! Our guy also noted to himself that he would get a free education on the heroin scene and living on the streets of Denver. As the evening came, the three made their way back to the crack house and enjoyed the rest of the evening with heroin and cocaine and plans for the next day.
Early the next day, the three piled in the car and headed to Denver. The heroin user scored the Day’s worth of heroin and cocaine and he gifted our guy with 333mg very good coke, 200mg heroin, and 3 gallons of fuel for driving them around where they needed. They drove to King Sooper to get some food and syringes, and they asked our guy if they could go to the park to shoot up. Since our guy was not shooting and driving, and wasn’t wanting them to do it in the car, they dove to the park so the two got fixed. Our guy just at some kratom to keep withdrawal from showing, and the three walked around downtown looking at the bums and the Capital, and eventually they drove back to the crack house. The girl spent hours fixing herself up for an ‘service call.' Our guy told them to let him know if they needed another ride later, then excused himself to his bedroom, did a little heroin and went to sleep.
Surprise the next day when his cocaine using roommate woke him up to inform our guy that there was an eviction notice on the door. See, our guy's roommate had actually spent the rent money on cocaine, and had been given 30 days notice to vacate. In addition, the roommate said he had forgotten about the fact that nobody who lived there was on the lease, none of them were legal residents. Reality hit our guy as he realized he was living illegally in a property that was being used as a crack house. There were only 2 days left for him to get out.
Our guy tried to look for a new place with a 4th roommates not mentioned until now (the one sober man in the crack house, every crack house has one along with cable TV) and made plans to see some new apartments with Sober. However, that night heroin user and our guy stayed up too late on cocaine and heroin, and our guy did not make the appointments he had with Sober. Not having enough money to get a place on his own, and realizing the gravity of losing his shelter in his beloved Boulder Colorado area, our guy decided instead to buy 4 grams of heroin and kill himself. He had idealizing suicide for some time, and now it became clear how it could all happen.
"So this was how it would come to be?" he said to himself a second time in less than a week.
He arranged to meet his escort friends in the city and got the heroin, telling the escorts he would be leaving to be with his parents and he would miss them. They exchanged numbers and emails as if our guy actually planned on seeing them again, and he went on his way to prepare to die. He was going to process the shot using a huge 5ml syringe and drive into the mountains to take it all. He called his dad to say goodbye, that he was going on a trip. He called a childhood friend to say how grateful having him as a friend made him feel. That childhood friend took a similar call earlier in the year from someone who killed herself right after, and childhood friend knew what the fuck was up...and called out guys' father to warn him. Our guy's father called and begged him to come home and get clean. Our guy reluctantly agreed. So he packed his things, gassed up, went to King Sooper to buy some syringes, fixed in the car with some heroin and fell asleep for a few hours.
It was a 12 hr drive From Boulder Colorado to where our guy was going, and once he awoke from nodding out in the parking lot, he took some prescription amphetamine and drove a couple hours. When our guy stopped off for gas at a truck stop, he would pull to the rest area for another shot of heroin and then would asleep for a few hours. Once sober, he took some more prescription amphetamine and drove for a few more hours, and he rinse and repeated the whole way. All in all the 12hr drive took almost two days, and now here he was. He lost his home in Colorado and was an unemployed opiate addict back with his parents so he could ‘clean up.’
He had no idea how he would do this, or if he even wanted to. He just knew he didn't want to sleep in his car. Now he had tried to stop opiates with all seriousness 3 or 4 times before…once as long as 5 months in 2004, but the Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms were no joke and he could never sleep or relax, and always felt like he was old and dying, no strength the entire time. He always came back to opiates. Realizing that losing his home and having to return defeated to his parents was a heavy blow to absorb, he figured he would finish off the 4 grams of heroin in small daily dosages to keep withdrawals at bay, then switch back to Kratom and wean off. He went through all the heroin in less than a month, and after some discomfort became reestablished on kratom. Then, he weaned down from about a kilo a month to 4-5 grams (3 times a day) and stayed at that level for about 5 months.
During much of this supposed recover time, he was going crazy with boredom and adjustment. So to compensate, our guy started eating reckless amounts of the amphetamine analogue 2-FMA. Our guy found this speed was not 'clean and work' speed. It did not drive him to get out of bed. This speed was just a euphoric puddle, almost as reinforcing as cocaine. His dosages started with 50-60mg a couple times a day but in no time became 100-250mg every few hours until using a scale become a waste of time, so he would just spoon it out. A typical evening began by eating enough kratom as needed, then adding 1/4g to 1/3g of 2-FMA until it would burst capillaries in his eyes and make him think he was going to die. Our guy would pray at least once a night to God to let him live, and when his mind settled, he would always eat more kratom and 2-FMA and the process would repeat itself. 2-FMA was intensely euphoric and reinforcing for our guy, and life centered around this ritual every night. This insanity went on for months and our guys friends thought he was finally going to lose his mind or do himself in. Our guy also started to be aware of cognitive deficits, finishing sentences became hard, his speech was becoming slurred. He wasn't sure if it was from all this speed, or the sleep deprivation, and he really didn't seem to care. The way to adjust was to avoid the company of others so he would not have to talk. Out of sight out of mind, but everyone who still cared was thinking this stupid speed research chemical would be the end of him.
However as it goes, things have a way of working themselves out. Eventually unemployment benefits ended, so no more 2-FMA. Our guy knew it was time to deal with getting off the Kratom. He weaned down as much as he could and then stopped. The withdrawals were horrible to say the least, and lasted a couple of months leaving him in a broken state physically and emotionally. He stopped taking prescription speed during the acute phase of the withdrawal because he was stimulated enough.
He now is past the sickness, bus sleeps very little, sometimes is up for days. He does not mentally crave opiates, but his cells still scream for them like a person downing needs that oxygen. He realized one difference, he is now horrified at how he has lived the past 10 years, and ashamed for all the people he hurt and disappointed. As more time goes by, he sees the benefits of being sober but still has the demon in him. He did start back up on his amphetamine prescription because it gave him the energy he needed to shower, feed his pets, and maintain social demands, related to friends and his recording hobby. But he also realized that the speed and opiates kind of all fit together in his type of poly drug addiction. He maybe even thinks the pot does too, but had never considered speed or pot 'addictive.' Maybe they aren't (he says) but they all do fit into a set of behaviors that led him to daily opiate use, needle use, and finally giving up and wanting to die.
After years of thinking about it and months now of researching it intently, he has decided to flood his brain with iboga because nothing else has worked, and he is finally ready to quit. He is confident that because he endured the acute withdrawal from opiates (heroin to kratom to nothing) on his own, and is now in that post acute withdrawal phase, the root will work much better for him and he can focus on the big picture instead of just opiate withdrawal. He knows iboga will never 'cure him' of being a poly drug abuser but he is hoping for a 'level playing field' again, where his brain will be repaired from opiate receptor flooding and the PAWS which prevent him from sleeping, relaxing, much less taking a job, will go away. Then he believes will finally be on the right road, and will have a true chance to make the decisions in life that will lead him to elusive self contained happiness.
To be continued.
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Stay strong.
love and best wishes, keep us posted. I really enjoyed this, thank you. There is a light. 
