Aidan of TCC
Bluelighter
I recently found this text file burried in my hard drive from a few years ago, and I'm not sure this is the perfect place for it, I figured I'd throw it out here in light of the other thread on combinations.
Since this is a few years old and I've come a long way in terms of personal knowledge since then, I may throw in my current perspective on the issue with more of a scientific slant to it a little bit later, if there's any interest. And do forgive me if this isn't appropriate for this forum.
Aidan said:The more I hear about drug cominations in the internet, the more startled I am by the lack of judgement some people have. On the other side of the coin, there's a bit of stigma attatched with mixing substances for many people. I'd like to give some input on the topic that may be informative.
Disclaimer: What follows is based on my own 'research' which includes data from myself, anecdotes from friends and my limited medical knowledge. I don't have any credentials, but what I describe has worked well for me. The recreational desirability of llegal drugs is not often the subject of academic research, let alone the recreational value of multiple illegal drugs simultaneously.
Intro to Successful Drug Combinations
Combining psychoactive substances in underexplored ways is very much like being able to cook or mix drinks without a recipe. You can make some damn good food by following a recipe, but you'll miss a lot of other things that take solid knowledge of your ingrediants and an adventurous outlook. The same goes for mixing drugs--the common ones are pretty fun, no doubt, but there's much more there to be discovered. However, also like cooking or mixing drinks, some things just don't go together. If someone decided to make you a pernod and coke on a whim, you'd wonder what the hell they were thinking (pernod is liquorice flavored alcohol). Likewise, when I hear about people combining mdma, cocaine, adderall and ketamine, or 3 tryptamine RCs, 2 phenethylamine RCs and a fifth of vodka, I wonder what's going on in their minds that made them think that'd be a good idea.
Edit: adderall + valium is actually a good combination that's stimulating but not high strung if you get the dose right, I don't know why I used it as silly combination example.
Chapter 1: Know Your Drug's Medicinal Use
The first lesson is to learn what the medicinal properties of applicable substances are. Schedule 2-5 substances have medicinal uses, as do some schedule 1 drugs, they just aren't accepted as having them. This part is critical because if something's going wrong and you have adderall, valium and hydrocodone, you want to know which one to take. The answer is not all three for any bad situation. Here's some medical information to know and love:
Benadryl (Diphenhydramine) Effective for treating nausea, allergies or as a sleep aid. Diphenhydramine interacts dangerously with MDMA in some people.
Codeine, percocet, vicadin etc. (all opiates/opioids) Very effective for treating pain. Opiates/opioids also supress coughing. CNDs (central nervous depressants, decrease breathing, heartrate, blood pressure).
Cocaine: Topical anesthetic. It'll numb any part of your body with mucus membrains to absorb it. CNS (central nervous stimulant, increases heartrate/breathing/blood pressure).
Ketamine: Disassociative anesthetic. If you need to put yourself down for surgery, ketamine's a good choice. Other than that it's medical uses are somewhat limited.
MDMAEcstasy) Can be used with therapy to deal with mental health problems. May also cause depression, so be careful if you're trying to do therapy on someone with depression/bipolar issues. CNS.
Amphetamines and related (adderall, dexedrine, ritalin, desoxyn [methampetamine]) Prescribed for ADD, narcolepsy and formerly/rarely severe obesity. Methamphetamine is rarely prescribed. Amphetamines are CNDs. Treatment for benzodiazepine overdoses includes the use of stimulants.
Benzodiazepines (Xanax, valium, ativan, klonopin) These highly effective, fast-active drugs are CNDs, central nervous depressants. They relieve anxiety and lower breathing/heartrate/bloodpressure. Valium has a particularly strong muscle relaxent property, while most are sedating (Ativan much less so). Excellent for bringing someone down from a bad trip, ending a trip due to necessity of sleep, reliving panic attacks, or counteracting a CNS.
Ambien Related to benzodiazepines, Ambien is a sedative-hypnotic sleep aid. It shares muscle relaxant properties with benzos and may be effective for anxiety as a last resort. Also a CND.
Marijuana The old stand by anti-nausea/pain reliever. Indica strains are better at pain relief.
Barbituates Replaced by benzodiazepines in most cases. Anti-anxiety agents in lower doses, tranquilizers in higher doses. All are CNDs as well.
Nitrous Another disassociative anesthetic, not useful medically without a system to deliver a flow of nitrous combined with oxygen to the user.
Chapter 2: Know Your Options
Now that you've got a good feel for the medical uses of various substances, it's time to look at the non-medical affects. As a good chef must know his spices and seasonings intimately, a safe polydrug user must be aware of the various flavors of drugs and how they compliment eachother. Lets look at some broad classes of substances.
Hallucinogens: A class of serotonergic drugs that bind to the 5-ht serotonin receptor, producing distortions in the five senses, most notably vision. Includes LSD, Mushrooms, Mescaline as well as marijuana, a weak hallucinogen.
Stimulants: Uppers, as they're called, are a broad class of CNS drugs encompassing many different families of chemicals. Hallucinogens are generally mild stimulants, particularly phenethylamine hallucinogens. Stimulants generally decrease appetite. All amphetamines family stimulants are dopaminergic, as is cocaine (I'm unsure whether any others are or not).
Depressants: Downers, as they're called, are a broad class of CND drugs with many member-families. Downers are calming, sedating and relaxing. There is often euphoria associated with them as well. Depressants slow you down, whether they're alcohol, benzodiazepines, opiates or barbituates.
Disassociative Anesthetics: This class of drugs induces a feeling of seperation of the mind and the body. One's body becomes a third person in the eye of the mind. Nitrous, Dextromethorphan(DXM, robotussin), Ketamine and PCP belong to this class, in increasing intensity. All may cause nausea, vertigo, loss of visual focus and motor coordination.
Deleriants: Datura, Diphenhydramine and Dramamine can induce a deleriant experience. Hallucinations are lifelike, from the mind, and much more real than hallucinogen induced distortions. The user may speak to people not present and be totally out touch with reality. I wouldn't recommend mixing anything with deleriants.
Chapter 3: Applied Knowledge
Now that you've got the knowledge, what do you want to achieve? Most likely you're either looking to improve your base experience, making a bad experience better, or a good one awesome. After a run down of guidelines, we'll take a peek at improving bad experiences.
KNOW YOUR DOSE These 3 words are to live by. Educated dosing would have prevented the vast majority of drug overdoses. Speedballing is deadly, not due to a strain on your heart (cocaine or methamphetamine alone strain it much more), but because the stimulant masks the depressant's effects. Problems start to arise when a deadly dose of depressants is ingested unwittingly. Your body can only take so much, whether or not you can feel the differences. To example the health issues with speedballing, note that valium overdoses are treated with stimulants, and methamphetamine overdose patients are given a depressant such as the benzodiazepine ativan.
So invest in a good scale, read up on erowid's dosage guides, and know your personal limits, and you have a much better chance of surviving drug use than most
Potentiation and Counteraction
Opposite classes of drugs tend to counteract eachother, and drugs of the same class tend to potentiate eachother. Thus one must be very careful to keep the dose low if combining multiple drugs of the same class with eachother. Drinking heavily on barbituates will kill you in a hurry, and drinking heavily with benzodiazepines or opiates isn't pretty either. Planning on railing a fat line of cocaine while on ecstasy? Your heart is going to hate you for it. Tripping on multiple hallucinogens at once can get intense in a hurry.
Improving a Negative Drug Experience: Here you need to think what your goal is. Are you too stimulated and need sleep? Are you about to pass out in public due to sedation? Has a trip turned sour? Once you know what you want, think about what can get you there. Benzodiazepines are very effective in counteracting the effects of stimulants. Marijuana and Benadryl can ease nausea. Opiates and barbituates can counter excess stimulation as well. Once you have an idea of what to take, research it. Rxlist.com lists known contraindictions for prescription medicines, and Erowid's health sections are good starting points. Experience vaults at erowid can also provide some information from other people who've combined the same things. Finally, proceed with caution. If your heart's racing unbearably, don't go and take 4mg of xanax and drink. Start low and work up gradually until you've eased your symptom, then be thankful you ended a bad experience and don't try to get fucked up in the other direction.
Chapter 4: Time to Have Fun
Now the meaty part, how to have a good time by combining substances. When planning a mix, the first step is to chose the core experience you're looking for. Do you want to trip? Roll? Relax? Be stimulated? Have an out of body experience? You can't have all of them at once, or even two of them together in many cases. If chosing 1 core substance, the highest relative dose you take should produce your desired core experience. If using 2 substances to reach your core experience, doseage should in most cases be lowered
Now that you've got your core experience picked out (we'll chose rolling), you get to decide how you want to accent it. By accenting your core experience with lower doses of drugs from other classes, you can produce infinte shades of experience. LSD + MDMA is a popular combination, but there's many variations within this 2-substance combo. When two drugs are both in effect, one tends to dominate over the other. A higher relative dose will generally dominate, but doses being equivilant, one will still dominate the experience.
Since our core experience is rolling, and LSD tends to override MDMA in equal doses, we'll want a low dose of LSD and a higher dose of MDMA. The MDMA dominate and the roll will take on shades of a trip. This experience is much different than if we had chosen tripping as our core, in which case the higher or equal dose of LSD would produce a tripping experience with shades of happyness and euphoria from the MDMA.
There you have it, you've just combined two drugs safely to produce a unique and rewarding experience.
Chapter 5: Moving Beyond the Basics
Once you get the basics down, you can try stuff a little more off beat and complex. Remember, for every drug you ingest of the same class (though primarily stimulants and depressants) you need to lower the dosage of all other drugs from the same class. If you've already taken the other substances and can't lower the dose, consider saving the combination for another day when you're more prepared. I'll give some examples and the thought behind them.
2.5 pills containing MDMA
0.5mg xanax
7.5mg hydrocodone
0.6g marijuana
003 alcohol beverages
Note the core experience, rolling.
The accent chosen is primarily depressant with a dash of hallucinogen to accompany MDMA's own dash of hallucinogen.
The doseage is highest in the core experience, and low for each of the three depressants as they potentiate one another's effects.
The benzodiazepine brought down the mental aspect of MDMA while increasing the euphoria, and the opiate decreased the desire to talk while also increasing euphoria. The result was a roll with an emphasis on body euphoria over emotional openness and sociability. The depressants eased the come down into sleep easily, and none was taken in risky quantity. However, side effects tend to be additive, and the short term memory loss of xanax, mdma, alcohol and marijuana combine to obliterate the recollection of anything occuring more than 10 seconds in the past.
Now lets have one that has some flaws in it.
80mg MDMA insufflated
20mg valium
20mg hydrocodone
?? marijuana
02 alcoholic beverages
Here the desired core experience is hard to distinguish. It appears to be depressant oriented, with 2 depressant classes in the low-recreational dose range, and another slightly below it. However, 80mg of MDMA insufflated is not an accenting dose.
The result was an experience that, while highly euphoric, seemed to pass by in an extremely disoriented and confusing 5 minutes rather than the 1.5 hours the peak actually lasted. With no clear dominant, the combination becomes muddled and overwhelming. A good adjustment to this would be to either cut the MDMA dose roughly in half, cut the valium and hydrocodone dose in half, or to simply drop one of the depressants altogether.
Chapter 6: Helpful Hints
Weed is safe to combine with anything else, though it may not be pleasant to do so (munchies with amphetamine appetite loss can be painful).
Nitrous will intensify hallucinogens.
Be very very careful combining alcohol with barbituates. IE you're better off not unless you're very confident in your judgement.
Deleriants are best experienced by themselves.
Combining two substances that are very similar isn't very exciting. Taking Valium + Xanax isn't any more fun than simply taking a higher dose of one or the other. I wouldn't want to combine 2C-I with Mescaline because there's too much overlap. You want your combination to broaden the experience, not leave it unchanged.
Body highs compound. The more substances you've ingested that give a body high, the better the body high will feel (within reason). Taking opiates on ecstasy gives an extremely intense body euphoria, for instance.
Dosage levels matter. The same combination of substances at different dosage levels can produce very different effects.
Timing matters. A good rule is that the farther into your drug-experience that you are, the more you should be leaning towards a depressant-dominated experience. Also keep in mind the duration of each substance...MDMA may dominate an LSD trip during MDMA's peak, but when you come down from the MDMA the LSD may still be going strong.
Route of ingestion matters. The route of ingestion you decide on impacts the duration and intensity of what you're ingesting. You can use this to your advantage,for instance, insufflation of the primary substance will shorten the core experience, allowing a smooth transition into a come down dominated by an entirely different class.
Afterward
The moral of the story is that knowledge is power. The more you know, the safer your drug (ab)use can be, and the more likely you are to have a rewarding and responsible experience. The better your feel for the different subtle variations between substances, the better your feel will be for combining them to produce the desired effect.
Just as you can't throw together gin, vodka, rum and whiskey together in equal parts and expect it to taste pleasant, you can't throw drugs randomly into your body in equal parts and expect it to feel pleasant. With a little practice, instead you'll combine orange juice, pinapple juice, peach schnapps, blackberry schnapps, white rum and raspberry syrup in careful proportions, and end up with a tasty drink (it is good, by the way).
That ended up being much longer, much less organized and I think much less useful than I had anticipated. It did give me something to do though, and if it's not helpful to anyone it'll fade off the front page in a hurry.
Questions, comments and scathing rebuttles welcomed and encouraged, especially if there is any inaccurate or missing information.
Since this is a few years old and I've come a long way in terms of personal knowledge since then, I may throw in my current perspective on the issue with more of a scientific slant to it a little bit later, if there's any interest. And do forgive me if this isn't appropriate for this forum.
