Require some help in identifying what (if any) drug my flatmate had taken.

[Albion]

Here's some background info. My flatmate is 18, a bright and gifted musician, studying music at my university. He's a sociable, kind, upstanding and respectful member of society. He's quite popular, and very dedicated to his music, often spending hours at a time on his own, working on compositions and the like. He's tea-total, with quite a condescending view on alcohol and recreational drug use. His name's Cormac.

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Tonight however, the most surreal thing happened:

Cormac started acting strangely around 2pm today. He knocked on everyone's doors and told us to come to his room. He announced that he was giving all his possessions away and that we could take whatever we wanted. He started talking about positive/negative energies, karma, etc. He was completely ranting though, couldn't explain anything, kept on going on tangents about all sorts of things: Al Qaeda, CIA, terrorists, global warming, eurozone crisis whatever, said it was all connected to what he was doing.

This went on for a couple of hours. He was really manic, laughing hysterically, took his shirt off, pacing up and down the corridor repeatedly whilst spouting all these strange ideas. He said the world was going to end. Then we went back to our rooms since we were getting annoyed at him, but then he started taking everything from his room and putting it out in the corridor. Within 10 minutes, everything was in the corridor...His mattress, laptop (which he snapped in half because he thought terrorists had hacked it), clothes, books, pens, everything.

So I went down to reception at that point to get someone, the woman from reception came up and tried to talk to him, but obviously he was just in a state of mania. She went away to get security. Cormac then went into the kitchen and smashed up the whole place. Threw everything onto the floor, plates smashed, pots and pans everywhere. He threw the table into the window along with all the chairs...It was terrifying. Security came up, they couldn't help and by that point we were all ordered out of the flat for our own safety.

A flatmate, called the police. The police came, Cormac came down the elevator and got immediately handcuffed by the policemen and dragged outside. They spoke to him for a bit, he was shouting and screaming and swearing. He was saying there were bombs in the uni that would go off, that it's part of a 'game' and that we had to solve a 'riddle' etc. Eventually an ambulance came, paramedics took him and now he's being held in a hospital, sectioned under the mental health act....



The police reckon he had taken a substance, knowingly or otherwise. My initial impressions were that he's tea-total, can't have taken drugs. But reading an article on mania and its relation to PCP, I'm wondering whether he was on PCP, or another stimulating dissociative.

This was posted in the 3-MEO-PCP thread, and I thought it quite matched the behaviour I witnessed earlier on:

Judging from my experience and reading users' posts the type of manic symptoms arising from 3-MeO-PCP or MXE use seem to be pretty good mimics of the symptoms people who are actually diagnosed with mania report experiencing. It's more complicated than CNS arousal, albeit blunt autonomic arousal can manifest in pretty complicated ways, too. There's a good quote from Andy Behrman on wikipedia's mania page that describes it:

"When I'm manic, I'm so awake and alert, that my eyelashes fluttering on the pillow sound like thunder."

Mania often involves this kind of amplification of sensation (an electrification of the world like 5-HT psychedelics), increased arousal (like straight stimulants), but also a kind of momentum of thought, ego, and feeling that can cause one to fly off on tangents in all directions with gross self-assurance, be they towards heaven, hell, or just some random far left field of consciousness.

Sometimes that momentum is so strong that it sweeps the experiencer along with it, and when the wave finally crashes they're so far from where they started that they've lost the plot (the NMDA antagonist mediated sense of disconnection from the body and amnesic effects probably makes one more prone to this aspect of mania than other drugs). [EDIT: once during a high dose DXM/MXE trip my internal monologue took the sound of the voice actor who read an audiobook I had been listening to in my car earlier in the day and I started to worry about the fate of the characters in earnest as if I was a part of the story -- thus literally losing "my plot" and substituting a fictional narrative from memory complete with alternate narrator]. Situations where this occurs may involve people elatedly resolving to completely re-haul their life while recklessly discounting the problems that arise from jumping into such an attempt blindly (granted in some situations such a change could be perfectly healthy, too, but recognizing the truth or falsity of that judgment in the first place may also be impaired by the manic state).

The ability to laugh off the ego inflation and delusions of grandeur you note during your use of 3-MeO-PCP sounds like hypomania, a milder -- and arguably much more healthy and useful -- form of mania where one's imagination can be swept along to fantastic hypothetical locations but their beliefs and perspectives remain more grounded. It's hard to pin down what mania is because it's so multifaceted, and can manifest itself through symptoms that seem to somewhat contradict each other, e.g. elation and rage.

While it's true that experiences of stimulants or psychedelics often contain characteristics of mania as well, I think the fact that 3-Me0-PCP and MXE bundle the qualities of stimulants, psychedelics, and dissociatives into single drugs allows them to better mirror mania in its totality.

TL : DR?

What do you reckon happened here?​

 

[Tripman]

This is very subjective and in possible way can any conclusive answer be give.

But FFS that guy really lost his shit...

 

[Albion]

This is very subjective and in possible way can any conclusive answer be give.

But FFS that guy really lost his shit...

I'm not looking for conclusive answers, just some suggestions. None of my flatmates know the first thing about drugs and it's quite frustrating to discuss what's happened with them. Bluelight has some of the most rational and informed people on the subject residing within it. Perfect for an educated approach.

 

[NeighborhoodThreat]

Sadly we can't give you any guesses either. I'd say wait for your friend to get back from the hospital.

 

[effie]

Hi JSPete,

That sounds like such a nightmare! I really hope your friend is okay... and you are, it sounds like a really traumatic experience, I'm so sorry you and your friend had to go through that.

It really is impossible for us to speculate what drug he may have ingested.. Many drugs can mimic psychaitric conditions such as a psychotic episode or mania - doctors always rule our organic causes first (this means something physical, like taking a drug or being delirious from an infection or something) before they consider a psychiatric diagnosis - and although there can be things that point towards it being drug-induced, but usually it is impossible to say until the effects wear off or a toxicology screen shows something (unlikely to check for 3-MeO-PCP though!) - so they could be assuming it is that until proven otherwise..

As I said there really is absolutely no way of us being able to tell what your friend might have taken, I'm really sorry.. hopefully when the drug wears off (if it is drug induced) your friend can explain what happened, and if it isn't drug-induced he is in a safe place now and will hopefully get the treatment he needs..

For this reason, I am going to close this as I don't think the discussion will be at all productive or helpful, speculating about random drugs - but if you are shaken up by this and want to talk, I recommend coming over to The Dark Side forum and talking it through there.. if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to send me a pm.

I wish your friend a speedy recovery