Twelve people were taken to hospital after overdosing on the drug gamma hydroxybutyrate last week. Here, Mike, 26, gives an insider's view of GHB use in Melbourne's dance party scene. He told his story to Sushi Das.
I started experimenting with "G" with some friends and I've done it maybe 10 or 12 times. It's not advisable to drink alcohol with it because it will increase the drug's potency and make an overdose more likely. So it's just something you don't do if you're going to take G. It's really quite stupid.
The first time I did it, I was working in a bar and a friend of mine, who had had a previous experience with it, said: "We're going out tonight after we've finished work (which is about five or six in the morning) and then going clubbing. I've got some G — do you want to have some? But you can't drink all night." I said: "All right, cool." So we didn't drink all night and we had it at his house some time between 6 and 7am.
Then we sat around, smoked a joint and went out to a club in the morning. It was so funny walking into the club. It was like walking on marshmallows and very, er, not too pathetic, more emotion . . . I'm struggling for the right words. It took about half an hour to take effect. I'd been experimenting with other party drugs for quite some time, so I was not that alien to the concept of the drug taking control of my body.
I wasn't scared. I mean the times I've taken it, it's always with somebody who's taken it before, so they can look after me if something goes wrong. They will know if I start to get a bad reaction, or I start to freak out, and they'll say: "Don’t worry, it's OK, it happens; just relax and it'll go away." It's one thing to be putting things into your body when you don’t know what they do, but it's another thing to do it an irresponsible way, as paradoxical as it may seem.
G is a liquid — they put food colour in it. The one that we had the first time was blue. It can be all different colours. It depends on who makes it. When you do G you start to feel a little bit disoriented. Your thoughts tend to skip and become a bit disjointed. You'll be talking about something and then you'll stop and think, "what was I talking about?". You're a bit vague but you don't really notice it until you get up and start to walk around. You get a bit of a head rush from standing up, and as your blood flow increases your heart starts pumping and your body will go, "oh hello!". You'll stagger a little, maybe be a bit wobbly on your feet. It's not a bad feeling; it's kind of a funny feeling. There are no hallucinations.
With any kind of drug that gives you a sense of euphoria — ecstasy or GBH or cocaine — you become more amorous. You can find people really attractive, and then you wake up the next morning and go "oh!". It's like beer goggles times 10, because when you're doing these drugs that give you a euphoric feeling, you tend to be able to speak a lot more easily. Like if you didn't have a lot of confidence with girls or guys, people tend to (take G and) go like: "Let's go and talk to this person." They’re in a happy mood.
There's no crescendo. It's more that you start to not be feeling it as much as before. How you feel when you come down depends on what you've been doing. Like if you're going out and you take it before you go into the club, you'll probably dance. But people sit down and talk, just rabbit on about nothing to some guy they've never met before and you tell your life story. Or they get up and walk off and feel a bit lost after taking a drug like that. Lost, not in a bad way, but just aimlessly wandering, kind of "what next?".
Most drugs, like cocaine, are expensive but G's not. Sometimes it comes in a vial, other times it comes in one of those little plastic fish things which have soy sauce in them when you buy sushi. We paid about $35 a vial. A vial's about 3 millilitres. We'd do about 1.5 millilitres for the night but it depends on how much you were taking generally. You can have a little bit at a time. The 1.5 millilitres can last about two or three hours, depending on your body clock.
You drink it: generally you put something into it, some drink of some sort. You can put it in a shot glass. We did it in a syringe like an old doctor's syringe without a needle attachment on it. You can put it in a glass and then sip some water afterwards or whatever. It tastes fairly rancid. It's bitter, acrid, like chewing Panadol. Kind of eweh!
When people are on drugs like ecstasy and G they can be slightly verbose and they'll sometimes babble about it, but generally it's hard to see what people are on when you're out in a club. Generally with ecstasy their eyeballs are really dilated and they're chewing on a Chupa Chup or something.
Most people I know who experiment with drugs are pretty much out of it (the G scene). Like the going up is not really worth the coming down. On the whole, I don't think they have the time to spend three days in a nightclub. They get crabby, they get grouchy, mood swings; it's just not really a good thing to do anymore.
I think people go out, they take the drugs, they have a good night with their friends and the next time they go to go out they think, "well, that's nice, let's do it again". And then after a while they realise it's not the drugs, it's the people they're with.
Everything is easy to get hold of if you know a couple of connected people. If you know somebody who does pills or speed or something like that, generally if you talk to them, they will know some guy. And once you get to talk to that guy, that guy will know another guy. So it depends on how much contact you have with these people and how often you go to nightclubs.
The people who sell the drugs don't like to sell to people they don't know; obviously there's the dangers of undercover police but also they don't want to be dealing with people when they don't know how they're going to react. I was working in the nightclub industry and G was always around.
There's not a lot of things in my life I regret, but most likely I wouldn't do G again. Well, I mean I would if I was back with those friends and in a similar environment, which is not likely.
The last time I did G was about a year ago. I stopped taking it because I stopped associating with those people who were involved.
At the time when I was taking it, I wasn't 100 per cent sure what was in it. I'd been told by my friends what was in it, that was OK. I mean a lot of drugs I was taking I was fairly well educated on.
A lot of people don't know what they're doing. You get kids like the girl in Sydney who died of an overdose of ecstasy. They are not well-informed people — going out and doing things that are potentially dangerous without prior knowledge. If you're going to do it, do some research before, or get somebody who knows what they are talking about. That's my advice to people. I've met a few people who have been ill on it.
You feel a little blue coming down, not extremely. It's not so much the drug that you need to sleep off, it's the going out late and then staying up for hours and hours on end. I was working in a nightclub and then going out at six in the morning and coming home at two or three in the arvo the next day. Then you'll be going home after 48 hours when it starts to get dark. Like your body goes, "that's enough mate, no more", but more often than not, it's a bit of a mental deadness. Once you punch through the wall of tiredness, your body gets a second wind. But you never catch up on sleep you lose.
Towards the end of my partying career (laughs) I was feeling a little bit more remorse — more just my body going "what have you done to me? you're an idiot!". But no real remorse; it's not like when you wake up from a hangover and go "aargh! what did I do?".
Mike is not his real name. He is 26 years old and has a full-time job.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/14/1079199095971.html?from=top5
First decent article I've read since the GHB TT incident. Is "Mike" a bluelighter maybe?
