Have you ever done "hard drugs?"

In My Humble Opinion
41

Mushrooms repeatedly when I was an adolescent - they grew wild in the fields around where I grew up. I blame them for my academic downturn though they could merely have coincided with the onset of adult ADD. In the rave era, E and LSD. Hated LSD, and I particularly recommend you never do it at the same time as an E (“I wanna dance! OMG everyone’s looking at me dancing, look at this blade of grass isn’t it beautiful… I wanna dance!” repeat ad infinitum). Speed a few times during the same era, but it messed me up way too much. Coke several times. Liked it way too much so enforced a rule on myself that I was only allowed it once a year. That year has extended to many years now.

Had morphine in hospital. That shit absolutely rules; it made me feel the best I’ve ever felt in my life, and that is why I will never try anything like it again unless I am prescribed it in hospital.

42

I don’t know Yook – some have claimed here at SDMB to have had multi-day “trip” just off eating weed. Their stories seemed credible enough. I’m still not sure even tripping balls on acid or mushrooms for a definite number of hours constitutes a “hard” drug. Hell, a regular person could probably drink a fifth of 80 proof and be a bit tipsy for a few hours.

Anecdote – I had seven or so mg. of Xanax yesterday over the course of four or five hours, and, not having drunk anything for a week or maybe two, it knocked me out. When I was out of caffeine, I napped in a chair at campus for a good hour. I suppose short-acting benzos qualify as addicting, and I know all the horror stories, but my internist and my experience have neither diaqgnosed nor experienced any addictive properties in my case. I’d never be able to eat enough to get a ‘buzz’ or a ‘high’ – for me, these are not drugs of abuse; even though I could drink beer all day, every day, and only get tired, I suppose it’s possible to achieve “hard drug” status with things like 5% beer or short-acting benzos.

43

I did really staggering amounts of LSD throughout the end of the eighties and on through most of the nineties. For most of that time I had a line on liquid and my routine for those years was to wait three days between trips, and then throw coins (two out of three) to determine whether or not I’d take acid that night. If the 2of3 favoured “heads,” I’d start with three drops in a glass of water, and flip again. For each time it came up heads, I’d add another drop, and stop at “tails.”

LSD was definitely my favourite mind-altering substance.

I have also used MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, 2CB, methamphetamine, ketamine, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, belladonna, amanita, opium, homebrew ayahuasca and god alone knows what one-off’s have slipped my mind.

Of these, the only substances that really make me uneasy are meth and coke (for the potential of habituation, which was never a problem for me personally but which is a palpable risk) and belladonna and amanita for the ease of which you can check out permanently with them. Oh, that reminds me - I extracted the alkaloids from a datura plant and scarfed those back once, too. That was the night my brother dropped by to apologize for being out of touch for so long, and to express his natural fraternal concerns after hearing that I was getting a bit cavalier with my drug use. (This seemed quite natural at the time, in spite of the fact that he had died of a heroin overdose ten years previously.)

Now that I am long-settled into a comfortable and responsible bourgeois existence, I do sometimes vaguely miss the days of plentiful and pluripotent LSD, and also the idle and irresponsible times in which I could be certain that there was nothing on the horizon for the next eight hours or so which demanded a clear head. I also sometimes miss those hours-long MDMA-fueled ruts. Those were good. I’m pretty sure that even (if it were legal, natch) and we could get a sitter, and I could talk my lifelong pharmaphobic wife into it… it probably wouldn’t be the same.

My middle-aged embrace of beer and wine is a more than adequate replacement for the rest. :slight_smile:

44

Nope, I’m strictly law-abiding. But I’m uptight like that. :stuck_out_tongue:

Even if it were all legal, addictions run in my family, and I know that I’m vulnerable to them too. Not fun. Not fun at all. So I wouldn’t touch any of the hard stuff, just because no amount of pleasure it can give me is worth the possible cost. I’m also careful about how much I drink, but fortunately for me alcohol just intensifies whatever I’m already feeling, so I’m not even tempted to try and drown my sorrows.

Although I’ll admit that mushrooms kind of sound like fun. I’d love to see the world in a less literal way for a while.

45

You’ve got to be shitting me! I never would have guessed! (Kidding). That coin toss thing is nuts, though – if it were on YouTube, I’d believe it, though.

Which of your genius friends came up with the coin-toss idea of deciding how hard to trip, I wonder??!!

It reminds me of an OuLiPo combinatoric game, whioch could be kind of fun (except I don’t have the time to do much more than drink whisky or occasionally pass some weed around in a pipe, unfortunately). Sounds like you and I would have run in some of the same circles in the 1990s.

46

Just slightly-informed speculation. The “purple micro dots” in my CA High School ( peddled at times by someone I knew well ) were mescaline.

47

40 years-old and have never ingested anything illegal. When people ask me “why?” I have the very simple answer that no one has ever OFFERED it to me! (Bizarrely enough.) Even pot. No lie. (Oh, once, now that I think about it at a party at a fellow Doper’s house, lol.)

Oddly enough, I’m very curious about LSD and ecstasy and would probably try them if someone I trusted offered some.

The “hardest” thing I’ve ever had was Vicodin after I had a tubal ligation. I only used half the scrip (didn’t seem to do much) and it still sits in my drawer of assorted random pills. Recently I went to the ER thinking I had a blood clot in my leg (after various ultrasounds and blood tests this turned out to not be the case) and out of nowhere they inexplicably gave me a prescription for another 30 Vicodin, which I never even bothered with.

I confess I did use it “illicitly” once when I got home from the worst (late shift) work day ever in the history of time and had a SPLITTING headache and knew I just wanted to go the hell to sleep and forget the whole day.

Aside from that I have about 45 Vicodin lolling around in my bathroom waiting to be abused, and I have 0% interest.

48

ROFLMAO I can believe that. Except I get more effect from expresso than I got from coke.

Actually, caffeine affects me only to a small degree - until I got heart issues I normally did a 24 oz expresso as my before bed treat. Back when I was waiting for my parathyroidectomy I was having more or less trouble staying awake more than a couple hours at a time, so I was going through 2 4 packs of red bull sugarless a day to stay awake at work and it barely worked and I had no jitters. [I was absolutely thrilled post op and my calcium profile returned to normal and I could actually stay awake without stimulants. It was getting bad enough my doc was thinking of putting me on amphetamines to get me through the day.]

I am apparently a nonaddictive personality - I dropped morphine a couple months before they were planning to wean me off it after I fucked up my back skiing. I had decided that the pain levels had dropped enough that ibuprofen in industrial amounts would work, so I opted to drop down to NSAIDs for pain managment. About the only pain I can’t manage with OTC meds is migraines and the occasional pseudogout flare. Though my damned FAI/arthritis/spinal stenosis is getting pretty painful this winter, and I may see what my ortho says.

49

To me, “hard” = injected.

Mescaline is likely what “purple microdot” was, reading up on the effects of mescaline.

50

So is marijuana the only illicit mind altering substance not considered “hard drugs” by the OP? Seems like the definition is overly broad.

51

Well, there is Valium (Vitamin V, as a friend calls it).:stuck_out_tongue:

52

I’ve had more than my share of alcohol and smoked marijuana a handful of times while in college, but never had the temptation to try anything harder. There’s a long history of addiction in my family of which I’ve been aware since my early teens, so that probably helped stem any desire to try anything harder. These days, I rarely even drink alcohol and when I do, it’s usually only one or two drinks.

53

E - when it was most likely to be pure MDMA was just amazing, but had to be the right crowd, right music. I think there’s diminishing returns there though, so it was only ever an occasional thing. Necked a pill that was pure ketamine, and hated it so much that it stopped that kind of thing for me.

Morphine - in hospital after an injury - woah! I can see how folk get addicted to that.

Coke - didn’t like it, and don’t like the effect it has on people.

Mushies - grew all over the place as a teen, but meh, not really my thing.

LSD - a couple of times, interesting, but like mushrooms, not really for me.

Weed - not a hard drug, but very rarely these days. If someone’s passing a joint around then fine, but haven’t sought it out for a long time.

Glue-sniffing - young and dumb thing, heh

54

Oh, yeah.

Never injected anything, never messed with crack or smoked meth. Other than that… I think drugs are fascinating.

55

Maybe you can answer this.

I probably took acid something like 5-10 times (I liked it quite a bit, especially on Halloween), but afterword I felt totally fried. Not a headache hangover like with alcohol, but like stupefyingly exhausted for, oh, 18-24 hours after the trip ended. Some people have told me this is more likely a result of speed or some other additive to the LSD, and that if it was pure LSD I wouldn’t have felt that.

I found mushrooms like LSD-Lite. Some stomach cramping to start, but a very pleasant though much briefer high, and essentially no hangover effect at all.

56

Did I write this?

::checks username::

OK we must have identical biochemistries.

57

To be honest, after trying the coke I had a sneaking suspicion that the power/energy/alert effect was partly psychosomatic [you know that study where you give someone something and tell them it had alcohol in it and they act drunk when they never got any alcohol at all?] I could see the numbing action clearly [or at least feel it] but I had absolutely no trouble going to bed less than 15 minutes after doing a pair of lines and falling asleep as normal.

58

Yep.

Coke = Really liked it. Always had a good time

Speed = as above

Mushrooms = Had some really amazing times.

E = Great Drug

LSD = Had some good times had some bad times but never really freaked out.

Morphine = My favourite thing to hear in a hospital. Do you want some morphine. Yummy.

59

Back in the '80’s I tried coke a couple times. That was enough to show me I hated it - the taste, the awful post-nasal drip thing, and the nervous, jittery, paranoid feeling it induced. Pretty much kept me from ever experimenting with anything harsher.

60

My guess is that whoever bought the “coke” got screwed.