Same here. I have a friend who is a nurse and often complains about how poor the drug control is. She could make off with loads of morphine and no-one would be the wiser. I must admit that I have been sorely tempted to ask her for some. But I really, really, really don’t want to get hooked.
Yeah. When I had been out of the hospital for a solid two days and had to go back to the emergency room, I felt a lot better knowing there was a shot of morphine waiting.
GW Bush, is that you?
Drawing an analogy between world travel and psychoactive substances… smoking pot is like traveling to a nice sunny beach in Jamaica, and smoking Salvia is traveling to Cambodia. There are no velvet ropes to keep you from falling off the edge of the temple. Its major draw is to boast of marking another destination as “visited”, but many won’t return due to risk, discomfort, or lack of tourist-friendly distraction. If that’s not your bag, then don’t even bother with it. Like you I have a legally owned and acquired bag of salvia that I’ll probably never touch again. On the flip side of the analogy, I would certainly visit Cambodia again. 
It’s a little funny to me that people are lumping percocet to weed or acid. To me, percocet is in a whole different category. I took a bunch of them back in the 90s, and there is no way I’d go through that experience again unless there were a huge win in it for me. The pain I went through absolutely sucked.
My surgeon told me to go straight home and lie down. Oh, and get the prescriction filled. Going to CVS and putting up with their shit is hardly going straight home. And when I got there, they said it would be a 40 minute wait, and would I like to come back tomorrow.
Under what valid circumstance does a person need percocets but can wait a day to get them? It wasn’t like I could have put off the pain of having my body recently invaded by sharp knives and needles.
My SO has tried it once or twice. He said it made him think he was caught in an invisible zipper, and he had to jump up and run sideways like a crab. The pull was so strong it almost knocked him over; he couldn’t keep up with how quickly the zipper was being zipped.
It always amazes me when doctors do this! But it’s not always this way. For one thing, I almost always have someone home with me who can go get the 'script filled while I lay down; if I will have to wait some number of hours to get it filled, the hospital will almost always send a few pills home with me. My current urologist will actually give me a 'script the day before a procedure, so I can get it filled and have it waiting for me when I get home from the hospital.
For myself, I included my experience with prescription drugs as well as my experience with the less-than-legal stuff because, one, that’s where most of my experience lies; two, Percocet, morphine and Dilaudid will, indeed, get you high. You may not enjoy the experience that ends up with you needing these drugs (I know I don’t enjoy kidney stones!) but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the high, if you find the high to be pleasant. Some people don’t like it at all.
For me it wasn’t even a high, but maybe that’s because I took it as directed. I felt a little groggy, but that may have also been my body’s reaction to being invaded. I was still in severe pain, but the drugs probably took the edge off of it.
Yep, that sounds exactly right.
Well, I take it as directed, too. I think it’s probably a YMMV thing.
Probably! 
I get buzzed off two glasses of wine/champagne, though, so at least I get to look a little cool this way?
I was given generic Vicodin for an abcessed tooth for the first time when I was in college. I hate it with a passion that I reserve for few other things. I went back to the dentist the next day and he, thinking I was allergic to hydrocodone, sent me off to get some generic Percocet instead. It didn’t help. I itched unrelentingly everywhere, I could not control my feet, I felt horribly overheated, and I had unaccountably vicious mood swings, usually in the downward direction. (“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m – oh god, there’s a kitten on TV! sobs into pillow”) And the worst part is that they did not do a blasted thing to make the pain abate. I think I wound up taking a total of three tablets out of a bottle of 30 hydrocodone/APAP and a bottle of 30 oxycodone/APAP. I ultimately opted to live with the toothache until the antibiotics had done their job.
I’ve been drunk quite a number of times. I don’t think being drunk is at all appealing unless I’m with a group of people, some of whom are also drunk. If I’m by myself there’s really nothing to laugh hysterically at.
I haven’t ever smoked pot. I did discover, when I lived in a dormitory where the radiators ran all the way along the exterior wall between rooms, that this was probably a good thing. The errant pot smoke escaping from my neighbor’s room through the heating ducts made me sneeze uncontrollably. All the sneezing of my usual sinus problems, and not even a contact high to show for it.
Curiosity did get the better of me once, and after checking places like Erowid to make sure I wouldn’t die, I took about 200mg of diphenhydramine. This was not anywhere near fun enough to make up for the cottonmouth and dehydration headache I had once it all wore off. I may be unusually susceptible to this one; allergy medications from the non-drowsy families don’t do a blessed thing to help when I am actually allergic to something, and I’m prone to seeing the walls crawl on the regulation dose of 25-50mg of Benadryl. Primarily what I got was floaty, like I was disconnected at all the joints, and a curious, shifting lacuna in my memory. I could retain something for about ten seconds, then it was gone, then a minute or two later I would suddenly recall what it was that I was thinking about. I prefer to remember my weird drug experiences, so I didn’t find that at all amusing.
I made the mistake of drinking actual cough syrup the first time I tried dextromethorphan. That was disgusting. The gelcaps made me less desperate to puke up a lung, but I managed to crack one open once by accident, and it turns out that the appalling taste of cough syrup is actually masking the taste of the active ingredient, which is light-years worse. The primary effect I got from that was that sitting in a semi-darkened room listening to music and watching the inside of my eyelids suddenly sounded like a perfectly good way to spend a Friday night. Any random variations in the darkness, such as the bumps on the popcorn ceiling or the usual faint phosphenes on the insides of my eyelids, were transformed – through sensory feedback, I presume – to strange shifting geometrics and abstracted figures, not unlike the later cats in the artwork of Louis Wain. I’ve heard other people describe a lightly-speedy body high; I never got that effect, but left to my own devices I would typically sit on the floor doing dance stretches with headphones until the effects wore off.
I try not to take excessive amounts of caffeine anymore. It completely removes my ability to shut up. I’m shocked that no one’s ever smacked me to stop the fountain of babble coming out of my mouth. 200mg – one NoDoz – is enough to make me peppy and inclined to go walk the length of the campus several times.
I made some brilliant pieces of art after smoking opium.
I missed my entire first LSD trip because I was waiting for intense visuals. Later, when I read more LSD literature, I remembered the trees dripping, wall texture crawling, and the bathroom mirror waving like the surface of a pond. These things were all really subtle at the time, and I didn’t pay much attention to them.
On mushrooms, however, I had a whole animistic “vision” which turned into a tattoo. I was sixteen at the time, so it’s a crappy tattoo. I may some day have it covered up with the amazing, professionally done, adult version, but part of me likes the terrible tattoo and the reminder of my impulsive and barely-survived youth. 
I’ve done a lot of different drugs, but this post inspired me to report on the one that may not get any other coverage here – heroin.
I only did it about five times. Could’ve been 10, but somewhere in that ballpark. It was during my last few weeks in town at the end of my first semester of college. I smoked it all of those times. It was similar to morphine, but more intense; not surprising, since heroin is diacetylmorphine, or morphine with two acetyl groups tacked on. Think of it as morphine with a turbocharger.
I felt it the instant the smoke hit my lungs. I had jazz music on, of course. It was like an invisible hand had grabbed on to me and yanked me above the clouds, and I was looking down on the world of love, hate, pain, suffering, emotion, goodness and badness, completely insulated from it. For a few minutes–actually, I have no idea how long–it was like nothing could get to me. Not so much a feeling of ecstacy as a feeling of pure transcendent safety. Like the problems of the world just could not get through to me, no matter how hard they tried. There’s really no linguistic description that could possibly do it justice. I’ve tried to capture it in words for almost three years now and I can’t do it. It’s just not possible.
Interesting little thing–I never had a comedown or a craving. It wasn’t like, “Holy shit! GIMME MORE!” It was more like I was floating gently back down to earth, and then one moment it was just gone.
The question of whether or not it’s possible to try heroin without getting hooked–well, I’m not trying to advocate heroin use, it’s a bad idea for a number of reasons, which I’ll get into later–but it’s not even a question to me. I did it, no problem. I mean, I didn’t have withdrawals or any of that stuff, nor did I ever have cravings or ever long for it. (Especially after the last time I did it, when I spent all of the next morning trying to clean up the house I was staying in at the last minute, puking several times from the combination of exertion + leftover heroin metabolites or something.) Last time I did the research, I found that in any given study, the number of people who have used heroin in the last 30 days is only about 8-10% of the number of people who have ever used it. I mean, think about that–if you knew 13 people who had used heroin (and you just might), odds are that only one or two of them would still be using it. That means that no matter how good heroin is–and, let me tell you, it is good–there’s some other combination of factors in addiction, outside of its inherent appeal. Especially since the numbers are similar for cocaine, which is nowhere near as powerful.
So, I honestly believe that if someone went into the experience determined to stay in control, s/he would stand a pretty good chance of not getting hooked. Addiction isn’t just a magic switch that gets flicked on instantly one day when you’re high, anyway–it’s a process. So I think anyone with enough self-control not to get drunk every day can probably handle it. Of course, YMMV…
However, there are other reasons not to spend too much time with heroin. One is that you’re not functional whatosever while you’re on heroin–or if you are, you’re not doing it right. It’s the kind of drug where you take it and then just sit in a chair and chill out until it’s over. I honestly have no idea how long that is, either–which brings us to time distortion. Not a big deal if you have absolutely nothing to do for a while, but if there’s a strong possibility that something requiring your attention will come up in the next, say, three hours or so, it’s not a good idea to indulge. So in my estimation, it’s not a drug for parents, unless the kids are away at camp, or staying with a reliable and independent babysitter for a while. But then there are the impurities. Pure heroin is white, but the vast majority of the stuff on the market is cut with so much nasty shit that it’s brown or black. The best that most users can hope for is light brown, which would be completely unacceptable to cocaine or methamphetamine users. About ten years ago there was a rash of brain damage (specifically, leukoenchepalopathy) caused by certain impurities common in heroin that only activated when heated, ie smoked. I don’t recall whether or not I’ve seen reports of those since, but the possibility is out there. And you can tell that black tar is cut up not only by the fact that, gee, it’s black, but because each batch tastes completely different. I had enough morbid curiosity back then that I was willing to try anything, but these days I’d be a lot pickier.
As for the puking, I did it on two occasions. I had smoked 5-10 times across a period of about three weeks IIRC, and both times were at the tail end of that. The first time was after I smoked a little in the morning after I’d smoked a little the night before–the guy who bought most of the stuff our group smoked had stayed over at my house, and when he woke up he wanted me to help finish the stuff off, so I obliged. The other occasion was the one I mentioned earlier, the day after the last time I ever did heroin. My theory is that it’s a combination of the adulterants and the leftover heroin metabolites that does it, since I didn’t feel at all queasy the first several times I did it.
I think there are probably no “instant addiction” drugs except maybe cocaine. Even William Burroughs himself who was famous for being on and off heroin said that it took a bit of work and persistence to “cultivate the habit”, as he called it. Naturally heroin does have that pleasure thing as incentive to stay “on the program” until full-blown physical dependence develops.
Of course if you continue taking it, it will be a different story. The day you decide the pleasure isn’t worth it anymore and you try to quit, you’ll get angry phone calls from parts of your brain that have nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure.
Thanks for that post, fetus, it was very enlightening. I understand that drug addiction can happen to anyone in any demographic, but my (perhaps faulty) perception is that heroin abuse runs rampant in ghettos and Hollywood. I can see the appeal of something that just makes it all go away. Alcohol has, to some extent, the same effect.
Arguably, nicotine can be.
Arguably, nicotine can be as hard to kick as heroin. I say “arguably” in the strict sense that people have made this argument (though I disagree with it). In order to cultivate a nicotine addiction you have to keep returning to the foul taste of smoke or chew; I don’t think anyone has ever argued that cultivating a nicotine addiction was simple as getting hooked on the first taste.
Well, I don’t know. I’ve certainly heard first-hand reports from people who say that all they wanted on coke was more coke. That doesn’t jibe with my personal experience, though. I certainly believe that it has that power for some people, because it makes you feel so good about yourself. But I have to disagree with you that it’s an “instant addiction” drug. Like anything else, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and its effect on the user is dependent on a lot of variables, one of which is the attitude that the user brings into it. I’ve done my share of coke, but for me it was more like a fun little experiment than anything else, and I never had a comedown, withdrawal or craving.
Well, it didn’t happen to me, so I have to call shenanigans on the idea that that inevitably happens to everyone who does it long enough.
Hrm. I guess. In the same way that pee wee football is “to some extent” the same thing as World Cup soccer. I don’t mean to belittle you here, but it’s hard for me to think of alcohol as being in the same ballpark as heroin in any way, or even the same sport.
In this very thread, someone mentioned that every nicotine addict is just trying to get back to the feeling of the first cigarette. I know what he’s talking about, although like everything else, nicotine was never all that addictive to me. (I did, once, have withdrawals from nicotine. So from my perspective, it’s more addictive than heroin, coke and methamphetamine.)
It’s hard to ask this question without straying into a “no true scotsman” fallacy, but do you really think you did it long enough to pick up a habit? I have no actual idea what the requisite period is, but I think Bill Burroughs said a month of using it daily.
My broader point was that opiates aren’t something you try once and call it “master”. An addict uses it for a time period thinking he’s only in it for the pleasure, then for whatever reason he stops using and discovers the delightful experience called “withdrawal”, which are not simply an absence of pleasure, it is a real feeling of extreme discomfort. It sneaks up on one. Whereas cocaine, in my experience, very strongly announced “I’m going to own you if I haven’t yet already.”
Good point, but if the argument you’re making is that it’s an initially unpleasant experience, think about this: Sticking a needle into your arm is no more pleasant. I’d bet that smoking heroin isn’t exactly Flavor Country. Alcohol is usually pretty fowl upon first tasting.
But yeah, nicotine doesn’t give a high.
OK, but that’s way different from my experience with cocaine. I’m sure I’ve done it at least 75 times and I never once had a comedown, withdrawal or craving. I’ve had a gram of it lying around and stretched it out for weeks.
No kidding! Especially with all that crap they put in there. I distinctly remember that one batch tasted like spoiled bologna.
Woah there! Easy with that brush! Either you’re not using the same nicotine I’ve had, or, more likely, it’s not quite that simple.