I don’t think this question has a factual answer… I’d like to know from dopers (snicker) who’ve done hard drugs in the past. I’d like to have detailed explanations on how certain drugs make one feel.
When you snort cocaine, what does it do to you? How does it make you feel? I’ve heard that it just deadens the nasal passages. Is that so? How is that pleasureable?
When you shoot heroin, how does it make you feel?
Same with smoking crack, etc.
Eric
Coke riddle: What comes after a line?
(those who have done it won’t need to look at the teaser)[teaser]ANOTHER LINE![/teaser] Coke just gave me a giddy energy, and a wierd kind of confidence. It also gave me green poop the next day and a nasal headache for a week. I could kinda see why it could become addictive, but it wasn’t for me. I tried it 4 or 5 times.
I actually thought acid was pretty fun. I had heard about alot of people “losing control” on acid, and it hits everyone different, but I was able to control my emotions and hallucinations, even encouraging some of the later along because I was enjoying it.
Shrooms is acid on training wheels.
XTC is a bit of a mix between coke and shrooms. It’s a bit scary. I saw a couple people get temporary paralysis, and I decided that as a guy who like being in control while on drugs (kinda an oxymoron, huh?) I didn’t like X.
If you have a Usenet server at your ISP, go to alt.drugs.hard and just read the posts. Don’t ask any questions, don’t post a thing because they don’t take kindly to it, and they’ll give you a good text ass-whupping. Just read. You’ll learn everything you want to know about what happens to people who do that for a lifestyle, and probably more than you wanted to know. Read it for three weeks. You’ll never be able to forget some of what you read.
The two times I tried cocaine, I was unable to discern what the effects were. Apparently it costs a lot more than I could afford to get enough of it to find out what it’s like. When you’ve given somebody $60, and your stash is gone 10 minutes later and you’re sitting there wondering if it’s going to kick in and it never does, you sorta get the picture that this is not the hobby for you. Mind, the persons I was with were wired for sound, so it was real cocaine, but I couldn’t feel a thing, buzz-wise.
Counting the seconds until this thread gets locked…
Coke just made me thirsty. The back of my mouth felt alkaline, and I tended to drink faster. It never really did all the much for me, although I had friends who hoovered it up until their noses rotted away. They called it a “smartener.” Said it made them feel on tiop of the situation, and capable of out-thinking anybody. Right.
Acid was a trip. 
I never did heavy doses of acid, but as a lighter dose, it just made me watch my feet go through the arm of the couch, and not care. Kinda a speedy run-up, and then everything just gets…interesting.
I did a lot of Quaaludes back in the early 80s. I can’t tell you what it was like though, because I was on Quaaludes at the time.
Pot: made me tired and hungry. Like I wanted a pizza but was too lazy to go to the phone and call for one. Never really cared for pot.
(Pointless aside:When I lived in the college dorms one of my roomates came home from a party and bragged to me that she’d smoked 8 bowls of pot. She soon became delirious, had seizures, and had trouble breathing. I was afraid to call the dorm authorities because I didn’t want to get her in trouble, and her friends had never seen anyone react like this to marijuana before and didn’t know what was wrong. She recovered just fine and didn’t think twice about the incident. Now I suspect she had an allergic reaction to something in the marijuana.
And yeah, if I had to go through this again I’d be on the horn to 911 faster than you could bat an eyelash.)
Speed: Tried it once. I had a long conversation with the dealer’s son about my dead grandmother. The boy didn’t pay much attention, as he was only two years old. Later I became very nervous and I’ve never tried the stuff again.
Never tried cocaine and the closest I’ve come to heroin was vicodin, which I took for a rotted tooth. It made me woozy and sick to my stomach. I didn’t try it again even when I had a root canal.
As for LSD, the closest I’ve come to that was eating a Jimsonweed leaf. It didn’t do anything and I was disapointed. Later I read a bit about Jimsonweed and learned that I was lucky. Eating parts of them can be fatal.
I took a quaalude (sp?) once, also in the early 80’s. I immediately lost my voice for about a week. I could barely make a sound. It also made me the stupidest person in the world for a few hours. Not an impressive combination. That ended my experience with hard drugs.
Back in 90, I stayed with a gay friend for a couple of weeks, he and his friends were heavily into crack use at the time. Not keep in mind I had just gotten out of the Army, so other than alcohol, I hadn’t even done so much as smioke weed since I was in like maybe the ninth grade. So I hesitated tryig it the first couple of days they asked me to join in. when I finally did, whoo boy.
It’s kind like coke in that you get a giddy energy. It also causes well not slurring but a weird effect in the lips that makes it hard to talk correctly, kind of like novacaine. It seems to negate the depressive effect of Alcohol. I’m actually surprised that crackheads don’t suffer incidents of acohol poisoning, because I can’t even begin to guess how much I drank that weekend, but it was a lot. Notice I said weekend? That’s because thats another happy effect, once you start it’s hard to stop until you reach the point where your body demands that you do. We started smoking it on a Friday evening went straight through Saturday and into Sunday.
It also makes people horny (quite a few guys would slip away temporarily to go screw) some didn’t even slip away. Some it gives nervous like traits, one of the guys would constantly stretch his neck, this other guy would keep pacing, another wouldn’t shut up for minute. Me it made hot, I sweated constantly and mostly sat around in my undewear. You also loose your inhibitions, I was propositioned serveral times, and remember considering it several times, and I I’m not gay.
I crashed sometime Sunday afternoon, and woke Monday night. My lungs felt like cotton and I sounded asthmatic, Then I began to cough and out came this gross gray gooey substance (I assume baking soda), a lot of it. After that I breathed fine, and don’t remember any other ill effects, the grey goo was enough. Thinking through the previous evenings was anough to convice me it ws a bad idea. Oh and I left a couple of hour later, before another party could start.
The good part of coke is like a giddy headrush that makes you smile and makes you want to explore the world. The bad part of coke is the teeth-gritting, can’t sleep for hours funk that follows.
Smoking crack is like coke, but more intense. Happy, silly, and fun. Then, in 5 minutes, you want more. A lot more. Depending on the addictiveness of your personality, you can go to grat lengths to get more. Apparently, I am not a very addictive person.
The good part of heroin is warm and floaty and comfortable, with not a care in the world. You feel safe and pain free, and it’s not even possible to put into word the euphoria you get from it. The bad part of heroin is that it kills you, and it kills your firends with alarming frequency. Vicodin and Oxy-pills are like this, but less intense.
I was an idiot when I was in my early 20s. Well, I still am an idiot, but I have much less destructive habits these days.
Talking about illegal drugs on the SDMB
Cajun Man
for the SDMB
These drugs are illegal in the US and will get you in big, bad trouble.
Ecstasy: intense feelings of affection and love for one’s friends. Incredible empathy and willingness to talk to strangers (and to touch them and stoke their hair and confess your life story). Sensitive skin, heightened feelings of touch. Near unstoppable urge to dance to electronic music. Periodic waves of indescribable pleasure crashing like waves through your head, along with strange thoughts of symmetry and order. Urge to kiss and hug people just because you love them so darn much. Feeling very affectionate and touchy-feeley, but not in a sexual way. At high doses, giddy and scarily out of control, but at lower doses, very happy and at peace with the world.
Grinding teeth, clenching fists, eyes rolling, mild visual disturbances, feeling very flat and depleted in the days following. Possible long-term memory loss, disturbance of sleep patterns, flings with members of same sex, poor dance music collection.
Cocaine: feelings of great satisfaction, along with immense self-confidence. Urge to strut around and show-off because you feel so darn cool. Happy to dance around, happy to gabble away in conversation, happy happy happy.
Incredibly dry mouth and lips, clenching fists, blood nose, empty wallet, possible accumulation of bling-bling jewellery, 70s flares, loss of nasal septum.
Amphetamines: big rush of energy. Nervy, jittery, restless. No specific feelings of emotion, but feeling very alive and in the moment.
Inability to sleep, lack of appetite, muscle soreness from lack of rest, inability to get a hard-on, possible dalliances with white trash and outlaw motorcycle gangs.
As should be obvious, I was a big fan of LSD back in the day. It was made illegal for no good reason. I found that it both encouraged and fragmented my “inner dialogue”, but the visuals were usually minor. Shrooms had more visuals but less introspection.
Cocaine, which is illegal for reasonable reasons, never did much for me, though I did enjoy it. It has a similar effect to a minor adrenaline rush, and makes you extremely talkative. This made it a good drug for getting to know people you just met. Other than that, I never found it particular worth it.
Marijuana is illegal simply out of spite. It’s like the government is a petty child who doesn’t want you to play with their toys. I find it (found…found…found, dammit!) inifinitely superior to alcohol, and would encourage anybody who must use illegal drugs to limit their indulgence to only pot.
Hmm… have yet to hear a bad story about acid. Does everyone like LSD?
Bad LSD experience? OK, here ya go:
I was with a group of people and we all dropped one night. We were all in an apartment having fun, doing stupid acid-induced things when I just felt like wigging out. I don’t know how to explain it to someone that has never done acid before but I felt so disconnected from reality that I started to think that I wasn’t coming back.
Since my friends were all tripping and didn’t really have anything they could do for me except give me time to come down, they just sat me in front of the TV and popped in a tape. Well, it was about six hours of Ren and Stimpy. It was funny. But at the end of that was Full Metal Jacket. That’s not fun when you’re tripping and have lost touch with reality.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe and that I would never come down. I spent a good deal of time that morning after (still tripping) going through the grapes in the refrigerator and selecting the ones that were “military worthy” and taking great delight in rejecting the bad ones. Then I just sat around for a while and ran my hands through them. After that I realized that we had been up and tripping for a good 12 hours (I thought we’d start to come down after about 8) so I freaked on how I was never going to come down and I would probably spend the rest of my life in an institution and I was going to have to call my parents and tell them I had been doing acid.
It wasn’t good.
I will say that I have had great trips that were all lovey and fun. That one just was awful. And also my last, about 10 years ago.
DuringmylatecollegecareerandimmediatelyaftercollegewhenIgotmyfirstjobandhadplentyofdisposableincomeIusedtotakecocaineabitbutnotenoughtoqualifyasahardcoreuserTheeuphoriawasshortlivedthealloverbodytingleundescribablygoodthesexmindblowingandthedesiretohavesomemorerightthisverysecondgreatIwasalsocharmingwittystunninglyhandsomeandtheallaroundbeeskneesevenwithabloodykleenexhangingoutofmynose.
That’s what cocaine was like for me.
Additionally, cocaine use is illegal in the US and can get you in world of trouble.
Acid made me violently ill for hours the one time I tried. Mushrooms made me trip once, but afterward I got a migraine, and the other two times I was just violently ill. Ecstacy was about like Jervoise describes it but I was seriously and uncomfortably depressed for 3 weeks afterward each time I did it. Turns out I’m a slow metaboliser (lack an enzyme in my liver needed to clean out the MDMA, so it stays in my system for days or weeks rather than hours).
I’ve never smoked pot.
I decided drugs such as these were not for me. I stick with the occasional drink and chocolate.
These drugs (except the alcohol and chocolate) are all illegal, and I do not recommend anyone doing anything illegal.
I probably did it around 150 times between the ages of 19 and 23. I used to like it a lot but the thought of doing it now is completely repulsive to me. There’s a definite trade off of “fun time” vs. “bad time” every time you do acid, or at least every time I did acid. The “bad time” was this dark, very introspective period of bad thoughts where I became insanely critical of myself and the decisions I’d made in life, feeling like I ways always letting people down and was not good enough. Not a good enough friend, not good enough to my parents, I’d worry about the future, etc. It sounds silly and cliché to try to explain it now but there really was this ominous, dark, foreboding feeling that would always overtake me as I was coming down.
The more I did acid, it was a very gradual change, but the more that I did, the more I noticed that I was having less fun on it and longer periods of feeling horrible like that. Now, when I think about acid, I do not really think about the fun I had on it. I think about the horrible feeling I’d get after the fun was over.
Blech. I’ll never touch that stuff again.
And remember kids, LSD is illegal in the USA.
I’m probably going to repeat a little of what other people have, but I’ve done lots of drugs, and during my college years tried anything I could get my hands on at least once:
Pot - One of the few drugs I really enjoyed. Depending on the type of weed you get your high can range from sleepy/lethargic to semi-energetic. I ALWAYS get the munchies.
Coke - One of my least favorite. For me, the experience was far too tense and energetic. I’m not by nature a tense person, so I didn’t like feeling stressed out when I was supposed to be having a good time.
Acid - Did a lot of this in college, and enjoyed it as long as I had some weed to come down with. This of your mind and body in an overdrive of hallucination and thinking. Only ever had one “bad” trip, and that was when a friend who didn’t know I was tripping told me about another friend who had committed suicide. I spent much of the night trying to maintain my sanity, and it wasn’t easy. Basically lucked out and had some friends that kept talking me down when I’d get out of control.
Ecstasy - Another favorite. The best way I could describe it is that everything you see, do, and touch is just about the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, done, or touched. Sex is overrated on X, at least it was for me.
Speed (Meth) - Kind of like a nightmare coke binge that just won’t stop. I only tried this once, and disliked it immensely.
Mescaline - Only tried this one once too, and think I got a bad batch. Basically didn’t do much for me.
Heroin - Never injected, just smoked it with weed. Generally made the highs higher and more lethargic.
Opium - Very similar to pot, but the laid back lethargic feeling is more powerful and lasts longer.
Shrooms - Did a bunch of these, usually by making tea. Very low key hallucinatations, very laid back. The comment by NurseCarme was very appropriate.
Have done a number of painkillers and sedatives, but you probably know those effects yourself.
And, oh yeah, drugs are bad, M’kay?
Nitrous–not the chintzy little whippits, but nitrous from a tank is insane. When you huff out, you hear a constant ‘wah wah wah wah’ in your head that recedes as you come back to reality. I always felt as if I was just a scintillion away from some huge cosmic secret when I was out. As if the gods were whispering in my ear, but I could only understand every second or third word. I loved it and was terrified by it at the same time. I’d never do it again.
Coke–I was a needle freak and so rarely snorted it. Instead, I’d do a shot and immediately vomit. You sweat, shudder, and your jaw locks into a clench. Then I’d spend the next twenty minutes or so feeling as if I could run a marathon, charm a roomful of strangers, and write the great american novel simultaneously before going off for my next shot. I loved it at the time, but looking back it doesn’t seem quite worth all the money I spent on it.
Heroin–I only did H a handful of times, the pharmaceutical versions were my poisons of choice–Oxys and Dilaudid. As the needle pulls out, you can feel the drug rushing up your arm to wrap your heart, neck, and head in a big fuzzy hug. Your spine tingles, buzzes, and then relaxes into a blissful jelly-like state. I’d spend the next few hours nodding out, scratching myself, and rubbing my nose, trying to figure out how, where, and when I could get my next dose. Regular use makes you constipated as hell, which wasn’t ever a big issue since I rarely ate when I was on my tears. All of your time, effort, and thoughts go into getting more money, any way you can. I kicked, relapsed, kicked, relapsed, and finally got clean for good three years ago this fall. I’d like to say that I never want to do these drugs again, but sometimes a craving sneaks up on me so strong I can taste the drug in the back of my throat. It’s surprising and painful, like a sucker punch from an attacker you didn’t even know was in the room. I just have to tough them out, and remind myself how little I liked myself during those times, regardless of how good the drug felt.
The absolutely most *intense * drug experience I ever had though, was shooting X. I did it once and only once and as soon as I hit the plunger I knew I’d made a mistake. The entire room bowed in toward me and kissed me atop my head. The walls spun, my belly dropped, and my head felt as if it were no longer attached to my neck. I could feel my heart beating at two or three times its normal rate, and I couldn’t feel my limbs. I collapsed. The buzz didn’t last long–maybe twenty or thirty minutes–but it was really frightening. Never, never, NEVER do this. I honestly feel lucky to be alive when I think about it.
I was in a room with a kid who did this…I really thought he was going to die right there. It was scary to watch.