Azrayne's drug geek thread

Izo

Tranny Chaser
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I spent a few years addicted to opiates (back pain, OTC codeine pills, tolerance, started extracting higher doses then went onto stronger pills, blah blah blah the usual story) a while back. Even before that I was really into the harm reduction thing because of the time I spent in the club/rave scene in my late teens/early 20's, combined with a natural curiosity/obsessiveness about all these chemicals which made me feel so great (and more generally in neurobiology, and altered states of consciousness - which I mostly achieve with meditation these days), and I ended up doing a lot of reading and research, spent a ton of time on forums like bluelight, etc. Throw in the 8 years or so of personal experience and that's it. I'm just a drug geek.

But yeah, Fentanyl is the go-to for EMT's this side of the Pacific as well - there was a big media fuss a few years back about ambulance operators who'd experiment with the leftovers, start stealing it and allegedly replacing it with water, etc, although I don't think it was actually that wide-spread a problem, just the media looking for something to scare people with. I certainly never met anyone who'd been involved in any of that, all the fentanyl I ever saw was patches, imported powder and once some taken from a hospital drip.

I lolled at the "allergic to anything but Dilaudid" thing because you're 100% right, it's total BS. Hydromorphone is rare enough here in Aus that most addicts don't even know what it is unless they've seen Drugstore Cowboy, although it's become a bit more common since they released the high dose XR pills I mentioned - in my 5 years of active opiate use, I only came across a source once, and that was obviously from someone who had knocked over a pharmacy or supply truck or somesuch (it was a huge stash of the 32/64mg Jurnista XR pills and vials I don't remember the dose of - given the vials, probably a supply truck, since I think any major hospital robberies would have hit the media). But yeah, online on the less reputable drug sites I see a lot of US addicts talk about the best way to get the best opiates, and most of the discussion is focused around getting hydromorphone.

As someone who's extremely oversensitive to the histaminergic side effects of opiates (to the point where I had to take an antihistamine every time I got high or I'd spend the next few hours throwing up and, in the case of morphine/codeine, breaking out in painful hives), I can tell you that in my personal experience, neither is more histaminergic than the other by a noticeable degree. In fact aforementioned morphine/codeine are the only opiates which stand out as producing allergic side effects stronger than the rest of the opiates - again, just in my personal experience (although I never did try oxymorphone or tramadol).

That said, and maybe this is just the junky in me, but anyone who specifically requests dilaudid is almost certainly an active user/probable addict anyway, and if they're in a situation where they're being dosed by EMT's then I'd think they're in very obvious pain and probably in a generally shitty situation, so I don't see the harm in just cutting them some slack and giving them the drug that makes them feel nicer for the ride to the hospital. But that's just me.
Hah. Like I said, I'm a drug geek. If I still used regularly I'd probably have a youtube channel or something where I explain the pro's and cons of different needle varieties and showed people how to use micron filters properly. I find drugs genuinely fascinating.

I have stories that are far worse than the IV suboxone one, but I save those for my shrink (and my nightmares).

Anyway, back to Johnny49's love life.
I smell spinoff thread!
And here we are. Tell us of Wonderland, Uncle Azrayne?
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
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Shit, I dunno where to start, 8 years is a lotta drug geeking. What do people wanna hear about?

latest


(personally I would have gone with Fort Kickass: Krieger's Drug Den for the title, but this works too).
 

yerm

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I have extremely high alcohol and cocaine tolerance but very low weed and shroom tolerance. Why?
 

Dookiefart

Silver Knight of the Realm
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I did so much extacy that I developed a stuttering problem. 10 years later and I still have problems.
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
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I have extremely high alcohol and cocaine tolerance but very low weed and shroom tolerance. Why?
No quick and easy answers to that, it would be a combination of factors. Everyone is different when it comes to drugs, a lot of it comes down to your neurological makeup, your psychology, your history of use and your metabolism. On top of that, tolerance to drugs is something that just isn't understood very well on a scientific level, a lot of factors play into it. eg. it's been demonstrated that your tolerance to a drug will be lower when you use it in an environment different to the one you usually use it in. Same drug, some dose, same route of administration - ROA - and you'll get higher if you use it somewhere you've never been before, as opposed to your usual hangout. I read an article speculating that this could be a factor in OD's, although I don't remember the exact degree to which the tolerance varies (which itself probably depends on how different the environment is). Thinking back, I suspect I got hit by this once myself - which resulted in a friend having to jump over the bathroom stall on Uni campus and slap me awake (my opiate years are just full of classy stories like that - luckily this was between semesters).

We'll start with shrooms, because they're the easy one. Like all psychedelics (although not all hallucinogens - eg. dissociatives like DXM and ketamine), you don't develop a long term tolerance to mushrooms, although you do develop a short term one. If you try to trip a second time directly after coming out of the first one, you'll experience severely diminished effects, but if you try it again a week later, it will be just as strong, as opposed to most other drugs, where tolerance more or less correlates to frequency of use and the dosage (although not always - my opiate tolerance climbed up about 5x over the year I was only using on weekend binges, but once I became a heavy user and started IVing, probably 2/3 or 3/4 days, it just halted. I hit the 200mg oral/100mg IV mark and just stayed there until I went onto suboxone 8 or 9 months later). So yeah, tolerance is weird, but as a rule, it's not a factor with shrooms.

It is a factor with weed though, even though weed has a slightly psychedelic effect itself, especially if you have a low tolerance, which is why you see the "wake and bake" crowd who can go through up to an oz a week and new smokers get couchlocked after a single bong. Weed is probably the drug/class of drug I know the least about, since I don't enjoy it much (nothing personal stoners, it just doesn't do it for me). Combined with the shrooms, you're probably just someone who's generally more sensitive to the drugs that have some degree of psychedelic effect. You might also have a mild tendency towards anxiety, which can be triggered by weed and psychedelics and will make them feel a lot stronger, I dunno.

Cocaine is probably down to a few factors - even among street drugs, coke quality is notorious for varying tremendously. Stimulants also tend to be relatively subtle unless you use high doses or smoke/inject them. People using coke also tend to care more about the fact that they're doing cocaine than whether they're actually getting a decent high, it's a real social/image drug, so people aren't as a rule gonna rack a line and say "yeah, it's ok, I'm kinda feeling it I guess," they wanna snort white powder off mirrors* and act like rock stars, which makes it hard to gauge whether you're naturally tolerant or whether you're just snorting shit coke and nobody wants to admit it. On top of that if you use it regularly, you're gonna develop a tolerance pretty quickly.

As for booze - like all drugs, you develop a tolerance to it the more frequently/heavily you use it, and you also tend to learn to handle it's effects better even when you're, biochemically speaking, just as drunk. Combined with the fact that it's a massive social drug in most of the world and people use it regularly without thinking about it, and you tend to develop a decent baseline tolerance with an even semi-active social life. Metabolism also plays a huge role here, your level of various enzymes in the liver will have a big influence on how alcohol effects you and how strongly it effects you (this is why a lot of Asian people get red and flushed when drunk, they have, iirc, lower levels of an enzyme which breaks down one of alcohol's metabolites).

If you're using coke and booze together (pretty common, although it's super bad for you for a bunch of reasons) each will make you feel the other less. The sedation from the alcohol will make it so you can handle more coke, and the stimulation from the coke will make it so you can handle more booze, so using them together you'll end up consuming more of both than you would using them separately.

So yeah, there's no one particular reason (although the major correlation outside of psychedelics is your history of use), what's important is that you know where your tolerance is at so you can handle your drugs well and not lose your shit, especially with something like shrooms or the booze/coke combo. Also a good idea to not let your tolerance to get too high for drugs you enjoy, as it never really goes back down (even if you go years without using the drug, your tolerance will shoot back to it's own level after using it again a few times, as a rule)

*which is stupid, because they're the most annoying snorting surfaces, really hard to gauge how big a line is when you're fucked up and it's reflected underneath itself. Not as classy but far more practical is plastic cards - those membership cards every fucking major chain store hands out these days are perfect. You can use one as a surface, another to cut lines/crush pills, and it's not weird for a dude to carry a bunch of them around.
 

Azrayne

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being a drug addict sounds like a lot of work
It is in a way, but it also really simplifies your life in a way which is both nice and incredibly horrifying. When you're not an addict, life is complicated, your happiness depends on a ton of factors - finance, family, friends, relationships, the economy, politics. When you're an addict, happiness is binary. If you're high or about to become high, you're happy pretty much regardless of the rest. If you're not high, you're too busy figuring out a way to get high to worry about the rest. It narrows all those shades of grey down to black and white. Obviously your life goes to shit in the process and eventually you have to pick up the pieces if you don't want to be a lifer, but at the time you don't really think about that too much, it's just "do I have enough in my stash for one more shot?"

I did so much extacy that I developed a stuttering problem. 10 years later and I still have problems.
That's way beyond my paygrade, but ecstasy is known to be neurotoxic and to cause long term psychological and cognitive problems (if I had a dollar for every rave scene casualty I partied with back in the day who's now in their late 20's/early 30's and on a pile of tranquilizers/antidepressants... well I wouldn't be that rich, but relatively speaking, it's a lot of people). This is even when it's pure - given that it's also notorious for being contaminated or substituted entirely, often with more toxic equivalents like PMA, drugs which when combined with it compound the neurotoxicity significantly like meth/amphetamine or, especially more recently, completely unknown research chemicals. Most "Molly" in the US these days is mephedrone, methylone or one of the dozens of other substitute cathinones (and the pills are probably even worse) - what the media were calling "bath salts" a year or two back. Every time one of these drugs is banned they just alter it slightly and put out a new version with no testing or research. The original batches were at least pulled from old chemistry journals or pharmaceuticals which are no longer used, but most of the Research Chemicals out there these days are molecules which have never existed until they were cooked up in some Chinese lab a year or two ago. So fuck knows what the long term effects are.

One of the most common psychological problems found in long term MDMA users is anxiety, so it's possible your stuttering is being caused by some form of anxiety disorder, especially if you find that it tends to come and go depending on situation/mood/stress levels. Beyond that, I don't know any more than, if you haven't already, you should see a mental health professional and a neurologist, be completely open about your drug use (even though a lot of medical professionals treat drug users like shit, it sucks, but not much you can do), and go from there.
 

Therage

Vyemm Raider
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It's a sad state that you don't enjoy the herb. Edibles and what not feel way better than opiates to me and I can still function in the real world without any major issues. Aside from random snacking.
 
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Dookiefart

Silver Knight of the Realm
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It is in a way, but it also really simplifies your life in a way which is both nice and incredibly horrifying. When you're not an addict, life is complicated, your happiness depends on a ton of factors - finance, family, friends, relationships, the economy, politics. When you're an addict, happiness is binary. If you're high or about to become high, you're happy pretty much regardless of the rest. If you're not high, you're too busy figuring out a way to get high to worry about the rest. It narrows all those shades of grey down to black and white. Obviously your life goes to shit in the process and eventually you have to pick up the pieces if you don't want to be a lifer, but at the time you don't really think about that too much, it's just "do I have enough in my stash for one more shot?"



That's way beyond my paygrade, but ecstasy is known to be neurotoxic and to cause long term psychological and cognitive problems (if I had a dollar for every rave scene casualty I partied with back in the day who's now in their late 20's/early 30's and on a pile of tranquilizers/antidepressants... well I wouldn't be that rich, but relatively speaking, it's a lot of people). This is even when it's pure - given that it's also notorious for being contaminated or substituted entirely, often with more toxic equivalents like PMA, drugs which when combined with it compound the neurotoxicity significantly like meth/amphetamine or, especially more recently, completely unknown research chemicals. Most "Molly" in the US these days is mephedrone, methylone or one of the dozens of other substitute cathinones (and the pills are probably even worse) - what the media were calling "bath salts" a year or two back. Every time one of these drugs is banned they just alter it slightly and put out a new version with no testing or research. The original batches were at least pulled from old chemistry journals or pharmaceuticals which are no longer used, but most of the Research Chemicals out there these days are molecules which have never existed until they were cooked up in some Chinese lab a year or two ago. So fuck knows what the long term effects are.

One of the most common psychological problems found in long term MDMA users is anxiety, so it's possible your stuttering is being caused by some form of anxiety disorder, especially if you find that it tends to come and go depending on situation/mood/stress levels. Beyond that, I don't know any more than, if you haven't already, you should see a mental health professional and a neurologist, be completely open about your drug use (even though a lot of medical professionals treat drug users like shit, it sucks, but not much you can do), and go from there.
Well, I guess that solves my anxiety problems. lol
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
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It's a sad state that you don't enjoy the herb. Edibles and what not feel way better than opiates to me and I can still function in the real world without any major issues. Aside from random snacking.
To be honest it kinda bums me out too. I wish I had a drug I could chill out with once or twice a week that doesn't turn into some crazy addiction. I drink socially, but alcohol by itself it's like eating plain pasta, it just makes me think about all the other stuff I wish was included in the mix, especially if I'm in situations where I could find drugs easily, so I limit my drinking to not reach the point where I start making bad decisions, and I make a conscious point of not using alcohol as a psychological bandaid because I'd feel pretty pathetic if I pulled through meth, opiates, ketamine and benzos only to end up an alcoholic.

But weed just doesn't do it for me. I've tried all the usual methods of smoking it, tried edibles (which were nicer than smoking it, but still not amazing), but my brain just doesn't like it. I stopped smoking it for 6 years after breaking up with my stoner ex, I actually just tried it again a few weeks ago at a mates place, we shared a bong between us of what was supposedly some pretty decent weed - I felt kinda laid back for the first 10 minutes, then I just wanted to go to bed and had to struggle to stay awake through the movie and the walk home. I remember when I smoked it more frequently years back I'd really enjoy food on it, and the sex was pretty amazing (better than sex on any other drug, although I haven't tried GHB sex, which is supposed to be amazing), but other than that it just zonked me out.

Do you ever regret doing drugs?
Not as a whole. I wouldn't give up my early highlight experiences with certain drugs (mostly MDMA, LSD and ketamine/MXE) for anything, they were very formative experiences and really opened up my mind and changed the way I viewed the world (although they weren't the psychological panacea some people like to portray them as - but I'm still optimistic about the current resurgence of research into their medical application going on), although ketamine especially, and to a lesser extent MDMA, I probably pushed further than I should have (I went through a period where I used ketamine/MXE as a replacement for opiates, injecting them frequently in long binges, which got very messy very quickly). My first two or three years of getting high I had a ton of amazing times with friends/girlfriends, whether small tripping sessions or massive dance festivals, it was like getting to dive into some cool wonderland every weekend, and I still enjoy those memories (even if some of them are a bit bittersweet given how it all turned out). Even later on there were some good times, or they seemed good at the time anyway.

Even my worst experiences with the hard drugs, when I was quite desperately addicted to opiates and constantly getting sick and being tempted to push my moral boundaries, or coming down from meth convinced I was about to die because my heart had been slamming away at 180bpm for the last 4 hours*(just like the weekend before, and the weekend before...), and just in general moving in those circles and dealing with the whole drug scene taught me a lot about myself, about society and about the world. So I'm not sure about those.

Maybe my life would be in a better place if I hadn't dedicated all those years to using drugs, or maybe I'd just have a different set of problems. Plenty of people manage to fuck their lives up without drugs, and I wasn't exactly a high performer even before I stopped Uni. I cruised through primary school a straight A student without thinking, so (fairly typical story) I hit high school and had no idea how to do all this "work" stuff I suddenly needed to do to keep up, blew the whole thing off to play games (until I started getting high around 16, at which point I blew it off to play games or party), barely scraped my way into aphilosophydegree, where I proceeded to attain mediocre grades for a year then put my degree on hold so I could work full time and have enough money to party every weekend - although at the time what I said to myself was that I "needed to figure out what I wanted to do with my life."

In a practical sense, I try not to think of it in terms of regret. It is what it is, I am where I am - there's no way of knowing whether my life would be better or worse if I'd made a wildly different set of decisions, so I try to enjoy the good memories and put to good use the things I learned from the bad ones.
 

Aaron

Goonsquad Officer
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Have you ever had to suck a shitcock to get money to get high?
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
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My browser froze up while I was writing out my response, so you get the first part of this in image format:

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This is a butterfly clip, to save explaining (great for larger injections):

blood-test.jpg


Anyway I worked as fast as I could while sweaty and shaky to get the shot prepped, the air out of the barrel and long tube and the massive needle at the end into a vein (I've always had shitty veins at the best of times, let alone after a few days of constant redosing, and I wasn't very hydrated, which makes it much trickier). I finally got a bit of blood to flow up the tube, press the plunger down about 20%, and nothing. Don't feel a fucking thing. But it might just be shit H (for the record, at the time about 60mg of the H I usually got would get me as high as 100mg of oxy/morphine), so I kept pressing slowly, in case it was buprenorphine (or almost as bad on top of withdrawals, meth or some other stimulant). So I kept going, eventually getting the whole 50mg in, and nothing. I figured at worst it was a complete dud, but the white looked suspiciously pharmaceutical, which made me suspect some kind of pill had been crushed in with fuck knows what, so I tried another 50mg. Then 100mg. Then another 100mg, then another, each time using a fresh butterfly clip/barrel and slowly pressing it in over 2 minutes or so in case something drastic happened.

Somewhere along the way I felt some edging of relief. By the time I'd hit 350mg of whatever the fuck I was injecting, I was no longer shaking or getting cold sweats, my pupils had shrunk down to slightly smaller than normal and I was just over the edge of the line into feeling comfortable. Comfortable enough to be pissed the fuck off, so I called my friend, yelled at him for 10 minutes, went into my room, ate a sleeping pill or two and passed out. 8 hours later I woke up with that feeling like all my joints had shattered and were poking into my muscles, and I remember a day of alternating between lying in bed watching the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and lying in a hot bath hating my life.

That was actually the second last time I shot up opiates - the last time was about 6 months after that, also with J - he got ripped off again buying from a woman who sold out of a needle exchange (hey, it's efficient) but this time I didn't let him pass the losses onto me. It was a pretty crazy two days and by the end I shot my last 130mg and barely felt anything, pretty much figured it was time to bite the bullet and call it there while I was ahead, or keep going down the rabbit hole and wake up one day 35 or 40, still living for nothing but the next shot. I haven't been squeaky clean since (went through a lot of benzos that year, although that was mostly self medicating, also went through a second round of ketamine binging, which is some intense, mind-twisting stuff when you're injecting it every half hour, and a while back I had a bit of a backslide into some GHB and meth for a night. But for the most part, I don't live that lifestyle anymore.

At the time I just put it down to J being hopeless and figured he'd gotten himself ripped off, but he ripped another friend of mine off about a year later (he sold a bottle of valium as clonazepam, which is worth twice as much, then left town, guess he figured it didn't matter at that stage... except his new start lasted about two weeks and suddenly he was back calling around for people to hook him up, swearing he hadn't done any such thing), as well as dodging me for months on some money he owed me and not delivering on a repayment in the form of a bottle of valium, so I started to look back on events in a new light, along with the time I gave him money to buy me some morphine capsules and he came back with 1/4 of the beads missing from each of the capsules, and a few of the other rumors I'd heard. Last I heard he's still running around, and he's probably gonna still be running around 10 years from now, if he lives that long. A shame cause he was a really good friend (one of the few of my drug using friends I invited over to my house) and came through for me when I was in some bad situations (did a two hour trip to drop off some valium for free when I was coming off a fucked up binge, shouted me loads of drugs, although I reciprocated, stuff like that). I think it all just got the better of him, some people just can't handle life too well.

Have you ever had to suck a shitcock to get money to get high?
Lol. Nope. Worst thing I did to obtain drug money was hock a nice watch a family member had bought me for my 18th BDay, although I sold a lot of other stuff with sentimental value and skimped on a lot of birthdays and Christmas presents. But I never stole, was never a dealer and never did anything sexual (I had an offer from one of the gay dealers I used to buy from in my early days - protip: gay dealers are the best, they had a much higher standard for their product because their customers are much more demanding - but at the time I wasn't an addict and turned it down). Though I met a few girls who worked while I was getting high and they were pretty much either a) nice, at least somewhat intelligent women who'd had severely fucked up childhoods and needed prolonged psychiatric care which they almost certainly would never receive, or b) the same, but manipulative scamming bitches who I wouldn't trust to hang onto a 5c coin for me. There didn't seem to be much middle ground, some of them had what it took to hang onto their humanity while living such a fucked up lifestyle, most didn't. Most of the overt hookers were older and not very attractive - the ones who'd been worn down after a decade + of heavy drug use. A younger woman with even moderate looks could attach herself to a dealer and pretty much get high for free, the more attractive, the higher up the ladder the dealer was and the more drugs she had access to. Whether you call that prostitution or not seems like splitting hairs to me.

My own appearance actually degraded pretty badly on opiates (though as a straight guy it's nowhere near as much of a factor, except it kept me single - which was lonely, but also meant I didn't have a GF I was obliged to share drugs with, so you take the good with the bad). People think of most junkies as being skinny, but I put on 20 kilos within 6 months when my use really ramped up - probably a combination of the fact that I'd started spending all my money on opiates and had none for weekend meth use (even a single night on the pipe burns off a few kilos, especially if you're at a gig or in town), the fact that opiates gave me the munchies really badly for some reason and the metabolic and hormonal changes heavy opiate use cause. I also started smoking somewhat regularly (nothing like a smoke after a shot) for the first time, instead of just being a weekend smoker, and my arms were generally covered in ugly, swollen bruises once I started with the needles (mostly healed up now, though I can see some faint scarring inside my elbows if I look). So yeah, I wasn't looking my best, and I was never Johnny Depp to begin with.



No idea why that image is appearing at the bottom as well, how do I delete the double?
 

hodj

Vox Populi Jihadi
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No idea why that image is appearing at the bottom as well, how do I delete the double?
You have to go into edit your post and go "Advanced" then click "Manage Attachments" and manually delete the image.

Took me forever to figure that out too.

I went and found a post I posted an image in to show you what you're looking for once you hit "Go Advanced" in the edit interface

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