Do YOU take drugs?

[bigmick22]

Beer and whiskey only for me - and very much in moderation

[pacman]

the moderate moderator, how apt...

[titleist]

Tried cocaine only once, while on holiday in Vegas in the mid 80's, had a ripper of a night but the next 2 days i was dead on my feet. Very easy to get hooked on imho..........nowadays i am more than happy with alcohol only.

[Stogie]

I used to do cinnamon sticks in school. It was cool but I just slept all weekend, watched Top of the Pops and ate Curly Wurlys...

No life for a kid...

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

Wow. I expected a MUCH different response. I am surprised to see so many "no's"

I played pretty hard in the 80's. Stopped about 15 years ago and don't like being around it today.

I am blown away by the devil that is crack cocaine. I have seen it just destroy so many lives and turn people into the "living dead" Thank God I never had a taste for it.

Now I'm a pretty boring guy.

[Rocket J. Squirrel]

(Stogie @ Nov. 09 2008,09:37) I used to do cinnamon sticks in school. It was cool but I just slept all weekend, watched Top of the Pops and ate Curly Wurlys...

No life for a kid...

I remember as a kid reading somewhere that you could catch a buzz from smoking nutmeg. I think we tried just dumping the ground stuff into a cigarette paper and trying to smoke it.

Maybe a little cinnamon would have helped.

[marshal]

Thank fuck i'm not the only idiot who tried smoking nutmeg The other popular schoolboy myth was drying out banana skins and trying to smoke them!

[strocube]

Snapped


€œIn the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey.€
-Beck
We are at Dave€™s house somewhere in the middle of late 70s southern California suburbia when the drugs begin to take hold. I hear zzzzzshshsh, echoing waves of an almost indiscernible, vaguely insectoid buzzing sound, getting louder, crescendoing, fading out, then coming back a few seconds, minutes, hours, days, eons later. My mouth tastes like I€™ve been sucking on a handful of loose change. €œWhat the fuck is going on?€ €œWhere are all the pretty colors and dancing elves?€ €œOh shit.€ €œFuck, I gotta get outta here, man!€
I had scored a hit of acid at lunch from Benny; a tab of €œWhite Lightning€, five bucks. Cool. I eat it and proceede to walk of campus.
I blame disco. I used to love to go to school dances when I was in junior high. They would play rock music, like T. Rex, David Bowie and Alice Cooper, maybe some cool oldies like The Dave Clark Five and Chuck Berry, perhaps some mellow Carol King stuff for the girls. Sometimes girls would even ask me to slow-dance--heaven. Sometimes they would even have live local bands playing for us. I can still hear the endless garage-band versions of €œSmoke On The Water€ reverberating through the gym. There was the requisite adolescent sexual tension. It was fun. I never missed a dance.
By the time I got into 10th grade, which for us was the beginning of high school, they were playing nothing but disco at all school dances. Too young to appreciate the irony and kitsch of it all, and perhaps a bit too dense to take advantage of the possibilities for getting laid, I bailed on the whole thing. €œDisco sucks, man.€ I could not relate. My grasp of the experience that had been junior high had been somewhat tenuous to begin with. I was barely there. I did have a few friends and an art teacher, Mr. Johnson, whom I liked and respected, and these more or less kept me connected to €œthe system€. High school was a different story all together. I did not make a graceful transition. Somewhat of an odd creature, I was adrift amidst the various crosscurrents of cliques, hormones, feathered hair, bell-bottoms and the expectations of others that I was neither equipped nor prepared to make sense of or deal with in any way that may have been of some value to me. I got stoned. If I couldn€™t or wouldn€™t play along at least I could say, €œFuck you, I want no part of this nonsense!€ That€™s what I did.
Recently chemically enhanced but not yet high, I was leaving campus when I ran into my friend Mark. €œHey man, What€™s going on?€ he asked.
€œNothin€™, I just ate a hit of acid.€
€œBenny€™s White Lightning?€
€œYeah, how€™d you know?€
€œHoly fuck man, I heard that shit is really strong.€
€œAlright.€
€œThat€™s cool, I got some angel dust. You wanna go over to Dave€™s and hang
out?€
€œ€˜Kay.€
Off to Dave€™s we walked. His house was a few blocks and about a fifteen-minute walk away from the school. Now Dave had always been a fat pretentious douche bag, but his parents were almost never around and he always had decent music, beer and munchies. Given my impending altered state I had no interest in either food or beer, but at least his house was someplace we could smoke, hang out and trip out for a while. I was seventeen, a senior at J.F. Kennedy High School in La Palma CA, and eating a tab of acid, smoking some angel dust and tripping my balls off seemed to me an excellent way to spend my afternoon.
While I€™m waiting for the acid to kick in we€™re sitting in Dave€™s backyard listening to Mott the Hoople and me and Mark are passing his PCP laced joint back and forth. Dave is not interested in our chemical recreation. After a few hits I€™ve had enough and I spark up a Marlborough. Mark gets up and walks into the kitchen to get a beer. From my perch on the picnic table in the backyard I can see the two of them through the kitchen window. Why are Dave and Mark talking about me? What are they saying? Why is Dave making strange faces at me and taping on the window? Maybe he knows I think he€™s a douche bag. What the hell is that oscillating buzzing sound? Why are there strange ominous voices and sinister whispers in the music? Where they always there? Of course they were, I just hadn€™t noticed them before. I can€™t stay here. I get up; walk out the back yard and into the street.
The air is smoggy, heavy, metallic; no joy in this grey diffused sunshine. I fall into the currents of those tidy suburban streets like a frightened sleepwalker in the grips of a nightmare from which there is no waking up. I am waking up; that is the nightmare. I drift along not knowing exactly where I€™m going or why. My mind is racing, yet everything is moving in slow motion. I€™ll figure this all out. Everything catches my attention, everything is reverberating, rippling and dripping with multiple meanings beneath the everyday meaning of things and it is a matter of life and death that I FIGURE IT OUT RIGHT NOW!
Cars go by, they elongate as they pass, their shape and length corresponding precisely to the Doppler effect of the sound they make as they pass. They are shorter as they approach and longer as they move away. I swear I can hear the radios in the cars. The people in them look like cheap discarded mannequins or twisted dolls left over from some deceased, crazy, old cat-lady€™s garage sale. I begin to discern patterns and hidden meanings in the movements of traffic. I know about Tuskegee, small pox blankets, mk ultra; I begin speculating about all the horrible shit I don€™t know about and how the ideological descendants of those very same heartless killers and mind-fuckers may have refined their techniques in the intervening years to maximize human suffering; then it hits me, somebody is controlling this. . .this, zombie zoo. That€™s what this is, a fucking zombie zoo and I€™m the only one who knows it. Jesus, I€™m a fucking lab rat zombie in some twisted bastard€™s, or group of twisted bastards mind control experiment. They are controlling my thoughts and everyone else€™s. I can€™t really see them but through their manipulations I know they are there. I€™m more scared than I€™ve ever been before or since. My skin is crawling. I€™m trembling. I€™m breaking out in cold sweats. I€™m hyperventilating. This is not a dream. This is happening.
The panic would come in waves, always accompanied by that zzzzzshshsh sound. As the sound got louder my fear would increase. It was building. Each time it was more intense. No sooner had I managed to calm myself just enough to keep going, than it would start all over again, weirder and more horrifying each time.
I€™m about to step onto a pedestrian overpass, when I actually step onto it I hear the sound of impossibly large machinery begin to click into gear. I step off. It stops. I step back on and I can hear those immense gears grinding into position. I€™ve got to get across. I try to ignore the sound and keep walking but no matter how much I walk the end does not seem to get any closer. Oh fuck, this thing is a giant treadmill and I€™m trapped forever. From behind me and to my right some scraggly zombie kid on a neon orange stingray bike rides past me straight to the other side. That breaks the spell long enough for me to get across.
I€™m pacing in circles at the corner of La Palma Avenue and Moody right where the Carl's Jr. is located. I think I€™ll cross the street. No, that€™s what they want me to do. Fuck them, I€™ll stay right here. Oh god, maybe that€™s what they want. This has to stop. Can€™t anyone else see what the hell is going on like I do? I stare intently into cars as they pass. I€™m literally foaming at the mouth at this point and waving my arms and shouting at people. The cops drive by and I stare right at them. I can€™t imagine what I must€™ve looked like to them. They pull into the parking lot of the Carl€™s Jr. and I make a run for it. They get out of their patrol car, chase me and wrestle me to the ground, cuff my ass and toss me into the back of the patrol car. I am convinced that they€™ll take me someplace and kill me, like those rednecks did to the character who played Burt Reynolds's little brother in that movie in which Burt plays a drunk Indian. Instead, they drive me to the La Palma police station and throw me into a little cell. They ask me what I€™ve taken and I tell them, €œOne hit of acid and some angle dust.€ €œOh, and by the way, all of this is fake.€ I€™m left to sit in the little cell for what seems like a couple of hours, although it€™s hard to tell for how long because at this point the flow of time is still a bit elastic. I€™m still horrified, but not nearly as bad as I had been. They tell me they've called my mom and that she€™s on her way to pick me up but I don€™t believe them. I€™m convinced that they€™ll try and send a double of my mother. I will not be fooled by some simpleton pigs. When she finally shows up I am satisfied that it is actually my mother. The cops release me to her, and off we drive in our family€™s blue 70s Chevy Kingswood station wagon.
My mother took me out of that jail and we drove around for a while until she could figure out what to do with me. While the more pronounced effects of the drugs had by then subsided some, I was still a long way from being okay.
Her friend Lucia lived in our neighborhood and it was arranged that I would stay at her house for a few days. Lucia and her husband had kids that were a few years older than me, and I think a couple of them were already out of the house by then. I had a quiet room to myself and the run of the house for about three days until my father€™s rage had subsided and it was safe for me to come home.
It took a chemically induced, paranoid, psychotic breakdown for my mother to intervene on my behalf, and for once to take some action to keep my father from beating the hell out of me. When he found out about my alkaloid induced adventure into tin foil hat country that day, his reaction was that he wanted to kill me for embarrassing him, and for the inconvenience of being interrupted at work by the phone call informing him of what had happened. It€™s more than likely that he wouldn€™t have actually killed me, but given the chance, without a doubt, he would€™ve beaten me senseless. I don€™t think the bastard ever said a word to me about my freak out.
Since the police had gotten involved, busting me in full loony mode, there were juvenile court proceedings to attend to in the coming months. I think I got some kind of probation and was sentenced to a few months of counseling.
I had a few months to go until the end of my senior year, and although I wasn€™t quite right I was able to finish out the term and graduate.
One of the unintended side effects of my trip through the looking glass was that it very dramatically put an end to me getting my jollies through recreational chemical means. I found that for years after my brush with the howling Tao it was impossible to smoke weed anymore because it would invariably trigger ragging paranoia and panic attacks.
While most of the time it seems pretty clear to me that there is no clique of nefarious scientists controlling our thoughts and watching our every move, it is true that we are all under control to some degree. Whether that control is due to ideology, culture, our own internalized beliefs about how the world works and our place in it, commodity fetishism, or religion, none of us are ever truly free for very long. You get rid of one illusion, and it seems that just as quickly you find yourself under the spell of another. The only ultimate freedom is death, and that€™s no freedom at all, that€™s just death.

[BAM]

When I was 15-16 I spent 2 years living in Jamaica thanks to my parents being involved in the luxury condominium & villa business. We lived in a villa located in the Iron Shore area just outside Montego Bay €¦ we were like the only people living in this area that weren€™t drug dealers. I quickly made lots of friends with the €˜neighbors€™ and for my first 6 months did nothing but party€¦ and smoke weed€¦ lots of it! We had garbage bags full of the stuff.. we even made our own hash oil under the pool. It was insane but it was like being on another planet just like Thailand€¦ but after this crazy lifestyle I got tired of it rather quickly and at the age of 17 I left Jamaica and went back home and never really touched drugs since. I guess over indulgence at a young age is a good cure!

[mirimark]

I voted; " I stopped a Long time ago. "
I have done drugs in my past. I've done every type of drug imaginable. The one thing I have never done was stick a needle in my arm. I never could bring myself to do that. there is just something about sticking a needle in my arm that really made me feel that this is above and beyond just having a good time. Never done it, Never will.

I quite taking drugs when I met my wife. I did fall off the wagon a couple of times, but when she got pregnant with my child I totally stopped and haven't did any since.

P.S.
Pot Smoking ? I've tried it but I am one of those who are Elergic to THC. I can't be with in 50ft. of pot smoke or i'll break out in hives and fall to my knees gasping for Oxygen. I learned this one when I was 15yr's old in the High School Weight Room Lifting with my wresting team. They had to call the ambulance, they all thought i was dying. Needless to say, we all got busted and suspended from school for a week.

[Guest]

In LOS I avoid people who dabble in anything illegal, really don't need the potential hassles from the BIB and I don't like it anyway.

Cigs & Beer, that'll do me

[Guest]

I don't smoke cigs & I don't drink.I have smoked ganga from about age 17 up until age 21.I started again at about age 36 and have been a moderate user ever since.I am now 51.There's nothing better than a couple of spliffs before getting down to a very long session of hot lusty sex.I find that it hightens and prolongs my sessions for up to 2 hours at a time.
When it comes to destroying a few brain cells it is my vice of choice.

[ohnoriceagain]

(TTChang @ Nov. 08 2008,02:00)

(ohnoriceagain @ Nov. 08 2008,09:22) Drugs are fun.

Seen heroin addiction first hand? I have ... Not fun. And not me fortunately. I visited the Opium Museum at the Golden Triangle yesterday - what an industry that was (still is?)

Four males in my family...two were junkies. One is alive, one is dead.

I've chased the dragon (2x) but never stuck a needle.

[surropan]

(marshal @ Nov. 08 2008,01:28) I also have a friend who years back abused cocaine  to serious levels and had his first heart attack at 39!  

I used to be addicted to coke. Nasty stuff, that.

[surropan]

(lbmax @ Nov. 10 2008,04:36) In LOS I avoid people who dabble in anything illegal

You mean like prostitution?