DOSE:			MDMA
			Cannabis
			Cocaine
			Crack
			Heroin

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

Not more than three years ago, a friend introduced me to weed, and this was the first time in my life I had ever administered an illegal substance to my body. I had tried it twice before, but I had never gotten high. I had tried and many times gotten trashed drinking during another three years prior to my first time being stoned, but this was different. It was unbelievable. It kicked alcohol's ass in my opinion, and I fell in love, remaining today as my dearest (despite not being condoned by the law) form of release.

Since before our dissection of the subject, my father was always stubbornly against marijuana, as his opinions differed from mine. While he would warmly reminisce about his younger nights spent drinking with his friends, his views on the differences in the legal statuses of alcohol and weed blindly ignored the fact that alcohol leads to a higher multitude of more severe problems than pot. He feared that it would play the role of the 'gateway drug' for me just as it has to so many before, despite my assurance that it wouldn't.

In my head, I originally intended to smoke weed, carefully experiment in moderate doses with ecstasy and acid, and never touch anything else. My logic was that being intoxicated alone wasn't enough to make the experience worthwhile. I would only try drugs that had the reputation of enhancing a normally enjoyable activity. If I didn't abuse these two, and pot was harmless, how could I ever let down my family, particularly my father? I thought I had it all planned out.

One really big problem with the way the United Stated government handles marijuana is that by making it illegal, it shares a strikingly powerful label with the more harmful, hardcore drugs. As the D.A.R.E officers and health teachers preached all of the negative effects of drugs, marijuana was regarded no differently than hardcore drugs just as it is by the justice system. When people first try pot (and let's face it, almost Everybody does), and realize it's really not as bad as it's made out to be, many of them lose faith in the education that cradled them through the process of learning about drugs.

Also, the use of several different hardcore drugs usually begins with a single one (not too many people begin with a candyflip or a speedball), typically the most popular one of the time. If marijuana were legal and considered less of a problem than alcohol (as would be the case-i.e. alcohol- domestic violence, car accidents; marijuana- apathy, the munchies), then when my friends and I were first offered ecstasy pills, it would have been our premiere hardcore drug AND our first time breaking drug laws. I probably still would have rolled, but I'd have retained faith in what I knew of the danger of drugs other than pot, and more importantly, many of my friends wouldn't have rolled (particularly that large percentage of people who originally won't try weed because it isn't legal).

During the summer of 2000, I found a connection for MDMA. I had wondered and educated, prepared, and therefore hyped myself for the first experience. That summer I rolled about 20 times, and by September, was noticing what could have been permanent visual disturbances such as random, bright, flashing specks of light in my peripheral vision and a more noticable rainbow colored field slightly overlapping my vision when smoking weed (something I see as more of a frightening brain defect than a cool hallucination). I reduced my pill consumptions to once every two or three months successfully, however, my need for 'hardcore excitement' (ahem... from drugs) combined with the fear of being a zombified E-Head made me take up a first time permanent opportunity to try heroin (shortly after having just tried acid 5 times). After doing it nine times in a week (sniffing, I've never shot) and feeling subtle withdrawal symptoms, I told myself I'd have to be the biggest, retarded asshole in the world to get addicted to heroin.

It was during this week that my real nightmare would begin. I was never one for coke, it just wasn't my thing. To tell you the truth, I never really understood why people like to do it. The middle man for my dope connect (who was a white all around cool guy who destroyed suburban lives by giving them coke, crack, and dope) was an African-American living in one of America's most crime notorious East coast cities (gotta' reprasent that much) who would allow my dealer, and later, me to wait at his home (a crackhouse) while he got the drugs.

All he asked upon his arrival home was not usually money but a share of the junk. It was also he who gave me my first hit of freebase coke and taught me how to cook it using baking soda. As I switched between base and dope I noticed sniffed cocaine was fun when mixed with heroin. My girlfriend and I started to look like junkies because we were freebasing every night and doing dope two to three times a week. There were nights when she cried or we fought over our 'on edge' tension that comes from running out of cook-up. I wanted myself let go of doing it time and time again, but I couldn't stop myself. I hated my stem with a passion, yet couldn't muster the will to break it or not buy a new one when my old one got too short. I hated the drug for repeatedly tricking me into getting high to be high, and not to enjoy the interaction between my activities and the drug's effect. Most of all, I hated myself for forgetting that I wanted to quit and what it would feel like to be 'cracked out' in ten minutes every night.

Then, shortly after discovering that being cracked out wasn't a thing if smack was on hand, I saw my upcoming dope addiction ahead of me and why. Because I couldn't go without some rocks, and I couldn't be cracked out, my coke addiction had thrusted me into a dope addiction. It never got worse than three bags a day, but my addiction to dope at that point would have persisted as a problem (due to my fear of the withdrawal that teethed at me at the end of each night, not a mental dependency) even if crack ceased to exist. That went on for two an a half months, with occasional relapses afterwards, and would have lasted longer had I not been determined (getting smack was like a pack of cigarettes knowing the people I did).

I continued freebasing for months afterwards despite having run almost completely out of money, turning my family's lifestyle upside down, my girlfriend's family's lifestyle, and dragging my girlfriend (who ironically was fiercly against crack and almost broke up with me the first time I cooked in her house) down with me in my ambitious pursuit of failure and addiction. Eventually I ran away, so to speak. I removed myself and a woman I loved so dearly and had unintentionally hurt so badly from the situation. But before that happened, I managed to score a some illies.

Nine and one fourth ecstasy pills in four rolls in fourty-eight hours is what my girl and I think did the most damage. Coming off of a dope addiction can cause depression due to dopamine imbalances in the brain. My hairs will stand on end and my blood will chill any time I visually think about or see an image of a rock being melted and charred in the 'Chore Boy' of a stem for the rest of my life. My about 45 times doing E of course has its toll too, but those closest to me claim to have noticed a significant change in my personality and presentation of my own mind through actions since I did those nine pills.

The change (which other than my hopelessness and lack of happiness is unnoticed by me) is said to have been more sudden and noticable than my jaded, tired attitude caused by my dope habit and more detrimental than my continued longing for coke, especially a rock. I am however, seeing my relationship fall apart lately due to my unresponsiveness to her emotions and my lack of them. I wouldn't accept it at first because E is so great, but I've definitely altered my brain in some negative, permanent, way, and I'm afraid that I'm never going to be quite the same. I'm probably right to be afraid.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 10545
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 8, 2002	Views: 47,522
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Heroin (27), Cocaine (13), Crack (82), MDMA (3) : Various (28), Relationships (44), HPPD / Lasting Visuals (40), Post Trip Problems (8), Depression (15), Addiction & Habituation (10), Health Problems (27), Retrospective / Summary (11)