DOSE:

Methamphetamine

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

Meth... I did meth for the first time about a year ago. I was 18 or 19 at the time. My roommate's girlfriend was a somewhat habitual user, and one evening, they asked me if I wanted to try some. I've always lived with a 'try anything once' attitude, so of course I accepted thier offer.

I'd heard many people I went to school with speak of using meth, (usually called 'crank' around here) And the picture of it that I drew in my mind was that it was a relatively harmless drug that made you really hyper for a while, and made it hard to sleep. I live in the midwest, in a somewhat rural area. There were always stories of 'meth lab' busts covering the front page of the local newspapers and filling the top-story section of the local TV and radio news broadcasts. There were a lot of people cooking meth, and sometimes it seemed to be more popular among people my age than marijuana. Everyone was doing it, it was easy to get, and the general conception seemed to be that it was relatively harmless.

Back to that first night... I snorted one line about 3 inches long, and less than an eighth of an inch wide. As soon as I lifted the rolled-up dollar bill off of the back of the cd case that she had chopped the lines out on, my eyes began to water and I felt a burning sensation in my nose. This soon went away, and the effects that followed seemed pretty mild. I felt like I had more energy, and I was talking much more than I usually do. I also noticed a change in my state of mind. I felt happy, less worried, less removed. I couldn't sleep at all that night, and I had to go to work the next day. When I finally gave up on the idea of sleeping, after tossing and turning for about 6 hours, I crawled out of bed and got ready for work. My buddie's girl was still there, and from the looks of it, they hadn't even attempted to sleep at all that night. I was complaining about having to go to work after a sleepless night when she offered me another line. I thought about it for a few minutes before I gave her my answer. 'Will people notice that I'm on something?' 'Will I get overheated or dehydrated if I do this and then work outside in 90 degree heat all day?' I was feeling very run down though, lower than any other drug I'd tried ever made me feel. So once again, I accepted her offer. Plastic baggy, razor blade, cd case, dollar bill, a brief moment of pain, and then a steady rush that kept me going all day long. Work seemed to go by faster, and I didn't mind it as much as I usually did. That night, I went home and slept, and didn't try meth again for several months. Even though I did enjoy it, I couldn't see how it was worth the money that people charged for it, and I was more content smoking weed or drinking on weekends with my buddies.

A few months later, I found out that a few of my friends were doing meth on the weekends. I did it with them a few times, and within about a month's period, I was tweeking every weekend. Most people look at a typical weekend as 2 or 3 days, and up until this time, so had I. But when I started tweeking, the weekends turned into one long entity for me. I worked nights at the time, and when I got off of work at 6 in the morning on a Friday or Saturday, I would snort a line instead of sleeping all day. This quickly led into staying up the entire weekend, usually going through a quarter or half gram over the 2 days. I continued this pattern for a couple of months, until I quit my job and began working a part-time job only, with less than 20 hours a week. Since I had a lot of spare time on my hands, I started doing more meth, then more, then more. At one point, I figured up that I had slept only 3 or 4 nights in an entire month (not counting the 10 minute power naps that I could sometimes manage to slip into on occasion). What I feel attracted me to meth the most was the fact that I didn't feel hungry. I had been overweight ever since I was a little kid, not fat, but too flabby for my approval. I had only been doing enough meth to keep me awake, and to keep me from feeling hungry. But as the months went by, I built up quite a tolerance to the stuff. I went from snorting a quarter gram over 3 or 4 days to snorting over a gram a day. Most of the time, I did it in spurts, or binges. I would tweak out for 3 or 4 days, and then come down Anyways, after 4 days of tweaking, smoking weed and tons of cigarettes, not to mention not eating anything, I would always feel like shit, and didn't want to stay up any longer. I'd go into one of these binges every 2 weeks or so, staying up 3 or 4 days usually. After 4 months or so of this pattern, I slowed down quite a bit.

Now, I didn't slow down because of money, or because I didn't want to become addicted (if I wasn't already), but because of what happened one evening. At the time of this writing, it was about one month ago. I'd been up about 4 days, and had just bought an eight-ball of some crank that didn't seem to be affecting me very much. No matter how much of it I did, I still felt low, and very tired. At about midnight, I snorted a half-gram or so in two lines. This woke me up a little bit, but I still wasn't satisfied. I had gone through half of the eightball I'd bought the night before by now, almost 2 grams in 24 hours. After I did the two lines, I sat down at my kitchen table and started reading a magazine. 2 of my friends were staying at my place at the time, and all 3 of us had been up a few days. While I was reading, one of my buds rolled up a joint and started passing it around. I hit it casually until it was out, and went on reading. After reading a long article, covering a 2 page spread in the magazine, I turned to the next page. When I lifted my arm to turn the page, I couldn't feel it move. It felt as if my arm was still resting on the table, but I could see it moving. I still had coordination, but no feeling whatsoever. I stood up quickly, pretty shocked at what was happening. It started in my right arm, total coordination, but no feeling whatsoever. Then, I felt it spreading into the rest of my body. This was really starting to scare me by now. I began to panic, and started sweating all over. I lifted my fingers to my neck and took my pulse with my left hand, which I still had feeling in, and discovered my heart was racing over 180 beats per minute. I started feeling weak and somewhat nautious. I told my 2 friends what was happening to me, and they both told me that it was probably just some side effect, and was nothing to worry about. I wished I could believe them, but by that time, I was feeling more fucked up than I ever had off of anything I had ever tried before. I stumbled over to the couch and laid down on my back. As soon as I relaxed myself as much as I could, I started to have an out-of-body experience. My entire body was numb. I couldn't talk, and now I couldn't move. I couldn't tell if I was breathing or not because I couldn't feel the air moving in and out of my lungs. I tried to close my eyes but couldn't. Then, I felt myself lifting up off of the couch, like someone was peeling me away from my body, starting with my head. My vision began to fade, steadily losing focus until I almost couldn't see. This was too much for me, and I was extremely panicked. I felt like I was dying, I was thinking about how my Mom would feel when she heard what happened to me. I started straining to move my body, almost like I was trying to wiggle out of a headlock by some invisible opponent. And after a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, I began to come to. I felt myself fall back into my body, and then I began to regain control of myself. I got up off the couch, greeted with an intense head rush that almost made me black out entirely. I began pacing around the house, just trying to keep control of myself, keep moving. Over the next couple of hours, I slowly came back to normal. I couldn't sleep for almost 30 hours after that, without any meth whatsoever. I finally got to sleep. I experienced numbness, almost a dissasociativeness in my arms for the next week or so. That experience was the scariest thing I'd ever had to go through, almost as intense as smoking DMT, and even more frightening due to the fact that the drugs I had taken were NOT supposed to create those kind of effects. I stopped doing meth after that, at least for a while.

A few weeks went by before I worked up the nerve to do another line. I was eating way too much, and I didn't want to put on any weight. Since I'd started tweaking, I had lost about 30 pounds, but I still wasn't satisfied. So I started tweaking again, being much more careful as far as my doses went than I had in the past.

To this day I still use meth. I've used it for almost a year now. I feel that it has had both positive and negative effects on me. I feel much better about myself since I'm quite a bit thinner than I was, although my eyes have acquired a much darker, set-back look that I don't feel is attractive. I am a musician in a rock band, and the energy that it gives me when I perform is amazing. It has upped my cigarette intake to almost double though, making it hard to get to the end of those screaming high notes I sing in some of my songs. I don't feel that I've permanently damaged myself in any way by using meth though. I still use it in spurts, but I rarely go more than one night without sleep anymore, mainly because I don't like the feeling of being strung out from sleep deprevation and my tolerance is so high that its too expensive for me to do enough meth to stay up more than one night. It's the only thing that seems to help me lose weight. It also takes away the sleepy feeling that marijuana and many other drugs bring on, leaving me available to enjoy the entire high, instead of falling asleep. Sometimes I'll do it every day for a week. Sometimes I won't touch it for 2 weeks. Never have I felt addicted to it. I do it because I like it, but if I want to stop, it's no trouble for me. After a couple days on it, I'm looking forward to being sober for a while, and that's never changed. I'm not saying meth isn't addictive, because I know it is, and I've seen several people fall into an addiction that is hard for them to deal with, and almost impossible to kick. I've always regulated myself, and only fucked up once.

Meth is a drug that you must respect. Don't let it's popularity trick you into thinking that it's not harmful to your body. Meth is a very dangerous drug if misused, as with almost anything. It can be very useful if you control it, but it can pull you into a hole that you can never climb out of if you let it.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 10803
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 20, 2004	Views: 25,150
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Methamphetamine (37) : Health Problems (27), Addiction & Habituation (10), Overdose (29), Retrospective / Summary (11), Various (28)