DOSE:

smoked

Crack

(freebase)

BODY WEIGHT:

103 kg

Before I go into my experience with crack first a little background about myself.

I'm a student, 24 years old and have lots of drug experience (easily a good 8 years or so of continual use). Like many before me the path began with weed and for years I smoked, and smoked, and smoked some more. I was never addicted I just enojoyed it too much to bother giving up, as it eventualy got boring I tried speed and didn't much like it (posibly the only drug I have ever encountered that I didn't enjoy), then I tried LSD and loved it, and then onto mushrooms and I loved them even more, then poppers and extacy and once again I loved it all. Then I would complement the drugs with others in a glorious mix, and all was wonderfull.

Each progressive drug I tried I fell in love with, so in some ways my mind was conditioned to thinking all drugs are great.

At some point in late 2001, early 2002 A friend of mine Mike started hanging around this girl and things got semi serious, it later emerged that this girl, Liz. was a heroin addict and a full time prostitute to support her habbit. She also was into crack and the more she would hang out with Mike the more he would be interested in trying it.

One weekend Mikes folks went on holiday for a few weeks and needless to say we all ended up crashing at his place for a while. I don't remember the exact course of events but I can remember sitting around the dinning table watching Liz take a pipe of crack and was thinking to myself, I know its supposedly addictive but I really want to try it out, besides I am strong enough to fight it, I'v never been addicted to anything in my life, I'll breeze it. Mike had already trialed it a few times before but this weekend provided everyone a great oportunity to smoke without fear of detection and in relative comfort.

A pipe was offered and I accepted, it was as easy as just saying 'Yes'. On reflection its interesting to note how just one word can change the direction of my life, what if that word had been 'No' instead, I wonder...

The pipe was readied, a rock was placed on and I drew it up to my lips, all the while Mike and Liz offering me advice on how to suck down the smoke, hold it down, and breath it out slowly. I set the flame to the rock and began breathing in.

Its imposible to describe the effect, the euphoria that swells inside my head, the way the blood runs out of my gums as they turn numb almost instantly, The sickly sweetness of the smoke, the way my hearing starts to fade out as if I have my hands over them and people just seam to mummble at me through the haze. Its so wonderful that I don't really know how to go with it. Whatever fear I had going into the experience is wiped out of existence. My doubts over the drug are dismissed instantly and as the effects quickly wear off in a matter of minutes all I find myself thinking about is, more, MORE, MORE!

Often afterwards in my later experiences I would find myself scouring the table looking for that last little speck of crack that I could drop on a pipe, the effort put into scanning the table was beyond anything I can rationaly explain, thinking about it now seams ludicrous that I would be looking across a table for a dot of crack the size of a grain of salt and consider myself blessed if I found one, if thats not addiction then I don't know what is.

I have never felt so good in my life as when I did crack and thats the truth, nothing natural can make me feel that way only drugs could do this, sex doesn't even come close, if you where to offer me the posibility of sex or crack I would just laugh at you as I reached towards my pipe.

Try picturing taking extacy, take all that excitement, affection and sexual arousal from the 3 hours that a pill would normaly take and condence it into a short 5 - 10 minute sensory attack, and your close to what crack feels like. E's return me to normal when they wear out, but crack is like a pit and the come down, really does drag me down.

Crack makes me the most horny, randy, sex crazed person I could ever imagine, I just want to jump in bed with someone and go all night long, and on crack I can, its like viagra and speed rolled into one. I have heard many people say they can't get it up on crack and that puzzles me, because I cant get the damn thing to go down :)

My sense of morals and ideals get droped down the drain, nothing else matters other than getting my next hit. If your wondering i'm still only just describing the effects of my first hit!

It only gets worse the more I have. For those two weeks Mikes folks where away we would assemble and have crack each and every night, it was costly but at the time it didn't concern me about money, money is there to be spent, hell I don't even try justifying it to your myself, if I have money I can get more crack, thats all that matters, and thats all that we did.

Now depending on how I look at it I was either very lucky or very unlucky in what happened next.

With the amount of smoking I was doing it was clogging up my lungs something stupid, and it got to a point very quickly that I would start having real trouble breathing imediatly after I had a pipe, there where times when I forght that if I ever had just to big a pipe my lungs would just completly close, I would stop breathing and die. And thats what it took to persuade me to cut back (though not off) of the crack.

I have this theory on how my brain associates feelings to events, I take a drug and I feel better, my mind learns that taking the drug = feeling better, and the more I do this the more trained my mind gets. Pretty soon all I think about when I feel good is the drug and I'm trapped. I escaped because everytime I smoked while it was making me feel good, the chest pains and panic from that became associated with the drug, so in a way I was trained to fear the drug. I can only speek for myself saying that this is how it worked for me.

Its been a long time since that big scare and I'm still on the crack, though its only a weekend casual use, a release from the drugery of the working week, I conditioned myself into this routine and am happy with it, one good friday or saturday and then a week off to recover before I do it again.

Before the chest pains came I can safely say I was on my way to becoming a very serious addict. And it took a near death experience to break that addiction in my mind, I will never look at it in the same way that I did when I first started out. I don't get that feeling for just one more pipe any longer, and my table scouring days are over.

I have got that 'I can quit at any time' attitude back again. I wonder what I would feel like if I didn't do crack this weekend, but why is it I am affraid to find out the answer?

Liz is no longer on the scene as she fell out with Mike and they have since parted ways, I don't doubt she is still addicted to everything as usual. Mike however is another story. He started using it the same time as me and he is in a far worse shape than I am.

Try to picture a walking skeleton with skin hanging of the bones, thats somewhat close to what Mike looks like. He got into the drugs in a big way and months of no sleep, no eating and constantly running around getting agitated has transformed the poor guy. It got so bad his muscles where atrophying, his body was so low in fat that his muscles where being digested to provide him with the sustainence he required (much in the same way as neo from the matrix) and he was prescribed high energy, high calory drinks to put some weight back on and while he is looking better he is by no means back to normal.

I look at Mike and realise that I could have ended up exactly the same (or worse). Theres nothing I can do for Mike as the paranoia and aggression of the crack cravings has him in its grip, he will be offensive, rude and even violent if things don't go all his way. I have offered advice and its been thrown in my face, which is what I expected,

Every persons addiction is unique and only they can find their own way out, if they don't really want to quit for themselves then it's a pointless battle (which is why I expect detoxing fails so often) they just don't want to quit enough, they havn't found that reason that breaks their addiction. Personal misery isn't enough as the answer to that is getting more crack and the pain goes away, feeling suicidal won't work either as getting crack would ease that pain aswell, its got to be some reason to quit that smoking more crack wont remove.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 18267
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 17, 2006	Views: 22,134
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Crack (82) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Various (28)