DOSE:

repeated

Methamphetamine

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

Before I get into my story I would like to tell everyone that I've struggled with weight issues my whole life. I was always at an average weight most of my life until the end of my high school career, when I gained a shocking 52 lbs in 2 years from mild depression and giving up sports. The first time that I tried crystal meth I had already lost about 40 lbs from dieting, exercising and the help of diet pills (Xenadrine). I first tried meth with a friend who has very much into it at the time while I was at college, late one Friday night. I was around drugs a lot because I was in the rave scene at the time, so I was familiar with the substance, but I had never tried it in fear of snorting anything. I had experimented with alcohol and marijuana in high school, but only at certain times like parties, or holidays such as New Years Eve and Halloween. I was introduced to Extacy when I was 19 and in my second year of college when I met a guy who threw parties (raves) and invited me to one. I then started rolling every weekend from late October until the begining of January (about 2 1/2 months) when I started to get into meth.

I agreed to try meth this time because my friend only smoked it and had a glass piece (meth pipe) with him. He put the piece up to my mouth and held it for me while he lit the end with a butane lighter. (Butane lighters are used frequently when freebasing crystal meth because the flame doesn't leave dark burn marks like regular lighters do) He turned the piece from side to side as it was heating up and then after the pipe started filling with smoke, he told me to start inhaling slowly until he said okay and then I sucked it all in and immediately blew the smoke back out, (as directed by him), unlike marijuana smoke, where most people want to hold it in as long as possible. With meth smoke though, I don't want to hold it in because I've been told it can crystalize in my lungs. Immediately I felt very much awake and my vision was crisper. My heart started to beat a little faster, I found myself smoking cigarettes more often and also realized I was walking around my room, straightening things on my counter, and trying to find things to organize or clean. I will admit that I was a little disapointed in the initial feeling of intensity because, as I said before, my other experiences with drugs were with alcohol, marijuana, and extacy, and in my case, those three drugs hit me a lot harder, physically, than meth did. (I later learned that, for me, smoking meth affects my thoughts and emotions more so than snorting it, which affects me more physically. I also learned later on down the road that when you do enough meth at one time the body buzz you get can be way stronger than any of the feelings you get from alcohol, marijuana, or extacy)

That weekend I smoked with my friend probably once every 4 hours from late Friday night (around 4 a.m.) until my last hit on Sunday afternoon around 5 p.m. without food or sleep (I kept myself hydrated though). I did, however, go to bed Sunday night, having no problems falling asleep after being up the previous nights. I weighed myself the Friday morning before I tried it and I was 172 lbs.(at 5'7'). Monday morning I weighed myself again after experiencing a whole weekend of meth or a 'tweekend' as my friends and I would later on call it, and I weighed 162.5 lbs. I had lost 9 1/2 lbs from Friday to Monday morning, so as a dieting female, it was the most incredible feeling looking down at that scale and losing almost 10 lbs in a weekend from nothing but sitting around and doing tweek. I wanted to start using it as a diet aid and an energy booster so I then started purchasing meth whenever and wherever I could find it, and since I didn't have access to a pipe and at the time didn't know how to make any sort of smoking device, I sucked it up one day and just learned to snort it which turned out to be not as bad as I had expected... the drainage (the dripping of the meth from your nose to your throat that comes after snorting) was worse than the burning feeling.

On average I would go through about only a 20 bag a week (1/10 of a gram or $20 worth). After doing that from mid-January until the begining of May (about 3 1/2 months), although I was dieting, I wasn't exercising anymore, I had lost an additional 10-15 lbs, so I weighed about 150 when summer vacation came in mid-May. Not only did I lose weight that semester, but my grades were better than they had ever been. I was on average a 2.5 GPA student, and my GPA was now 3.0. I also want to let you know that during that period of time I was using meth only as a diet aid, I wasn't using it to party with on the weekends ('getting fucked up'). The only other times would be if I just wanted to stay up later one night, I would do a little.

Meth was a lot harder to find during that summer for me because I wasn't at school anymore and my hometown was more into cocaine than meth and I wasn't on good terms with the person I was mostly getting it from previously (not to mention there was a shortage in raves that summer). So, I just used my diet pills for my weight control while I was home and I got back into Extacy on the weekends. I only came across meth once that summer and partied with it for only a night because of how little there was.

My first weekend back at school again, I had moved into an apartment with a friend I met the school year before. I met a lot of new people in my apartment building and the majority of them, surprisingly, partied a lot with various drugs (depending on the person). I couldn't believe my luck when I found out that a neighbor only 2 doors down the hallway from me, had a best friend who was a meth cook, so the very first weekend I moved in, I got some off of him. Since I had basically gone all summer without it and wasn't quite sure of how stable the hook up was, I bought a gram off of him for $100, instead of the normal 2-3 bags ($40) at a time. I spent that weekend partying with it, with my neighbor and some other residents of the building. I had forgotten how much I loved the drug and it turned out that the hookup was frequent, so I ended up usually buying 3 bags off him. I would go through about 2 bags on the weekend and use one bag during the school week for an energy boost/mood enhacer/diet aid (I ate and slept during the school week). I went through this process for about 4 weeks (end of September) until my neighbors hookup moved and we couldn't find anymore.

Luck came my way again when one of my friends that I met through the rave scene, who goes to the same college as I do, found a hookup. This time it wasn't just regular meth; this was extremely good glass chards, so not only was it more expensive, but it was also more habit forming because of the fewer side effects you'd get from the added ingredients one would find in cheap meth. I started buying from him and we would party from Friday night until Sunday night (our good 'ol tweekends) and when everyone else ran out of their amount, they'd go to bed and continue with their 'normal' lives the next day. I, on the other hand, would buy more glass and continue to do it throughout the following week, but now it was different because I was no longer using it as a diet aid, I was using it because I got used to the good feeling it gave me and I was more motivated to do things. The problem though was that I no longer could just do a bump or two each day (a bump being a small pile on the end of a pen cap), I would start the day off thinking I was, but would always do 'just a little bit more' that day. My bumps were turning into lines and instead of getting 'energized' I was now getting high - high, to the point where I would just sit at my computer in my apartment and play solitaire for hours and chain smoke cigarettes and skip class because it was just too boring and I wouldn't be able to sit in a class that long while I was speeding that hard. I started skipping classes all the time, I got into fights with friends who didn't agree with my lifestyle, I was extremely defensive in any matter, I found myself getting annoyed more often at little things and snapping at people more often. I found myself losing interest in things I used to like, like going to parties or going out with friends, I would now just go over to my one friend's apartment and sit there and do meth with him and a couple other people for days at a time. We would just sit there with the tv on, on mute, with music playing and we'd just pick at our fingernails and chain smoke until it was time to do some more. My friend ended up getting a glass piece so we started smoking it all the time when snorting it wasn't enough anymore, or when my nose and throat were sore and swollen from snorting too much. I was now spending anywhere from $60-$100 a weekend to get high and an additional $40-$80 during the week to NOT feel like complete shit. I would try not doing any meth after one of our tweekends in the begining of the week and I found that if I didn't do more, I'd just sleep or lay in bed and eat all day, with no motivation to even get out of my pajamas, so to perform as a normal human, I had to do some everyday. Finals week came and I had been doing this glass like almost non-stop for about 3 months straight which seemed like 3 days because the time just FLEW by (sleeping an average of 4 nights a week; being up Friday night, Saturday night, and one night during the week just for fun) and my weight was down to its lowest it's been since I was in 6th grade at 134 lbs (Keep in mind I'm 5'7' and the average weight for a 5'7' female is about 145-160). Also, that whole time I was eating like a pig during the week and not exercising anymore but still was losing weight. My highest weight before I started dieting was 212 lbs and was 172 when I started doing meth. I now was 134 lbs. which means I lost about 40 lbs from doing meth, and 25 of those lbs were in 3 months. I didn't have enough money to pay for my bills, I had to ask my dad for more money, I lost some friends, I ended up skipping one of my finals cuz I didn't have any more meth and I was too tired to get out of bed for it and I didn't study for any of the other ones. I still had the same cold that I had in September because my body didn't have any time to heal since I was getting high everyday, I was depressed at night unless I was high and even sometimes when I was high, I'd cry for no reason and not talk to anyone, hiding out in my bedroom alone, my eyes had huge black circles underneath them (which I STILL have today), my pupils were constantly dialated, my face was as white as a ghost's and my lips were bright red all the time from chewing on them constantly, I had scabs on my fingers from constantly picking at them with nail scissors, I had red patches of blotchiness on my skin, on my arms and legs mostly, my knees were purple from bad circulation and my heartrate was on average 120 beats per minute. I looked like hell. I went home for Christmas break with a 0.5 GPA from the semester. I got 3 F's and a C. I couldn't believe it... I knew my grades were going to be bad, but I never would've thought I'd go from being a 3.0 student to a 0.5 student.

I had 4 weeks of sobriety during Christmas break in which I took the time to take a serious look at what I'd done to my life in the past semester. I wanted to make a change... I wanted to become a better friend, a better student, a better person in general. I went to my family doctor and he told me I had ADHD and ironically enough, I got put on Adderall XR (amphetamine). I had decided not to tell him about my drug addiction and see how the medication would work for me and how it would affect me. Believe it or not, this Adderall has changed my life... Not only does it give me the help I need for my attention span and motivation that meth did for me, but it takes away all the physical cravings I had for meth because it's made of a combination of 4 mixed amphetamine salts. It's also in capsul form which I'm thankful for because you can't crush them up and snort them like you could if it were in tablet form which could possibly lead to abusing the prescription. I take it regularly at 15 mg a day and it lasts for about 12 hours. I now am back at school for the 2nd semester and I'm extremely excited and motivated to work hard and bring my GPA back up. I've mended problems with friends (most of them, some I've lost permanantely) I look and feel so much healthier, I've lost more than half of my stress, and I just find life to be a lot happier... and a lot calmer and slower too. I'm also back on my original diet that mostly consists of watching what I eat and what times I eat. I'm not perfect though, don't get me wrong, I still have a slight stimulant addiction, taking in caffeine and diet pills daily, and I'm working on that... and I'm sure there will be other times I'll party with other drugs that I've done before, like extacy or shrooms, but never will I get into crystal meth like I did again.

I'd like to close this report and leave you with this: It is true that drugs CAN BE bad, when not used properly. If you are interested in trying any drugs, especially methamphetamine, please ask yourself this question: Am I happy with my life right now? If your answer is No, DON'T get into drugs... Please be responsible and mature and read as much information about the drug you're interested in as possible before trying it. Thanks for reading my story, I hope it has inspired someone out there...

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 20452
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 13, 2005	Views: 37,621
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Methamphetamine (37) : Various (28), Multi-Day Experience (13), Loss of Magic (34), Post Trip Problems (8), Depression (15), Addiction & Habituation (10), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Health Problems (27), Retrospective / Summary (11)