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DXM, THC and NIN
DXM (with CPM) & Cannabis
Citation:   Kevin S.. "DXM, THC and NIN: An Experience with DXM (with CPM) & Cannabis (exp4793)". Erowid.org. Jan 9, 2002. erowid.org/exp/4793

 
DOSE:
240 mg oral DXM (pill / tablet)
  1.5 bowls smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 175 lb
DISCLAIMER: My experience was with a dosage unknown at the time to me. I still only know how to gauge the effects of DXM with respect to the number of Coricidin HBP (myself and my friends' standard source for DXM) tablets taken. If you decide to take DXM as a result of this story, please know the dosage, both of DXM and anything else that is in your source, that you are taking BEFORE you swallow 8 pills of God-knows-what else besides DXM.

First, a little about me. Drugs and large doses of alcohol were something I stayed away from until my first semester at college. The fact that Mommy and Daddy were 6 hours away helped get me into alcohol, then DXM and marijuana (I'll call it THC or MJ from here on). To give you an idea of my tolerance to body-altering chemicals, 3 beers in less than half an hour got me really tipsy (still does sometimes). I've been drunk twice to the point where I could not stand up or walk without assistance, and in both cases I'd had less than many others around me.

Anyway, on to the DXM story. This is two stories, actually, a minor first experience and a longer account of my best experience with it. The first time I'd heard about it was when my roommate and a few of his friends had taken 8 tablets of this medicine with DXM, then gone to watch The Cell at the movie theater (I do not recommend driving while on DXM under any circumstance whatsoever). A couple of weeks later, I decided to take some to find out what it was like. Hey, it's legal and my friends have suffered no ill effects other than intense sleepiness 8-12 hours after the high begins, so I figured there would be little harm in trying it once. I took 8 tablets of a cough suppressant called Coricidin HPB Cough and Cold, for people with high blood pressure. One of two active ingredients in the drug is the DXM, the other is the decongestant. Each tablet contains DXM 30mg and Chlorpheniramine Maleate 4mg, for a total dose of 240mg DXM. 10 to 12 tablets (300-360mg) produces a very intense disassociating experience for me. The maximum I have ever heard anyone take of this particular form of DXM is that one of my friends took 16 of these (480mg), and had a total out-of-body experience.

The onset was 45 minutes before I started feeling the effects. I can see the effects of DXM before I feel them. Usually, my eyes are open wide, and the rest of my body is in a relaxed attitude. Once I start feeling the effects, it starts hitting hard in another 15-30 minutes. Unfortunately, I was sick with a minor chest cold and stomachache due to drainage that first time. When coming up on DXM, I feel an intense dizziness that changes every few seconds, and my vision blurs and changes to match the sensations, so the feeling is very realistic. I have the sensation that I am spinning in both directions at once, then it calms down and I feel tingly, with maybe a slight dizziness, then it waves up again. This dizziness in addition to feeling sick to begin with made me very ill. I was laying in my bed when it hit hard, and I almost made it to the bathroom down a long hall before I was violently sick. After finishing being sick, I cleaned up and headed back to my bed, where I spent the rest of the trip. Aside from this sick episode at the beginning, the rest of the trip was quite pleasurable. My sense of touch was numbed, and I felt as if I were floating. All pain went away or was easily ignored, and I felt very warm and safe in my bed. Many people say that the best way to enjoy DXM is to be somewhat active, such as taking a walk. This does increase the effects, but I have noticed that when not sober (drunk, stoned on THC or otherwise fucked up), I don't like to go out in public, due to a slight paranoia I get that someone will notice and care that I am stoned. As I continue to use THC, that's started to go away because I realize that no one but me cares if I'm stoned. Being in my own room my first time gave me a very relaxed, mellow experience. Eventually, I fell asleep, and slept for 12 hours, waking up slightly tired, but with no other ill effects.

The second time I tried DXM was after I had been introduced to MJ, but had never been truly stoned from it. From a sober start that night, I took 8 tablets again (240mg), and played a few first-person shooters until it started coming on. In my opinion, it's a good idea to play a game that I can lose myself in, since it helps the disassociative effects, and the effects come as less of a shock. I just look up from the game and realize it's taken effect. After I started coming up, I went down to a friend's room to talk, since my roommate was gone doing something else. My friend, immediately knew I was on something from the wide eyes. I told him I was on 8 coricidin, and we started chilling from there. After a few minutes, he gets out a pipe and we start hitting MJ. After the first bowl out of the pipe, the DXM started hitting incredibly hard (the THC hadn't started to affect me; most varieties of MJ don't come on for me for about 10 minutes after the first hit), and I got the dizzy sensations again. I knew to expect them this time though, and aside from an acid-tasting burp, I didn't experience any ill effects coming up this time. I was feeling the same tingly numbness, the warmth, and the sensation that my body is behind in its movements from what my mind is telling it. The THC from the two bowls of MJ we had smoked so far had severely dried my mouth, so I rose and got a glass of water and a piece of gum. It seemed as if my brain had stepped into a pair of stilts and I was looking from a taller perspective than my height allowed, like I was riding piggy-back on my own body in slow motion. I got the drink, noting that through the numbness the THC and DXM mix gave my nerves, the glass was very cold. The reflections of the light on the water became very clearly focused, as opposed to everything else in my vision, which became blurry and doubled. When I put the gum into my mouth, it tasted incredibly strong of mint, and the taste, though powerful, was pleasureable. I could not feel the texture of the gum in my mouth, however. Upon sitting down, my viewpoint returned to where I thought it should be.

Then, my friend starts getting out the music. He takes out a Nine Inch Nails CD and pops it in to his computer, then plays it using Winamp and a visualization called G-force. The experience was wierd, to say the least. By this time the lights had been turned off, but I just noticed it then, looking up to realize the only brightness was the computer monitor. The music was written for acid-trippers. I was losing myself in the visualization, while the music was skipping, tripping, fading out and coming back, losing an element and gaining another. I'd never really gotten into techno, besides the most tame stuff, and this music was something I lost myself in, to get jolted by something that wasn't there and should be. The visualizations were mellow, white fading through shades of purple to black, dots in circles and polar rose shapes, clusters, lines, curves getting tossed from the center to fall back in. I was on the edge of my seat, slowly moving and shifting, feeling the warmth from the THC slowly fade in as muscles flexed and limbs twiched slowly. I felt as if I were a taller me than I really was, slowly reacting to my thought train, which was faster than anything, slowed by my reactions and slowed by what the eye returned. At this point, I estimate about 3 hours after dropping the pills.
Then we get to this track on the CD that's just piano, fading in and out, still tripping in its notes slightly, soft overall, but with an anger to its tone and melody that could be felt as it got louder, and the feeling lingered behind as the music faded. It was beautiful, and J was really getting into the visualizations as well. He was leaning back in his chair, staring at it with wide eyes. Mine, however, felt half closed, and though my face felt as though I was sleepy, I was tensed with this nervous energy, which I now know is brought on by the THC and my current state of relaxation and non-movement. My head was on my left shoulder and trying to move further that way in starts whenever I didn't actively realize it and concentrate on holding my head straight. My mouth felt slightly open, but I doubt I drooled due to the THC. It was as if the visualization was turning slower and slower in small random increments and I were being turned faster to compensate. I sat there in that state for eternity, warm, numb.

This point was about the peak of my experience. 5 hours or so, I estimate (I wasn't looking at any clock, this is what I felt and judged it to be), and since then J and I had smoked 3 bowls of MJ between us, with about 5 or 6 good hits per bowl. I felt my body speeding up slightly to match my thoughts. My reflexes were coming back, and the nervous energy was fading slightly, but I was still very numb to touch sensations (I could always feel temperature sensations, and cold or hot, they always felt like they were radiating into me, to be replaced by the warmth the THC gives), and I was still a much taller me than I really was. I got up, refreshed my drink, feeling the coldness of the glass fading in, thanked J, and headed back to my room. Upon walking back, I looked down to see the top of my own head. The carpet was blue, and I could see a brown plane of hair that I was walking on, it felt like. This wasn't alarming in the least at the time, and although I still felt like I was moving, I consider it the closest I want to come to an OBE.

I mentioned earlier that moving around intensifies the effects. In the hallway, everything I had experienced before came back plus more. I never managed to lift my gaze higher than just below level, and as I opened the door, it felt as if I were on piggyback, not using my arms, looking down sharply at the knob. I entered my own room, and my roommate was up on his DXM which he must have popped about an hour after I did. The body I was riding on the shoulders of turned to look at him, he asked me something, and I replied with 'I am so fuckin high, man' in a low half-sleepy, half buzzed voice. I floated above my body, hitting my head on the ceiling while my body climbed up to the top bunk, and I drift into a horizontal position while the bed thumps as my body crashes. The last I remember of that night, I was looking at the clock, trying to see the time, but all I saw was 18:88. When I closed my eyes, those visualizations I saw replayed in my head, bursting into new designs and songs which have never been written. These got brighter, then grayer, then black, with the only thing I see being 18:88.

I woke to a warm room, a slimy mouth (THC kinda sucks the morning after), and a raging thirst in the back of my throat. After downing a glass of cold water, I started to wake up, and my body ached but obeyed instantly when I told it to get out of bed. The sun was shining through the closed blinds, and the room had no lights on, though when I came in it had seemed very bright, due to the white walls and a few lights on. I brushed my teeth to get my saliva going again, then walked down to the bathroom. Apart from being awake but physically exhausted, which went away after another nap, I was in no pain nor was I hung over in the alcohol sense. I just felt drained. That day was Sunday, I finally found out, so I was able to recover via sleep the rest of the day. I woke at 5:00 PM Sunday, almost 24 hours after I first dropped the pills. I got up, went to dinner still feeling a little sleepy, but no more than usual, and came back to do the last of my work as if I had just spent the last day out of my body. Which I had done.

My experiences with DXM have been good, on the whole, but I have to be ready for what I'll feel coming up on the drug, i.e. stay focused on something; if I allow my mind to wander, it gets very fast and intense, and bad images start to come to my mind's eye. Also, I make sure of my environment. I had little or no sense of the passage of time while on this, and I actually remember just pictures of that night, so more could have happened (but didn't).

Exp Year: 2000ExpID: 4793
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 9, 2002Views: 44,510
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DXM (22), Chlorpheniramine Maleate (164), Cannabis (1) : Combinations (3), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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