DOSE:

28 g

oral

Guarana

(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

60 kg

I was only 17 1/2, and looking for a viable alternative to speed or pills, and having had no experience with either before, I decided to purchased 50 1000mg Gaurana complex tablets after reading about Gaurana products in FHM magazine.

The night started well, and we headed off into Northbridge (The clubbing suburb in Perth, Australia.) I had had a few alcoholic drinks at the first club and was feeling quite warm and happy when I decided to take 5 of the capsules at once. It was quite unnoticable at first, but within 40 minutes I was running all around the club, feeling quite drunk, yet very energetic. After deciding I had drank too much, (2 more liquor test tubes), I had another three capsules. I by then had lost the group I came with, and was alone in the club that I had only been to a few times before, and never left the safety of.

I ended up leaving that club and walking the rather considerable distance to the main strip. I arrived at a new club that I had never heard of before at 1:30AM and walked up the stairs. Oh, what a site for sore eyes. . .Hundreds of bodies tightly packed onto the dancefloor moving to my favourite kind of music. I got up onto one of the boxes and started dancing. I was dancing very aggressively, almost throwing my body and limbs sharply to the beat. I coudln't stop, I didn't want to get down, I wanted to keep going and going, despite my racing pulse and ragged breathing. I kept drinking from my bottle of water, all traces of intoxication now gone from my system, sweated out long ago. Everytime I felt a little tired, 2 or 3 capsules would get swallowed. That would keep me going. Soon it became apparent that although I was nearly going to collapse from exhaustion, I could still hold my body upright and dance. I continued to do so for the next hour until the club closed, semmingly pulling energy from nowhere to keep dancing like mad.

At 6AM I stepped outside the club as the doors were shutting I managed to get a taxi home which was 25 minutes away. All the way home in the cab, noises sounded distant, I couldn't sit still, and no matter what I did, I was so hot and couldn't stop sweating! I was so tired, but couldn't even begin to feel sleep coming to me. I arrived home at 6:30 and got myself a glass of water and lay down on the couch and shut my eyes. I had seen that there were not very many capsules left in the bottle, and assumed that this was why I couldn't sleep.

When I shut my eyes, in the dead quiet, I could hear blaring music pounding directly into my head, the songs from the previous night came banging back into my consciousness demanding attention. It was like my brain had recorded all the music and was playing it back to me perfectly. I couldn't shut it out. Wierd images twisted and writhed behind my eyelids, sometimes crystal-clear, like looking at a photo. When I opened my eyes, the music slowly faded and everything looked normal. I realised that my breathing was very quick, and that I couldn't stop writhing around on the couch, and that my heart wouldn't slow down, still as fast as it was in the club, and I had been sitting still for at least 45 minutes.

It was then that my mother woke up, got it out of me that I had taken 28 capsules by myself, and took my pulse. After 45 minutes of sitting and laying still, I had a resting pulse of 155bpm. Mum rang Poisons Information Centre, told them the dosage I had had and they said to her 'He has ingested the equivalent of 300 cups of coffee worth of caffeine. Get him to a hospital, he could go into Cardiac Arrest.' I was rushed to hospital, convulsing all the way there, involuntarily. I couldn't stop my body from twisting and jerking violently, and all the time, that terrible music pounding into my head. I started to cry because it wouldn't stop. I was put under observation in the emergency room with a drip in my arm, as I was severely dehydrated.

I slept four hours later for a long time and when I woke up, I ate and went back to sleep for the night. No long term side-effects that I noticed. Except for a slight tolerance to caffeine.

Not a wonderful experience at all, be careful of the stuff, even though it's sold in a health food shop, it's not entirely safe. I do admit however that I grossly exceeded the daily suggested limit. FYI the reccommended dosage was 1 capsule every morning. I thought because it was from a health food shop it would be alright to ignore that.

I have since become a recreational speed and ecstacy user, and have linked some of the things from the 'gaurana incident' to a bad speed come down. Like the music, and the images behind the eyelids. But I have never ever had a speed comedown like what happened on gaurana. . .and I have taken alot of speed before.

Exp Year: 2000	ExpID: 5019
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 11, 2002	Views: 41,048
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Guarana (117) : Overdose (29), Health Problems (27), Various (28)