DOSE:	repeated	insufflated	Amphetamines	(ground / crushed)
	repeated	oral	Amphetamines	(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

110 lb

My experiences with amphetamines - adderall and dexedrine - relate mostly to academics, which is the ONLY reason I used them. I never took amphetamines with alcohol or weed, and highly advice against mixing this sort of thing.

Usage: I first took adderall during finals week of last semester (we'll say May 2006). Some kid was selling it for $4/20mg pills, a complete rip off. But I grabbed some anyway because I was doing absolutely horribly academically and was planning on pulling a lot of all-nighters this week to try and salvage what little I could of my academic performance. I can't remember how much I took that first week. Lots, an awful lot – not a smart thing to do. I snorted most of them and popped a few for longer lasting results. I started taking 60 or 80 mg at a time, all if not most of it insufflated, and the high was amazing and very intense. I started up on it again this semester but lowered my intake quite significantly, and only took XRs. After awhile, I stopped snorting them and took them regularly. Then I graduated to taking one a day, and now I am taking 10-15mgs of prescribed dexedrine. Below is my experience with all of this.

Effects: The effects were amazing. Euphoria and a robot-like work ethic. Once I got myself to sit down and open a book, all I wanted to do was homework: study, read, write something. I also noticed a heightened sense of mental clarity and was so philosophical I would bring on intense emotional rushes. I could figure out everything - whether school or things in my life I wanted to change. I wrote my roommate, 'I'm sorry I don't listen to your problems enough. I am always here for you.' Other times, with way, way too much adderall in my system, I would talk incessantly and call everyone I knew, often at odd hours. Although I've never done cocaine, I imagine this is what it would be like. All I wanted to do was talk and be social. I'd get involved conversations and get very anxious when it wasn’t my turn to talk. The reason I think this is like cocaine is because the only time I’ve been around people doing coke, one of the girls kept asking me questions and would interrupt me before I even started answering, getting into a very epiphany-like soliloquy and had that crazy-world-we-live-in attitude I know everyone is familiar with.

Anyway, so at very high doses I noticed I simply could not stop talking. My thoughts were so clear, deep, and honest I had to get them out. I wrote out once a very detailed psychological explanation of why kids/teenagers get trapped in a cycle of academic underachievement (like myself) and why some people (like my sister) are always high achievers, definitely something I would ordinarily find way too goofy to put so much thought or credit to. Whatever it was, once I actually sat down to do something, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. The night before my physics final, I promised myself I was going to stay up all night, on my porch, doing nothing but studying. This was at 11:00pm. By 6:00am, an hour before my final, my goal had been realized: I didn’t get up once all night to eat, use the bathroom, take more amphetamines, or take a study break. In fact, I didn’t even notice or care how cold I was all night until I got inside and noticed my hands and toes were numb.

By test time, I took a few more. In fact, I do remember what I took: 40mg IR Adderall and 150mg wellbutrin. It was my last test and I was so excited to get it over with. I figured with the mental clarity brought on by the adderall I would do just fine. In fact, I ended up failing miserably (see below for afterthoughts on amphetamines + tests). I was so enthralled in what is normally an awfully boring subject that I ended up focusing too much on certain problems and lost track of time for everything else. My mind raced through the test carelessly and wasn’t able to think creatively and abstractly enough to work through complex problems. See below for more thoughts on this. Again, these are my experiences at high doses (roughly 60-80, sometimes 100mgs, spaced over a few hours).

At moderate doses (about 40mg), I had almost all the studying power of the high doses but much less of the euphoria. I could still stay up quite late studying and didn’t feel the chattiness effect at all. I felt very little of the introspectiveness I was so used to and I really think the lack of that “high” was helpful in getting work done effectively – I wasn’t so excited for things that I missed points entirely or skipped through concepts without realizing it.

At low doses (maybe 20mg XR adderall), I wasn’t expecting much. However, the effect was there, just a much more subtle feeling. I started to take one in the morning before classes if I had a long day. I have these hellish circuit logic labs that I literally spend probably 20/hrs a week on, at least at this time when I was less experienced with the material but the assignments kept pouring in. I could get through it more efficiently and the frustration didn’t bog me down so much. The effects wore off relatively quickly though (as opposed to high doses where sometimes I still wouldn’t sleep for 24 hours after ingestion), and by the end of the day I would sometimes feel tired, grumpy, depressed, not “with it”, and stupid. I finally decided that low doses were most effective for getting what I needed done. A lot less fun, yes, but more useful in the long run.

Dexedrine: After abusing and taking unprescribed adderall (both felonies on separate accounts), there was no way I would get a prescription through pure honesty. So I lied to a doc, simply fudging my family history to make my story more believable and turning my usage history into a story involving a diagnosis in high school leading to a script that I took myself off of, and now I want to give it or something else another shot. While lying to a doctor to get a prescription is on a pretty low moral level for most people and signifies addiction by professional standards, and although I can’t recommend doing this to anyone else, at the same time, I am so glad I am on this drug.

I am taking it almost completely as prescribed, I’m taking 5mg extra per day, but nothing huge, and am going to skip out on it over the weekend. No snorting, no crushing, no chewing, no holding under my tongue, etc. Just taking the damn meds to help me focus. I feel so much more organized and interested in what I am doing. I’m experiencing what every other ADHD success story kid or adult will tell you (let me repeat that I have not be diagnosed and have my own feelings about this “disorder”) – I can focus on my schoolwork, do homework, less distracted, elevated mood, more productive, etc.

When I was insanely high on amphetamines, I flew through material incredibly fast. However, looking back on it, I couldn’t remember most of the stuff or remember how to do it. I can’t tell if this stems from a difficulty in retrieving information from a time frame where I was in a different mindset, or if the euphoria gave me a false sense of confidence. I think a large portion of it comes from the second explanation, though. I was so careless I would hardly get anything right, although I’d brush everything off as, oh, silly me, I just wrote it down wrong. Instead of admitting to myself that the medication was actually interfering with my studying, I just took more so I wouldn’t lose all the information I had just jammed into my head. During tests, I ended up performing quite poorly a number of times when I think I could have done better had I not been on an amphetamine binge. Although the tiredness is not there, lack of sleep does, I believe, catch up to me when I don’t expect it and I simply cannot think straight.

It’s also very difficult to keep track of time and I end up “hyperfocusing” on figments of a problem or the test and can’t convince myself to prioritize my time better. Then there’s the crash…I can have crashing symptoms WHILE buzzing from more amphetamine. During one of my tests, the stress really caught up to me on a problem that I know I could do, it was just very complicated and I needed to focus hard on it. The amphetamine-induced psychosis came on to me unexpectedly and gave me a horrible panic attack. What happened was this: I got nervous. Normal reaction. Then came a feeling of panic. Still normal, though a lot stronger than what would normally happen. Suddenly, my vision becomes tunneled and dark. I’m terrified. My heart is pounding. I’m convinced I’m about to have a heart attack, a seizure, or faint. I’m hoping those around me will notice and get me medical attention, and the professor will let me retake the test.

Then there’s voices. I knew they were only in my head but it was still so terrifying in a way I can’t begin to explain. I couldn’t distinguish what they were saying, they were just yelling and screaming at me. I grabbed onto the desk as hard as I could and closed my eyes and took deep breaths until it went away. It did go away, but guess what? It could have badly screwed up a one time only opportunity to take this test. I can’t just go back to the professor and explain, uh, sorry, I was hearing voices, can I take it again? Anyway, this is why I would not take large doses before a test.

A normal dose, although a helluva lot less fun, is so much more safe, so much more effective, and so much easier to get a hold of than to constantly bombard my body with more and more amphetamines. In all honesty, I probably will take a high dose of this stuff from time to time. The high *is* amazing, and nothing can take away from that. But it’s also so much more important, if I'm taking it for studying, to remember why I am taking it. The psychosis, from what I’ve seen and experienced, is relatively common. I also got “speed acne” after my longest binge and let me tell you, it was not pretty.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 56313
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 5, 2008	Views: 58,640
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Amphetamines (6) : General (1), Multi-Day Experience (13), Retrospective / Summary (11), School (35)