DOSE:	repeated		Wormwood
	repeated		Absinthe
	repeated		Various

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

I started to read a good deal of experiences with wormwood over the summer and grew curious. In addition to devoting a good deal of time in college to serious psychedelic experimentation, I had tried a number of legal entheogens over the past three years. I had a great deal of success with salvia d. but was disappointed by most everything else I tried, blue lotus, sinicuichi, damiana, kanna, etc. I wasn't terribly excited by the prospect of trying belladonna or datura just yet but the accounts I read of psychedelic experiences on wormwood fascinated me.

I remember buying an ounce of wormwood back in my freshman year of undergrad when I was taking herbs medicinally on a regular basis. It was old but I decided to try and make it into a tea, as I remember using it in much smaller dosages as a tonic and figured that a higher dosage would let the hallucinagenic properties of the herb come through. I felt incredibly relaxed after ten or fifteen minutes, and was in a pleasant, dreamy state for the majority of that day.

I bought a fresh ounce of wormwood as well as yohimbe, skullcap, and gingko at an apothecary downtown to make the tea Rouge Pyschonaut describes in his submission. I followed his preparation exactly and had a really pleasant time - I was just as deeply relaxed as I had been the day before on the tea I made from the older wormwood, but the yohimbe had this syngergistic effect with the wormwood that gave me an intense amount of 'up', which I did not experience from a tea of the same dosage - two tablespoons - of yohimbe alone. I started dancing in my apartment as if I was on MDMA, with this overwhelming need to keep moving and an incredible delight in the sensation.

I came down from the 'up' of the tea and smoked a bowl of delivery service ganja, after which I decided to lay down and gaze at a saffron and red 'om' tapestry that is usually pretty trippy. Crimson rays stretched out as halos around red 'om' silk screens that started to twitch and waver in the low light of my bedroom. I didn't have any other visuals to speak of, and the next night when I tried the tea without smoking I got so bored that I eventually broke down at hour two and pulled out the bong anyway. The tea was close to a good salvia tea when cannabis got involved, but without I was unable to get much of an effect.

I tried smoking wormwood but got nothing but an intense cough from taking in such an enormous amount of smoke. I tried stacking bowls of wormwood with ganja and wild lettuce and got a little dreamy but nothing of consequence happened. I even tried extracting thujone in a half pint of vodka by throwing in maybe 10 grams and letting it sit in the closet for a week. I strained it with mulsin cloth and drank it with sugar and cold water (as if it was absinthe) and it was awful. I felt very intense for ten to fifteen minutes after drinking the extract and then just disoriented for a couple hours after. I went out for drinks with friends after having a glass of this extract on three occassions and each time I noticed that it didn't really matter how much I drank after the extract - I felt exactly the same. I was lucid but uncoordinated, and felt a great need to converse and yet a lack of eloquence or a difficulty talking.

I bought a bottle of French absente at a liquor store in the East Village and decided to throw a cocktail party the next evening. All of my guests had a glass of the absente, which tasted much better but probably had substantially less thujone than what I had concocted on my own. Everyone was incredibly talkative and drank an enormous amount of alcohol and smoked an impressive amount of ganja and then woke up the next morning feeling as if they'd had a cocktail with dinner and got to bed early. I was convinced that the absente had played some part in the social lubrication that occured and noticed a distinctive personal barrier breakdown half an hour after everyone's first drink - the absente.

I decided to try my crude alcohol extraction again, putting close to an ounce of wormwood in a bottle of Stoli and leaving it for seven days in an undisturbed closet. I felt incredibly fucked up when I drank a touch of the stuff before going out to dinner with friends. I didn't feel anything close to the hallucination or artistic inspiration that I'd read about, and realized that if I kept drinking the extract I might be too drunk to even enjoy the effects of the wormwood.

I had an idea looking at the half-bottle of wormwood vodka sitting on my coffee table next to my bong. I remembered hearing from friends of mine that they'd had good results putting cognac in bongs and hookahs. I decided to fill my bong with somewhere around ten ounces of water and ten ounces of my wormwood vodka. I loaded the bowl up with this really nice green and lit up. The effects were incredible and almost immediate.

There was this brillant spatial distortion suddenly, and stationary images on a distant laptop began to shift and dance about the screen. I could hardly feel my body, and when I did it seemed so other that I was fascinated by the smallest movements. I started writing almost immediately - nonsense at first, then a strange stream of consciousness in which writing became this oddly metacognitive activity. I wrote a few poems and had this sudden breakthrough with a song that I've been working on for the past few weeks.

I decided for some reason to start dancing - not because it felt particularly good but more because my body felt very strange and distant the entire time. I didn't feel the physical ease that I have with MDMA and instead felt as if I was working very hard to pull off movements that are usually easy for me. I was exhausted after twenty minutes and fell nearly comatose on my couch listening to the music wrap around me. I felt as if time was passing incredibly slowly, and I was almost disappointed when I could no longer take the intensity of everything and decided to go to bed. That was, to my surprise, three hours after I first smoked. I slept incredibly well and woke up the next morning with a dreamy haze over me. I smoked a much smaller bowl out of the same bong the next morning and felt most of the fun effects without nearly as much debilitation.

Luckily, I still have enough wormwood vodka to fill up my bong for another round. Wormwood's cheap, and so can vodka be if you really don't care about taste (and if you're smoking it, you probably don't need Grey Goose), the 'absinthe bong' is in my opinion the best way to enjoy the effects of wormwood and its synergy with cannabis without getting drunk as hell.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 56530
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 9, 2009	Views: 24,893
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Absinthe (4), Wormwood (50) : Combinations (3), Preparation / Recipes (30), Retrospective / Summary (11), Not Applicable (38)