DOSE:	1 g	smoked	Catnip	(plant material)
	3 g	oral	Catnip	(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

Last night, at about 8pm, after a day of cleaning my apartment and playing with my roommate’s cat I came across a bag of organic catnip intended for the little furball. So, for as much my personal enjoyment as the cat’s, I gave him a small pinch. He immediately licked it out of my palm and completely wigged out. Rolling around, dashing across the apartment, biting my arm, he had no idea what the hell was going on. After half an hour of this he finally calmed down and decided to take a nap. Obviously, the first question I ask myself after this display of feline depravity was, “Is there any way I can get high off of this?” In the past I had always dismissed catnip as one of those “legal highs” that was more psychosomatic then anything else but it turns out I was completely wrong.

I rolled up about a gram of the catnip into a cigarette and went out on the porch to smoke it. I can’t really say I care for the smell but the taste wasn’t too bad. Almost immediately after my first inhalation a very mild relaxing feeling came over me. It was almost like a mellow marijuana buzz but not quite. A better comparison would probably be the feeling of relaxation you get when you first step into a hot tub. There were no cognitive effects at all, it seemed like it was 100% physical.

Still buzzed, I went back inside and decided to make some tea and see if I could coax a stronger high out of this plant. I made the brew by pouring boiling water over ~3 grams of catnip and steeping it until it was cool enough for me to drink, which was about 15 minutes. Apparently some people think it tastes bad, I don’t know though, it tastes a lot like mint which I’m fond of so I was able to drink it without any problems.

No longer then 5 minutes after ingesting the tea I was able to really feel the effects which were very similar to being both drunk and high at the same time. I had some difficulty forming complex thoughts, several times I would be saying something and completely blank on where I was headed with the idea. Music sounded all right, nothing amazing, but there was a noticeable improvement to an already good Orb album. The most striking effect however, and the one that makes me believe that I react very differently then most to nepetalactone, was the coordination issues.

Over the course of the night and into the following morning I almost fell over at least 10 times. My balance was so poor that my roommate had to ask me several times if I was going to be all right. I knocked my laptop onto the floor and almost tore down an accordion-door to my room when I went to close it. There was also a strong sensation of spinning which came over me whenever I tried to move. Strangely enough my memory or ability to reason wasn’t impaired at all. I was able to watch an hour-long speech on peak-oil, analyze it, and read 2 or 3 diverging opinions on the topic before I went to sleep.

Now, I drank the tea at 9PM and went to sleep at 3AM still feeling drunk. The cat woke me up at around 8 in the morning to feed him but when I got up I fell right back down, still very not sober. I pulled myself up off the ground only to remember that we ran out of cat food the night before. So I kicked the cat out of my room and went back sleep until 1:00 in the afternoon when I finally got up still burnt out. As the day wore on my ability for complex thoughts gradually came back to me, as did my sense of balance. I would say I was back to baseline about 21 hours after ingestion.

I’ve done my fair share of drugs: nutmeg, DXM, nitrous oxide, opiates, marijuana, amphetamines, mushrooms, mescaline, LSD, 2-CE, 2-CI, 5-MEO-DMT, MDMA… The only drug that has ever caused an atypical reaction has been prescription opiates, which make my head spin and have caused me to puke on several occasions while just on a prescribed dose. Catnip had very similar negative effects to a 20mg oral dose of oxycodone but they lasted about three times as long.

We’ve read about people with different body chemistries having adverse reactions to common drugs, but I never thought that it would happen to me and while using catnip. Anyway, just getting the word out that it can happen.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 57996
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 6, 2009	Views: 39,206
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Catnip (68) : First Times (2), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)