DOSE:

1 hit

oral

DOB

(blotter / tab)

About nine months ago, I had my first experience with hard drugs. I was sixteen, and at this point had never tried anything other than weed.

Me and a group of friends were supposed to meet up for Toronto's 'Nuit Blanche'. What this is is basically a downtown-wide lightshow. High-rise buildings were putting on displays, there were displays in the street, basically a tripper's heaven. The plan originally was to get drunk and join in on a freerave parade, and see where the night took us.

I can't remember now how early I knew I was going to be taking acid, but it was late enough that I had done next to no research on it. This was my first mistake. I got to meeting up with my friends at around 7:30, an hour late, for whatever reason. Most of them took off to find a really fucked up girl who was high on something and freaking out, so I just met up with my best friend A and we decided to wait until they came back.

She had already taken a tab about an hour earlier, and I was completely sober. I remember the blotter being a light brownish color. She gave it to me on the bus and we made our way down to the square where we were supposed to meet everyone. Our friend J got the drugs for us and assured us it was good acid. My second mistake was not questioning what I was taking. A was already getting kind of loopy and I didn't want to be the only one sober while everyone was high out of their minds, so I stuck the tab under my tongue without thinking twice. I remember it tasting kind of bitter and metallic. Had I done any research I would have known that this was a good sign that it was not acid.

We tried to call our friends but all of their phones went straight to voicemail. My friend was pretty gone at this point, mostly drunk I think, but we started to freak out because we thought we would be high alone our first times.

At some point we found everyone and things were going well. That’s when I made my third mistake, drinking. I don't remember the drugs coming on but I figure now that I was probably too drunk to realize. Somehow we got to the freerave parade, just in time. It started and everything was going fine, I didn't realize I was high, I just felt nice dancing with everyone and having a great time. About an hour later is when things started to go bad. I went inside some building with my friend so she could use the bathroom. We probably looked cracked out and insane, sitting right in the middle of a line to use the bathroom. Right after that A got a phone call from her parents who insisted that she got her ass home right then. Without much of an explanation she left, leaving me alone. I somehow got back outside and found everyone still chilling out, I figured it was way too early to leave and I thought I would enjoy the night. Probably mistake number four.

I don't remember why I went back in the building, but I remember freaking out over not having A there. That's when I met another girl, we can call her A2. We had some mutual friends and she was high on E, I told her how I was scared and high on acid and she told me we could be each other's buddies and take care of each other. For a while we were just walking in and out of places, meeting with friends and then wandering off somewhere. We realized at some point that our friends left, around 2 in the morning. That's when I got a phone call from my own parents demanding to know where I was.

I was surprisingly super coherent and managed to convincingly explain that I was staying over with a friend, and for her not to worry. Me and A2 managed to catch the last subway train and we were trying to get to one of the friend's houses. We found out that we got off at the wrong station and his house was pretty much unreachable at that point. But we were in my area and I decided that we should go kill time at a Timmies while the high wore off.

We got to Timmies and A2 fell asleep for a while. I don't know what the hell possessed me to do this, but at around 5 in the morning I left. I was tripping balls even though I wasn't even feeling the full effects of it yet. I remember walking the ten minutes to my house along a large, but mostly empty street.

Having cars stop and random assholes holler at you while you're high as fuck is probably the most terrifying feeling I ever experienced. I was convinced that any moment they'd step out of the car and drag me back in. Somehow, I got back home. Again, I did a pretty convincing job of pretending to be sober, my parents were so tired that they didn't even notice the fact that my pupils were the size of dinner plates.

That's when the hallucinations started. It was scary and beautiful and overwhelming all at once. I began to realize how fucked up I really was. I closed my eyes to be left with the wonderful kaleidoscope colors weaving in and out of the black background. I saw buildings that would multiply themselves, turn themselves on angles, and start rotating in towards me and out again. I saw four snakes, each holding a head of my teacher instead of their own, glowing green and spinning.

Probably the worst feeling was the guilt I had for leaving A2. I knew it was a dick move, even then. I considered going back to the Timmies but realized how insane that would have made me look to my parents. A2 lost her phone earlier and I couldn't text her. I just had to deal with it and hope that she would be okay.

Among all the hallucinations though, the most terrifying was the feeling of my bed rotating on its axis, leaving me helpless while I slid down into the depths of hell. That one was pretty bad. The whole time from when I A left until I got home, I was constantly on a mission of some sort. Find someone I knew, find a place to sleep, get to the subway, get home. When I was in my bed I was relatively sure I was safe, that my body would be alright, but as far as I was concerned my mind was still lost somewhere in the city. I had a super vivid hallucination of wandering downtown with strangers, sleeping in random attics, trying to make my way home. I knew that I was just tripping out, but it seemed so real that I thought that if I didn't do it that my mind would be stuck downtown forever.

The sun started to finally come up, and birds were chirping, and at this point I figured that I should be starting to come down. I didn't, if anything I felt more high than I did the night before. I got a text from a random number asking me if I knew the girl. I replied begging to know if she was okay and asking her to pass along a million apologies. I learned that this person found A2 at the Timmies that morning, gave her a ride home, got my number from her and was asking her to text me to find out if I was okay. Dear god did I feel like a bitch. What was even weirder was that the person I was texting turned out to be someone that I knew from years ago, we realized who we were texting and she started to ask me things like if this girl was high, if I was high. Really confusing and awkward but I was ridiculously glad that A2 was alright and safe.

I got a message from another really good friend of mine, M, who was not at the event but who wanted me to go on some walk with her at 9 in the morning. I was 99 percent sure her parents were in my living room discussing my state of mind with my mom, and after asking her to make sure I ended up telling her how fucked up I was. She was my saviour, she came over, spoke to my mom for a while, ate breakfast while I picked at some bread, and got me out of the house. I was telling her about my crazy night, and I noticed the grass moving, in waves. I realized that I was still high as fuck, even though everyone was told last night that we would be fine after twelve hours. M had to leave for work eventually, leaving me to do nothing all day while I waited for the come down.

I got in touch with A and we both wondered why we were still so high. She hadn't slept either and I began to think that I caused brain damage and was stuck like this forever. I texted J, who got us the drugs, asking to know when the insanity was supposed to end. He assured me it would be soon, even though he was high himself and didn't realize that it would be another good 12 hours before we even began to come down.

I basically spent the day on the phone with all of the people from the night before, all watching the same TV shows, tripping out to the same stuff. The hallucinations weren't nearly as vivid, but it was still enough to convince me that I was the one at the back of the cop car on MTV's Campus P.D. I understood that I would be high for a little while longer and that I might as well enjoy the trip. Towards the evening time, word got around the group that what we took wasn't acid, but was in fact DOB. I somehow got in contact with A2, and after apologizing a million times, began to explain that I was pretty sure I would be stuck high forever. She told me her close friend had been given DOB once, and that he could help me through it. I talked to him for a while, and by the way he was relating to everything I was experiencing, it pretty much confirmed the fact that it was DOB. He told me I would be high until the next morning, and to just relax and wait it out. He was probably the most comforting aspect of the whole experience.

Later into the night, around 11 I started to finally come down. It was the most amazing feeling I had ever known. I spent the whole day fearing that I would never understand the difference between reality and hallucination ever again, that I would be a brain fried vegetable for the rest of my life. I swore to myself that I would never take a hallucinogen ever again. While I was doing a lot better, I was still pretty high, and I remember poetically describing to my friends how I was clawing at sobriety, how I was almost there but it was still so far away. The more I sobered up, the more emotional I got, until at some point I was crying tears of joy. I was finally coming down off of a 30 hour high, it was more than a little intense for someone who had never gone longer than a few hours on weed. After talking to everyone and making sure they were all alright, I decided it would finally be safe for me to go and get some sleep.

I woke up the next morning with the biggest appreciation for life. I paid so much attention to the clarity of my vision, my hearing, but most importantly I realized how much I valued knowing reality. Being able to distinguish my thoughts from my environment.

Perhaps it was the unexpectedness, perhaps it was the duration. For whatever reason DOB was an incredibly traumatizing, yet eye opening experience. It left me with a new appreciation for my life as I experience it now. I made several horrible mistakes that could have ended with consequences much worse than being high for 30 hours. I now know much better.

Almost a year later I feel like I'm ready to experiment with hallucinogens again, I've got a weekend lined up to try shrooms coming soon. I'm doing a lot of mental preparation this time, I'm going to know exactly what I am getting, and I have a day set aside to fully meditate, relax and experience the high.

I try to live my life without regrets, and so I see my experience with DOB as a learning opportunity. Thankfully, even without knowing anything about what I was getting myself into, I had the mental strength to handle all of the emotions and experience. The lesson is heard loud and clear, don’t mess around with drugs on a whim.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 96525
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 16
Published: Dec 3, 2012	Views: 6,605
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
DOB (19) : First Times (2), Difficult Experiences (5), Various (28)