Drugs
GifMike: I was a bit of a junkie when I was a kid. There is not a drug, method or combination I have not tried. Feel free to dip into my wealth of knowledge on the subject.
Locke: What, in your opinion is the most dangerous drug out there?
GifMike: Meth by far. Crystal Meth, Crank, Speed, Go Fast. Statistically less than 2% of people who try it, more than once, ever get out. I’m the only person I know who did. All my old drug friends are either dead or in jail.
Demosthenes: Aren’t there other drugs just as dangerous? From what I understand both Cocaine and Extacy have higher attributed death rates.
GifMike: No other drug even comes close as far as I’m concerned. And yes the actual death rate is much less. Crank doesn’t kill you, it eats at you. People addicted can live very long lives. The danger isn’t in the using it’s in the type of junkie it creates. Meth is a powerful amphetamine. It replaces sleep. True tweekers are often awake for 6 to 9 days at a time, then crash for 2 to 3. You end up with very aggressive people roaming the streets all night with endless amouts of energy at their disposal and in desperate need of money. Drugs like heroin, pot or even alchohol just make you lazier and lazier as you go. I don’t see Coke as a danger because even the best cocaine only lasts an hour or so and you build up a tolerance for the high eventually, forcing you to take a break from it if you want it to keep working right. It releases the stored dopamine in your system (The chemical that makes you feel awesome and powerful) and when that runs out it can take awhile for your body to build it back up, leaving you unable to fight off any kind of depression. (FYI: If you like this high forget Coke start running. There IS such a thing as runners high and it’s the reason so many people are addicted to long distance running. That type of training releases a constant flow of dopamine and teaches the body to produce endless quantities of it. People HAVE run themselves to death though so be wary.) Now good SPEED can last upwards of 12 hours, and never lessens in affect, at least it didn’t for me. My mouth still waters when I talk about it and I absolutely can’t even be in the same building as it. I can still smell it from four floors away and I’m scratching my arm at this very second.
Locke: Why then are people so afraid of heroin?
GifMike: Heroin is a completly different kind of addiction. It sounds weird but those that get addicted to heroin never actually feel the high they’re looking for more than once. Certain people are very susceptible to it. If you hear reference to the Kiss of God or Goddess, An Angels Kiss, the Devils Embrace or maybe the Gaze of Darkness, these are all pertaining to the very first time someone tries heroin. I can’t really explain it, but it’s almost an religious experience. The pleasure, the pain, the utter utter silence and contentment. Something I’ll admit I chased for a short time. But then my dislike of waste got the better of me and I realized that it can’t be attained more than once. The memory of it is haunting though.
Locke: Is it like acid, do you hallucinate?
GifMike: Every time for me after the first wasn’t any more than being seriously drunk, and you practically sleep it away. It’s really just a street form of morphine, the drug they give you to kill ALL pain. Acid or LSD, sometimes called clear liquid with the high often called tripping was first designed to be a form of rat poisen called Warfarin, but wasn’t very effective. That created a myth that acid is laced with rat poisen. That is an urban legend, please disregard it. Modern rat poisens are far far more potent killers along the line of cyonide. Please don’t try to trip from it, you WILL die. The high from LSD (Or magic mushrooms also a hallucinogen) differs for everybody. For me both almost always started with the walls breathing as I breathed. Mushrooms tended to make anything moving have colorful trails, whereas LSD would actually cause me to see things that weren’t real. On a good trip this could be a dog that travelled beside me, on a bad one it could easily be maggots on my food or spiders coming out of my skin. What’s scary about this kind of high is that there is no real way to stop it. With Coke or heroin or Crank, if the high gets to be too much a heavy meal will often make you come down. Not so with LSD, Peyote and to a lesser extent mushrooms. Once your in, your in and you will just have to wait it out no matter how bad it gets. And remember a strong dose of acid can last a good 10 to 15 hours. It’s not at all for the casual drug user. I have seen linebackers curled up in the fetal position crying for it to stop all fricken night. It’s not unlike what you might get from Crank if you stay awake too long. If you have a prolonged tweak of 6 to 7 days your body WILL start to dream while you’re awake whether you like it or not.
Demosthenes: Is that normal, to stay awake for that long?
GifMike: Not normal and It’s quite expensive, but my group would actually make our own and when a batch came out we would go a little overboard.
Locke: So it was like acid with all the spiders and stuff?
GifMike: No…Different, but just as dangerous. You’re not really in control of yourself at that point. Often when that happened or you took acid someone would be appointed to babysit you so you didn’t kill yourself or attract the straights or police. And I had some very traumatic experiences with staying awake too long, at least with Meth.
Locke: Like what?
GifMike: Well you’re going to think I was stupid and you’d be right, but my very first love was with someone who turned out not to be real. I had a 7 or 8 day bender, I thought I went the Circle K to get smokes, met a girl, hit it off, went to the movies and made out with her, we spent the rest of the day just holding hands laying in the park. When I got back and started to tell my friends all about her they told me that I had been passed out for two days on the floor as evidenced by the fact that I had soiled myself repeatedly and was covered in vomit. To this day it hurts to think about her.
to be continued…