Over on Cracked, a reasonably normal-sounding guy summed up six lessons he learned when he “accidentally took PCP and went crazy.” What he describes is equal parts hilarious and terrifying, the latter especially true if you have any experience whatsoever with losing your shit on drugs.
This guy’s night began when a couple strangers handed him a hand rolled cigar as a way of thanking him for the cigarettes he’d given them at the bar. He smoked that cigar (see my use of the word “reasonably” to modify “normal-sounding” above), then sat down to watch a movie—and that’s when all hell broke less. At least in his mind.
Suddenly he was trying to call in to work to confront them about how they were running a drug ring, not getting an answer, concluding that this must mean his coworkers were coming to break into his house, running over to his friend’s to use his phone and deciding that the friend was in on the conspiracy against him—and that’s not even the crazy part. Homeboy’s night ended with him being put in restraints after stabbing himself with a pen to get away from the cops arresting him.
Boy, did this tale bring back some memories I might have liked to forget—and inspire me to come up with my own list of what I learned from some not-remotely-reasonably-sane drug taking decisions.
1) Know What You’re Taking
Now our friend over at Cracked would have benefited from this pearl of wisdom—just as I could have the night of my 28th birthday party. Here’s what happened, as best as I can remember: I decided to have a party at a now long-gone bar in Hollywood. As my friends began to descend, a drug buddy of mine whispered to me that he’d stolen coke from his roommate and did I want to do some? Thievery didn’t phase me but might have been a clue that we couldn’t guarantee what it was we were ingesting in the bathroom roughly five seconds later. And then, about 20 minutes after that, my friends started to look not at all like my friends but more like strangers and felt like I needed to lie down. There wasn’t anywhere appropriate inside the venue for this nap and so I stumbled outside and propped myself on a dumpster. I have vague memories of friends coming out and kneeling beside me to wish me a happy birthday, no one too phased by where I was celebrating. I never made it back in the bar and when it closed, some friends took me back to their place to sleep it off on their couch. The next day, my drug pal told me that his roommate confronted him about having stolen his ketamine. Yep, that tranquilizer given to elephants, commonly called Special K, a drug you probably should know you’re taking pre-snort. I’m clearly not someone who’s at her best while in a k-hole but then again, is anyone?
2) Don’t Indulge Your Paranoia
During the years I was doing coke in my apartment alone, I got a little paranoid—or a lot paranoid depending on your point of view. First I became convinced that my neighbors, a composer and his wife, were spying on me with binoculars they’d purchased for that very purpose. Sure, I kept my windows closed and my curtains drawn but I was reasonably certain they had special binoculars that could see through curtains. I also had certain ideas about my next-door neighbor. To my credit, he was a bit unstable but to his, that instability was pushed to its breaking point by virtue of the fact that I copied keys for about five of my fellow coke-y friends and so they were constantly coming and going through the bottom door that my neighbor and I shared. There were also the all-night coke parties he had to contend with, parties that inspired him to (understandably) yell at us when we woke him up. Later on the morning he’d had his biggest meltdown, I noticed that the part of the garage just where I parked my car had been broken off and I became certain that he had done it as a warning about what he would do to me if I continued to piss him off. That night, I was home alone, high on coke, watching a special called, as far as I remember it, “Neighbors Who Kill.” I decided my life was in danger and so I called a druggie friend who lived nearby and told him I could be killed any second. He was the only person on earth who would take this fear seriously and so he showed up at my door minutes later and walked me to the “safety” of his apartment. We stayed up all night doing coke and trying to come up with ways we could save my life. I didn’t have the motivation to move and so I called the cops on the way home the next morning and when they arrived, I told them they should arrest my violent neighbor. I told them about the part of the garage near my car being broken; luckily, they did not arrest me. Instead they looked at each other, looked at me, handed me a card for a neighbor dispute service and wished me luck.
3) Listen to Your Shrink
When I was roughly six months sober, it occurred to me that the rehab and 12-step people were wrong—that alcoholism and addiction were not the same and that I was solely a drug addict and not an alcoholic—and so I could go have a drink. I happened to have a date scheduled that night with a guy I’d met at a party the week before—a date that involved him cooking me dinner. While I’d told when we’d met that I was sober, I explained when I got to his house that things had changed and could I have a glass of wine? He didn’t seem fazed and poured me some. I sipped it, marveling over the fact that I’d made this innocuous seeming beverage into such a big deal. To reward myself for finally seeing the light after my overreaction for the previous six months, I had another glass and then another until I’d killed the bottle. An hour or so later, when my date offered me Ecstasy, I took it—and then took three more pills over the course of the night. The point of all this is that when, three days later, having started my day count over, I went to therapy where my shrink told me a story I’ve never forgotten. It was about a girl who took E and freaked out at a party so badly that people called the cops. She thought the cops were non-policeman dressed up in cop uniforms and found it hilarious—even when they cuffed her and brought her to jail. She couldn’t believe how real the jail seemed—just like a real one!—and when they checked her out of the slammer and into a mental hospital, she stayed amused by how real that, too, seemed. According to my therapist, the girl never came out of her trip and was still in the hospital, crazy as could be. Was this story apocryphal? Possibly. Did it scare me into never doing another drug? Yes, sir.
And I’ve been sober ever since.
Photo courtesy of SplitShire
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