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Old Spice, New Trip
Nutmeg
Citation:   Alucard. "Old Spice, New Trip: An Experience with Nutmeg (exp27421)". Erowid.org. Apr 30, 2006. erowid.org/exp/27421

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
16 g oral Nutmeg (ground / crushed)
  T+ 1:00 14 g oral Nutmeg (ground / crushed)
BODY WEIGHT: 135 lb
My age at the time of the experience: 15

Mindset: The most I hoped for was to 'get high' and have a Cannabis-type experience. I was completely caught off guard by the intensity and duration of the effects, and as such I was substantially worried about my parents, school officials, and other acquaintances noticing the fact that I was 'fucked up.'

Setting: During the afternoon and evenings, I stayed at the house of my mother's friend, who was letting our family of four stay with her while our new house was being built. From 7AM until 3PM I went to school at the local high school.

Dosage: 30 grams of freshly ground Nutmeg, straight from the local health food store (this turned out to be important, as later experiments using standard nutmeg from Vons and other large chain food stores did not work at all).

Time of ingestion: Approximately 3:30 PM on a Thursday.

Potential drug/herb/vitamin interactions: None whatsoever

The Experience:

I was a healthy teenage male (still am), and I've never had any reason to take drugs or medication for any other reason but entertainment. My drug use history at the time of the experience was as follows: Cannabis, Magic Mushrooms (Psilocybe genus), Alcohol, Concerta (an ADHD medication), Calea Zacatechichi (the Dream Herb), Salvia Divinorum (the Shepherdess), and Benadryl (diphenhydramine HCl). I very rarely drank (less than 5 times in my life so far), and never used any of the other drugs more than once or twice a week at the most. The Concerta was just a one-time thing, and it was boring and pointless.

Before trying any substance, I investigated it thoroughly to ensure that it was safe and that I knew what I was getting into. This policy of investigation was what got me interested in Nutmeg to begin with. I checked out over a dozen sources and read over 50 experience reports, and every single one of the experiences was different. There were a few factors which seemed to be common, such as cotton-mouth, blood-shot eyes, etc., but the extreme discrepancies in the reports were simply outrageous. Some people ate in excess of an ounce (28.5 grams) and nothing happened. One girl had approximately 15 grams and claimed to have had full-blown hallucinations and delirium. This was intriguing to me, and I decided to run an experiment on myself to determine the effects of Nutmeg on physical faculties and perception. I only found one death that was attributed solely to Nutmeg, and the victim was an 8-year-old boy who consumed 2 full nuts worth of fresh nutmeg, so I decided that I was reasonably safe.

I decided that I would start out with what I determined to be the average dosage of all the accounts I am familiar with. This turned out to be 1.25 grams per 10 pounds of body weight. I weigh 135 pounds, so my dosage was approximately 16 grams. My friend weighed 160 pounds; we determined his dosage to be about 18 grams. With this in mind, we set out on our quest to acquire this mysterious spice, this ordinary household item which was purported to have extraordinary properties.

T + 0:00 After school on Thursday afternoon, we found a 60 gram jar of fresh-ground Nutmeg for $1.67 at a local health food store. We made the purchase, and also bought two bottles of chocolate milk to drink it with. We returned to the house I was staying in, measured out 16 grams for me and 18 grams for him, mixed them into our chocolate milks, and began to chug them at approximately 3:30 PM. The taste was unbelievably awful (and I've had Calea tea before). The texture was abhorrent beyond reason. Somehow we fought the instinct to gag and vomit with every sip. We made it through our bottles of chocolate milk within 5 minutes, but oh how awful those 5 minutes were. Afterwards we washed our mouths out and went for a drive. We met up with 2 girls we knew, hung out for about a half hour, and returned to the house, rather disappointed that no effects had manifested themselves.

T + 1:00 Keep in mind, we were both rookies, especially to the oral-ingestion method, and we made an incredibly stupid and common mistake: we decided to take more since we didn't feel anything. There was approximately 27 grams of Nutmeg left in the bottle, and we split it between us and mixed it into two glasses of lemonade. This time it went down a lot easier, I'm not sure if that's because our taste buds were dead or because the lemonade did a better job of concealing the flavor, I have heard reports of lemonade being the best beverage to mix nutmeg with (relatively), and I must say, it was a hell of a lot better than the chocolate milk. So, at this point in time, we've taken in approximately 30 grams of fresh-ground Nutmeg, spaced out over an interval of one hour. Nothing at all happened between 4:30 PM and 8:30 PM, so I'll skip straight there:

T + 5:00 At this point my friend had gone home for the night (we had school at 7:30 the next morning) and we had both pretty much decided that Nutmeg was bullshit and our experiment was over with. I was walking to the neighborhood pool with my family at approximately 8:30 pm, it was twilight, and I felt rather light and philosophical. I took delight in observing small interesting things, like wind chimes blowing in the wind. I got to the pool, and by the time I was there I had started feeling a bit off, but not in a bad way. I just wasn't fully normal, and I couldn't put my finger on what it was that felt different. I wasn't sick or tired, I just felt weird. By the time I got out of the pool at 9 PM I was substantially 'off'. I had to climb a fence to get out because the gate was locked (we didn't live there and my mother's friend forgot to give us a key) and I was praying the whole time I was climbing the fence that my family wouldn't see my fall all over myself. I managed to climb the fence just fine, but by the time I got home I was getting worse and worse.

T + 6:00 I realize that the Nutmeg is having an effect, and an incredibly intense one, because I can't follow sentences and I'm trying as hard as I god damned can to just be normal. This is a terrible situation to be in while tripping and Nutmeg is no different. My eyes are more bloodshot than they'd ever been before, and my sense of time is completely fucked up. I've lost every single iota of short term memory, to the point where I can't even follow a simple story. This gets put to the test many times across the next hour because I'm still awake and with my parents. My mom's boyfriend is trying to tell me a story and I concentrate all my effort on following the plot of the story and understanding it, but I can't. By the end of a sentence, I'd forgotten all about what he said at the beginning.

This was extremely distressing because my mother is rather paranoid about drug use, and every other question out of her mouth was 'Are you on drugs?' or 'Do I need to take you to the hospital and have you drug tested?' I kept repeating that I was just sick, and extremely tired as well, and that I needed to go to sleep. Finally, after one last futile attempt to act normal, I slipped off to my room and tried to go to sleep, thinking about how insane this was and wondering when the fuck it was going to end, since it had only just started about an hour ago. I didn't have problems going to sleep, although I don't remember any dreams.

One further note of interest: Despite the fact that I was severely mentally handicapped by this lack of short term memory (which leads to constant confusion about where you are and what you're doing) my body seemed to take over and I was on autopilot. For instance, I ended up doing several pages of homework right before I went to sleep, and doing them reasonably well even for a sober state. The difference was this: if I had been sober, I probably wouldn't have done the homework. In my mind, it was 'something that needed to be done,' and so I did it, and that was pretty much that. This continued into the next day, and I took an Honors Humanities (a college course that I was taking in 10th grade) test and ending up getting a 95%, the highest grade in the class. I never read the book that the test was on and I barely recall taking the test itself, but apparently I did excellently on it.

The Next Morning (Friday):

T + 16:00 At this point it's 7am and I wake up to get ready for school, but I know that I'm fucked the instant I open my eyes. I'm still tripping just as hard as the night before! My eyes are still bloodshot, my short term memory is still shit, and I look like a victim of shell shock. Oh well, back on autopilot, getting dressed, brushing my teeth, showering, the usual. One thing I haven’t emphasized a lot is the distance from reality that I had the entire time of the experience (except for the fifth hour after ingestion during which I was just beginning to come up). Not having any sort of continuity in memory led me to just sort of “zone out” for most of the time, doing everything I had to do by instinct, and barely getting by. You must understand, I value my own intelligence greatly, I respect it and I want to keep it, which is why I almost never drink or do things which I know to have a physically detrimental effect on my brain. Nutmeg turned me into a zoned out retard. I did not have any chance of looking and acting like my normal self.

I don’t remember much about school except for the constant underlying current of anxiety and wanting this cloud of retardation to lift. When I asked my friends about my general condition that day, they told me pretty much what I suspected: my eyes were extremely bloodshot the entire time, I stumbled a bit too often, and occasionally when I spotted someone I knew and trusted I would literally sprint all the way up to them and tell them in a crazed and excited voice that “I’m tripping my ass off from nutmeg, yes the household spice, this is insane, it’s literally insane, I have no idea what’s going on and it won’t end, I’ve been like this since yesterday evening!” I also had a habit of walking off at awkward times, such as right in the middle of conversations, and one girl told me that I waved to her and was walking over to talk to her but then I turned 90 degrees to my right and walked off somewhere else. She thought I was angry with her or just being an asshole, but I explained myself the next time I saw her (on Monday).

I took a test during my 3rd class of the day and got the highest grade in the class. I never read the book that the test was on, I didn’t recall hardly any of the test by the next day, and to most of the class it was obvious that I was pretty fucked up. Luckily we had a substitute teacher that day. I didn’t note any changes to my appetite, ability to eat, or speech faculties, but my mouth was noticeably dry for the entire duration of the experience, and once again my brain was barely able to make it through the day and keep my body out of trouble.

Saturday:

I woke up Saturday still tripping almost as hard as I was Friday, but I was a bit more used to it and I didn’t have school, so I had more time to sleep and recuperate some of my faculties (but not many). Saturday was filled with the same effects as Friday, very slightly diminished in scope, but one event of interest occurred that night. For whatever reason, my parents decided that they wanted to go see Spy Kids 2 (at this point it was still playing in theaters. They asked me if I wanted to come, and so I agreed for one reason only: I did not have enough command of my vocabulary to be able to explain to them why I didn’t want to go. I knew that if they asked me any questions like, “Well, why not? Come on, it’ll be fun,” that I would reveal just how completely gone my mental abilities were at the moment. And so, I said yes, expecting the movie to be dumb but not really being aware enough of myself and my environment to care much. Much to my surprise, my only memory of the movie was being completely fascinated with it, beyond any sort of reasonable explanation. Simply put, it was a fucking cool movie, with strange and interesting special effects, and an overall insane series of situations that suited my handicapped brain excellently.

A week later, when I was sober, I went and watched the same movie to see if it was the nutmeg that made it so great. Wow, the movie sucked big time. The plot was absolutely atrocious and the actors were an embarrassment to humankind. It was a kid movie though, so it pretty much met my low expectations for it. I think the reason I loved it so much while fucked out of my mind on nutmeg was because the nutmeg suspended my short term memory, thereby not allowing me to follow plot or judge reality very well at all, and forcing me to focus completely on whatever picture or scene was in front of me at the moment. The scenes in that movie were different, colorful, fantastic, supernatural, magical, all sorts of shit that just happened to jive extremely well with my mental state while fucked up on nutmeg.

Sunday:

I woke up Sunday morning still feeling out of sorts, but it wore off for all practical purposes by noon. Wow. What a ride it was. Completely and totally trashed from Thursday evening until Sunday morning, all from one dose.

*Further notes - On a later experiment with a lower dose of nutmeg, I had sex with my girlfriend at least 35 times within a single afternoon and evening. This wasn’t due to the nutmeg giving me more physical ability or better sex drive, it was due to the fact that it was an incredible mental struggle to do anything requiring thought, planning, or short term memory, and just about everything two people can do together requires at least one of those things. Except for sex. Lots of sex. God bless instincts, because have sex we did, again and again and again. My first nutmeg experience was intense, but it did give me the respect for nutmeg’s power that was crucial to driving me to further experimentation with it, and the further experimentation with it revealed a fun, cheap, and safe (although awful tasting) way to alter your consciousness and have a great time.

Exp Year: 2002ExpID: 27421
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 30, 2006Views: 145,697
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Nutmeg (41) : Sex Discussion (14), Hangover / Days After (46), First Times (2), Various (28)

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