DOSE:

oral

DXM

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

This is the story of my personal experience with Dextromethorphan, also known as DXM. It covers a time-span of about 3 months, plus background information and present-time information. It contains extracts of many trip reports. It's very long, but I put a lot of effort into making it as comprehensive and pleasant to read as I could and I hope that someone will learn something from this report. Please note that I do not recommend the kind of drug use/abuse that will be described. Seriously!

Personal information at the time at which the experiences took place:

Physically:
Muscular constitution
Medium height
Around 80 kg
Very good health
On and off periods of intense physical exercise

Psychically:
Intelligent, creative, funny
Tendency to push anything to the extreme
Emotionally quite sensitive
Clinically depressive (I would say - I did not receive this diagnostic as result of psychiatric evaluation)
Periods of light to medium self-mutilation and self-destructive behaviour
Periods of suicidal tendencies

*After reading this you would probably think what the hell am I doing taking drugs? I couldn't agree with you more but this is who I am. I would seriously advise anyone who recognises himself in my profile to stay away from drugs. Still, this is who I am and this is my experience.

Background:

I was 17 years old. I had quite some experience with insufflated ketamine, I had smoked pot a few times, and had taken 1 ecstasy pill once. I considered myself a well integrated newcomer to the psychoactive world. My long-term experience with severe alcohol abuse gave me confidence in a weird way, although I quickly understood that the world of polydrug use was a whole different ballgame. I was the kind of person that couldn't stand being sober and I was almost never afraid of being too 'out of it'. I also engaged quite frequently in meditation and rituals with the purpose of spiritual evolution.

My 17th birthday was a mind blowing mini-rave. It was the first time I took ecstasy - 1 whole pill of a good brand, despite my dealer's warnings to take half. I also mixed it with alcohol, pot and a lot of ketamine. It was perfectly and brilliantly enjoyable. Very few side ffects and I wouldn't let myself be bothered by them. I accepted drug use as a whole, with its entire array of consequences. I've always had very few and mild side ffects. No doubt the mental attitude - the confidence, the experience with meditation, and the fact that I started feeling a real sense of love and understanding for drugs has much to do with my good relationship with psychoactive chemicals.

The story:

After my 17th birthday, my best friend, my childhood-long friend started using DXM. It wasn't long until I started using it too, despite some initial prejudice about medical drugs (strange prejudice considering I was using ketamine). I started with 200 mg and I fell in love with it, it was so unique. In fact my first trip was as unique as anything could be.The come-up was great, slowly building up to euphoria, tripping, even a sense of visionary exploration. The highlight of the trip was a period of complete lack of emotions. I couldn't feel any kind of emotions. I was cold as a reptilian brain and IF I could have felt something, I would probably have felt bad about not being able to feel anything. It was something that I had never experienced before, and that I never experienced again to that ultimate extent. Not even the sight of my mother startled any emotions whatsoever. I was a perfectly balanced and fine-tuned machine of biological engineering. Then a curiosity trip started, I was asking everybody on the messenger what they were wearing and what their room contained and I felt a rush of pure pleasure at every answer I got. I don't remember noticing any negative effects whatsoever.

I took DXM again quite soon after, maybe a little higher dose. Every couple of days at first, the every week I upped the dosage by one or two more pills (I was buying it from the pharmacy in boxes that contained 20 pills, each containing 20 mg of DXM and it was quite cheap). It was probably a few weeks or a month at best until I started using at a daily basis and in all and any environments. I was tripping at home, tripping on the street, tripping at friend's house, at school, at parties, in clubs, hell I was tripping in sleep. As soon as I started increasing the dosage beyond 250-300 mg, sleep didn't quite take away the effects. I swallowed 20 pills at around noon and when I got up in the morning, after the first tobacco cigarette, the effects rushed in by themselves. This was brilliant for me, because I wished that the effects would never ever end.

I fell in love with DXM. A mutual relationship of deepest love and understanding. I would sacriffce time, effort and money to procure it and DXM would bless me with its dissociative trip. It was amazing, even to me, how much money I could get hold of in order to feed my habit. It wasn't long before I could control the trip substantially. If I wanted closed eyed visuals and distorted thinking I could guide the trip in that direction. If I wanted stimulation, energy and pleasure to dance away all night, it was there. Of course, the trip also followed its own path and I respected it, if I really felt like not moving at all for two hours, that's what I would do and I would appreciate it fully. It was a symbiosis.

I was tripping on hardcore rock music (which I very much enjoy all the time) and it was brilliant. All the anger and frustration in the song liberated my own deep-rooted psychological problems and the dancing...well the dancing was the best EVER. Even moving my head in the song's rhythm was enough to send waves of pleasure through my body.

Much more psychologically addicted than physically. I can't even say for sure if I was ever physically addicted to DXM, though research suggests it may be possible.

Time passed and the dosage climbed. Tolerance was taking its toll and most of all my personality was taking its toll. I wanted to be even more out of it, more and more. I wanted to see where I could go with DXM, but not in the sense that I acknowledged there would be a limit eventually. I thought it could just go on forever gradually.

I was on DXM every single day, with the occasional one day breaks (although they usually occurred because of lack of money, time or serious problems with hiding my drug abuse from my parents). I didn't take any other drug, and I wasn't interested in the least in taking any other drug. I was 17 after all, and my very smart mom was starting to suspect things, despite our previous relationship of endless trust. I think the titanium-hard trust that we shared before using drugs was the only reason I could go on as long as I did. That..and she knew that I had been a virtual alcoholic for a long time, so most of the times I could lie to her that I'm drunk.

Then the freaky stuff started - using twice a day, 20 pills in the noon, 20 at night or 40 pills at a time. 700 or 800 mg a day. It started to take its toll on my body. I lost appetite for 10-15 hours at a time and then I ate like crazy. I was eating once or twice a day and the nutritional contents of my meals couldn't matter less as long as it was tasty. I never neglected hydration though. I drank water on purpose even though I was not thirsty to protect my body and to keep the trip as comfortable as possible. I soon discovered that taking DXM in two separate doses hours apart from each other provided a more intense and a little different trip, a little more dreaming awake kind of trip. At dosages over 30 pills I started to feel muscle tension towards the second half of the trip, though it was often pleasant and it came with a rush of feeling and emotions in my muscles. I was Super-man. As I long as I wanted to do something, I could do it with all of my being. I would run like an 100 meter sprinter to catch a bus. I was in an unbelievable connection with myself and with everything around me. In the few pauses from using DXM that I had I was still tripping.
I was proud of being what I was - practically a daily junkie.

Every trip was brilliant but one was so in particular. I took 25 pills at a friend's house, accompanied by the girl whom I loved very intensely but with which I hadn't engaged in any intimate relationship up to that moment. After an hour of hard courtship, tripping my head off, we kissed and it was like the whole world crashed on me. I never tried heroin but this is surely what it must feel like. The incredible pleasure took my breath every 5 seconds and I looked into her eyes with as much love as any man could hold in his heart.

I almost never started a trip alone. My best buddy soon followed my example and we were both tripping as often as we could. My relationship with him became even more special. We were like brothers. When he didn't have money, I would share everything with him, even if it meant taking just 10 pills. But that meant he also has 10 pills and it made everything perfect. It still is like that today. I can rarely share drugs with anyone without feeling oppressed in a way but with him I share almost everything. Many times I would trip the second half alone of the effect in my room, in insane bouts of mind traveling in my bed, but most of the times we would trip together. A brilliant menage a trois with DXM as our shared lover.

I soon lost all inhibition with my DXM use. I once spent 3 days in my house with my mother and grandmother, tripped as hell, with my sunglasses on and a police hat I got as a gift on my head. I was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas come true. Few people can imagine staying in bed with their mother, watching elephants on Animal Planet, completely out of their minds, gasping in amazement as they saw the huge peaceful beasts. Completely unafraid that she might realise that I was on drugs. So tripped out that almost anything that happened would be all right. Meteors, the apocalypse, if I was tripping, hell could come on earth and I would just shake my hands with the devil and go out for a beer together with a huge smile on my face and my pupils reaching out of my eye-sockets. I was a Zen monk. I was prepared for anything and when anything happened I was at a peace with the universe.

The girl which I had kissed in the night of the...ohh so mindblowing pleasure trip had left me. She said she couldn't handle a drug addict, that she was afraid and although that was one of the reasons I later found out that she never loved me the way that I loved her. She was one of the few things that could spoil one of my DXM trips. One night talking over the messenger about our feelings and about my pain over her departure, I burst in tears. I realised I wasn't invulnerable, but only for a few hours. Then, I remembered my lover, the one that had stayed with me, the one that loves me as much as I love her - DXM.

By now, everyone knew I was a drug addict, colleagues, friends, even some teachers and my mom suspected me heavily and she even pointed out some remarks like' you know... Whatever you're doing, if you don't stop, I don't know what will happen'. I had eventually acquired some weak ketamine more out of curiosity how they would mix, plus my best friend wanted to try it out. At the college prom, I was tripping as hell, with all the teachers and colleagues. I was in a club and I could see the stars. I actually asked a complete stranger if this is an outdoor party. Twice. He told me we're in a club, but I knew I could see the stars. I knew we were outdoors even before I asked him. I mixed it with ketamine at the prom and strangely it kind of cut the trip down but it did provide some strange addendum to the experience. Wasn't worth it anyway. Nothing could beat pure DXM.

Then came the turning point, in the worst moment possible. At about lunch-time I smoked ketamine at school with another friend then I took 20 pills and he took 15. We came home, watched a movie which I had seen before, but yet I couldn't understand one bit of it. I smoked some more ketamine at home, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, exposed to the sight of anyone who would open the door to my room. I knew that my mother and grandmother were in the house but it was perfectly ok to me. We then left the house to go to a bar, one which was sometimes frequented by drugs users so we thought..hey why not? On the way there we bought 40 more pills, so that we could take twenty each. He met with a girl he occasionally hooked up with and decided not to take his share of the pills. So I took another 25 pills. We got to the club, it was about 7 a clock afternoon, sat down at a table and he had a sudden breakthrough: ' Man, you do realise that you took 50 pills today right ?'. I had taken 1 gram of DXM, a dose I had never tried before and I was in a public setting, with parents at home..so I couldn't really go home at this time. Then I said 'Wow, that's a lot, hey...if I panic it's even worse'. As I said this I completely relaxed and let myself be engulfed by the substance. I knew better than to fight a trip, no matter how intense, plus...it was DXM - my symbiotic substance.

I had also taken ketamine that day and the weeks in a row on DXM affected my mind progressively. I overdosed. After a few hours, when the second dose started coming in effect, I closed my eyes and the Matrix screen appeared. The one with green vertical endless writing. I opened my eyes and I couldn't see anything from my real environment. Nothing. But incredibly I could feel what was around me, I could almost see what was around me as if I could read the green writing, just like the operators in the movie could. Muscle tension soon rose to a new level. I could barely move. All my muscles would immediately contract in the same second and I would find myself forced to stand up from my chair. I would black out every 5 minutes. I saw myself from 20 meters away hugging my friend's girl and I know for sure that actually happened. I loved everyone and when we left the club I could only move by spinning around. I did this for ten minutes on the street, in the center of my city. It was full of people, but for me they didn't exist. Black out, image, black out, thought, black out. This was my mind. I barely got home and there my mother awaited me with an empty DXM pill sheet in her hand, which I had forgotten on the table. It wasn't the first she found anyway. In my delirious overdose, all that I said was 'hey, so what? I'm having fun'. Needles to say it was a horrible night, my mother started crying, then I started crying, shouting, she threatened me that I will no longer be her son, that she will have nothing to do with me. Imagine what that did to me in the middle of a DXM overdose. Blackout.

I woke up the next day, convinced that I will quit. I had to go to school. I never thought I'd make it to school. In the metro station I could hear every little sound from 200 people around me. Every heel touching the floor, every whisper, every movement. My arms contracted involuntarily, my eyes rolled over and my thoughts were clashing with the speed of a runaway train. I was going insane with every little second and I knew it. I managed to keep my sanity but it was a horrible day. A few days afterwards I was feeling the intense need for the drug in the form of an incredible hunger right beneath my chest that would not end even if I ate, drank or smoke. One time at a restaurant I ate until I threw up and while I was vomiting I was hungry as hell. I had periods when I felt so hungry that I nearly fainted although my body had nutrients and water. Depression, anger, frustration all followed me whatever I did. It's not a wonder it took just 2 weeks before I started using again.

Then the turning point got even more drastic. With my health gradually weakening, and on a hefty dose of DXM, I ran in the middle of winter, sweating and with only a tank top on, for one hour looking for a pharmacy. Then when I bought my fix, I came back into the club...from -5 degrees back to 30 degrees...or whatever temperature was in the overly crowded club. I had tons of fun but I got home in a horrible state. My mother realised I was on drugs again and the whole thing started all over again...crying, shouting. I could honestly understand her disappointment. Only that I couldn't really cope with it because if was half dead. I had been having a cold for several days and the temperature changes in that night had turned it into a fullblown flu. I've never sweated so much in my life, my body temperature was something like 40 degrees Celsius and I couldn't piss. Not one drop. My body was full of chemicals and I couldn't piss. With every hour my state deteriorated. I was sick, so sick, nauseous, it was almost painful. My mother saw me..but I didn't want to call the ambulance and neither did she..she was emotionally wrecked, she couldn't even think. So I spent the entire night in my bed, half tripping, half suffering, not an ounce of sleep. When I got out of bed in the morning, I could barely walk, I was soaked in sweat, just like I had come out of a pool and I still couldn't piss. I was chalk-white. I felt like I was dying. I probably wasn't too far away. This wasn't the result of the DXM chemical. It was just my body, weakened by so intense abuse, trying to fight off a very bad flu, full of chemical metabolites which it couldn't eliminate.

I kept thinking..' ok..so now I lie down and die'. I went on the balcony, thinking to catch a last sight of life and everything seemed so beautiful. The trees, the leaves, the air, everything was alive and I knew it was probably one of the last times I would see them. Then I fell on my knees, prayed with tears in my eyes and felt this intense fury, the will to stay alive. I went to the bathroom and I struggled and struggled and I eventually managed to piss. God helped me! It was such an amazing feeling. I had lived. I knew I would live. I couldn't help myself from crying like a baby.

It wasn't long before I wished I had died that day. The withdrawal came on and..it was horrible. I never fully recovered from it until I started using drugs again, one year and a half later. I'm not going to go into how the withdrawal felt, I'll just say, it gets a lot worse than those two weeks I stayed without DXM. After a few months I was relatively ok, but I still had periods of utter need for the drug.

Epilogue:

This period of my life, although probably the most amazing one did a lot of damage. As I told you, I loved almost every bit of it, but it left its mark. A year after I had ceased consuming any drug, I had dissociative periods out of the blue and that's really scary. My mind is even more unbalanced than before. I've developed an obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and frequent bouts of manic-depressive behaviour. I'm a walking time-bomb, you could say. It's gotten a little better since I started using drugs (only natural drugs from plants) but I don't know how long it will be before I slip into the extreme again. My relationship with my family has gotten much better, but you imagine that sometimes she doesn't feel she can fully trust me. And I don't blame her.

DXM is a wonderful drug, but everything has consequences.

In the end, was it worth it ? I honestly don't know.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 72904
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 20, 2016	Views: 415
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
DXM (22) : Various (28), Addiction & Habituation (10)