Hey guys, I was wondering whats ur attitude towards/experience with drugs. Are you “selfmedicating” with something currently? Did some substances help you with deprssion or whatever? Do you have some habbits that you´d like to quit? Or past addictions that made ur life terrible? Or perhaps some “funny” trip stories? Let me know, Im interested 😀
Weed is my drug of choice. I guess you could say that Im addicted to it. I smoke every day after school (alot). I can take a week off and I dont get almost any “withdrawls”. Just some cravings for the first two days but nothing that would get unmanagable. I dont even belive that weed withdrawls are a real thing but i heard that some people have them. I dont plan on quitting tho. I just dont see the reason why. I get that weed is only an escape for me but fck it. Id rather be escaping than suffering. Im sometimes judged by other people but honestly I dont even care anymore. Those who call me an addict usually couldnt get one day through without their coffee or cigs anyway.
I was doing a lot of psychedelics in the past. Ironically I first thought that they would maybe cure my weed addiction, force me to face my demons and get my life together but didn´t happen. I ve gradually stopped about a half year ago. I more or less stopped enjoying it. It was too intense for me and too long and I never got nothing useful out of the experience. Also I think It just dissociated me from reality even further. I never really had a bad trip tho. I was doing MDMA too but never to the point that you could call it abusing it. I also quit that coz it just lost its “magic” to me as to many other people. I to this day still havent experienced better feeling than my first MDMA dose tho.
I never enjoyed alcohol much. I got natural tolerance to it so it takes alot to get me drunk. Also I seem to not get the desirable mild effect of just warming and boosting confidence. I just either dont feel nothing at all or Im too drunk so I get loud and annoying. Also hangover sucks. I never have intense hangovers but they last so long, like the whole day after I drink heavily I just feel like crap.
I got into blow recently and I kinda like it. It just crushes my social anxiety. I feel that when Im coked out I can talk to people without fear of them judging me, I just dont give so much damn what others think about me. Also I think that Im genuinely less awkward even when Im not high on it atm. Like i got to experience what being confident feels like so my brain can to some extent simulate that feeling. When I first tried it I thought it would be some hard shit that would totally fuck me up (coz of the terrible reputation it has I guess) but in reality the experience is so mild and light. I feel it acts on me the way small dose of alcohol does on many people. (like you cant even compare it to MDMA high, that just fks me totally to the point when I have to run and jump like crazy and I dont manage to keep a conversation). Im definitely not saying that its good for me or anyone else and sure, the fact that I manage to keep it under control for now doesnt mean that it wont destroy me later on. I just think it really is perhaps shamed a bit too much when you compare it to alcohol that is so glorified in our culture but can be just as harmful or even more. Like most people describe coke as just this uncontrolable thing that they just have to sniff till they got none or no money left and then they feel like total crap. Im sure it affects some people like this but I think its generally overexadurated. I never got any comedowns from coke. Maybe its coz people tend to mix large doses of alcohol with it and that forms a poison in your body. Sure I drink a bit when Im coked but I always keep it under control like 3 beers max and thats it coz I know what alcohol can do with it.
Like to me this society is kinda fked up. The only drugs that can give you physical addiction and physical withdrawls are opioids, benzos and alcohol – all of these are legal!!! Meanwhile you could get to prison in some countries for just smoking weed…. I´m by no means saying that psychological addiction is not dangerous but lets be real I dont think it can get you really as destroyed as physical dependency. Like heroin/xanax/alcohol withdrawl can even kill you! Coke or weed withrawl definitely cant…
18 comments
I must admit my reply is just barely on subject. I do self medicate. It is very effective and quite safe. So I am barely on subject. I get good relief and/or prevention of depression and anxiety from the use of a SAD (sometimes also called “Bright” lamp) from September through March and then use several essential oils and supplements daily.
I mostly wrote this is case someone is considering whether to take meds or do it naturally. Anyway: no addiction, no problems. Just good results for several years now.
I’m glad you brought up the natural drug self-medicating idea. That’s something I’ve been really interested in, but it seems to require more discipline & patience than the typical pill popper (me for years) has.
My problem is, when I’m feeling ok, then literally everything in my life feels perfectly manageable and there’s no need for any treatment, natural or otherwise. But then a sudden downturn hits and I need something fast and powerful. Open mouth, insert whiskey. It’s a hard cycle to break.
So my question is, is there a really powerful natural drug, oil or technique that you use in such emergencies? Something for when you’re ready to jump out the window but you’re still rational enough to try calming your mind?
If I may butt in: Some people are very calming. My ex-girlfriend was very calm and had an almost hypnotic effect on me. She made me much more comfortable in my own skin and around others (which is a galactical improvement for me). Unfortunately, it didn’t really last after I broke up with her.
But yeah, I would term that a “natural remedy” of sorts: being around people who calm you down.
Man I know where you are coming from. The short answer is: the stuff I take, do, or use every day takes most of the emergency aspect away before things can even get that far. The highs are less high, the lows less low. Panic and anxiety pretty well gone. But yes, some of that stuff is strong enough for the few bad times I will still get, bearing in mind the bad times are far less intense than they once where.
@muspelhem Well for sure. You bet. In addition to certain person I find calming there is also a cat I find calming. (One study claimed that cat owners are a whopping 40% less likely to have a heart attack.) So supplements, essential oils, a certain person, a cat, certain activities and so on, can help keep our heads level and off the drugs.
Cool 🙂 I didn’t know that about cats. I guess having a ruthless predator around 24/7 kind of puts things in perspective… But good news for me. I was never a dog person. But I find cats kind of cool.
Im happy that you feel ok and dont need any of this shit. Its true that sobriety is the ideal state, the correct way to live if you will. I dont wanna glorify drug use but I think some people (like me) just cant help themselves. I think that oils and lamps would not cut it for me I dont wanna put down these treatments in anyway by saying that, if they work for you thats great, you are lucky and I would like to be in your place. But for me I just need that “being high” effect and I dont think they could provide it.
I see where you are coming from. I used to mood alter myself for almost 20 years with unsustainable activities loaded up with bodily risk and sometimes outrageous job stress and got relief from my mental pain that way. No one would call those drugs, but in effect, they were.
But you know, someday, if the high itself becomes too risky or unmanageable in some way these gentle ways are still going to be around. But yeah, we gotta have relief until help arrives.
I’m all for drugs… if they worked. But I’ve never found one that has, aside from a short escape. I’ve tried prescribed anti deps (just made me sleep, gain weight, lose sex drive) as well as some softer recreational stuff. And of course I drink like a fish. Nothing helps long term and everything makes it worse. I think it’s like you said, regardless of what drug we’re talking about, “It just dissociated me from reality even further.” And eventually you gotta come back to reality which hurts like a beech. That’s the “withdrawal” I’m worried about, even if we’re talking about something as common as weed. I can’t take the slap of reality coming back. So me, these days I try to stay sober and be able to mange reality better. Ideally I think drugs & alcohol should be used to enhance what you’re naturally feeling, like if you’re with friends having a good time. But I guess for suicidal people, enhancing what we’re feeling isn’t a good idea.
Strongly agree.
I dont think that all drugs strictly enhance your natural feelings. I feel like psychedelics for sure do that, for some people alcohol does that too but with stimulants/opioids/benzos I think its different. No matter how shitty or depressed you feel at the moment stimulants are always going to give you that confidence boost and speed up, opioids are going to relax you and benzos will just make you not give a fk about anything, no matter how misserable you are. Thats just my opinion and my experience tho. Drugs work differently on other people for sure.
I’m pretty vanilla, I guess.
My parents are kind of “boring” in that department, and I didn’t hang out with the potheads or the smokers in school, so I suppose that has influenced me. My parents drink alcohol (wine mostly), and only occasionally, not every day.
I have only smoked one or two cigarettes in my life, but I have sold thousands of them when I worked in a convenience store. Which doesn’t feel great. I also sold lots of alcohol to alcoholics that will realistically die from it soon. That doesn’t feel great either.
Anyway. I was kind of late to the whole drinking thing and stayed away from alcohol pretty much until I was grown up. I suppose you could say I had a kind of straight edge ethic, without being aware of that term at the time. In my mid-20s, I grew tired of alcohol, which had never appealed much anyway. My dad is into wine, as I said, and he even worked in a vinyard picking grapes when he was young. I guess listening to him talk about wine has had the effect of putting me off it 🙂 So I don’t really drink now. I quit partly because i was tired of getting ripped off in bars and clubs, partly because I always felt years older the day after. And honestly, I think it has paid off in terms of how healthy I look. I feel like I don’t have great genes, so you have to work with what you’ve got. I don’t miss it and am comfortable socializing without it (or as comfortable as you can be with social anxiety).
I have smoked weed once or twice too, but a) it doesn’t do much for me, and b) I get the darkest mood ever the next day. That frightened me, so I try to steer clear of it.
I think I could get addicted to coffee, if I tried, but I don’t even drink that much. But I am definitely more of a stimulant kind of guy. Depressants don’t do it for me. Maybe I’m already depressed enough. But yeah, caffeine – I like that, and it makes me talkative (so does wine) and hyper. Another reason I’m glad I avoided cigarettes when I was younger. I think nicotine might have been right up my alley.
Then I was on quetiapine, which is an antipsychotic, for nine years, from my early 20s to early 30s. I am diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, so I’m not really psychotic as such (as far as I know), but strangely, it sort of helped with my depression. I found it much easier to enjoy activities, to feel pleasure, and to socialize. It also made me better at most skills. Seriously, it felt kind of like a wonder drug.
But the downsides were that I slept a lot more, I started getting spasms lying in bed in the evening (it can cause tardive dyskinesia if used long-term), I believe it shrunk my dick (has happened in animal trials, and other people are complaining about it online), which I’m super bummed-out about, obviously, and it also put a severe dampener on my libido. Worst of all, it really changed my personality from a typical starry-eyed hippy idealist type to a grumpy old man conservative type. Which is kind of shocking to me. I feel like the “psycho” dial has been dialled up: Less empathy, less interest in other people. Worst of all, I still suffer from many of these sideeffects years after quitting.
But the drug I am addicted to is porn (and maybe sex, if I was better at getting it). That is something I feel like I can’t control. It completely absorbs me, and I pretty much always feel worse after using it. I guess it is the main thing sabotaging me with the opposite sex, because if every time you’re horny, you jerk off to porn, and if every time you meet a woman you’re attracted to, you freeze and do nothing or flee the scene, you’re never gonna get any or get into a loving relationship. So yeah, porn has probably wrecked the most for me, and is the “drug” I am helpless against. I feel utterly helpless.
P.S. I feel bad for kids who become gambling addicts. I used to have so many kids trying to place bets, even though it’s illegal. That is something that will ruin your life fast if it gets out of hand. No one likes someone who is always borrowing money and never repaying it…
Its really amazing how same substances work differently on other people. For example with weed I had exactly the oposite reaction when I first started smoking. I could feel the afterglow effect for the next day and It always made me feel happier, not dark. That porn thing hits home tho. I also am genuinly terrified around girls and I dont know how much my porn habbit contributed to it (I dont watch it that much tho, not daily maybe like 4 times a week idk). As I said coke is like “miracle” substance for me when it comes to talking to girls and socializing in general. I feel like a better version of me, Im confident, Im not selfcounsious etc. It kinda scares me coz Im afraid I will get hooked on it and wont be able to communicate with people without it. But sofar the opposite has happend. I generally feel more comfortable talking to girls now even when Im not high (as I said). That doesnt meen it instantly made me some superman that doesnt feel anxious at all but its better I think. I used to get so nervous just talking to girls (even those I wasnt attracted to) or just sitting next to them or standing in a line next to them to the point that I was shaking and anyone could recognize that Im terrified. Now I usually can atleast have some form of conversation. Expressing romantical interest is whole another level tho, but atleast I see some progress. Its also totally possible that my social anxiety just got a bit better as I got older and my use has nothing to do with it but I dont feel like thats the case. I remember when I first did coke I thought to myself “wow communicating with other people is like that easy I dont know what Im so afraid of all the time” and I started to record my behaviour when high, how I talk to people, my body language and everything and I try to act in similar way when Im sober. It really looks like Im gloryfying this substance but I dont want it to sound that way. It can be and IS very dangerous after all (Im sure everyone knows that alredy). But also I think every mind altering substance can have some medicinal effects atleast for some people when taken responsibly and with respect. Like for example cancer treatment is very dangerous, it fks up your body but when you have cancer you just take it coz its the best you got and it benefits you in that specific situation.
I’m no expert on this, but I think only alcohol can actually kill you from withdrawal. Even stuff like heroin doesn’t. It’s been a while since I’ve heard this though, so maybe I’m not remembering correctly.
Im not sure about heroin. Xanax definitely can.
You were right, heroin withdrawl cant kill ya. Methadone can tho. It is an opioid too thats given as a replacement for heroin. Methadone is schedule 2 in the US meanwhile weed is schedule 1 btw xddddddd. So ye heroin cant but its not only alcohol. As I said its alcohol, benzos and opioids ( its just some opioids can and some not).
Yep, just looked up, you’re right on that.
I’ve never tried any drug that wasn’t prescribed to me, and I haven’t really had any good experiences with those. They just make me feel super numb and apathetic but hey, feeling nothing is better than feeling everything, right? I really want to try weed to forget about my thoughts and just have fun, but a lot of people say that it just makes you paranoid and I’m honestly too scared to try it. I’ve only had one drink before, but I feel like it would help clear my head a little better than weed, my only problem is I get addicted to things VERY easily and would probably become a raging alcoholic by my 20th birthday next year. My mood changes very often though, sometimes I want to be reckless and get high with friends but sometimes I want to be the purest form of myself I can convince people I am. I don’t know, I’m confusing.