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Help me figure out what drug I was slipped...
Sci-Fi Wasabi
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Registered User regular
Okay, this may be a little strange.
7 Years ago, when I was a teenager, my good buddy started getting into drugs. I tried pot with him for the first time and it was probably your average experience, i.e. lots of giggling and asshattery. I did it a second time a week later and it was much of the same. My mother has smoked pot nearly all of my natural life up until she died of lung cancer a few short years ago. Back then, despite my mothers preference to the drug, I never really cared for it outside of these few isolated incidents.
Anyway, my third (and last) experience was pretty fucking frightening. My buddy invited an accquantance from school over with his weed and we had at it.
Within minutes, it was like I was dead. I remember little, not being able to see, having almost no balance, spending most of my time on the floor crying and telling them to "hide me so my mom wouldnt see what happened to me".
Things returned mostly to normal after I fell asleep in my room. When I woke up, I was traumatized and shaken, and asked them what had happened. They were mostly antagonistic and pessimistic, wondering why I was such a downer. They smoked the same weed and seemed to have little or no effect on them. I think they ate pizza and played poker while I was writhing around on the floor.
The following few days of school I tried to figure out what happened with poor results. I could not get a straight answer out of either of them. They basically just told me I was a "lightweight", but I couldn't believe I'd have such an awful experience due to weed alone. With little to no help from my closest friend, I told him to fuck off and never return.
The following few months, I suffered from what I can only think of as General Anxiety Disorder. Things started feeling kind of stilted and unreal, I was scared all the time, I stopped doing certain things, and worst of all, sometimes the same sensations I was having were coming back to me in bursts of a few minutes.
A few months later, by the time High School started, I had a new group of friends and was feeling a lot better. The events that transpired before left my mind and I began to relax. I never touched drugs again for fear that similar events would occur again, and thusly, did not attend many parties at all.
So I graduated High School and a few short later my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the end of the year she had died.
I moved in with my dad and started working. My first job was so shitty in my mind (circuit city) that I would start having anxiety attacks every time I'd have to be at work. This, combined with the high pressure of the sales position I was in, led me to quit a few months later. My second job was similar, shitty job, anxiety, and I quit. I moved with my girlfriend down to California with her parents, and I felt leagues better. I got a job at Gamestop and worked there Happily for the next year. I had missed my hometown, so we saved up and moved back.
Things have been so stressful lately that one day I was hit with a full blown anxiety attack, as powerful then as it was 7 years prior. I began freaking out. I thought I was past those events. Cured. And now I was feeling those exact same feelings. I can only think it is caused by stress in my life.
What worries me is this: I know I'm suffering from anxiety attacks. What I'm feeling is most certainly in line with criteria for that condition. But I never found out why that weed caused this. Was there something in that drug that did this? or was the anxiety itself triggered because of it?
Is this all just worry from anxiety? I'm afraid I have like brain damage or something, because I dont know what went into my body.
I'm sorry for the long winded ( and probably confusing ) post. Any insight is appreciated.
7 Years ago, when I was a teenager, my good buddy started getting into drugs. I tried pot with him for the first time and it was probably your average experience, i.e. lots of giggling and asshattery. I did it a second time a week later and it was much of the same. My mother has smoked pot nearly all of my natural life up until she died of lung cancer a few short years ago. Back then, despite my mothers preference to the drug, I never really cared for it outside of these few isolated incidents.
Anyway, my third (and last) experience was pretty fucking frightening. My buddy invited an accquantance from school over with his weed and we had at it.
Within minutes, it was like I was dead. I remember little, not being able to see, having almost no balance, spending most of my time on the floor crying and telling them to "hide me so my mom wouldnt see what happened to me".
Things returned mostly to normal after I fell asleep in my room. When I woke up, I was traumatized and shaken, and asked them what had happened. They were mostly antagonistic and pessimistic, wondering why I was such a downer. They smoked the same weed and seemed to have little or no effect on them. I think they ate pizza and played poker while I was writhing around on the floor.
The following few days of school I tried to figure out what happened with poor results. I could not get a straight answer out of either of them. They basically just told me I was a "lightweight", but I couldn't believe I'd have such an awful experience due to weed alone. With little to no help from my closest friend, I told him to fuck off and never return.
The following few months, I suffered from what I can only think of as General Anxiety Disorder. Things started feeling kind of stilted and unreal, I was scared all the time, I stopped doing certain things, and worst of all, sometimes the same sensations I was having were coming back to me in bursts of a few minutes.
A few months later, by the time High School started, I had a new group of friends and was feeling a lot better. The events that transpired before left my mind and I began to relax. I never touched drugs again for fear that similar events would occur again, and thusly, did not attend many parties at all.
So I graduated High School and a few short later my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the end of the year she had died.
I moved in with my dad and started working. My first job was so shitty in my mind (circuit city) that I would start having anxiety attacks every time I'd have to be at work. This, combined with the high pressure of the sales position I was in, led me to quit a few months later. My second job was similar, shitty job, anxiety, and I quit. I moved with my girlfriend down to California with her parents, and I felt leagues better. I got a job at Gamestop and worked there Happily for the next year. I had missed my hometown, so we saved up and moved back.
Things have been so stressful lately that one day I was hit with a full blown anxiety attack, as powerful then as it was 7 years prior. I began freaking out. I thought I was past those events. Cured. And now I was feeling those exact same feelings. I can only think it is caused by stress in my life.
What worries me is this: I know I'm suffering from anxiety attacks. What I'm feeling is most certainly in line with criteria for that condition. But I never found out why that weed caused this. Was there something in that drug that did this? or was the anxiety itself triggered because of it?
Is this all just worry from anxiety? I'm afraid I have like brain damage or something, because I dont know what went into my body.
I'm sorry for the long winded ( and probably confusing ) post. Any insight is appreciated.
Sci-Fi Wasabi on
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Bad trips aren't common for the green monster, but they can happen easily enough. If I remember that wee little bit of neuroscience right, some people don't have many receptors for THC in thier brains. It takes a couple goes for your grey matter to grow a new field of them after you've been introduced to the substance. If that were true, your first and second times would have primed your brainpan, and the third would have been your meeting with Trippy McTripperson from the Clan McTrippy.
Not many vets get the same experiences they had when they were first starting out. Those first few rides can take place at a whole 'nother level. If you're already anxiety prone, a pretty hefty sign that you have some kind of imbalance already, it doesn't take much to push one over the edge.
I'm a quasi-beleiver in self-medication. Meaning that people remember and sometimes psychosomatically create their responses to certain things because of what thier bodies tell them on an intuitive level. That isn't to say the experience is less real or less valid, quite the opposite. Your bad trip could very well have been your mind saying 'FUCK YOU, NEVER DO THAT TO ME AGAIN!!' or some such. And so I would say that there is probably a good reason why you are apprehensive and cautious about putting foriegn drugs into your system.
It is likely (given your history and descriptions of personal mental health) that your brain chemistry is very finely tuned, or perhaps even struggling to stay in balance. Foriegn substances may have a huge impact on that, and affect you far more than the average person. If you have this feeling, this intuition that you should stay the fuck away from drugs, then I would go with that. There's probably a good reason.
nutshell: Weed alone can cause that kind of experience; it's rare, but not unheard of with certain types of body chemistry.
EDIT: Perhaps you had a panic attack while you were tripping? I'm no expert on panic attacks, but given the highly suggestable state weed can put one in, and the powerfully convicting feelings of a triggered attack, I would think that having a panic attack while high would suck some pretty serious goat ball.
I guess my latest worry is that if I *was* slipped some kind of drug, would it have irreversable effects on my brain or psyche? I looked up PCP last night on wikipedia and it talked about the possibility of something called Olney's Lesions that I guess happened to lab rats who were subjected to high doses of similar dissociates. Not that I am sure thats what happened to ME, but nonetheless I (maybe irrationally) fear that something in my brain has changed forever and I will never recover.
EDIT: I called my sister and apparently she had a similar (but less intense) experience about 2 years ago. Could this be genetic?
Lacing exists, don't get me wrong - many users who have a flavour favourite will mix and match their vice of choice. But this is done by people who use Drug A as a method of delivering thier Drug B dose - not by people trying to hook or trash unwitting consumers.
In this case, you have a control group - your other friends who did the same stuff. It sounds like they were doing very weedy things, if they'd been doing angelwings or cocopuffs, you would know. Cuz those guys don't exactly sit down.
I would like to submit though, that people who get panic attacks also commonly attach a phobia to the events surrounding thier first experience. It's just that traumatic. Often stated as being the most terrifying experience of a person's life. Maybe this is just you working through that associated fear, trying to work out what happened at the beginning of it all. Sounds like a good thing to do.
I suspect this happened to a cousin of mine, actually, as he has been diagnosed with some schizoid disorder or other after trying pot (and other drugs, for that matter...), but it may be correlation rather than causation.
My advice is to not take the chance of fucking yourself up.
If you -really- need to self-medicate, use St. John's Wort. I am unaware of any side effects from it, and my personal experience with it has been positive. It's also nice and legal.
PCB is a dissassociative, so fear and anxiety would not be part of that equation. Quite the opposite. PCB users are rather feared in law enforcement because they don't really feel pain or fear like normal people, and thier adrenaline levels are high enough that sometimes one must get down to the gritty business of breaking bones to stop them.
Schizophrenia is something I was afraid of (only because a website mentioned it, maybe I should stop looking this shit up, heheh), but I don't really seem to have those symptoms. I don't hear voices, I seem to be pretty organized at what I do ( I like to be clean and keep myself clean, but not obsessively so). I would not say that I suffer any significant delusions. I'm open to others' interpretation and do not insist on things other people would call delusions.
Listen to me, I'm trying to make the case that I'm not crazy :P
Chances are, if your life isn't going to absolute shit now, you're probably fine. Just exercise some caution in what you put in to your body.
And whatever you do, don't start convincing yourself of mental disorders, because you really don't want to get in to that mess.
So I haven't talked to a professional. I wouldn't say my life has gone to complete shit. I'm in between jobs right now which is very stressful, but I can't say my life is shit. I have the will to live, and I have the will to make change.
And from what I've read it sounds like you can rule out any funny business with the weed. A very similar thing happened with a friend of mine (including the us not giving a shit part) only as far as i know it didn't have any lingering side effects. I guess you were part of the 1%, which sucks. Smart move not to have done it again, though.
And i doubt you are schizophrenic. Just really anxious.
https://medium.com/@alascii
There's nothing about dissociatives that prevents their users from being afraid and/or anxious.
I haven't touched drugs in years, but back in high school I personally experienced two dissociatives (PCP being one of them). Both of them made me very afraid.
The PCP was an accident - I had smoked some pot that was laced with it. It was not an urban legend, because marijuana doesn't cause vivid hallucinations, inability to feel pain, or blind rage, and several months later I met the person who had imported it and they confirmed that it was laced. This was over a decade ago - so maybe the market has changed since then - but back in those days it was dirt cheap to make PCP and it could be used to boost the perceived value of low-quality pot.
That having been said, the long term effects Sci-Fi Wasabi is describing don't sound like that to me. I agree with DodgeBlan, it sounds like regular anxiety and not schizophrenia. It's still worth seeing a psychiatrist about.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
I used to have semi panic attacks when I used to ride the bus back in grades 8 to 12 or so, especially when I'd be listening to music on my headphones. It used to start to get hard to breath deeply and a full breath so I'd lower my music and force myself to yawn which would open my lungs up and I'd be good for the rest of the ride usually or force myself to yawn again later.
Now I'm older and understand what was happening there. When you panic you start breathing very upper chest/lungs(heart rate goes up by relation) and yawning makes you take a deep full breath which is very relaxing so I knew what to do before I understood why. After high school I became angrier, short breathed and more stressed but didn't understand why. I thought I was getting out of shape as I'd run out of breath jogging lightly but could of course run for quite some time before actually getting winded. Eventually I hit up a chiropractor for help with some elbow, shoulder and various problems I was having. First thing he showed me was how to breah deep with my diaphram. This had a very life changing effect on me, I became relaxed, happy and very patient the more I practiced breathing deep. It took away those anxiety feelings I had when I rode the bus or was in public in general and I no longer flipped out when I stubbed my toe.
I'm not going to say this is going to work for you specifically but I'm willing to bet it'll help.
Start off by either stretching out your muscles or go straight to the breathing but I reccommend stretching first to help relax tight muscles.
Lie on your back, place one hand below/on your belly button(1 fing on the button and rest below), one hand on your chest, exhale, now exhale even more(your chest should deflate a bit), inhale deeply trying to move your lower hand up with your breath, exhale completely, inhale again trying to move that hand and make sure your hand on the chest isn't moving too much and repeat for 5minutes to 10minutes.
At first you won't wanna spend 5minutes doing it cause it can get boring but be patient with it. You can do this even sitting down, watching tv or lieing in your bed. If your just sitting there watching tv doing nothing mind as well try to focus on your breathing deep. The more you do it the easier it becomes.
However your anxiety attacks could be unrelated, but they seem like a large enough problem that you should consider seeing a counsellor/therapist/doctor about it.
I have epilepsy, and my neurologist warned me off weed because they're still not exactly sure of the reaction it could cause.
I don't drink or smoke.
Those three times were the only times in which weed has been involved with me, outside of possible second hand smoke from my mother.
Like, I'm freaked out that somehow I am irreversibly changed somehow, temporarily forgetting the good years I've had since then.
I have never been diagnosed with any neurological disorders that I know of.
you're growing up
some people have anxiety attacks
Weed can cause people prone to attacks to have them
in short, I doubt there's anything wrong with the drugs you smoked. You're feeling different because you're growing up. You had a bad trip, it happens. Weed is not a 100% nothing ever feels bad drug.
you're young, you're seeing the world in front of you, you'll get used to how you feel now, you're a kid, all kids get what you're getting
edit: you're going through quite a lot, it's stress. Chill out
Salvia looks black, you'd be able to tell if it was in the weed. Beyond that, I'm not sure how you smoked it, but when I smoked it out of a bong it was beyond "tripping out". It was a full blown lose-sense-of-reality hallucination. I'm not sure what it's like when smoked improperly (like through a pipe, etc.) but if it's anything close to what happened to me it's definitely not what the OP is talking about.
Go into more detail if you could, Spaz.
Sounds like it could've been that. It's hard to tell how long I was 'under' because time was definitely distorted.
It may have been laced with something, it may not have. As others have mentioned, pot can cause these kinds of bad reactions by themselves, especially in first-time users.
The chance of that happening is infinitesimal.
My suggestion is to deal with the here and now. Try to get in to a see a psychiatrist; let them know you're having panic attacks and anxiety. Whether your anxiety was triggered by pot or was just coincidental doesn't really matter much; you've already said you're not going to smoke pot again, so worrying about 'was it the pot? was it in the pot? did I damage my brain' is only going to make your anxiety worse. So instead of fixating on the past, try to deal with your anxiety in the present moment, and the first step in this regard is to go see a doctor.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It may cause your anxiety to be worse, however, it may also just be causing your anxiety all together, and the change might not have been physiological at all. It's possible that the only you reason you associate smoking pot with the onset of a 7 year general anxiety disorder is because you are looking for something to blame, and the negative connotations that you have associated with pot (from your experiences with your mother) have actually caused the anxiety and whatnot in the first place.
I think that you would benefit much from a few talk therapy sessions with a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Just make sure that you tell them everything you have told us and anything else that could be related to your mental well-being. Good luck.
Also, I didn't see an answer about Salvia yet, but its trip usually lasts less than 10 minutes. From, your description, it sounds like you just got really high, and there was no other drug lacing the weed.
It really is quite something if pot can trigger this on its own. I mean, really anything that alters your mood has the ability to fuck some things up sometimes.
I remember before this incident I was kind of a high strung person. Of course, not to the intensity I was (or am now, for that matter). I had issues with seperation anxiety due to my parent's divorce and whatnot. The funny thing is, I've almost downplayed the emotional impact the divorce and death of my mother had on me emotionally. It's quite possible I pooled those emotions into this one incident and unknowingly increased its potency to disrupt me.
I just want to be a happy, healthy individual who can move on in life and be somebody.
Yes. Call your county's health department. You can find it online by searching for your county government web page, or in the phone book under County Government services. Ask them for referrals to low-cost mental health services.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My eyes rolled back into my head and I went to an entirely different world. I was being hit up and down over and over again (like, my whole body flying these directions) and I saw what i can only describe as flashes of realities scroll down before my eyes, sorta like flipping through a book. Then I saw some objects that I can't remember (I remember one being a body, possibly me) and I saw them disintegrate into tiny dots of colors. When I came back to reality I was visibly shaken and totally exhausted. It only lasted a couple minutes but it felt like a lifetime.
Oh, and I was laughing my ass off the entire time. It wasn't funny or particularly euphoric or anything, but I just kept laughing.
Trust me, it wasn't salvia.
I need more info, though. Did you immediately start tripping like this? Or did it feel like you were getting really high really quick, and then it just kept getting worse and worse, till you felt like you did?
I remember laying on the floor, curled up against the bottom of a chair. I was watching the carpet, and felt like I was practically dying. No hallucinations, but I just felt like death.
I tried to eat a piece of pizza when it happened. I've never enjoyed pizza as much as I used to, since then.
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I remember toking up out of a small pipe. I'm pretty sure I smelled marijuana. We did it in my room and then I went out into my living room and things just didn't feel right. I felt really distant from everything and began panicking. Then visually things felt like I was moving laterally into pictures. My vision froze. Like, I'd see the two of them standing there and it would stay there, like my brain was lagging. It felt like my body was struggling to keep things going consistently and it was very overwhelming, like you are on a rollercoaster during a freefall, but never ending. I could hear the pizza guy at the door say "man, whats going on with that kid?" because I was screaming, of course, and things returned to normal for a minutes time and I was woozy, like how you'd feel if you were reaaaaally drunk. They said it was because I hadn't eaten. I was not hungry at all, so I picked up a slice and took a tiny nibble out of it and put it back down. Things started getting weird again so I got back down on the floor and rid the rest of it out. I cant remember if it felt a lifetime...it certainly felt timeless in a sense, but when I came to, it felt like I had been freaking out for at least 4 or 5 hours. I woke up back in my room not knowing how I got there, and in a blanket. I assume they either carried me back to my room or I unknowingly walked back myself. They were watching baseketball, and as you can imagine, now I hate that movie :P and very shakingly, I asked them what happened. They told me I was just freaking out and acting like an idiot. I managed to fall asleep again.
The next day, we were walking around and I was still very shaken. I remember then that all of a sudden it felt like a mini version of the nights events were happening again. I remember going "oh no its happennning agaaaaain!" and for a few minutes I'd just have to stand there and calm myself. I'd say these "flashbacks" in a sense were more emotional than visual. No real hallucinations to speak of, beside the "brain lagging" effect, albeit not nearly on the same scale. Mostly panic, like the fear that I'd be in that state forever. Then it would subside and I'd feel better. At first the "flashbacks" would occour daily, then weekly, then monthly. By highschools time it'd be like every other year, and even then, maybe only a duration of a few seconds. As of recently I haven't felt any effects like that at ALL.
Then about a month or so ago I was starting to feel pretty bad anxiety attacks, and one day I was just taking a shower and things just suddenly felt "that way". I was like noooooo! This was supposed to be gone! And my anxiety escalated from there. It's been a long while since ive had what you could describe as an intense "flashback", but now lately its like I can trick myself into the way it felt. Like, I can remember what it was like, and just for a fleeting moments time, I will sort of relive it. THAT really scares me. I assume the psychologist's role will be to sort of disarm the powerful emotional tie I have to that? I don't really know.
Then after high school when I was working, I went to a few parties and was able to drink in what you could consider a "healthy" way. I drank moderately but could achieve "drunkenness" and felt good. My judgment didn't seem impaired and I acted very reasonably and sociable without any of the fears I'd have prior. Just an interesting note.
I want to say that the flashbacks are a mental thing. I think, having had such a bad experience when first trying things like that(drugs, alcohol, etc), you kind of connect them all with that experience. I didn't have my similar experience until over a year since I had started smoking.
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Unless you're me, and salvia refuses to work. Ever.
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It doesn't sound like the most fun drug in the world, by any means.
Soothe this worry!