December 09, 2002

I've taken a lot of drugs in my time, for varied purposes that are probably equal parts entertainment, enlightenment-seeking, and self-medication. While certain drugs will probably always retain their entertainment value, it was during a nitrous-oxide binge awhile back that I arrived at the definitive answer regarding the whole "drugs as a path to enlightenment" thing.

Nitrous, for those who don�t know, is laughing gas. When administered at the dentist's office it's given as a mixture with oxygen. When administered in someone's living room or at a rave, it usually comes in small silver cylinders commonly referred to as "whippets" and normally used to charge up whipped-cream dispensers (although, in my opinion, there is no possible way that the manufacturers of these chargers, such as ISI and Easy-Whip, can seriously believe that America is a nation of fresh whipped-cream and artistic dessert fiends--I'm sure their sales volume is 75% inhaled, 25% whipped). The charger is cracked and inhaled via a balloon or some other device, and the inhaler experiences about 60 seconds of whacked-out stonedness. Then the inhaler needs another one, and another, behavior which lends the gas the well-earned sobriquet "Hippy Crack." People usually mix it with other drugs to temporarily charge up whatever experience they're having. By itself, the gas is dissociative, an auditory hallucinogen, and sometimes produces intense A-ha! experiences.

An A-ha! experience is what I call a drug-induced pseudo-enlightenment experience, the stereotypically trippy Have you ever really looked at your hands, man? sort of thing. My favorite story about such an experience was told by a 60s psychedelic pioneer whose name escapes me at the moment--he had spent the night smoking a large quantity of high-quality marijuana and hashish, and at one point before collapsing into bed had written down his Big Revelation That Would Explain Everything. When he got up the next morning, he eagerly read what he had written the night before: Feet go into shoes!

At any rate, during my aforementioned nitrous binge, I had one of those experiences--the creeping, certain sense that I was just about to Understand It All. Then the nitrous wore off, so I cracked another cylinder and held the gas in my lungs for longer. The sensation came again: so close! So close to the Big Big Knowledge! Then I had to exhale, and the gas wore off. So I went after it again, each time being exhorted to hold my breath longer...wait for it...almost there! The exhortations themselves took on the appearance of a skinny, wizened Indian guru on a mountaintop somewhere. He gleefully beckoned me closer and closer, until suddenly it dawned on me: if I continued attempting to get the Big Big Knowledge in this manner, I was going to hold my breath until I passed out, and then I would fall onto the floor. Then I really did get it, and burst out laughing as I exhaled and the rings of anoxia darkness around the edges of my vision began to brighten.

What did I get? That all of the Timothy Learys, and Ram Dasses, and Stephen Gaskins of the world were full of shit. The ultimate knowledge that I was so certain I could get, if only I could deprive my brain of fresh oxygen for just...a...few...more...seconds!...was, in fact, death. That's what I was edging closer towards, sitting there with my pile of empty little silver bulbs. Nitrous Oxide was no different than pot, or LSD, or mushrooms, or ether or even butane (in my much younger and much stupider days). It all led the same place, and as soon as I understood that, the zany little Indian guru guy cackled with delight and disappeared.

As I said, I've done a lot of drugs. Many, many, many hits of LSD, which taught me a lot about the workings of my own psychology, what it feels like to be a lunatic, and what it means to be "looked after" by the universe at large. I learned the same sorts of things from mushrooms, but with indigestion. Mescaline, the synthesized version of the naturally occurring phenethylamine found in various plants such as peyote, taught me how to find anything funny by making me giggle. A lot. Bales of pot taught me about psychological addiction: when I realized that all the weed was doing for me was giving me anxiety attacks and the munchies, I stopped doing it. The occasional bout of pill-popping, usually Oxycodone or Codeine, which falls squarely into the aforementioned "entertainment" category, as does the gloppy gram of fresh opium I enjoyed on the beach at Zipolite in Oaxaca. I do like the opiates. They're warm and dreamy and soft. But I've stayed away from heroin and morphine because I�m smart enough to know that I'm dumb enough to get hooked. I tried cocaine once, but didn't really see the point. There was also a bit of ether long ago, which was everything that Hunter S. Thompson said it was. There was salvia, which is akin to being ground between the giant machined gears of reality and not at all instructive, except as a brutal reminder of the lesson I learned from Nitrous Oxide. Most recently there was Ecstasy, taken only because I happened to come across a gram of pure crystalline MDMA. Like the opiates, MDMA was an excellent entertainment value, but even that wasn't really worth the personal difficulties resultant therefrom. Then there's the most common and troublesome drug, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, your friend and mine: alcohol. That's the Great Self-Medication. I learned the same lesson from alcohol that I learned from pot...mostly. It's still a problem now and again, but I'm pleased as punch to report that I have learned the lesson that the Cocaine-Addicted Electrified Rat has failed to learn: if it feels bad, stop it. This is because I am a good and smart monkey, much smarter than the rat. Usually.

But mostly, what I learned from doing drugs was how to do them. You must understand, also, that I started doing drugs at the age of three. More precisely, I was given drugs at the age of three: Dexedrine, also known as dextroamphetamine, which was what they gave hard to manage children such as myself before they came out with my favorite chemical straightjacket, methylphenidate hydrochloride, also called Ritalin. I took a bunch of that, too, well past that point in adolescence where it's really embarrassing when the school nurse shows up in class with your daily pill in a little paper cup because you've skipped out on it.

The point of all of that backstory is that I knew, from a very young age, that small, harmless-looking bits of material, when ingested, could alter my perceptions, my moods, and the way I thought about things. The common misconception is that Ritalin returns kids to some sort of "normal" state, that it just erases hyperactivity or ADHD or whatever it is that Ciba-Geigy is calling their marketing strategy these days, and makes kids into happy little attentive campers. That may be true for some, but it wasn't for me, so I became acquainted with what it meant to zone out quite early in my life. This is not intended as an excuse for my drug use, or to shift the blame for that behavior to my parents, but instead is offered simply as a reasonable explanation for my somewhat fearless experimentation and my comfort with varying sorts of substance-induced altered states of consciousness. It may also account for that unfortunate incident with the nutmeg.

The primary difference between my childhood drug use and my later exploits was always, I maintained, a matter of choice. When I was a child, I was drugged. When I was (ostensibly) an adult, I was drugging. One was passive, one was active, and the latter was more fun and, to me, much more acceptable. As I grew older and less convinced of my own maturity, I came to realize that by and large this active drugging behavior was symptomatic of underlying psychological difficulties, and I began to deal with those. Over the past six or seven years, the drugs, one by one, have lost their utility. Alcohol, as I mentioned, lingers on, but in nowhere near the quantities required for true self-medication.

Last year, after a bunch of murderers flew a pair of airplanes into some buildings and knocked them down near where I work, I decided to decrease my stress levels by buying a house. That didn't work out very well, so--overcoming my instinctive aversion to The Man's Drugs--I sought modern pharmacological help. Paxil for the brain, and lovely Xanax for the anxiety. I read up on SSRIs, and on benzodiazepines. I discovered that Xanax was considered highly addictive, and having had some experience with the drug during an earlier bout of psychological mayhem I could see why. It's got a wonderfully calming effect. So: having gotten my coveted 'scrip for Xanax from my doctor, I carefully managed my dosage and how long I stayed on the stuff, rarely more than .5 mg a day, and by the end of my second bottle I gracefully tapered off from .25 mg to .16 mg, and then to nothing. Very smooth, no muss, no fuss, no withdrawal. By then the Paxil had sort of kicked in, so my anxiety had lessened somewhat. It was the Xanax, however, that enabled me to navigate the house-buying-mortgage-getting gauntlet without busting out my assault weapons and my scopes and picking a nice high clock tower to camp out in.

As I mentioned before, I avoided the harder opiates because of the addiction potential. I managed my Xanax carefully. These are things that doing drugs taught me about. Now, almost a year after starting on Paxil, I've moved out of New York. I've got a groovy little house in a nice part of the world. It's time to lose the pharmaceutical crutch and get on with my life. Shouldn't be too hard, right? I knew that there was the possibility of withdrawal problems, as with all SSRIs. That made sense...it does, after all, muck about with serotonin, one of the workhorse chemicals of the brain and body, and it's only reasonable that you should taper off gradually to give the body time to adjust. My doctor hadn't mentioned anything about it, and, after all, I had stopped smoking simply by losing interest in cigarettes. No sweat.

As it turns out, despite having carefully managed to avoid doing drugs that might result in physiological withdrawal, despite having dropped nicotine--supposedly more addictive than cocaine--like a bad habit, somehow, I still seem to have ended up on a drug that will, in all probability, cause withdrawal symptoms when I try to quit it. After years of consumer agitation, several lawsuits, and total denial, Glaxo SmithKline has revised the Paxil labeling to include "dizziness, sensory disturbances (e.g., paresthesias such as electric shock sensations), agitation, anxiety, nausea and sweating" as possible results of ending the use of the medication. Of course, other places list the potential consequences as "intense insomnia, extraordinarily vivid dreams [both of which I've had within the last 48 hours], severe mood swings, especially heightened irritability/anger [ditto], profuse sweating, especially at night, [yup]," and so on, and so forth. If you dig through the 32 pages of documentation Glaxo SmithKlein offers on its website, you�ll also discover that all of these reactions "may have no causal relationship to the drug" and are "generally self-limiting." Yay! I was getting worried there for a minute. I'm sure that the fact that Paxil made Glaxo SmithKline $12.1 billion last year means that their science is suitably professional and unbiased.

If I had the energy, I'd be incredibly pissed off. After experimenting with all sorts licit and illicit substances and learning the important lessons about drug abuse and personal growth, after weaning myself off each one as it became problematic, after dropping cigarettes without batting an eye...once again, it's The Man's Drug that fucks me over.

Mr. Jean-Pierre Garnier can kiss my sweating, paresthetic, extraordinarily vivid ass.