DOSE:		insufflated	Cocaine
		insufflated	MDMA
		oral	Alcohol - Hard
		oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

168 lb

This is a slightly different report ]]as the body of the tale is about the after effects of the drug rather than the experience itself.

I have a friend who now lives in another part of the country. In years gone by we had many, many drug experiences together and are both very practiced in the use of a range of hallucinogens, stimulants and sedatives, including cannabis, mushrooms, LSD, Ketamine, amphetamines of various sorts and cocaine. Now he’s a family man, so the ‘wild nights’ are far fewer than formerly, although we indulge when we get the chance. So it was, last weekend.

He came to stay; we had lunch together and then began the odyssey. We started with cocaine, washed down with fine single malt, and then moved on to powdered MDMA (1gm between two) which we insufflated over the course of the next ten hours.
After the first assault on the cocaine, our intake for the rest of the evening was very moderate. I think we had another three lines each, over the rest of the evening.

There were none of the usual conflicts, either between the alcohol and the MDMA or, indeed between the MDMA and the cocaine, apart from my friend’s slight sensations of nausea, which never really amounted to anything. All the drugs were of excellent quality and purity. We had a very enjoyable experience, went to bed at around 5am and slept reasonably well.

The following day, we stuck to wine and cocaine, both taken in moderate amounts, followed by a hearty-ish roast dinner cooked for us by my wife. My friend left at around 7pm, I crashed out at 10.10pm, simply because I had nothing better to do. I had a broken night's sleep, not terrible, just broken.

I woke up at about 9.30am, feeling ineffably strange. Time had slowed to the extent that it lost almost all relevance as a measure of duration. I made and smoked a roll up; I might as well have been smoking a cigar, the amount of time it took to finish it. I lay in bed for a bit, listening to the sounds outside my building (my flat backs onto the rear of a row of shops and cafes, so there is often the sound of voices or activity). This, unfortunately, only seemed to reinforce the 'elasticity' of the temporal space I inhabited.

From experience I know that the first 40 minutes of post-E consciousness are the roughest, so made myself a tea and had another roll up in bed, waiting for that first flush of 'normality' to return. Except that it didn't. In a very subtle, but quite disturbing way, I felt just on the 'outside' of the skin of MY reality , with all its responsibilities and abstract complexities, and couldn't get back 'in'.

I wandered into my living room, surrounded by the muted chaos of one of those weekends, then into the kitchen, full of the debris from the meal my wife had cooked for us the night before. The mere concept of clearing the kitchen looked as hard as climbing Mount Everest in my current state, so I sat on the sofa in the living room, trying to get a tangible grip on some part of my existence, let alone my actual life.

It was very quiet in the room, silence only broken by the spatter of a quick rain shower on the window and ticking of the kitchen clock, seeming to measure my remaining life out in even, 60 second pulses, whilst I remained rooted to the chair.

Then my phone rang.
I work as a freelance video editor and, particularly at this time of year, my agency will often ring round to see if anyone wants a day's last-minute work (this invariably happens on a Monday). Normally, I would let the call go, but always called them back within an hour to revise the situation. On this morning, there was no way on earth I would be able to handle an edit but, more importantly, I was not mentally strong enough to talk to anyone at the OFFICE. For the first time in ten years, I let the call slide by without ever returning the call - an indication of just how shot I was. I want to point out that I have edited in some pretty shocking states of mind in the past, so I wasn't just running away in a cowardly fashion.

Knowing I was in a state, I resolved to formulate some kind of plan, to do stuff just to get my serotonin firing off again. I decided to clear up the room that needed the least attention, the guest room, as it happens. This done, I reassessed.
Feeling better?
Shaken off the weirdness?
No.

I sat and watched some random documentary on Chinese village life and a jade sculptor; it was the most anodyne bit of television I could handle. Anything even slightly reflecting my real life was intolerably harsh, unforgiving and unviewable.

Thinking my state was caused by not having had a lot of food over the weekend, I made a sandwich and somehow got it down, even though every single swallow tasted like a mixture of barbed wire and razor blades. I felt a little better, but the mental confusion was still uppermost.

Terrified that work were going to call me again, I had hit upon the solution of charging my cell in the kitchen, with the door shut, so I couldn't hear it ringing. I eventually plucked up the courage to look at it, and noticed three missed calls from my wife, so I thought I'd better give her a bell. The chat went OK, although aspects of it only served to remind me how 'off-world' I still was.

I thought a film would help me focus, so I put on 'Predator 2' (of all things) for no other reason than because I had woken up thinking about it that morning. Before I played it, I had a quick glance at my watch and saw it was only 2.30pm. This REALLY shook me up, because, mentally, I had thought it was at least three hours later than it was. Because of my job, dealing with duration, pace and time on a daily basis, I have a very finely honed internal sense of duration. To find this so out of whack was quite scary. I got through most of the film without incident, smoking a couple of low-strength joints as I watched.

I thought I'd get my head down for a while, to see if sleep would help. What sleep?! I tossed and turned and, in between odd bouts of comfort, I was assailed with long stretches of even greater personal confusion. This peaked on a couple of occasions, to the extent that I started to wonder just how long this subtle but omni-present confusion was going to continue. I started to think of the other tasks and appointments I had set myself for the rest of the week (meetings with banks, and my accountant) and how I was possibly going to manage any of them if this state of mind persisted. After a while, this confusion slowly dissipated (I now think this was the effect of the joints) and, realising I wouldn't sleep, started focusing on my next tasks in the flat. I got up and tackled the kitchen washing up and, slowly, very slowly, started to come back to my reality. I guess that this was at about 5pm.

I called my wife and had a slightly more optimistic conversation, then put the TV on and watched a lot of The Simpsons and South Park. As time went by, I started to feel more and more grounded. At about 7pm, I returned a call of my Dad’s, knowing that this task would be the litmus test of my sanity. These chats can be fairly unpredictable so I reasoned that, if I can talk to him, I could talk to anyone. The conversation went just fine, so I knew I was alright. I had a proper meal, had another chat with my wife (we don't live together) and then watched 'Attack of the Clones' which seemed perfect viewing to help me recover from a very, very long day. I went to bed, knowing that I would be OK, and so it proved.

I am fine today and have spent a train journey to Brighton to see a friend, writing this experience down, almost just to get it on paper whilst it is still fresh. I had originally intended it for my fellow 'psychonaut' only, but then thought that others might be interested.

I am no 'newbie' when it comes to comedowns, and I am well-aware of the 'derealisation' experienced as a side effect of serotogenic drugs, but this was something new. The post-MDMA effect was far stronger than I have experienced for a very, very long time, especially after a relatively modest weekend’s indulgence. After a post-mortem on the experience I have reasoned that, the only thing we did differently, in this case, was taking a large amount of alcohol before we insufflated our MDMA.

Comparing my experience with those ‘trip disasters’ and ‘train wrecks’ I have read about may seem slightly ridiculous but, as I have just said, I am no stranger to these states of mind and, the sheer oddness of this comedown and the sometimes quite unforgiving nature of this reaction has, as a result, made me far more careful as to how I pick and choose my bouts of MDMA use in future...

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 110099
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 54
Published: Nov 26, 2017	Views: 8,064
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Cocaine (13), MDMA (3) : Hangover / Days After (46), Multi-Day Experience (13), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)