Modern humans must learn how to relate to psychoactives
responsibly, treating them with respect and awareness,
working to minimize harms and maximize benefits, and
integrating use into a healthy, enjoyable, and productive life.
How Views Change
Topiramate (Topomax) & Cannabis
Citation:   Winston100s. "How Views Change: An Experience with Topiramate (Topomax) & Cannabis (exp27214)". Erowid.org. Jul 11, 2010. erowid.org/exp/27214

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
1 bowl smoked Cannabis (plant material)
  T+ 2:30 50 mg insufflated Pharms - Topiramate (ground / crushed)
  T+ 7:00 1 bowl smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 253 lb
I used psychedelics alot when I was younger, with my friends. I didn't have any goals in my life, I didn't have any plans. We were all under 18, and most were still in high school. When I was still in high school, I probably shouldn't have used psychedelics (including marijuana) so much. If I could take it all back now, I still wouldn't though. I feel I've done the fine tuning enough today, and finally sorted through the garbage.

It started when my closest friends and I all started to smoke weed around the same time. We thought we knew it all, and looking back we knew just a tiny little bit. I've done Ketamine, LSD, Mushrooms, MDMA, Opiates, Amphetamines, Cocaine, DXM, LSA, Benzos, Alcohol, Marijuana, many legal drugs, many prescribed recreational and psychiatric drugs, and many poor substitutes. Ketamine, LSD, Mushrooms, MDMA, Opiates, Amphetamines, and Cocaine I have done less than a dozen times each. I haven’t felt the need for any drug at any time, except when I was smoking marijuana daily. For about 2 years, I was smoking weed every day. I would take psychedelics with my friends whenever we thought of it, and more and more benzodiazipines with alcohol. The last 3 years I have done DXM and LSA more times than I can count, and I believe at one point they may have helped to cloud my goals and my thinking.

I was put on anti-psychotics and antidepressants in July after getting paranoid while smoking weed with my two good friends. Late August I moved away from my old friends, and my old way of using drugs. My whole situation has changed, slowly, to the way it is now. I got in trouble with the law eventually, for something I did when I was high. It was then I was introduced to Narcotics Anonymous, nearly a year ago. I quit using street drugs for various amounts of time. Never getting quite 2 months off street drugs, honestly looking back at it. Still, I've used psychedelics only a handful of times in the last year (LSA & DXM).

I believe I was more pressured into it than anything else, because my mother is a recovering schizophrenic alcoholic. She is also a born again Christian. She found Alcoholics Anonymous is the only thing that helps her to not drink. She has never done any street drugs. I never even considered her an alcoholic, but one of the few good things about AA/NA is no one can decide that but yourself.

At this time, I was getting switched from SSRIs, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications by a psychiatrist. Nothing was helping me enough. I had not been going to college, or ever really completed a full semester, and had really not made any friends my age since I moved. I had no motivation to do anything. Nothing seemed worthwhile, and nothing had been since I was about 16 or so. Now, I had no drugs and no friends to do drugs with.

So I declined more and more over the months. My old friends I talked to online were noticing changes in me, and didn't know what to think. I did less street drugs, and never in consecutive days. I made a final choice about my using back in June, when I stayed 30 days in an inpatient recovery facility. It was there that I saw things in ways I never thought of before. I thought long about whether the prescription medications were holding me back. When I got out of my stay, I went to mental health again. I stayed there in the hospital for 3 days on a 5150 (health code in California, for an involuntary hold of a patient who seems a threat or harm to themselves or others), and was put on a new set of medications.

When I got back to my mom's house, I quit taking any medications and I sat in my bed all day watching TV and sleeping. I didn't talk to anyone anymore. Around mid-August, I got around to setting my computer back up after just shrugging off that it was broken. I was not going to NA meetings at all anymore, I have gone to maybe a dozen meetings since July. I believe I felt generally stupider and slower, and my memory was shot. I got back online, and spent the nights how I used to: on drug forums.

It was near the end of August, I decided I was going to try DXM again. The last time I had done it was in May. About a week after I first did DXM, I met one of my only friends I've met in over a year. It was also from this that I decided to get back into mental health and tell the psychiatrist I had stopped taking the antidepressants and antipsychotics back in July. He gave me 5 new prescriptions. One of the new drugs the psychiatrist prescribed me was Topomax. The others are wellbutrin, trileptal, serequol, and risperdal.

The last two days before this night, I had just gotten my bottle of Topomax and bought weed. I took 4 Topomax and smoked a bowl, then 2 more a few hours later. The next day I took a total of 5 throughout the day with a little more weed.

I believe it had all been building up, since I first did psychedelics again, at the end of August.

---------------

So last night, about 15 minutes after last smoking a bowl of low grade with tobacco, I make it to my front door. It is around 8pm, I smoked the last of my weed today at noon, then I insuffulated 2 Topomax 25mg sometime from 2:00pm to 3:00pm. I was already feeling good at around 7pm, when I met up with my friend and smoked weed. I started to get real high real fast after the first few hits. I'm glad my friend understands how out of it I get on pills. Most people don’t.

I'm coming inside. I say hi to Brad, he's sitting on the couch, I think. It seems I'm going real fast, everything is in a blur when I look back on it. I go straight to my room and close the door, a million thoughts in my head at once. I take my computer off standby, but I'm too out of it to get a chance to set up music. It was too hot, so I open up the blinds above my bed and turn the fan on. I then sit down and begin to fool around at the computer.

I'm hearing mega music in my head, it reminds me of Queens Of The Stone Age or Monster Magnet. It's awesome. It's about that song I've been writing. I open up notepad, and start listening to the 1 minute tracks I had recorded myself a week or two ago, not as good as what I can play now on guitar. But I still like it. I realized its all basically the same song, just different parts. I eventually stopped Winamp, sat on my bed and hooked the guitar up. I started practicing for a little bit what I had been playing for the past two weeks since I first learned.

Eventually I sat back down on the computer, it had been roughly 25 minutes since I got home. I decided to go online, but I first thought of putting my weed away. I looked through my pockets and searched for my prescription bottle which had my weed in it. I'm doing all this while trying to load music on Winamp, trying to look for the right song for that moment. I still have notepad open, and I start to write lyrics again. I seem to be getting more and more detached. I go to my closet to put my weed where I always put it, and when I reach into my pocket I hear some voice which sounded like it was through a megaphone outside my bedroom door say something to the effect of 'Drop it, buddy' and then I heard right after 'If he doesn't make another move that will be the only smart move he's made all night'.

Now, I've heard paranoid shit before, on drugs and off them. I just thought I had flipped again. I hadn't even smoked too much weed that night. But this slowly started me into what built up to a massive panic. I ignored that voice, and put the weed up in the top shelf in the closet, when I heard a different voice this time, still sounding through a megaphone 'What are we going to do with this guy?' and one of the first ones 'He just doesn't learn, does he?' Now, I couldn't believe I had just heard 3 distinct voices, all seeming to react to my actions. I have never experienced this one before.

So, starting to get a little more paranoid, I go towards my bed to close my blinds. I peer outside for a second or two, and I'm thinking real hard now, 'Is someone REALLY watching me?' I heard those same voices again chuckle while saying 'Oh, look, I think he gets the picture now' and another one say something like 'Oh gee, am I going to go to jail?' I then heard lots of laughter. I had a marijuana pipe, one bowl of marijuana, and prescription drugs in my room. On my computer, I had IRC and IM logs of my friends and I planning road trips to meet. When I heard that last voice say, 'the picture', my mind went off. I started thinking a million thoughts at once. Most were typical panic and paranoia thoughts.

I thought it was over for me.

I thought I was going to jail that night.

I thought my mom's new boyfriend had been setting me up from day 1.

I soon convinced myself I had enough shit on my computer to convict me of conspiracy to distribute LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, probably more drugs. For all I knew right then, everyone online I had talked to were FBI agents or cops.

I thought I was heading to Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison or the home for the criminally insane.

My mind was racing. I started to visualize my new reality. I had visions of me in court, with my doctor testifying. Him saying how I had been delusional, how I hadn't not been delusional and schizophrenic since he first met me. I thought I was going to be locked up and fed psychiatric drugs for the rest of my life. And now, when I was high, it was all going to go down. I thought about killing myself for a few seconds there.

It kept building. They were reading my thoughts, the voices kept going. They were telling me what not to do. They were advising me not to do anything more stupid than I have already done. 'Just get down on the floor, and it will all be over soon.' The other ones would then agree. I stayed in those thoughts for the longest 3-5 minutes ever, just standing right next to my door, hearing the voices talk. I thought of going online, but I was frozen in terror. I had convinced myself my mom was in on it, that she had called the cops on me. I was completely incapacitated. I knew what I should have done, I should have put on music and tried to lay down to let it pass, or call someone up. But I couldn't put on music, I couldn't lay down and let it pass. The only thing I could do at the time was listen to what I was hearing.

Time was nonexistent. So in what had felt like an eternity, my thoughts eventually came to 'Why haven't I been busted yet?' So, I decided to see what was really going on. I opened up the door, and I can’t remember hearing anything but distorted noise. I walk out into the living room, and my mom and her boyfriend are just sitting there looking straight ahead on the couch. I am severely confused and disoriented. I attempt to say something to them, but they can’t seem to hear me. At this point, my thoughts of what was actually happening had changed. I thought for a quick second they knew I was on drugs, and they wanted me to tell them. I should of just kept walking through the house, but I then thought it might of been a setup.

In less than another half second, I realized what was then the truth. They were listening to a AA speaker tape. In a matter of a few seconds, the tape was shut off and I hugged them both. I told them I loved them, and I wanted more freedom in my life. They said they loved me and they understood. Just a week earlier, I basically told my mom's boyfriend to piss off, and I wanted nothing to do with him. I told my mom that night I had been depressed the last month or two, and I thought she didn't care. I said I just didn't want to tell them, because I thought they didn't want to know. I ended up saying that I was trying to find something that worked for me.

When I got back into my room, roughly 5 minutes later, I felt changed. Things were different. At this point, my thoughts may have still been racing, but it’s typical for topomax and weed. I get alot accomlished when I am like this. I played more guitar and I felt a nice mellow high. I turned on Pink Floyd and layed down on my bed. I love music when I am high. I was just as high until I went to sleep about 6 hours later.

*************************************************************************************************************************************

What I have felt while high on Topomax in combination with marijuana words will never do justice. Every time I have been on this, I seem to want to describe it, but I can't seem to make it sound right and it never makes sense. I eventually just stopped trying. It takes a long time to get sentences out, and when they come out it is usually jumbled and incoherent to others. At times it has zoned me out, so I don't know what I am even thinking about. At other times, it feels like I am even heading into being manic, or a psychosis. On the verge of 'losing it'. The great thing is, it varies so much with me. It's different every 15 minutes, and after every hit of marijuana I smoke.

I think I may still prefer benzodiazipines more. It has a simliar memory impairment like ambien does, and some of the sedating effects of muscle relaxers for me. I realized the night prior, I had gotten to a point where, I don't know what I had been saying or doing anymore. And this, for me, now is a GREAT thing in my life. I just was myself, and that may not sound like much, but that is real hard for me. It has always been hard for me to be myself on drugs, or not on drugs. Topomax really works good for that. So my whole weekend on Topomax would consist of me doing what I feel I want to do, without thinking it through and not really having a memory of it, or not having a memory of it would not seem to matter. No regrets. Just flowing, and not caring. I've heard it described as making one 'generally stupid'. The last few days I've done basically everything on impulse and with lower inhibitions.

Drugs have really helped me work through what I have been going through lately. I would never have said that to my mom when I was high before. About the suicide thing, and my life being over. How I thought, maybe that was the only way out. I think that was a major test for me. I've dealt with suicide in the past, but I don't believe it’s the way out or ever will be again. My arms will always be filled with burn marks and scars from abuse. I really didn't want to kill myself. I just didn't want that to be the truth.

I have thought about alot of important things to me in the last month. For now, I am going to continue doing what I feel I need to do. I enjoy what I do with my time now, like I never have in the last year, or any time I can remember in my life.

Exp Year: 2000ExpID: 27214
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 11, 2010Views: 17,976
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Pharms - Topiramate (328), Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Difficult Experiences (5), Families (41), Music Discussion (22), Depression (15), Combinations (3), Alone (16)

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