DOSE:		oral	Pharms - Escitalopram	(daily)
	6 hits	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

75 kg

I'll firstly introduce myself and get a few facts straight. I'm 17 now, living in Melbourne, Australia at a highly academic high school with a very stressful lifestyle in terms of school, friends, family and work. I have a history of strong anxiety related depression and poor self esteem. I’ve been on a course of Lexapro (Escitalopram oxalate, common SSRI) for about 6 months to date, and I had tried weed 3 times prior to this story, but to no avail.

It all started when I rang a friend one boring Sunday afternoon. He was one who I knew usually had some weed on him or knew where to get some. He said that he didn't have any, however if I call someone called Jack, he would fix me up with some weed. He described this guy Jack to me. This guy was a real pothead and had a lot of surplus weed lying around his house, which he'd be happy enough to sell to me. I called this guy (nervously), and we arranged a meeting spot and a meeting time.

He picked me up, introduced himself to me, and drove me to his house. I was not expecting this, and was quite uneasy at first, but once I had established what his character was like, I really didn't mind. He was very chilled, relaxed and easy going. For some reason he thought that I was a real pothead as well, having called around to his house for a quick fix of weed. However I wasn't, and I never had the chance to express my situation as far as my lack of experience with smoking was concerned. This soon became apparent though, when I tried to operate the bong which he gave me. He laughed at me, and thought that perhaps I had smoked a lot, but never used a bong. I took about 5 or 6 extremely long drags from the bong and held them in for a long time, because this is exactly what he did. I just copied him. I might also add that the marijuana he gave me smelt very strongly, and was just bud, and I am sure to date that it was just cannabis.

We sat for a while - approximately 20 minutes - to let the weed set in. At this stage, I felt absolutely nothing at all, and decided to get up and leave. We headed out to his carport, and I opened his car door, at which stage I started to feel extremely strange. I sat down, and when I touched my skin, the feeling would come about a second or two later. If I pinched myself, the pain would come a second or two later. This was really starting to scare me. I had been drunk before, I had been on sedatives before, antidepressants, anything. Nothing compared to the feelings which were about to follow.

My vision was clouded over, hazy and began to look 'tunnel-like'. I touched myself again and I could barely feel anything. It was then that I started to panic and have my out of body experience.

I felt like I was outside my body, away from my senses, not a person. I felt like I was a distant spirit that had only small samples of what my senses were receiving. Small, clouded, single frames of the world around me came every few seconds. I also received small samples of sound, which made absolutely no sense at all and confused me. I no longer felt like a living, breathing, feeling person. Instead more like a spirit, which was vaguely in control of a body. I felt partially dead. I felt like I was fading away and I was never going to return to my body. The darkness was taking control, and I was being drowned out. Apparently during this time I was smashing my head on the dashboard of Jack’s car. I cannot remember doing this.

The next few frames of sight I got were that of a train station's blinding lights in the dark. I told this body of mine to get out of the car and to move slowly to a patch of grass. The next few frames I got were of a completely different environment. I was stumbling around, receiving pictures of the ground, pictures of the sky, eventuating somewhere completely different - at the opposite end of the train station. I cannot remember moving there. I decide that perhaps it would be better for me to stop changing my environment, so I stop moving about and stare with my face down in a patch of grass. I do this for as long as I can. But at this stage I was starting to have a severe panic attack. How long was this going to last? Would the effects of this last forever? Would this ever end? I was not paralysed, but it took extreme amounts of effort to achieve small movements, and by the time I did, it was like I was just realising what was happening several seconds later. It was somewhat like a lagged computer game.

During the next while, I felt my phone ring several times. What was frustrating is that I could not coordinate myself to get it out of my jeans pocket. When I finally managed to get it out of my pocket, I tried to answer it, by mashing the keypad with my fingers. I succeeded in answering my phone. I couldn't understand what was being said, but my state was improving enough to recognise that this was my mother. I told her that I loved her and that I was dying, and I told her that I was at a station, and I told her roughly the area that I thought I was in.

I shortly thereafter forgot that I had even spoken to my mum or even had a phone. Time was beginning to become more fluent, but my perceptions of the past, present and future were all messed about. I find myself going walkabouts in the parking lot, and I don't know how many times, but I remember seeing the shocked faces of teenagers in a minibus who were roughly my age. I was disgraced by what I had become. I wanted to wake up and snap back to sensitive reality but I couldn’t. I just wanted to die. It's not that I was suicidal, but each moment of this was so unbearable to live to the next I just wanted to find a way to kill myself. I would not have been able to coordinate myself to do so anyway. I tried several times to navigate my way to the train tracks, failing time and time again, finding myself in different places each time. It was so rotten. So horrible.

By the time my mother arrived, my mother and father (apparently) assisted me in navigating my way to the car, and picked up my belongings which were all around the train station. They said I would be fine and gave me a bottle of water. I drained all 600mls of it in a matter of seconds. They said that the time since they had called me till the time they picked me up would have been only 30 minutes. It felt like I had spent several days and nights waiting for them.

By the time I got home, the ordeal continued for another 2-3 hours, but nowhere near as badly. Time became more fluent as I sat on the family sofa, and my past and present became clearer. However, I was still much uncoordinated and my speech was described as 'disturbing' yet alarmingly intelligent, with references to an essay I did about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I slept quite easily that night, but my 'fuzzy' vision and delayed senses continued noticeably for the next three days. I was told that this was impossible by Jack (who I might add, was apologetic for ditching me at the train station). Nightmares followed for the next two weeks, which I thought would never cease, but eventually did.

I decided to try weed again about two weeks following the previous time, just after the nightmares came to an end, this time smoking from a joint. I took about 4 short hits and had a similar ordeal to the one I had had two weeks earlier. I smoked another joint two weeks following that as well, having just 2 hits, and had a repeat experience. It is at this time that I have decided to write this up to share my experience. I was told that this was extremely rare.

My warnings go out to people with any of the characteristics that I have.
> History of extreme depression and social anxiety
> Long courses of SSRI antidepressants
> An overactive mind.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 37521
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 21, 2004	Views: 56,422
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Pharms - Escitalopram (304), Cannabis (1), OBE (332) : Various (28), Post Trip Problems (8), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3)