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Extremes Reconciled in a World of Dichotomies
Amphetamines, Lorazepam & Gabapentin
Citation:   Insolite. "Extremes Reconciled in a World of Dichotomies: An Experience with Amphetamines, Lorazepam & Gabapentin (exp377)". Erowid.org. Jun 13, 2000. erowid.org/exp/377

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
225 mg oral Pharms - Venlafaxine (daily)
  T+ 0:00 20 mg oral Amphetamines (pill / tablet)
  T+ 1:00 10 mg oral Amphetamines (pill / tablet)
  T+ 5:00 900 mg oral Pharms - Gabapentin (powder / crystals)
  T+ 5:00 0.5 mg insufflated Pharms - Lorazepam (powder / crystals)
BODY WEIGHT: 129 lb
Part I: electric boogaloo in the stars, kid.

Chemical cocktail consumed

1) 10mg amphetamine (oral)
2) 10mg d-amphetamine (oral)
3) ~10mg d-amphetamine + .5mg lorazepam (nasal) + 900mg gabapentin (oral)
4) indeterminate amount of nicotine (smoked/sublingual) + saline solution (nasal)
== an alternate plane

In addition I take 225mg venlafaxine a day for 'depression.' How that effects this voyage I am not sure.




In the beginning

It's exam week now, and so I have lots of work to do. Absurd amounts of work, one might say. What better way to study than to take a little bit of speed? Several of my friends have a script for it, so I borrowed some.
First I take two 'adderall,' the blue pill of half d-amphetamine, and for some reason beyond me, half l-amphetamine. Since l-amphetamine has almost no cns activity I don't know how this may affect my experience. This is at about 3pm. The pills go down with a little mango sunny delight. Thereafter I experience typical low-dose amphetamine effects; logorrhea, increased cognition, and the sort. It's what they give it to add children for, no?




Later that day

I get a ride from a friend to his house. We each take two dexedrine spansules and chew them thoroughly so as to thwart the wax matrix that keeps the d-amph hostage inside. This happens at about 4pm. I have two more spansules in my pocket for later. He gives me also three pieces of nicorette gum (nicotine polacrilex, 2mg) for potential later nicotine fixes. We go to the local library. He studies cryptography; I study chemistry. We accomplish much this day, in no small part thanks to the d-amph. My heart is beating furtively as it so often does under the tutelage (so to speak) of kind d-amph. Also, I am rather flushed and warm. D-amph does this too. A few cigarettes throughout help mellow the ride somewhat. They take the sinister edge off of the d-amph. 7.30pm I arrive home.




In the house

My parents notice that I smell strongly of cigarettes and my own bodily odours. I notice moreso that, in the process of studying chemistry, I have worked myself into a sweat. I didn't know I could get that deeply into an abstract concept. It's nice to know. In any case, I take a shower. I cleanse myself thoroughly. Ritual cleansing, bordering on obsessive-compulsive, is another typical d-amph thing. Meanwhile, I have started chewing my first piece of nicorette. Everything gets wiggly, like nicotine will do.

Now I am clean. I talk with the parents for a while; about politics, chemistry, my future. Then I sequester myself in my room so that I may dedicate myself to my studies for a while.




Evening-time

This is where things get strange.

From previous experience I have learned that the ideal way to administer d-amph is per the nasal route. There are a few drawbacks to this. One is that I must grind up the spansules in a mortar and pestle. This means I get nasty bits of wax up my nose. The other problem is the high peak plasma levels of amphetamine associated with nasal administration. It makes me jittery and less able to work than I otherwise would be able to, sans that powerful all-encompassing shake. It's as if the whole world gets rather...jittery. It comes to fit my mood.

The solution? I'll grind up my nightly dose of ativan with the d-amph -- just .5mg. That smooth benzodiazepine action should take the edge off of the amphetamine without reducing my head to mush. Administered orally it does just that.

Per nasal, though, was entirely different. I divide my concotion into four lines and inhale deeply. Occaisionally thereafter I use saline nasal drops in order to (in theory) enhance absorbtion -- it offers a better medium for the chemicals to perfuse the mucous membranes than the plain lactose and wax it would otherwise have. If nothing else, it reduces or eliminates the bright-orange snot that I would otherwise exude for a day. The nasal membrane is a finicky one. For about ten minutes it was typical speed -- I organise, eat a 'nutri-grain' bar since I realise I haven't eaten since lunch-time. Purely objective, rational thoughts control my mind. After that the lorazepam starts to make itself known.

I've snorted benzos before; they hit faster and last about as long as they normally do. This time was different, though. My psychiatrist put me on gabapentin to help with my funky temporal lobes. Its modes of action are unknown at this point. Whatever it does -- placaebo, increased synaptic levels of gaba, binding at some novel neuroprotein -- it makes benzos stronger, almost exponentially so.




In the darkness

Once the lorazepam starts working I enter a state completely unlike any other I have experienced before -- and I like to pretend, if nothing else, that I am a relatively well-experienced psychonaut. The amphetamine makes everything coherent and yet I am on a different plane from my surroundings. I play a mix tape from a friend that arrived in the mail today and try to interact on irc. I say heh a lot. Little else. I give up on the irc idea. I chew more nicorette, wait a little while, and savor the sensation
The tape is a mix of all sorts of indie-rock goodness. It is raw. I notice this. There are edges to everything, nuances I do not notice otherwise. More than anything else, the repetitive parts of the music become more pronounced. The beats, or a chorus, perhaps, or a sample played over and over. I enter a trance state. The music controls me. Everything else in the environment becomes an extension of the music. It's like the inverse of synaesthesia. Things do not blend into each other. They only become extensions of one greater concept, extensions of some godhead whose power I can only imagine.

For a moment I shift back into the domain of the real world. It is a fluid transition, like a tidal shift, back and forth, slowly but distinctly. My boat either floats or runs aground. The nicorette goes into the trash can; I wash my hands as a ritual movement. It is beyond my control now. With the addition of the nicotine, everything has become an automatic movement. Consciousness exists, everything is well-deliberated and contemplated. I am just completely dissociated from it.

This sensation is not like ketamine, dxm, nitrous, or any other typical dissociative. There is none of the out-of-body floating. If anything, I have become more rooted in the world.

After a moment I start browsing at the lycaeum and happen upon the trip reports. I think, 'this is novel enough to merit a trip report.' And so I start writing. It flows without thought. Even now it does the same. Time has lost all reference; space has lost its dimensionality. Everything is one thing. Everything flows into each other; the part is inseperable from the whole.

After writing for a while I go outside to smoke a cigarette. The parents are asleep; I can smoke (outside) unfettered. Outside is a lovely world. There is snow melting on the ground and trees everywhere.

After a few drags off of a pall mall -- my potent nicotine dispenser of choice -- the world changes again, dramatically. I smoke more quickly than I normally would. In the past, I have usually experiences slight flattening of perception and minor visual distortions from this sort of nicotine intake. This time, the world becomes magical. There are stars, and the moon is out. They glitter with a shine that otherwise could not -- should not, almost -- exist. It is otherworldly. An aeroplane crossing through the branches of the trees becomes a shooting star. Its lights become trails that blink intermittently as the branches obscure my view of the plane. Ashing the cigarette becomes a mystical experience as well; the red-hot ash falls to the ground as lava spewing from a volcano. As the ash flickers and fades to grey it emits a spray of light. Even moving my head at this point creates a monochrome kaleidescope -- everything is in shades of grey (it is dark outside at this point. I do not know what time it is; time has become superfluous). Sometimes a flicker of color interrupts this grey miasma. It flashes across my consciousness forcefully, sending a shudder through my body. These flashes of color are reality. Everything else is its backdrop; a sort of ether through which consciousness may flow freely, grasping at the ephemeral bursts of existence that perfuse the ether.

And then there is now. After the cigarette, I come back and sit down to finish the trip report. The monitor is shimmering and shifting; where there is a flat background colors appear. There is a persian rug intermittently covering the screen, a rug in green and red and yellow and blue and all the other colors. Sometimes things flash across the world. There are blobs, but mostly there are lines. A centimeter or two of bright against the perpetual grey.




Postscript

Postscript is perhaps a misleading title; I'm still 'tripping balls' as I type it. The intensity is less than it was, though. The experience has been one of thanatos: the boundaries exist between objects in the world -- indeed, between myself and the world -- are negated. This is nothingness. Through this nothingness, though, there is an element of reality that will not -- can not -- be subdued so easily. Existence may be an artificial construct, but it is a logical one. As much as I try to deconstruct the godhead that is this world, it will not budge. At some level there is an internally congruent layer of existence in the universe. Whether this congruency rises from the internal world, from the psyche, from myself; or if it is a product of the external world, I cannot tell. I cannot even tell if the two are seperate entities.

On a psychological-pharmacological level, methinks the amphetamine offers the ability to analyze objects critically, while the lorazepam -- with the aid of gabapentin -- eliminates that which seperates one perception from another.

Nicotine, though, seems to be the keystone of the mix, so to speak. While under the influence of nicotine, the tendency toward analysis and bifurcation (everything _is_ or _is not_) of the amphetamine and the muddling effect of the lorazepam (everything is everything) are reconciled. The sensory perturbations which nicotine induces offer fodder for the other chemicals to bite upon, as it were. Through nicotine, the world has cast itself in a new mold; a mold without the nagging inconsistencies and incongruencies of the old. This new world is, in a sense (in many senses, really) more real than the old.

What remains to be seen is what happens tomorrow. That, though, will be another story.

It is 11.45pm now; I shall take 5mg diazepam, to assist sleep, and contemplate this experience further tomorrow.




Phase II: the next day

I take that 5mg diazepam and pass out in 45 minutes. Exactly four hours (to the minute!) later I wake up to find that my alarm clock is flashing. In the quasi-opiate-orgasmic state I was in the day before I must have accidentally jostled the plug enough to temporarily cut the flow of the electricity. Oops. I toss and turn for a little while and find morpheus will not take me back into his arms. Enough of that.

I masturbate (it's surprising that my penis worked at all, considering how much speed I've taken this week) and play simcity until 6:30am, when I would typically get up and out the door for another day of school. I yawn and get a ride from my mother to school, occasionally nodding off and shaking neurotically. Stupid driver's license.

In any case, upon arriving at school I see my girlfriend. She had a present for me in the form of five tylenol #3 (with codeine!). And on the day of my history and english exams. At that! Opiates have always given me this dreamy-yet-rational state perfect for reasoning through a humanities course. What's a boy supposed to do, eh? I take four and one 10mg Adderall and then head down to my english class. The codeine starts working -- not as well as it could have, since I'd been using earlier in that week some dilaudid from another friend -- but enough to give me some 'massive buzzage,' so to speak -- in any case, it hit during the fill-in-the-blank short answer portion of the test. All of a sudden the whole mindless-regurgitation bit got more interesting. Once I finish that it's off to a computer to write two essays. Normally they would be the sort of mind-numbing literary 'criticism' drivel I shove out five days a week, but with the help of brother codeine and sister speed, they become the stuff of which dreams are made. I dispense two custom made essay-bodies and have some of the more intense scholarlyly-enhanced pleasure-waves of my life. They were almost as nice as the year before, when I'd taken percocet with my physics final.

The sensations this time were more coginitive than usual -- speed does that, I have found. Where normally I would experience an intense full-body sense of contentment and overall 'can-do' spirit, this was different. It came from the act of creating and associated strictly with those elements involved in that creation. I had visions of my brain lighting up, cortex aflitter with light. Maybe it was the nicotine gum that did it, but it was a minor flashback to the visual play of the night before.




The end

Now that I read the above, I realize how extremely fucked-up I was. Cliche? Hell yes. But the substances involved were atypical. It was what I would have expected mixing ketamine and 2-cb, say, but not two substances so relatively benign as amphetamine and lorazepam. I suggest the combination to anyone so interested. If the general state is replicable, I'd be interested to hear it.

Exp Year: 2000ExpID: 377
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 13, 2000Views: 69,587
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Pharms - Lorazepam (79), Pharms - Gabapentin (183), Amphetamines (6) : Various (28), Multi-Day Experience (13), Combinations (3)

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