DOSE:

smoked

Products - Spice-Like Smoking Blends

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

Spice Gold: a report of my first 5 experiences

Product name ‘Spice Gold’.
Ingredients; Baybean, Blue Lotus, Dwarf Scullcap, Indian Warrior, Lion’s Tail, Maconha Bravo, Marshmallow, Pink Lotus, Red Clover, Rose, Siberian Motherwort, Vanilla, and Honey.
I paid $55 US for 800 mg, legally.
Spice Gold is distributed by a UK company.
I have no affiliation with this company.

Background
I used several illegal drugs when I was younger, and lived in places with relatively lenient drug penalties, but I no longer do. Drug penalties are extreme where I now live. So I'm excited to try smoking Spice, which is legal here.

I use drugs for spiritual purposes, but also for relaxation as creativity-enhancers.
I researched Spice Gold on the internet for several hours before deciding to buy some, and read more reports and facts before using it the first time. I take no prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, herbs or supplements apart from occasional multi-vitamins or vitamin C pills. I am in good health, exercise frequently, and eat a very healthy diet.

I should state here that some drugs affect me in an unusual manner. For instance, marijuana makes me energetic and unable to sleep for hours. Drugs affect different individuals differently. Therefore, please remember that your results may vary.

Experience 1
Set and Setting: Good mindset, excited about trying some new herbs, generally very relaxed and in a positive mental space recently. In my house, with my family gone for the weekend. We live very near a beach, and I love our house and neighborhood. I just ate a medium-sized, healthy dinner of rice and lentils. I haven’t taken any mild-altering substance other than one beer a week for at least 3 months.

Intention: To try out the Spice Gold combo. I am looking for a substance that provides self-insight and insight into my life, mental and physical energy, and allows me to ‘open up’ and ‘relax’. Any spiritual enhancement/effects present will also be welcome. I am also looking for something that may combine well with various psychedelic/entheogens I may experience in the future.

Preparation: I cleaned the house. I had a clear calendar for about 4 days, so it would be easy to relax and enjoy this.

8:10 I smoked the Spice Gold. I used my new glass water pipe, and finished a very small bowl (about 30 mg, based on the estimate that it was one-fifteenth of the 400 mg packer). Smoked it in 2.5 small-to-medium sized hits.

8:18 I am playing guitar. The music emerging is slightly unusual for me; it's not the licks I'm playing but the WAY I'm playing them that is somewhat different. A new approach. Listening with freshly opened ears. My short-term memory (working memory) is impacted, much like with marijuana.

8:25 Observing no problems or anomalies in my reaction to the first bowl, I smoked another one, slightly larger this time (40 mg?). Three medium hits. After the penultimate hit, I became slightly dizzy, which often occurs when I reach my limit smoking marijuana, and after the final hit, I became quite dizzy (again, if I continued smoking marijuana after becoming slightly dizzy, I would get dizzier with each hit - this also often happened after 4-6 hits of marijuana, so it may be my limit for smoking any plant material).

8:34 Feeling nice. This rainstorm outside is beautiful, and I can hear both its awesome power and the delicate sound it makes on the windows simultaneously.

9:24 I've been creating a song with 3 bluesy acoustic guitar tracks and an African-sounding bass drum track played over clay drums. An unusual, cool sound. It's time to call the friend who suggested smoking this stuff now. Let's see how I handle talking on the phone now.

10:00 Good talking to my friend, though as usual, I didn't really like talking on the phone while in an altered state. I'm now back at recording the song, replacing the bass drum with a doumbeck. It feels very satisfying, though I'm not very emotional right now.

10:30 I am going to begin a yoga session to see what influence the Spice Gold has.

10:55 It has a distinct multifaceted influence which is not all good. Very lazy, I'm having to force myself to continue - I am doing each stretch in a static way, keeping one posture for a long time . Then again, my sense of time is quite off now. There is more to the influence than this. Difficult to explain, but it’s clear, even as it’s cloudy. I’m also not quite ‘as high’ as with pot – maybe this is a plus two, whereas smoking even 2 hits of high quality pot would typically lead to a plus three. I have what seems like somewhat heightened awareness of my body, though less so than with marijuana, and this makes the yoga feel reasonably good, but I can also see my body in a new way, and this insight helps me adjust my postures slightly with beneficial results.

11:05 Subjectively feels like a long experience, very relaxed, becoming lethargic. I'll take a shower and go to sleep.

I find this quite similar to marijuana, with maybe 70 percent overlapping effects. This definitely doesn't give me the energy that I used to get from marijuana. It's a bit cloudy, like pot, and I even have a similar feeling in my body. It feels roughly like it felt to smoke pot during periods when I smoked a lot - that is to say that I feel less affected than when I smoked pot, if I was smoking irregularly, or for the first time in a day, but the third bowl of the day (for example) affected me to a similar degree (and in a similar manner).

Written the Next Day:
It took me hours to fall asleep last night. Just like when I used to get very high on marijuana, my mind raced uncontrollably, forbidding sleep, and it wasn't especially fun. I listened to some wonderful music, however, so it's not like the time was wasted. Still, because I couldn't sleep until 1:30 AM, I was zonked the following day (I'm used to going to sleep at 9 or 10). But more than just missing that amount of sleep, I believe that I felt tired from the experience (as I do from marijuana) - I had no energy, and basically stayed in bed all day.

I enjoyed the feeling of the Spice Gold high, maybe even a lot. However, I didn't enjoy not being able to sleep, and the lethargy the following day was nasty. I will try Spice Gold again, earlier in the day, allowing time to come down before sleep, and see if I feel lethargic the following day again. If so, I will be hesitant to do it again - it's not THAT good, to be worth sacrificing around 30 hours of my life for a 4 or 5 hour high. However, if I was tired this time due to breaking my sleep patterns, and next time I feel okay the day after using Spice, I will probably continue to use Spice Gold on weekend nights, for relaxation, and for fun.

Experience 2: Three days after experience 1.
I was in another country, where penalties for drugs are less severe that the one in which I live. I smoked Spice Gold twice during an LSD experience. Once during the come-up, and once a few hours after the peak (a plus three) had ended (gone to a weak plus three). The second time, it brought me back up to a plus three again nicely, but without too strong of a qualitative influence on the experience. The trip was a fairly strong one, for me, at this point in my tripping career, at least (estimated 200 mcg LSD, or roughly 3 average-strength paper doses) – on a smaller dose, the Spice Gold might be more evident. It was nice in several ways, however, including the increased peak, but I was unable to sleep for many hours after smoking it. Of course, it’s hard to sleep on LSD, but the Spice Gold strengthened the trip, so it’s at least partly at fault this time again.

I spent a significant portion of the experience writing and recording music – I created two and a half songs. It was challenging to use the computer while tripping, but I managed to do a decent job of it. The music generally turned out well.

I spent almost half of the experience at the beach, in awe of the amazing power of the ocean, feeling my spirit settled by touching the sand.

About two hours after I smoked the Spice, I began thinking of my relationship with my mother. I realized that I could forgive her, right then, and I did so. It was a powerful emotional experience for me. I had been working on forgiving her for at least a decade, and had made only limited progress. This time, thanks primarily to the LSD, I forgave her completely for every single aggressive, nasty, insane thing that she ever did to me. I committed the huge act of allowing forgiveness to cascade through me. This is a lifetime experience, one of the dozen-odd that define me at this point in my life. After forgiving her, I felt so light and open, like I’d just opened like a flower to the sun, like I’d just made love to the universe. Later, I called my mom on the phone and told her that I forgave her. I talked to her just as she was going into surgery for cancer. I was crying so hard that I could barely talk. This experience was a precious treasure that I will have for my entire life.

(Six days later, I still feel open and new from having forgiven. I feel less weighted down in my daily life, like I’m not wasting energy holding a grudge, but I feel light and loving. I attribute the ability to realize that I could forgive her to the LSD. This has resulted in a huge improvement in my life. The Spice helped enhance the LSD, so I was happy that I had it, too.)

Experience 3 – The day after experience 2
I remember that smoking pot the day after a fairly powerful psychedelic experience would bring back the psychedelic state for an hour or two, though not usually as powerfully as the original. I tried it today with Spice Gold, by smoking 3 hits, and it didn’t seem to work this way at all. I smoked it in the early afternoon, so by bedtime, it had worn off completely, and I fell asleep without a problem. I had a pleasant experience, and it lifted my mood and energy levels somewhat for hours after smoking one small bowl. I interacted with family members who were unaware that I was slightly altered, and they remained unaware until I informed them.

Experience 4 – Five days after experience 3
I was feeling nauseous, which I used to smoke pot to relieve. I decided to try smoking Spice Gold. I took 3.5 medium hits. It helped me quite a bit – a success!

This experience included most of the same themes I experienced from earlier experiences, but this time was different in that I was able to do yoga intently for a relatively long duration (about 75 minutes). Yoga felt good on the Spice Gold, but my balance was worse than usual.

The Spice helps bring me deeply into my body, as pot does, but with the pot, my mind is more scattered. Being aware of my body was beneficial in doing yoga.

Spice doesn’t seem to provide too much of a mood lift. I don’t feel bad in any way, but I’m certainly not blowing smoke rings of happiness (metaphorically speaking), as I experienced at times with pot. In some way, I feel immune to depressed feelings, but I also feel resistant to ecstatic feelings, as if Spice heightens my mood slightly but also limits the possibilities.

Listening again to the recording I made during experience 1, I find it beautiful. It sounds passionate, and fairly focused despite displaying aspects of my typical propensity to chaos. A good balance. The 2 complete songs I recorded during the LSD / Spice experience (experience 2) sound full of emotion as well, but are slightly more problematic technically – I have some cleaning up to do.

It’s now long past my bedtime, and I’m tried physically, but my mind is still going incessantly (though creatively).

Experience 5 – 4 days after experience 4
Now that I know that Spice keeps me awake, I decided to smoke some after finishing a week’s work in order to play, rather than pass out from tiredness. I took 1 and a half large hits, finishing the rest of my US $55 worth. My tiredness colored the experience, especially for the first 2 hours, when I took a bath (which felt wonderful, though I was momentarily concerned about my heart rate while in the bath. A few minutes later, when I checked, it was fine/usual (60 BPM), so it could have been an illusion.) Other than the bath, I sat and browsed the internet, which I generally consider a waste of valuable enlightened time, but was too exhausted to do anything else. After that, however, I gathered myself together and began to record a song, and I was able to focus extremely well for more than 2 hours, with enhanced creativity. Definitely a positive experience, once I got out of the low space and began the musical process.

Overall impression based on 5 experiences
A good pot substitute, better for me than things that don’t seem to do much on their own, like Kanna (Sceletim Tortuosum), or things go farther than I want to go on most evenings, like Salvia.

I can take 3 to 4 hits and get the full experience. When I smoked almost double this amount, for experience 1, the effects were only slightly stronger, but lasted a long time (which meant I couldn’t sleep). When I took 1.5 large hits for the 5th experience, I got a full experience, including not being able or needing to sleep for at least 4.5 hours (and counting, as I write this)

I wish that it didn’t keep me awake (just like marijuana does). But, since it does, I will use it to extend my days and create music at night when my family is asleep, and expect to be tired the next day – from lack of sleep, and possibly from the herb’s effects as well.

That being said, it provides a good mental energy, focused and creative. It helps me sit for long hours recording music, assisting with my endurance and focus.

It also significantly impairs my sense of balance, so that doing yoga is sometimes very tricky, though yoga is generally very pleasurable on Spice.

Overall mental/physical effects overlap roughly 70-80% with pot - the remaining portion of the pot effects are either slightly different or simply not present with Spice.

I will continue to experiment with Spice, but I hope to use it relatively infrequently. I will use it particularly when recording music, since it seemed so good in that way, and possibly to experiment with meditation

I have smoked marijuana at least 2000 times in my life, and I have had around 100 ‘psychedelic’ experiences, including Salvia, smoked DMT, Ayahuasca, Mescaline, and two or three dozen fairly high dosage LSD and mushrooms trips, though (as I stated above) I no longer use illegal drugs. Because of my (and others’) desire to find some herb to serve as a ‘pot substitute’, and based on my personal experiences with marijuana and Spice, I will compare them below, despite having admittedly comparatively limited understanding of Spice.

Similarities to Marijuana
Both have: ‘stony’ effect, dreamy/wavy feelings, impartment of short-term memory, change in subjective experience of time duration, mental energy created, creativity enhanced, music enhanced, some tactile enhancement, anti-nausea (though Spice not as strong as pot). I am not able to sleep on either. But I am apparently very unusual in my reaction to pot, and I might be with my reaction to Spice as well.

Differences from Marijuana
Smoking Spice resulted in: less mood enhancement, less physical energy, slightly less distance from ‘consensus reality’/less altered, less obviously altered (my wife can always tell when I’m high on pot); a lazier overall feeling. It feels less like I’m dreaming/in the clouds than pot does. More focused than pot. Probably better for working at most mental tasks than pot, since I’m less altered, and more focused. My thoughts are less qualitatively different from my normal thinking patterns than with marijuana use. Marijuana tears me open, emotionally/spiritually, in some ways that Spice doesn’t touch. But Spice does touch some areas, and may touch some that Marijuana doesn’t touch, certainly seems worth exploring in an effort to reap some deeper rewards.

In Retrospect: Update 8 Months later
At this point, I have smoked Spice Gold at least 100 times in these 8 months. I found a place in the UK that sells large quantities for less (I bought 30 grams for around $250 US). I have gone through around 10 grams in this time.

I feel that my initial analysis proved to be quite accurate in most ways. However, I was wrong about one thing: smoking Spice can sometimes be stronger than smoking pot.

Another important addition is to note that I seem to be more sensitive to the effects of Spice now, especially when I haven’t smoked for a while. At one point, after a one-week break, one medium hit from a pipe made me feel almost like I was on a decent dose of LSD for about an hour and a half before I came down to the level of the usual “high”. However, I was able to interact with family members who were unaware of my condition. I was unusually open and loving with them, and I feel that it helped our relationship, in addition to reminding me how to be more open and loving than I usually am capable of.

The next day, I took one small hit and felt high for at least 4 hours. The next, one large hit got me high for 4 hours. Tonight I smoked some for about the 14th day in a row since that incident, and I had to smoke 2.5 hits to get to the usual “high” level. It has lasted 4 hours, however, and does not show any sign of abating. This high lasts much longer than pot. It is a good high. I worry about the health risks, however, as well as the aspects of addiction (not physical, but psychological) that arise, and I will limit my smoking in the coming year.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 75995
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 27, 2009	Views: 31,880
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Products - Spice-Like Smoking Blends (472) : Various (28), Retrospective / Summary (11)