DOSE:

repeated

smoked

Products - Spice-Like Smoking Blends

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

70 kg

A week into the new year and there is very little weed around. This is doubly frustrating since my own crop of 5 White Widdow plants is now maybe 10 days away from cropping. The garage/office space is now filled with the aroma of the nice chunky white buds with their dense trichomes, which are going crazy. When I cleared out the dead fan leaves lower down the plants today, I came away sticky and fragrant. Two of the plants are less mature so I'll give them another week and some more food, but in two days I will flush with pure water for a week to wash out the system before I crop the three that are ready. There is a real pleasure in the period of self sufficiency achieved after a good crop. No more messing around chasing odd bits from people. I tend to relax considerably and get more creative sometimes, when I don't have to waste time and energy finding a smoke. Plus my bank balance recovers quite pleasantly from not buying.

No, since around Christmas, I have kept a backup of some herbal weed alternative or other. My local head shop were selling what they called 'Gold' blend. I asked them if this was the 'Spice Gold' about which I head read bits on Bluelight, and they said not. It had some kind of effect, but nothing much. I begin to suspect that the nightly ritual and process of smoking itself may have an unconscious role in the induction of sleep, irrespective of whether there is much of a psychoactive ingredient present. It just gave me a dry mouth and made my eyes a bit hard to focus. I boosted it with a double dose of Kalms brand sleepers. They have valerian as a listed ingredient and have some kind of enhancing effect on my dreams.

Then I took the plunge and ordered Spice Gold over the internet. It too was disappointingly mild, but there was something slightly weedlike about it to my mind. I wasn't sure, but I felt it lacked some of my favorite things that the real thing has. But, it was mild enough not to worry about. I reordered the strongest formulation that I could find for a later rematch. By that point I had read that there was evidence that JH-018 was the active synthetic cannabinoid contained in the blend. [Erowid Note: Other analyses of Spice products have yielded different results, see Spice Product Vault.] This encouraged in me some kind of perhaps foolish bravado, based on the assumption that it must therefore be a weaker THC analogue. I rolled a couple of big ones one night when I was completely without weed or hash, and proceeded to smoke them while reading Private Eye magazine before bed, I think it was last wednesday night.

I was 3/4 through the second joint when I simply had to acknowledge a fact that had been nudging towards me for the passed hour. I was extremely stoned indeed. Yes, no doubt about that. Tricky on my pins. Squinting hard to read the printed word. It was not the familiar ground of THC that I found myself in though. It was a colder and less welcoming vista. Minor hallucinatory visual seemed to give things a shimmer but in a naturalistic way, rather than a phosphorescent way. I begin to giggle to myself about how surprising it was to find myself so peculiarly stoned. I had got, thankfully, a hot cup of tea to hand because I was getting a chronically dry mouth.

I imagined some chemistry boffin tinkering slightly with the proposed structure of a hypothetical THC analogue, a la Shulgin or Nichols. Except this guy just happened to have successfully suppressed all known euphoric properties of the original, and even intensified the dysphoric. And since it was unlikely to be very abusable, some enterprising individual is able to market it as an 'incense' and 'not intended for human ingestion'. When I say it intensified the dysphoric, this was not clear all the time. I had some interesting trains of thought which made me think, yes this is somehow a bit satisfying to me. However, after I had gone to bed, I heard P on the phone downstairs. She was talking to one of her friends who has just had a little boy by the name of Eli. For some reason my imagination played havoc with what I was hearing, and I kept thinking she was talking about me. The old faithful rational part of my mind was saying, 'whoa there, you're getting paranoid matey', but even it was a little unsure for a moment.

I have never experienced what I would classify as intrusive paranoid stuff on my favorite smoke, ever. I know it has bad effects in that department for some, but THC has not done so for me, and I have puffed my way through a staggeringly and some might say pitifully large amount over the years. No I have always enjoyed my herb with a happy heart. Occasionally I have had reason to curse the propensity for idleness it causes me, but in general I have given it the thumbs up through the ups and the downs.

But, here is this cannabinoid and its given me a dose of paranoia, and my mouth is as dry as the inside of Ghandi's flip flop. As I layed there in bed I went on to have a full on panic attack, the like of which I have never had before. The paranoid thoughts reached a crescendo of pointless gnashing of 'what if's and other self loathing nonsense that seemed to suddenly embody themselves in my minds eye, and my breathing became shallow and fast. I realised what I was sort of doing to myself, in a way, and started to rationalise and batten down. I took control of my breathing and calmed myself. But the application of this conscious control was not connected directly to my autonomic nervous system whose response was in a time lag of 30 seconds or so it seemed. Because my heart beat began to ramp up frighteningly and I could feel the very sudden strong jerks of that poor muscle in my chest. And I felt that each breath was scarcely enough to deliver the oxygen I needed. I was really quite scared at that point. I almost gave P a shout if only just for her to hold me until it settled down, but I felt some shame at having got so foolishly walloped by some shady internet herb which I only took because I couldn't handle the thought of going a day without inhaling some funky thing or other. No I sat it out.

Two possible options. It calms down and I get some sleep, or my heart bursts, or some equivalent sequelae of events. It turns out I was able to get some sleep of the non permanent kind. But not great sleep. Not just a terrible dry mouth, but reduced moisture in all mucosal tissues of the face. Meaning I woke up with a face full of sticky bogies and eyes like pissholes in the snow. I didn't properly occupy either the world of the awake or that of the asleep, during the whole night, but something in my bodyclock clicked at 4.53 am, as it invariably does just now and I got up for work on autopilot. I felt bad, not properly mentally located. All the machine like behaviours were intact although occasionally a little clumsier. At work, my error rate was better than usual when sorting, perhaps because I was trying hard not to fuck up. Socially I could have got on normally until at the end of a chat with A---y about guitars or something he looked up from what he was doing and caught my eye - 'You look like you've had a rough night pal.' To which I could only mumble some kind of token of agreement. After that I bumbled on frequently troubled by the question 'did what I just say make sense?' etc.

So today I got a call from my friend that he had some quality green going for grabs, and I nipped over in happy anticipation of the right kind of THC. There is a connection in the feel of this and good old herb. But it really is not the same profile at all. The duration of the drugs effects seem more drawn out. Like the smoke will hit me mentally full on say half an hour after a joint, and then leave me in a state of mild confusion, and anxiety, for up to 8 hours afterwards. This is why I'd be interested if Spice Gold manufacturers actually real customers who have given up the real herb for one of their products. I strongly suspect that in the long term, not. So after a couple of hours at A-------s house, I'm back here and feeling more conventionally stoned.

As soon as I crop this grow I'll start the next crop growing. Trouble is, although I have loved the Dutch Passion White Widdow strain each time I have grown it in the past, it takes so long to flower. Worth the wait, surely, for quality and quantity sake. The same can be said for the Blueberry, a different but equally charming smoke. I would like a quicker turnaround. These baby's will have taken just short of three months from seed to reefer.

I can't definitively say that I will never re-order a Spice Product again because curing a drought I have a tendency to clutch at straws. I just thought that in the light of all the positive things being said about Spice, (And I am not talking DMT here!) I should sound a note of caution. Traditional THC is self limiting in that the lethal dose is something phenomenal, if there even is one. However this JW-018, if it is the active compound in Spice, did well and truly whupp this hardened weedsmoker most surprisingly.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 76319
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 25, 2009	Views: 40,489
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Products - Spice-Like Smoking Blends (472) : Various (28), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2)