DOSE:

oral

Hydrocodone

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

My mother had had back surgery over a year ago, for which she was prescribed a bottle of 60 hydrocodone tablets. I watched the bottle carefully every time I visited, and noticed that it seemed to remain steadily at the same level. I asked her casually at one point why she hadn’t been taking them, to which she replied that she did not like the way they made her feel. On my next visit – just a few weeks ago – I noted the expiration date, which had passed several months before. At this point I took seven tablets from the bottle, three of which I chopped up with an X-acto knife and put in a glass of water (filled about an inch high, so I could swallow them in a single sip). I found that they dissolved nicely, and within a minute even the bigger pieces were gone when I stirred the solution with a spoon.

I climbed out on the roof to have a cigarette afterwards, not feeling any immediate effects, but quickly climbed back in, realizing I did not want to be in a perilous position when the sedation set in. My mother’s girlfriend didn’t like the two of us to smoke in the house, but I knew she was asleep, so I ran downstairs quickly with my cigarette still lit to go out on the porch. My mother was talking on the phone in the living room as I headed outside, and she smiled when she saw me, which made me realize that I must be displaying some sort of unusual behavior (though I felt nothing). As the night progressed, I found myself feeling more relaxed and light-spirited. I had a cup of tea with my mother, and felt more warm and sociable than I am ordinarily. It was not a ‘high’ in the euphoric sense; in fact, the only physical difference I felt was a slight sluggishness, but I did not by any means feel incapacitated.

The next day I chewed another tablet with an Altoid before going to a social event. Once again, I was looser, but it was much more subtle than the night before, and I got tired walking around so much. A few days later, I tried taking two tablets before I went to a coffee shop, which turned out to be a bad experience. I couldn’t stand the music, the smoky atmosphere, or any of the people chattering around me, and for the first time ever I went home before they closed.

I continued to stock up on pills every time I visited my mother, preparing for a higher dosage. As of last night, I possessed twelve tablets, and took ten of them. I had been somewhat depressed earlier in the day, which was what prompted the idea, but by nighttime (when I was ready to begin) I had cheered up quite a bit. The dose per tablet is not indicated, so I’m not sure exactly how much I ended up taking, but I would estimate that it was somewhere from 150-250 mg. I used the same method as the first time, putting a little water in three different glasses and dividing the ground tablets among them.

Taking ten pills is a lot harder than taking three, and I had to keep myself from gagging as I swallowed the water in the third glass. When I was done, I went down to my basement to have a cigarette, waiting to feel something. It had been about twenty minutes, and I was beginning to get concerned that I had done something wrong. Then I remembered hearing that opiates decrease sexual energy, so I tried masturbating. I was able to get hard right away, but the actual pleasure I felt was extremely minimal. I tried flipping through one of Eric Kroll’s fetish books, looking for that one photograph that would really turn me on, only to find that I wasn’t really very impressed with any of them. I knew the key body parts that I needed to focus on, but the allure just wasn’t there. Finally, I put the book away and turned the light off, trying to conjure up my own imagery. About every thirty seconds I would forget what I was doing for a few moments, and my hand would stop moving. I had to remind myself of erotic thoughts constantly.

Then I began to hear voices. Nothing creepy or unnatural, just parents or friends saying casual things to me. It was kind of strange, just because all of these remarks were so out of context, but it didn’t seem strange at the time. Finally I gave up and zipped my pants up, lighting another cigarette. I was still in the basement with all the lights off, so it was kind of fun to see this one tiny red glow standing out in an endless expanse of darkness. When I exhaled, I could see the glow become masked for a second by a little cloud of smoke, which was probably the closest to witnessing a physical euphoric image that I came that night. I became so distracted, in fact, that I forgot to keep my fingers tightly around the base of the cigarette, and it dropped on to my shirtless stomach. I was so alarmed by this that I stumbled off the couch, knowing that I would be unable to calmly direct my hand to the cigarette and pick it from my belly without getting a much more severe burn. The cigarette fell to the floor, and the quick flash of pain that I had felt while it was touching my skin was quickly cut off, as if I had imagined it.

My leg knocked into a shelf while I was scrambling for the light switch. Once again, though I was startled, I felt very little physically. I finally found the switch, and the light seemed artificial and false as it replaced the darkness. I saw the cigarette on the floor, burned down to the filter, and I stubbed it out in an ashtray and went upstairs. It was much hotter in my room, and I became nauseous. I turned a fan on and sat directly in front of it, waiting for the feeling to pass. It didn’t, so I decided I would smoke a little weed to calm me down. But alas, I had left my lighter in the basement, and the trip down seemed virtually impossible. I picked up my bong, breathing deeply to try and calm myself as I walked carefully down the stairs. The air was humming now, and it seemed that the walls were closing in on me whenever I got up to walk around.

I set my bong on the bottom step in the basement, turning to the bathroom to take a cold shower. This is something that usually relieves sickness for me, but not tonight--the water made me cringe, and when I turned it off and stepped out of the shower I vomited in the sink. Fortunately, it was runny vomit, and went right down the drain when I turned the tap on. Also, because of the codeine high, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it would ordinarily (come to think of it, it didn‘t bother me at all). I dried myself off slowly and put on a pair of shorts, then left the bathroom, picking up the bong and walking back to the couch. But I realized as I sat down that I didn’t have any idea where my weed was, so I went back upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where I vomited again in an empty dog dish. By this point, I was able to grasp that I wasn’t having very much fun at all, so after I washed out the dish I decided I might as well just go to bed.

Having never tried an opiate before, and being accustomed to the tangible pleasures of being stoned or drunk, I had stupidly assumed that I would be able to get the most out of codeine by interacting with the physical world. When I finally crawled into bed, it was out of defeat, but I was amazed to discover that this was when the experience truly began. Had I lied in a still place to begin with, it is likely that I never would have thrown up, and I also would have enjoyed the high for much longer--the fact that I was nearing exhaustion by the time I got into bed surely caused me to fall asleep much faster.

As I lay in bed, my body became heavier, and it was a strain to lift an arm or leg. Not simply because I didn’t have the physical strength to, but also because I didn’t care enough to bother putting such tension on myself just to prove I could do it. If I had an itch somewhere, I didn’t bother to scratch it. I would hallucinate every time I closed my eyes--never of the bizarre, but only mundane things I saw every day. In a way, it was like the experience of hearing voices while in the basement, but only on a higher level. I knew that these things I saw were extremely abnormal -– essentially, I was dreaming while awake -- but, at the time, they did not strike me as the least bit strange. As I drifted into sleep (unconsciousness?), I continued to see things, particularly people I know talking to me, and at a certain point it was difficult to differentiate as to whether my eyes were open or closed. Later – it could have been minutes or hours – I tried to move a leg, and there’s a surge of millions of prickles shooting from my thigh to my toe, as if my leg had been asleep for a year and I had just noticed.

When I move an arm or turn around in my bed, I get the same reaction, just like this tingly explosion all over my body. I think this is something that happened several times during the night, because at one point I felt the same thing while straightening out my legs, and saw when looking over at my clock that it was 4:00 a.m., many hours after I had taken the drug. I awoke the following morning refreshed, with little or no aftereffects.

I don’t know whether I could recommend the drug, even though I can certainly recommend the experience itself as enjoyable. It is definitely something that I would like to try again. Whether this is a good thing, I don’t know. Surely it can be used as a healthy means of escapism in small and infrequent doses, but it seems that it would be very easy to get addicted to such a pleasant high. In a way, it doesn’t even seem like a high, because I don’t feel any jarring or incredibly distinct sensations, it’s just more of a numbness. Weed and alcohol can intensify unpleasant feelings, which is a slight incentive not to use to self-medicate depression on a regular basis. But something like codeine, on the other hand (or any opiate, for that matter, but I can’t speak from experience), would serve simply to blot out emotion, positive or negative. And, although this can be a good thing at times, I just don’t think it would be very nourishing psychologically to out and out obliterate feeling more than once every few months. I’d probably suggest considering ones personal temperament accordingly before using.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 8072
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 18, 2003	Views: 158,359
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Hydrocodone (111) : Alone (16), Sex Discussion (14), Glowing Experiences (4), Difficult Experiences (5), Retrospective / Summary (11), General (1)