DOSE: T+ 0:00	2 mg	insufflated	Pharms - Buprenorphine	(ground / crushed)
T+ 2:00	1 mg	IV	Pharms - Buprenorphine
T+ 3:30	1 mg	insufflated	Pharms - Buprenorphine	(ground / crushed)

BODY WEIGHT:

260 lb

An Opioid, Music and Catharsis as Creativity Aides

I’ve just had the most fascinating, fulfilling, and cathartic experience I’ve had in a while. As soon as it was over (and even a little before) my first thought was; “I can’t wait to write a trip report about this when I get home!” I’ve been doing a series of these recently. Most of the ones I’m writing up happened many months ago, if not years, and these are based on my recollections long after the fact. I didn’t even manage to keep any useful notes on most of these experiences; but this one that I am about to present you with is, I am proud to say, rather fresh! :)

I’ll begin with a quick little bit of background on myself, my usage, my experience, and my history. I am a Caucasian male. Currently about 6” tall, about 260 lbs. I seem to have a preternatural tolerance to a wide variety of substances. This may have something to do with a variety of conditions I have. My endocrine system and many other things are all out of whack because I’ve been a type 1 Diabetic since I was about two years of age. Shortly thereafter, sometime before I was in the double digits, my parents took me to a doctor and I got myself diagnosed with ADHD/ADD. Well back when I was diagnosed it was one or the other. I forget which they said I was. It doesn’t matter. I may or may not have it. It’s hard to say. I’m quite hyper at times but then again I can also be manic-depressive. Either way this all leads to me being put on various types of Insulin since I was 2 (which I need to live) and being put on various powerful stimulants sine I was prepubescent until about the age of 16. That is when I decided to stop taking them. So any number of co-morbidities and extenuating circumstances are buzzing around inside me mucking stuff up.

I became interested with drugs at about the age of 18. I am 22 years old now, and I didn’t get to try anything other than cigarettes, alcohol, and caffeine until I was 19. The first two I’m not too fond of and I consume caffeine in some way sometimes up to a couple of times a day. That schedule isn’t regular though. At some point in my almost 5 years of doing drugs I have experienced most of the most common and most popular drugs of most chemical classes as well as some rather new and novel ones. I’ve done my fair share of Psychedelics, Empathogens and Entactogens, Stimulants, and Opioids/Opiates. I’ve done a couple of different Disassociatives, one Deleriant, a handful of Sedative-Hypnotics, Cannabis and several Cannabinoid admixtures, some Benzos, I’ve tried a few herbal substance, and Salvia. I’ve yet to find a substance and/or chemical class that have been completely to my dislike or was completely without some type of value.

I have a grandiose and romantic streak in me and this makes me want to explore and experience new and intriguing things. Since, unfortunately, I have not been able to do as much exploring in the real world as I would like, I often turn to drugs and my own body and mind for these pursuits.

I had recently gotten my hands on some new substances and one of them, which I was (and am) rather excited about is Buprenorphine, in the form of 8 mg Subutex tablets. These little pills seemed to hold much promise for me. I go to Opiates/Opioids for what a lot of people go to Alcohol, Cannabis, or Cigarettes for; comfort, a de-stressifier, a relaxant. Just something to make everything all right and interesting for an evening or an hour. I try not to stay too addicted to anything at any given time and with Opioids (I’ll just say this from here on out) re-dosing in a single session aside I try not to do them more than once a week assuming I have any. A relatively cheap and power full mu-agonist that I could take in convenient mg doses by crushing a pill into fractions! Sign me up.

I had gotten 5 of these pills on Monday and I went through about 3 mg (2 mg insufflated, and .5 mg IV two different times later) to test them out and see what a good dose would be to take at the upcoming concert I was going to that Friday. I was stoked. I hadn’t gotten to do anything interesting outside of the house in what seemed like months. The group was Zakir Hussain and Pandit Shivkumar Sharma. This was my first classical Indian musical event and the first time I would be going out in public on an Opioid, one which is quickly shaping up to be one of my favourites; I was ecstatic.

Unfortunately while I was glad to have the company of my life partner and my roommate for this show, they were both squeamish about driving. As much as I try to avoid it, it looked like it was going to be one of the few times I was forced to drive somewhere high. Alas, I disapprove of this activity as much as you do Erowid. Let me save you the trouble. (Erowid does not condone driving while intoxicated under any circumstance! It makes you a danger, not only to yourself, but to others!)

I decide to take my initial dose a while before the show to let it come on as fully as it can and then just sort of “bump” that initial dose up to only possibly slightly above my initial peak.

T 00:00 - 2:00 pm I snort a fourth of the 8mg pill containing approximately 2 mg of Buprenorphine. I sit around for a bit. I come up on the Buprenorphine. One distinct pattern that seems to have manifested itself these two times I’ve been on Buprenorphine is that I’m usually not quite sure what point I am at in the experience. Once I come up I am simply up. Peak effects are reached shortly after Inotice first alerts. I would say that I typically peak sometime between 5 and 45 minutes after I’ve insufflated the powder. Then I remain about as high for approximately 8 – 10 hours with very slight after effects going on for many hours afterwards. The whole time I’m up I find my level of intoxication to be quite variable. It comes and goes as it pleases. Sometimes I’m more “noddy”, visibly having the head on the neck ever so slightly with eyes crossed/drooping, and other times I’m more awake (certain Opioids tend to give me a minor stimulant like boost and make me a bit of a chatterbox, most noticeably I find Fentanyl does this to me) and enjoying the body high and talking and thinking, and sometimes, and especially in this trip report, I find myself lucky enough to get what are referred to by the nodding crowd as pipe dreams. I shall elaborate on this further in a bit.

T 02:00 – 4:00 pm I take a second dose of approximately 1 mg IV.

T 03:30 – 5:30 pm We are about to leave. Time to take the last of our drugs. I ready my roommate’s dose of 2 mgs which he promptly insufflates. I was considering not bringing any substances with on the road but my compatriots decide to bring their pot and so I end up bringing 1 mg of Subutex. Before we get going I insufflate one more mg of powder.

T 04:15 – 6:15 pm We’ve been on the road for a little over half an hour. At this point I really wish that someone else was driving. I’m having an uncomfortable time focusing 100% of my energy of driving the vehicle. I’m able to snap myself back to full attention each time, just before I begin nodding fully. This is not good. I decide to try and instigate conversation between the three of us, asking my friends to give me data about the trip reports I will be writing up that they are in. This works. I am able to maintain my focus until the effects of the drug become less pronounced. Again I would like to reiterate that driving on drugs is stupid and dangerous. Don’t do it if it can be helped.

T 05:20 – 7:20 pm We arrive at the concert venue, just in time! The show will be starting in only ten minutes. My friends sit in the car and smoke out while I stand outside. Tensions have been very high between everyone this past week. My car recently broke, which I need for my job. This has given me significantly less hours at work and I’ve just been sitting at home trying not to sulk. The repairs to the car put us in the red for the first time ever. We are poorer now than when we were homeless. I’ve been kind of depressed for various other reasons as well, and being stuck at home has just increased the levels of friction between my roommate, my woman and me. We drove up here in the cab of a truck meant to comfortably seat two while I was trying to stay awake and not kill everyone. Things where not the best between us or for us.

I waited impatiently for them to get done. I was nervous. The parking lot was too crowded. Fuck it, whatever. We are here to have a good time. We traded places. I got in the car and tried to snort the mg worth of powder I had brought with us. I couldn’t. The container I had brought it in was not the best and it got stuck and I lost most of it. I was quite upset. This was the final straw so to speak.

I got out of the truck in a bit of a tizzy. My roommate tried to calm me down. He wanted me to do breathing exercises. He was very insistent. I wasn’t “that” mad and I told him that his plan was stupid and it would be a waste of time. We needed to start heading inside or we would be late.

T 05:35 – 7:35 pm The concert begins!
The music is calming and entrancing. It is quite unlike anything we’ve ever heard before. It seems to be mostly improvisational. All our attitudes start to get significantly better.

And this is the point where things get really interesting. I start to not only nod but I start to drift. I flow with the music inwards. As I close my eyes I am overwhelmed with pleasure and happiness. I am enveloped in warmth and again I am aware that everything will be all right (and is, all ready, fine in fact!). And I start to see things. Visions swim to me out of the blackness and appear before my inner eye, on that dark and empty clean slate of my conscious mind. Thoughts come to me. Stories, ideas, concepts, characters, images, and scenes. Phrases and happenings. Images flow around me and through me, too me. I slowly open my eyes and I am able to remember what I saw. “Hey, that was a pretty good idea.” I think to myself. I nod back off. This continues to happen and I just enjoy the first few. It takes me a minute to recognize what is going on. These may or may not be what other people call Pipe Dreams, the strong visions/dreams that many people get when they get a really good nod going. That is what I call them anyways. This may not be what they are but I enjoy the terminology and I like thinking about them that way. It brings me great pleasure. They oh so rarely happen to me in this state. They are a mix between imagining, dreaming, and having ideas come to me in the normal fashion. I like to think of myself as a writer and an artist, and these Pipe Dreams come to me in a very similar way as my normal story concepts. They float up to me or are handed to me by my subconscious. It is the same experience just with a certain Opioid dreaminess and intensity present.

I find myself inundated with these ideas. Every time I nod off many new ideas come to me, I am able to ruminate on older story concepts and update them and fill them out as well. This is marvelous. I am being filled up. Every time I come back and open my eyes I scramble to get my pen (which thankfully I had brought with me) and write down what had just happen/come to me. I very quickly run out of paper aka our ticket stubs and in the darkness of the concert hall I begin to scrawl all over my left arm and my jeans. I cannot forget these concepts! My mind is positively ballooning with concepts!

My most direct comparison to this experience was my first (and to date only) IM Methoxetamine experience. This was an inverse of that. Instead of my consciousness, thoughtscape, and dreamscape exploding out the back of my head and solidifying into a shadowy empire realm of pure consciousness, I sank inwards where I drifted on the warm currents of cathartic release in the dark sea of my mind. In both experiences the music was central.

And just like that it was over. The first two hours were compacted into what felt like maybe ten or fifteen minutes. The drugs started to wear off and as they took a short break to tune up their instruments for their last act I came out of it a bit. I was still pretty high but just more overly ecstatic from the joy of what had just happened to me and from the creative knowledge I had just gained. I was grounded back in reality. That last song was as long for me as it was for everyone else.

As soon as I got home I sat down to write everything out. This was a fascinating and wondrous experience. I’ve never gotten so strong a response from just Opioids. My conclusion is that the stress which had been building for some time found a cathartic release that night in the trance like quality of the music which allowed me to nod out so thoroughly whilst still focused. This was an explosion of creativity the likes of which I had not seen for months. This was yet another reminder to me that I should never underestimate anything. I was absolutely blown away and astounded by a substance and an experience that I had expected to just give me a good time and to enable me to have a nice carefree evening. It did that, in spades! I believe that the relative comfort of this evening combined with the trance like quality of the music was the impetus for a great emotional and creative release in me. I am grateful and humbled! :)

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 99823
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Apr 1, 2021	Views: 1,588
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Pharms - Buprenorphine (265) : Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53), Music Discussion (22), Glowing Experiences (4)