Chapter 3: Drugs

Chapter 3: Drugs
The narrative of consensus for anyone who experiments with drugs and comes unstuck is currently one of victimhood. As unfortunate as disease. I suggest, that for many, myself in their number, I loved taking drugs. So much I was almost prepared to die for the enjoyment it gave me. Rock climbers, sportsmen, circus performers all live in essense the same level of irresponsibility. They deserve no greater respect than drug users. From as long as I can remember drugs have always fascinated me. I'm sure as early as six or seven I'd been aware of the Beatles LSD inspired songs. These fairy tail, joyous tales of a magical beauty had me hooked. Strawberry Fields forever, Lucy in the sky with Diamonds, wonderful expressions of a childlike perspective, unsoiled by adult baggage and drudgery. I don't condone their use. I wouldn't advise others to get involved but my life has been spent in search for altered states of consiousness. And what's more I have loved the majority of this spectacular adventure. It has been a brave and dangerous undertaking. Scott of the Arctic would understand.
To give a true picture of how I came to be teatotal, and that is where this book leads, I must be candid. Not to hide or deny how substance use led me into addiction, the loss of my home and wife, the deaths of many, many of my closest freinds. The loss of my business and onward to homelessness and poverty. Much of my actions were born out of a drug fuelled psychosis. Diagnosed as bipolar 1 drugs have served as life savers at times.
Also drugs delivered many of the greatest and post beautiful episodes in my life. They gave me a spiritual dimension to life, something lost as any tiny faith I might have toyed with was so crudely and profoundly extinguished by my mothers death. She never smoked, never drank. She prayed each day. God, if he is of an interventionist disposition, clearly wished to cause pain to my mother and family with an evil beyond comprehension. I lost faith in Father Christmas aged seven, lost faith in God aged ten. Yet read this description of my last few years you will see drugs also brought the most magical times of utter beauty and finally, as this story will describe, first hand religious experiences. Experiences so profound they stole away my atheist certainty, and cured me of all addiction.
A breif pharmacopeia at this point may be useful to contextualise the events about to unfold.
By twelve I was on the lookout for but seldom found cannabis in any form from hashish to marijuana. By fourteen I was smoking it everyday. This continued until I was thirty one. It was a background drug, like cigarettes though, in my circles more socially acceptable. At around the same age, thirteen or so, I began to find access to LSD though money restricted my use. Psylocibin, Liberty caps, british shamans natural sacrament became a complete obsession. After discovering their power i sought to explore the inner space of the mind with a serious appetite. Each season saw three months, even longer if your drying techniques were developed. From early doses of thirty I progressed to several hundred in a go, brewed up in to a tea. Taken in this manner the transition or takeoff can be as breif as ten minutes.
My father has always been respected as a great drinker whose intake would easily have killed men of weaker constitution. I never saw its charm back then, perhaps in response to my fathers love of alcohol. Each generation must find new ways, new styles of clothing, new music to ensure a generational divide. A cultural evolution and an assertion of personal identity. Through psylocibin I enjoyed spiritual revelations. Here was a shamanic religion. Here you didn't need faith, I saw miracles each week. At its higher points I grasped fundamental aspects of life and existence. Such magic, such power does not come free of dangers. My nerve grew weaker and by twenty I stopped taking magic mushrooms. To this day I very rarely use this sacrament but I shall never regret the thousand or more trips that grounded me in shamanism and the ability to travel to other dimensions.
I had a minor rebellion to my hippy adolescence and began to enjoy the flatter, more simple yet clumsy alcohol my father so loved. I continued with cannabis and then at sixteen discovered speed. For a year or so I snorted the powder but grew to dislike it. I moved to the country for a few years of sobriety.
I returned to live in leeds. Having not got on with snorting powders speed had been of little interest. At the time, just by the university, there was a medical research unit. Here, young drug free unemployed people could earn money as human guineapigs. Most of the drugs are already on the European market but I was fortunate to be in the trials for hydro morphone spheroid. A powerful new morphine ten times in strength, though of course, our doses were t significant. Each twenty minutes nurses took blood samples clumsily from the same hole your vein repeatedly. It was there slapdash approach to needles that made me think, 'I could do that far more clinically.'
On release I immediately bought some high quality amphetamine sulphate. Injecting in to ones main vein was in comparable to the blocked powder in sinus Tom foolery. The rush immense. From man to God in seconds. Every hair on ones body erect and an attention of mind I'd never before felt. Amphetamines are damaging to the heart. They also discincline one to eat or sleep. Combined with depletion in dopamine can often lead to speed psychosis. I was fortunate to meet a beautiful student who had just enrolled on a post graduate course in Birmingham. I moved down there and soon re entered education studying fine craft furniture and spent two years merely smoking cannabis and drinking the odd beer.
Following this I became a keen cyclist, launched my first business and continued my relative sobriety. My new girlfreind was in Cheltenham studying art and having a lot of fun. The rave scene had begun. The acid grew very weak but the club/ dance scene is not acid based. Once I discovered pills, ecstasy and MDMa I lost my inhibitions and became an all night dancer.
I returned to college, gave up cigarettes and did my three years at Buckinghamshire college, smoking hash pipes all day. This allowed me to work hard as I was too stoned to socialise. I got a first piping a good eighth a day. I took no other drugs there.
After leaving college my relative sobriety continued, my girlfreind had bought a cottage on the Welsh borders and I spent a year renovating it. Once complete I spent a short while working as a cabinet maker.
My degree show and following exhibitions attracted media attention and I found I had job offers coming in to lecture. First Wolverhampton gave me two days a week, next university of central England offered me another two and a half days a week. Finally, Shrewsbury where I had studied offered MA day a week. So, despite having neither training nor experience I'd become a full time lecturer. My girlfreind was working away so I had no support. Making is a solitary process where I sought the zone, flow, a state of hyperfocus where one cuts off from the world to lose themselves in their work. This is the polar opposite to the hundreds of human interactions in a day tutoring entails. I had had breif spells of mental ill health but nothing like the breakdown this brought on. I was prescribed sleepers and anti depressants. I took to drinking a bottle of spirits a day and driving up to leeds where all my old speed freak freinds had converted to the brown afghany heroin that flooded the country in 98/99. I'd enjoy week or fortnight long heroin holidays safe in the knowledge that I had no contacts down in the Midlands so spent two years as an occassional unaddicted user.
The coping strategies were destroying me so I gave up all teaching jobs and moved to somerset. I spent two years working for one of the countries best known designer makers. I cut back to wine and, along with my partner began a two year stint of weekend clubbing. Always fuelled by MDMa. The dance club scene is pointless without pills and MDMa. These were good times.
In a drug haze i launched my own business. I had become ecstasy fried and a chance meeting was to change my life forever. As a homeless sofa surfer I had spent a while living with Ron Tree. He had followed his music career and was now Hawkwind frontman. Suddenly I was connected and my recreational heroin binges linked up. On a Wednesday in 2001 I woke up ill. From then till 2015 I was addicted to opiates. The honeymoon period though beautiful is breif. My partner split up with me, I lost my house and in 2003 had a go at cold turkey. After a month I could work but after six months my endorphins were still in shreds. So, after a phone call I was happy again, my social life blossoming and I was able to work hard.
After three months I decided the endless search for money or gear, the patches of drought and its resultant sickness, we're not for me. I became a registered addict and was put on a new experimental opiate addiction management system. Subutex, bupronorphine is a partial agonist. It delivers an up,ifting, motivating buzz but prevents heroin from having any affect. At first, release from heroin is wonderful. However, overtime it erodes ones endorphin system. Gradually you lose interest in sex, you can't fall in love, orgasms are minor sensations, you become cold, detached. You aren't fully emotionally engaged.
Recovering from heroin takes at least a year. I never had the luxury of taking that much time off. So, in order to keep my clients happy i remained an addict to a sublingual tablet.
In 2007 my father fell damaging his brain.mit fell on me as the childless sibling to abandon everything and go look after him. He was in hospital as it transpired so I found work for a museum fitters.
Owning a Siberian husky cross German shepherd cross placed strict restrictions on where to stay. My best freind richard, now dead, was a disabled heroin dealer. He looked after my dog and I succeeded in resisting the heroin. Unfortunately crack cocaine had taken off so I picked up a six year habit. This horrible drug leaves one with the heeee gee eyes.
I returned to frome after ten months and picked up my business with a massive order. I was never short of work meaning I never had time to get well.
My crack use in frome continued and to balance this I found myself with a limitless supply of benzodiazepenes through traveller freinds. Now addicted to subutex, diazepam, crack and alcohol I knew I'd have to stop. Giving up crack was easy but the benzos, Christ. It took six months off work, sleeping two hours, waking to screaming nightmares, then walking the street s with my dog waiting for day.
But I did it. Spent two years totally clean. I was so happy. By chance crack stepped back in for a few weeks. I had discovered the research chemical scene and began to explore these new and sometimes fascinating new compounds. So angry with myself at falling back to crack I took seventy five times the recommended dosage of Methoxphenidine, a new dissociative in a suicidal attempt to nuke the crack habit. Fortunately I lived but for days I couldn't walk or talk. I spent three weeks in total psychosis where I travelled to the distant future. I spent time in the past also, world war 1. And in a version of future America where no plant or animal could survive. Just broken synthetic goods in bright plastics. One leg or arm might suddenly grow seventy feet in length whilst other limbs would shrink to action man proportions. I was fortunate not to be sectioned.
I succeeded in killing the crack demon posession. Sadly benzos became available online and crept back in. I discovered a new powerful stimulant called ethylphenidate. Very nearly killing myself on a number of occasions through overdose. I was in a bad way. Death was very likely were i to continue.
Though at its bottom end, research chemicals were rough new stimulants and dissociatives quite by chance a family of new and highly advanced family of chemicals emerged. The new lysergics. These are synthesised and purified from LSD. I had come full circle.
This book is the story of the adventures taken whilst drifting into drug induced psychosis. It also tells of my discovery of a group of chemicals that could save mankind. So advanced compared to acid and mushrooms. A family of chemicals able to deliver first hand religious experiences. Chemicals that I believe will be an evolutionary trigger in human consiousness. More sophisticated than the Peruvian shamans ayaushka. My life has been spent perfecting drug taking techniques. Learning as a human guinea pig. Seeing the deaths of many close freinds,nfellow psychonauts. Yet ultimately this war I have fought, this journey of experimentation in human consiousness has delivered the key to our species next step. Something as significant as language.
This quick grounding in my drug use is written to let you know that I have studied drugs, as a user all my life. That I am an expert in the field. It also tells how the discovery came about. Only by studying, practicing drug use of all varieties to the extremes, to the point where many died, only by laying my life on the line have I been able to report back. Now recovered from addiction I have an answer. The key to the next paradigm shift in human awareness. The next level for the human species.


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