DOSE:

repeated

insufflated

Cocaine

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

Well, hello everyone,
I'm here to tell you that cocaine is very very psychologically addictive. But first, a bit about myself...

My name is Daniella, and I'm a student who grew up in the Midwest and is now studying political economy at UC Berkeley. In high school, I smoked a fair amount of weed and drank a lot too. This started when I was a sophomore, and I still remember (as everyone does) the first time I wasn't sober. It was a gorgeous summer day in late May...the kind of day you don't see too often in my hometown. I had made up with a friend of mine after a fight of one year, and in the meantime, she had become a dangerous, rebellious partier. So she convinced me to steal a bottle of banana liquor from my parents and take it to this Crystal Method concert we were going to see. I felt so high already just biking along (I didn't have my license yet), listening to this song by the Beastie Boys...number 10 on Ill Communication...I always feel like it's the soundtrack to my drug-filled life. And ahh...what a feeling it was to be drunk. Suddenly, I was free of the constraints I had placed upon myself. I ended making out with two guys and just feeling on top of the world. All the cliches about lonely teenage kids who find refuge in drugs apply here. I spent the next two years slowly slipping downhill, in constant fights with my parents. It was as if I had suddenly come to the conclusion that I didn't need to deal with bullshit because there was a way out. The result was me acting like a bit of a bitch to my shocked parents, who had always considered me the model, straight-A student.

I graduated early from high school and went off to study at Tel Aviv University. There I got very depressed, and smoked weed every day. I got out of this, however, and fell in love with my best friend. I began writing poetry and I seriously thought I would become a writer. During this time, I came to see drugs as stupid and immature, something my older and more experienced Israeli friends didn't need to touch.

In the meantime, my motley crue (is that really a phrase?) of friends was getting heavily into ecstacy back home. Basically, there's nothing to do in most of Milwaukee if you're under 21 and you don't attend dumb drinking parties with the kids in your high school. By the end of my high school career, I had accumulated many friends from different places...but when I came back, that had somehow dissapeared. Many of my friends had done too much ecstasy and were simply and permanently fucked up for life. They were depressed and weird, and I found myself so so glad that I had left. That was the summer that I began to see Milwaukee as a foreign place, not as the home in which I had spent my first 17 years.

Six weeks after I got back from Israel I moved to a student co-op in Berkeley and began studying at UC Berkeley. Going from Israel to Berkeley was total culture shock for me--I can't even begin to get into how different the two places appeared to me. I had moved around enough by this time that making friends didn't scare me. That first semester, I tried more drugs again and got more into the drug culture that is an inherent part of being a student at the most liberal public school in America. I did acid for the first time, and I had the worst experience of my life. I am not exaggerating--it was as if I were intensely depressed, and there was nothing I could do about it. Horrible thought replaced horrible thought in my mind, and I couldn't come down in any way. I have subsequently done acid many times, and I've liked it a bit, but that first time...jesus, I have nightmares about it.

Soon after winter break, I tried mushrooms, which I really liked. I found them milder than acid. They made me want to think and analyze everything very intensely, but without so many negative thoughts entering my head. The next semester, I got out of smoking pot so much, but that's when I made this new friend named Adam. Adam was this incredibly smart guy, who had just graduated from Cal with honors, who also happened to be a total psychopath--an addict of every drug and a scammer of every person. For some reason, we took a liking to each other and did lots of drugs together. I remember going with him one day to a place where he got cocaine. Next month, bored and looking for drugs, I went back to that place and bought a gram of extremely shitty cocaine. It was mixed with speed I think, but it did the trick. I think I felt better that night than I have had on any drug before. I felt so confident, and yet, so articulate--not like I felt alcohol, pot, or shrooms at all.

I ended up making out with a friend I'd had all year. I woke up the next day and took a Spanish oral exam. The week after that, I ended up making out with that same guy again. Now it was summer, and I was taking summer school at Berkeley, and I stayed in my same co-op, which I was really beginning to like. I started dating that guy, John, who was very wary of me doing cocaine. I did it maybe twice that summer, and it was always the same--best experience I'd had since the last time I did it. Even constant sex with John was not nearly as satisfying as cocaine was to me.

I had decided to take the next semester off to earn some money. I still lived in my same co-op and got cozier with my boyfriend. My habit of using cocaine on Friday nights or at parties persisted. But now I was really starting to feel like I needed it. I wouldn't even have fun when I was on it because my only real thought was getting more or not having enough. I started snorting an eight-ball by myself every Friday. For those of you who don't know anything about coke, this is an enormous amount--the equivalent of 3 1/2 to 4 grams of coke, which is about 10 times the amount the average user consumes in an evening. I didn't get a job for awhile, and all my free money was spent on coke, so thus, I didn't save anything.

I'm returning to school next semester, and I've promised myself that last night was the last time I was to do coke. My boyfriend, who had always wanted me to quit, was very supportive of me when I told him that.

Maybe this doesn't seem like a horror story--my life didn't go to shit after doing drugs. But I definitely felt the affects of addiction. I constantly crave cocaine--I can't stop this feeling, so I've just learned to ignore it. I think about it all the time, for when I was high, I felt like I could do anything. Tommorrow starts the first day of my cocaine-free life. Can I do it?????

Well, that's a quick history of my teenage years and my drug experiences. I'm sorry if you didn't like it, but I'm pretty fucked up right now, so it's the best I could do.

Sincerely,
Daniella

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 10646
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 14, 2019	Views: 840
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Cocaine (13) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Not Applicable (38)