DOSE:

600 mg

insufflated

Pharms - Bupropion

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

I have a pretty long history with wellbutrin. At first it was very helpful, and remained a psychiatric staple for me for years; but then I tried insufflating it one time and I've been struggling with that habit ever since. It has never been the only substance in my system, because I've been on some cocktail of meds or another since 2011. Here's a summary of my experiences with it.

I was prescribed wellbutrin sometime in 2017 to help treat my depression after I had worked my way through prozac, lexapro, zoloft, and effexor over the course of the previous 5 or 6 years. Around the time I started taking it, I was also taking buspar (buspirone) and remiron (mirtazapine) for anxiety and insomnia, and I was just about to return to university after going on medical leave for a year to recover from a pretty nasty period of cocaine and MDMA abuse that completely wrecked my ability to keep up with classes and culminated in a psychotic episode lasting for months. That combination (150mg wellbutrin, 20mg buspar, and 15mg mirtazapine) did the trick for the summer and my first semester back in school; wellbutrin gave me enough energy to get out of bed, buspar helped curb my panic attacks, and mirtazapine knocked me out when I needed it. Overall, pretty effective.

A whole bunch of new awful and weird shit happened to me that fall: I moved in with my abusive boyfriend and seven of his friends, the building turned out to be infested with cockroaches and bedbugs, our landlord lived in Singapore and ghosted us, I realized I had some kind of dissociative disorder and could bring out my alters with acid but ended up using it too often and brought on more regular psychotic symptoms... but somehow, I kept my shit together enough to stay in school. I probably couldn't have done that without wellbutrin. By the end of the semester I knew I needed to add an antipsychotic to my regimen, but I was still in a year-long bureaucratic limbo switching to a new psychiatrist at a health center that was a fucking disaster at the time (it has since improved), so I tricked a primary care doctor into "refilling" a fake 100mg seroquel (quetiapine) prescription since a friend had let me take some of his at various points over the summer and it helped neutralize my panic attacks. Throughout 2018 I took my four medications pretty consistently, but I became progressively more sluggish from the seroquel and started struggling in school again, so I eventually stopped taking that and buspar. By 2019 it was hard to tell if my wellbutrin was still working. I started taking 200mg of lamictal (lamotrigine) and 2mg of risperdal (risperidone) that summer, which together tremendously helped to stabilize my mood and manage my psychosis, but it became even more difficult to distinguish what each of my medications actually felt like individually.

That is, until the end of November 2019. I was in pretty dire straits again at that point academically, because even though I had managed to get disability accommodations, as my antipsychotics wore me down over the previous couple of years, I started having to take on "incomplete contracts" and finish work for several classes well after the semesters I was registered for them. As these contracts piled up, I fell into various stages of academic probation, and at one point the registrar system automatically suspended me because I wasn't earning enough credits. Basically, by that fall, I had one final chance at finishing all my remaining incompletes and not taking on any new ones or that would be it.

I worked my whole ass off that semester, but I still fell behind again, and I knew I needed some kind of stimulant to just get me through the mountain of backed up work. I looked everywhere for some adderall or 2-FMA, two substances that had worked wonders for me in the past, but everyone was dry and there's no way I'll ever get an amphetamine prescription because of my history with stimulants and antipsychotics. My best friend had finally gotten an adderall prescription for their ADHD, and it was helping them a lot, but I didn't want to ask for any because I knew they needed it. They tossed me a few pills anyway. Bless you, G. But I needed something more.

Then, suddenly, another friend who had recently gotten a wellbutrin prescription and knew I had been on it for years reached out and asked me if they could get any decent effects from snorting it. At first, I thought it sounded ridiculous. There was no way. The pills I had been getting for the last several years were the white oblong I 13s; they looked huge, packed with binders and fillers. I couldn't imagine that the 150mg of something I couldn't even say for certain still affected me would be worth snorting all of that shit. I told my friend no, that was probably a stupid idea.

But as the end of the semester crept closer, I kept thinking about my friend's question. Time was running out and I was desperate. I started to wonder if just snorting anything might have a small placebo effect. Eventually, I decided I had nothing to lose and I might as well try it. So one day, after class, I crushed up one of my pills. The amount of powder was pretty daunting, so I cut it into two ~75mg lines, then rolled up a dollar bill and railed one of them. It was pretty bad; it stung a little and tasted like chalk, and the eye on that side of my face immediately welled up with tears. But to my surprise, as it set in over the next few minutes, I did feel a small buzz, kind of like the feeling of a small dose of adderall coming on. I got to work, and although the bulk and taste of powder on my pharynx was distracting, I somehow felt a bit more focused. Half of an I 13 was easily enough to clog one nostril (at the time... just wait), so shortly afterward I filled up the other one with the second line. I don't remember my first experience perfectly because antipsychotics have done terrible things to my memory, but I know that early on I was very sensitive to the side effects of snorting wellbutrin. I had a bit more energy, sure, and a brief exhilarating head rush and perhaps a bit of a confidence boost; but also slightly clammy hands and feet, occasional shivers and eye twitches, and most memorably, a very bizarre and uncomfortable sensation in my teeth. It wasn't exactly painful, but it felt like each one of my teeth was being pinched in a vicegrip and might fall out.

Anyway, I kept doing this for the remaining four weeks of the semester, and I got an unbelievable amount of work done. And I rapidly lost control over my use. After a week and a half of snorting a pill at home every other day so my nose could recover, I decided I wasn't being productive enough, so I stopped going home and started snorting 150mg of wellbutrin every day in the campus library bathrooms. I soon amped up to about 300mg almost every day, and it felt disgusting, but the mixture of mild euphoria, dexedrine-like focus enhancement, and sheer constant pain kept me working around the clock.

I didn't have any finals that semester, but for the last couple of weeks I was churning out papers, coding projects, and other assignments like a well-oiled machine. I spent a lot of that time dissociating, but unlike my usual experiences with dissociation, thanks to the wellbutrin I was able to continue writing and solving physics problems. I gave the most eloquent and persuasive presentation of my life on a subject I thoroughly over-researched (I found 50 papers to cite in under two weeks) with a face full of wellbutrin, dilated pupils, and a brain that hadn't slept in 48 hours. I somehow got everything done and was back in good standing for the first time in years.

The most annoying effect of chronic wellbutrin insufflation during that period of my life was the feeling of powder sliding around from side to side in my maxillary sinuses (the ones between your nose and your cheekbones) while trying to sleep. It would feel awful being completely unable to breathe through one of my nostrils at a time, so I had to constantly roll over to send the powdery mucousy junk to the other side to let the rest of my face take a break. I lost all the nasal innocence I never knew I still had.

I did not want this shit to continue now that I had recovered my good standing, so I managed to cut back a lot over the winter. I would still habitually snort 50mg here and there while camming (that's how I paid my rent), just to get enough of that stupid sexy rush of feeling bad to keep up the enthusiasm, but most of the time I just took it orally. But I had developed a tolerance at that point (I barely felt any of the original side effects, and the only thing that still bothered me was the congestion) so I asked my psychiatrist for a dose increase and started receiving 300mg in the smaller, round 354-labeled pills. At first I thought it was going to be hard to resist the temptation to snort larger amounts, because these pills contained twice the previous dose in about half the amount of powder, but I learned the hard way in my first indulgence that the round pills taste a thousand times worse than the oblong ones. They have that "chemical taste", I suppose, but it's really like nothing else that has ever been in my nose or mouth. I managed to stop insufflating for a few weeks because it was utterly intolerable, and I was somewhat grateful for the change.

Then in March the COVID-19 lockdown started.

I didn't realize how dependent I had actually become on being in the library and snorting my wellbutrin like a freak in the bathroom to get my work done. I immediately fell into a depressive slump, and it didn't take long for me to start railing lines all day long again. I quickly realized a significant part of the horrible taste of the round pills is due to the coating material, so I figured out how to carefully crack that off and toss it. Thanks to this meager improvement, my consumption started to skyrocket. I was regularly railing a full 300mg pill every 3 to 6 hours. I tried to remain conscious of the fact that large amounts of wellbutrin can severely lower your seizure threshold, so I never did more than 1.2 grams in a 24 hour period, but... getting up to that level felt fucking wretched. The only time I've ever felt more like a zombie was one week a couple years ago when a bunch of friends and I fell down a xanax rabbit hole that we barely survived.

I started buying a gram of cocaine from a friend every few weeks, and soon every week, just to interrupt my wellbutrin binges with something better. That was pretty stupid, for reasons that I hope are obvious. I was just juggling two different materials for one insufflation addiction. I ended up going through all my coke at once over a couple of days each time, then resorting to snorting wellbutrin a few days later to deal with the coke withdrawal.

I did manage to space out my cocaine purchases more until I stopped using it entirely, because I didn't want to repeat what happened in 2016 and flunk out of school after all of this hard work. I also returned to my prescribed dose of wellbutrin, though it took months for me to stop insufflating it. It is now August, and it has been seven weeks since the last time I punished my sinuses. I had cravings to just snort something, anything at all, for the first few weeks. I get oblong I 71s now (the better tasting pills), so it would be easier... But I'm quite determined to never misuse this substance again. I finally had another urge tonight, so I sat down and wrote this report instead to remind myself how it played out over the last nine months. No thanks.

Exp Year: 2017-2020	ExpID: 114671
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Sep 20, 2023	Views: 19
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