DOSE: T+ 0:00	500 mg	oral	Diphenhydramine	(capsule)
T+ 1:00	1.5 g	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

Several of my regular tripping companions gathered at our friend M’s house at around 5:30 in the afternoon sometime in mid July. With an empty house until 2:00 am, we figured it would be fun to trip, but wanted something that didn’t last as long as DXM (one our staple drugs). We finally agreed on Beandryl after one of the friends, S, told us a bit about how easy it was to get. So we went and procured three boxes of 48 25 mg Beandryl capsules each. Once we got back, we went on the porch, broke open some soda, and divided up the pills.

As I remember, five people decided to trip, myself included. It was my first time. Four of us, M, S, K, and myself, decided to take 20 pills (500 mg) each, since we hadn’t tripped hard on anything in a long time. The fifth tripper, A, went with a smaller dose of 14 (350 mg). I ingested all 20 25mg Benadryl capsules in the course of some three minutes and decided to wait for the trip to come on. Compared to other pharmaceuticals, it took a terribly long time, perhaps an hour or more, before I noticed any serious change. During that time, to speed the process of coming up, I did jumping jacks and watched the sun start to go down.

About 45 minutes after ingestion, our friend B showed up at the house, along with some other people and an absurd amount of marijuana. Being the insatiable people we are, B broke up a couple bowls and we shared them between six or seven people. During this process, I kept wandering in and out of the house, trying to find M and get him to smoke with us. I finally found M and told him to go and smoke, then sat down on the living room couch. By this point, just over an hour in, I felt a bit drunk while walking and I had some difficulty pulling my thoughts together enough to act on them. I managed to fight off confusion enough to go back and smoke a touch more. Then everything became a blur.

The confusion really took hold when people started to get up and leave. I couldn’t tell who was left in the house, and everything seemed very frantic as I fought to process what was going on around me. Visual and auditory hallucinations hadn’t started yet, but the drunkenness had definitely hit. I finally started to figure out what was going on after the house started to clear out, leaving just me, M, his girlfriend K, A, and B (B was the only one not tripping). I sat on the couch and talked to A for a little while, trying to keep tabs on how his trip was going. About that time the first auditory hallucinations started, a methodical clicking sound coming from the ceiling. I attributed it to the light fixture above me, and simply tried to ignore it. Quickly following the auditory hallucinations, my vision started to change. Things became very dreamlike and somewhat distant, and everything started to look a bit darker, as though the lights indoors had become candles with their darker, more yellow-orange glow.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

After a little bit of talking, I was called upon to drive B back to his house (I do not recommend anyone try driving while on Benadryl!). The drive there wasn’t too bad, it was only 5 minutes to B’s house, but I had a hard time in the dark. The contrast between light and dark seemed diminished. Lights were more dull and yellow and it made me think my headlights weren’t working. That aside, though, I had no difficulty getting to B’s house. When I left B’s house, the visual hallucinations started. Everyone talks about Beandryl producing very realistic visuals, at least realistic in your impressionable drunken state, but I found that they were less potent that expected. Everything not real had a very transparent, wispy quality to it. Anyways, I started back, and the first thing I noticed was a wasp flying around in my car. It bothered me a bit, and I pulled over, only to find that when I stopped it was gone. I began to start understanding how bad an idea it was to drive in this state.

Shaken up, I waited to calm down before continuing on. Just after I got back on the road, I passed a streetlight that had gone out. Around the base of it seemed to be a huge dark grey sheet flapping in the wind. I slowed down and asked aloud “Is that a flag?” Then realized that I could see the streetlight underneath the sheet and concluded that it was a hallucination. Now very paranoid about how hard I was tripping, I resolved to focus solely on driving. The way back seemed like it took forever. Processing things like stop signs seemed to take twice the effort, and I had to constantly remind myself out loud about different traffic laws I needed to obey. Still, I was able to rationalize my way through the drive and returned safely to M’s house.

I came back inside to find that M had taken A home too, leaving just me, M, and K in the house. I went to the computer and sat down, trying to play a game of solitare while I calmed down. I couldn’t focus on the game, and resorted to just watching the screen and listening to M and K talk. I don’t know how long that took, I lost track of time, but I suddenly became aware that everything was quiet. I looked over at K, sitting next to the computer desk in a recliner, and when I did I heard a loud crash coming from behind the computer. I immediately concluded that his speakers had just fallen behind the desk, so I wobbled to my feet and tried desperately to find the fallen speakers, knocking over a lamp in the process. After a good five minutes, M got up and came over to ask what I was doing. I stammered out something about how he needed to help me because his speaker just fell. He looked, pronounced everything normal, and told me to sit back down. Hallucinations again.

I sat back down and picked up the picture that had fallen (this one was real). The glass over the picture seemed to be a rainbow of rippling colors, like gasoline spilled in a pool of water. I watched for a moment, then put the picture down. When I looked back at the computer, a dark grey-black ball appeared in my peripheral vision. I tried to focus on the ball but it disappeared whenever I looked away from the computer screen. I went through this process several times, amused at how the ball appeared and disappeared. Finally, it vanished and I went back to my solitaire game.

By now I was feeling a bit more coordinated mentally, and got the feeling that I was coming down, or at least was nearing the end of the trip’s peak. I managed to play a few rounds of solitaire on the computer, and felt pretty relieved that I wasn’t so drunk anymore. The mental coordination also helped me hold it together around other visual hallucinations, putting me in the place of a more controlled observer than participant in my mind’s wild ride. At one point during a solitaire game, I looked at the picture frame again, and found it crawling with tiny transparent insects, something like centipedes with four pincers in the place of front legs. I actually watched them for a while, surprisingly calm because I knew they were a hallucination.

A bit later I heard something under the desk and looked down to see an arm from the elbow down projecting from one of the electrical outlets. Like all the other hallucinations, it had a dull grey color to it, and I could faintly see the carpeting through the forearm. The hand moved very rapidly, almost too fast for me to follow, in a series of hand gestures. The irregular stop-and-go motion reminded me of the way the insects moved, and of the sheet flapping in the wind, quickly changing position and holding rigid for a moment before moving again. Still, surreal as it was, I simply mused at what I was seeing, then, after it disappeared I turned and told M and K about it. They were both amazed that I had seen something that strange, and we talked about what I had seen, along with M’s past trip experiences until I was almost completely down. The visual hallucinations stopped after seeing the arm, and the distortion in light quality and contrast gradually faded over the course of around half an hour – though a slight distortion lingered. I had enough sense to check a clock and found that it was just after 12:30. It had been just under six hours since I took the pills.

After coming completely down, I felt mentally exhausted, probably due to the drive back from B’s house. I waited for about 15 minutes and then left for my own house, while M took K back to her home. Thankfully, I had no other hallucinations or ill effects on the way back to my house, although some of the drab lighting effects would come and go for the rest of the night.

For the remainder of the week, I had occasional, sudden hallucinations, mostly moving black and grey dots, that would appear and disappear in just a fraction of a second. My hands were also very shaky, and feelings of exhaustion persisted for at least 36 hours after I came down. Still, all in all, it wasn’t a bad first experience.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 56136
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 16, 2007	Views: 82,808
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Diphenhydramine (109) : Hangover / Days After (46), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)