DOSE:		oral	MDMA	(pill / tablet)
		oral	Alcohol	(liquid)
		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

I had a rough bout with E from October of 2000 to January 2001. I was 20. Before that, I hadn't really been a big abuser of drugs. I basically was your run-of-the-mill Catholic school girl gone wrong, having started to smoke a lot of pot and drink heavily in my senior year of high school all of the sudden. Like breaking out of a shell.

At first, the pot used to make me really nervous and I would freak out and get paranoid, but I learned to love it. I was a complete pothead by the time I was a freshman at college. And of course, I got absorbed into pot culture... it's captivating in a way... just the whole atmosphere behind it all...

Anyway, fast-forward to last fall, which was supposed to be my junior year of college. That summer, I was smoking really good KB about 4 or 5 times a day and drinking a six-pack of decent beer on my porch every night. I used to wake up at 2pm the next day with a half a beer on my window sill and drink that for breakfast. I was pretty numb to my anxieties at this point and suffering from a lot of depression, though I would never admit it and was probably unaware of it anyway because I was high all the time. I had been putting off some casual therapy for years. There was nothing wrong with me enough to require drugs or a psychiatrist or anything... I just really needed someone to talk to... but I was smoking all the time and I thought it was helping so I just put it off...

So I had really wanted to try E. In October, this shady kid I'd been sleeping with over the summer called me at 4am to ask me if I knew anyone who wanted some pills. So I said, yeah - me. They were big, blue statues of liberty pills. Not double stacked or anything, but big. I was half scared and half excited.

My boyfriend and I decided to take the pills at our off-campus house on a Thursday night. We lived in a three floor house with 16 other people so we figured there'd be enough going on there to keep us busy. We didn't really make any plans to go out because I freak easily and we wanted to make sure I stayed calm. The setting was calm - people smoking bowls in the common room, studying, making dinner... lots of light and low music. We'd bought two gallons of water to drink cuz we were scared shitless about the dehydration stories. We didn't smoke or anything beforehand cuz we just wanted to experience a pure MDMA high.

So we popped them at about 7 and at first, nothing seemed to be happening. The scared part of me seemed relieved in a way... but then I started to feel tiny pinpricks of nervousness eat away at me. It was strange... like my body knew it was waiting for something. We complained that they were duds and climbed up to my loft to hang out... at about 8, I started to feel slightly like my body was physically expanding to encompass the area of the room... like it was spreading out in little particles all over... but I didn't feel high and I could think very clearly, so I was confused. All of the sudden, I looked at this crack in the wall of my loft and I let it out: 'That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,' I said. BOOM. Instantaneously I was rolling, and so was my boyfriend, who was looking out the window at all the people walking by and talking to them. It was overwhelming. At first I thought I wouldnt' be able to handle it. My heart began racing faster than I'd thought it would and I started to sweat and shake... my boyfriend had me lie down, at which point I started babbling about how wonderful it all was and how I wanted to be at peace with it all... but I didn't know if I was ok... it passed.

The rest of the night was one of the best experiences I've ever had. We listened to music, came clean with people in the house over stupid issues... talked their heads off... got it all on video... had sex... but we didn't even want to... we were too busy holding each other and telling each other how much we loved each other... It was like the connecting mentally was more important than the actual sex. I felt like I was walking on air too and fast. Very speedy. I was hooked then and there.

The next day I had diarrhea before my 8am class for three hours... vomited once or twice... thought I was absolutely going to die... but I was so goddam happy even still... I didn't care. I was still clenching my jaw that day, lying in bed sick... smiling my ass off and making phone calls for more E.

Over the next three and a half months, I did E at least once a weekend and usually more in pretty much the same exact setting and always with just my boyfriend. We never went out. We liked the house. We never took more than one pill at a time or more than one pill per experience.

No time was EVER as good as the first. The first three or four times were fantastic. The rest of them we usually spent getting high (smoking gravity bong hits, which I had started doing at a rate of three or so per day with good KB) and complaining that the E was weak.

We started arguing a lot. A lot. I started crying a lot more. I had barely noticed, but my friends had all stopped talking to me. I had secluded myself with my boyfriend in my room most of the time and had started to hate everyone in the house.

On Christmas Eve, my very calm and peaceful boyfriend threw me into a closet, stuck his fingers down my throat, ripped a sweater I was wearing into shreads and left me in the bathroom while I held a razor to my wrist. The whole time, I couldnt' figure out what had gone wrong. We had done E the night before and we were so addicted we just kept trying to get more anytime anything like this would happen, but it had gotten to the point where we weren't even getting high anymore. We were pissed off and frustrated and blaming it on the dealers, saying the E was weak, tampered, fake.

On January 1, 2001, I took my last hit of E. The night before I had taken a huge rip off the gravity bong and had forgotten my name... I had been in the kitchen telling my boyfriend that the voice in my head told me to guard my neck... riiiiiight... this sort of thing pretty much did not happen to me from smoking pot, so I was a little freaked out about taking E the next day, but I did anyway...

It was snowing outside and for once, we decided to go out. We thought it would kick in while we were playing in it. About six blocks from the house, I suddenly looked around and everything was weird. I wasn't hallucinating or seeing things or anything like that... I can't really explain it... just, the world was NOT as it shoudl have been. Houses and buildings looked scary and I was afraid. I thought my boyfriend was trying to kill me... we started walking back and I nearly collapsed from the cold weather. I couldn't talk... my speach was slurred... My mind was racing with weird thoughts... specifically that the world wasn't really there... that I had been imagining it my whole life.

I got into the shower and then passed out. It was absolutely horrible. The big surprise came the next day when I STILL FELT THIS WAY. I literally woke up in the middle of a panic attack. Screaming, crying and shaking. I couldn't tell who was real and where I was. I felt as though my mind had retreated back into my head... far away behind a glass wall and that I was just watching everyone around me but not really participating. I had no appetite. I felt sick. Things were coming out of my mouth and they were making sense, but I had no idea how it was happening. I was scared shitless.

For the next two full months, I constantly endured this horrifying state of mind until it finally started to get better. Strange, scary things happened to me. I was in the car as a passenger when I told my boyfriend that he was just a figment of my imagination and that I knew I was really driving. He freaked. I would go up to my housemates and touch them to see if they were really there, which freaked them out. It was horrible. I thought I was mental for life. I couldn't get out from that glass wall and I read about dissociative disorder and started thinking it was me...

I was physically sick too. I went from 125 lbs. to 100 lbs. in three weeks, which, believe me, is painful. My skin turned yellowish. My eyes sunk in. I WOULD NOT eat. Not because I didn't want to, but well, because I had no appetite at all and becase food looked so scary. Everything was so scary. I developed night sweats so bad that I had to change my T shirt four times a each night... we were in the back room with the windows open in the middle of January. I was so dehydrated that if and when I peed, it was this sick, orangy color. I had to wait for my boyfriend to get home to help me shower because I could not stand up alone. I had lost too much weight and felt dizzy enough to pass out. Finally, I developed a 102 degree fever which remained constant for TWO WEEKS. This is when I decided to go to the doctor - at the beginnning of February since all of these symptoms had continued for over a month now. Keep in mind I had stopped ALL drug usage on the 1st of January. ALL of it. So I'd been sober and crazy and sick.

I was honest with the doc (guys - you can do this - they have a legal obligation not to tell anyone) and she said, well, you're going through intense physical methamphetamine withdrawal. She asked me if I'd had the pills tested cuz it sounded like I'd done a lot of meth and/or amphetamines to her... she even kept asking me if I'd done coke which I'd never touched, but hardly believed me. She said my symptoms were severe. I'd also started to suffer from a lung infection from smoking so goddam much. She didn't put me on any medication and said to wait it out. I was scared. She said my mental health would get better... that I was going through 'methamphetamine psychosis'... something lots of users develop in withdrawal that is temporary but makes them schiz out a lot for months afterward.

Finally at the end of March, I felt good enough to come home and start working. It took a while to get used to and I was still having sporadic panic attacks, but I did it. I told my parents everything... kept going to therapy... saved money and took some summer classes and now here I am, I've been sober almost 8 months, from everything, I have a good relationship with my parents, I've resolved my depression and my mental health is stable. I gained back all the weight and am healthier than I've ever been. I am so lucky that things turned out all right.

Through therapy I discovered zen meditation and philosophical means of working through my cravings (which I still have SEVERAL of) and my anxieties. My relatives have noticed a huge change in me and say I'm a much happier, relaxed person. Through meditation, you can achieve the same high you get on E, but you can control it. The basic ritual of counting your breaths as you meditate helps this, placing you in a euphoric, yet contolled state of peace and calmness. I would recommend this to anyone interested in the topic.

This whole thing has changed my life. All my beliefs, my plans for life, my friends (who, after much effort on my part, came back to me), my family... ALL CHANGED... I will never, ever be the same. I still have mini flashbacks and sometimes horrible panic attacks... but as time goes by, I learn to deal with them and to calm myself down. This has just been one hell of an experience that I still find hard to belive I went through... and sharing it not only is a theraputic release, but also lets me know I may be helping other people... research your drugs before you experiment, and don't do as much as frequently as i did... that was my biggest mistake... all in moderation...

Hope this enlightened some curious folks out there...

Exp Year: 2000	ExpID: 8709
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 10, 2001	Views: 40,015
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
MDMA (3), Alcohol (61), Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Depression (15), Addiction & Habituation (10), Various (28)