DOSE:		smoked	Cannabis - Hash
		smoked	Tobacco

BODY WEIGHT:

58 kg

I'm a relatively frequent smoker of marijuana and something that really appeals to me in this drug is its potential to cause adventurous experiences - that is to say that smoking weed or hash (unlike, for example, drinking alcohol or taking benzos, which always ends up taking me to the same sad place) usually feels like a "mini trip" for me, and when I'm high there are always these little wild unpredictable moments that catch me off guard and give me lots of excitement and love and interest in life and small things. But this unpredictability also means that I have to treat cannabis with some degree of respect, and that is a lesson that I learned the hard way a long time ago but that unfortunately wasn’t on my mind yesterday when I hurled myself at a great chunk of unfamiliar hash and fell into this very challenging field that I had to pull myself out of.

For some context, recently I’ve been smoking pretty often with my girlfriend after work and it’s all been smooth and warm because though we are tired from work we aren’t really stressed and usually don’t smoke that much, leading almost always to mellow highs which go really well with lying down, kissing, watching movies, etc. Yesterday, though, our headspace was very different from what it usually is because my girlfriend spent the day shooting and I spent it worrying about my own shooting which starts next week (we both work in film), and when we met up it was very clear to both of us that inside us there was fear, worry, anxiety and hurt. We did the best to help each other and I think it worked a lot to relieve the feelings that were crushing us then but of course it didn’t make it all just go away, so practically in silence holding hands we took the train to my place and arrived at about dinnertime. I’m writing about all of this to try and give a picture of the setting of my experience: I was full of worry but with someone I love who soothes me but who is also full of worry.

In my place we kiss and eat and everything is going pretty well (within reason) until I fuck up and break a glass which doesn’t belong to me but to the landlord whose room I’m renting. It might seem small to you, reader, but after a long, shaky day this is the kind of thing that makes the shit hit the fan. I was wrecked and asked my girlfriend to turn off all the lights and we hugged on the sofa under a blanket until I got my feelings to pass which they did as these fearful, shaky, angry feelings always do. When I calmed down my girlfriend and I talked and kissed and after a while decided that it would be nice to smoke some hash before bed.

Now, the hash that we usually smoke we buy either in the ghetto near where my girlfriend lives from a guy at the foot of some stairs inside a run-down building, or in the ghetto near where I live from a group of guys under the arcades of a house (“fixed” plug spots in the ghetto are common in my country). Both hashes are cheap and pretty clean, but relatively mild. The hash that we were smoking yesterday evening, though, was a very recent purchase from a friend of mine who had vouched for it. It looked normal and smelled strong and we rolled about .4g worth of it (really rough estimate, we eyeballed it) with some tobacco in a long thin joint and lit up. And though usually I’m relatively aware of how high I am and how much I should smoke to keep having a good time, something in my mind yesterday made me bullcharge the joint like it was a cigarette and so I smoked a lot more than I would and a lot faster too. My girlfriend, who is a lot “stronger” and more resistant when it comes to drugs than me, smoked her average amount at her average speed.

At first I honestly (and very stupidly) felt that I had kind of undersmoked and would soon have to light up again to feel any sort of noticeable effects. I cuddled into my girlfriend as she showed me a youtube video and decided that if by the time it was over I wasn’t feeling high enough I’d light up again. But very soon into the video I started to feel that a much stronger high than I expected was building up, and suddenly I lost complete contact with the video - words were gibberish, funny and slightly unpleasant - and tuned totally and completely into my girlfriend’s heartbeat. The beating of her heart was the only thing that existed in the whole world, it was the beat of my body and my experience too, it was just everything. I don’t know how else to put it - there was nothing besides the beat, and I was water rippling to the beat. I don’t know how long this feeling lasted because honestly time wasn’t really factoring into it, I was feeling it more like a painting, like it’s just there and other stuff may be happening before or after or around it but the painting’s still there, it is what it is. I wanna make it very clear that this was neither pleasant or unpleasant (I only really felt *bad* during this experience when I felt sick or when the fear of having gone mad popped into my mind, but I’ll touch on these later), it was just what it was and it was huge, it was honestly like something out of an acid trip, but with a different “feel” to it, because with psychedelics these kinds of things feel like unravelings while here it just felt like distortion. But I like distortion and when I snapped out of the heart-trance I was feeling okay, just confused and surprised.

My girlfriend puts on another video and again it’s just nonsense (I can make perfect sense of what she says, however, and can talk back like I’m sober, though I doubt I would have been able to a few moments before during the heart-trance) and I get to thinking that maybe screens and media and tv shows and even movies are brain-rot poison that burns out your beauty sensors and ruins the way you feel and experience the world and I even got to feeling guilty about being in the film industry sort of as an accomplice to this huge awful thing. These thoughts weren’t coming out like this, they weren’t articulate, they were cars on the highway and I could see them in the distance but couldn’t make them out too well - I knew when a thought was coming and felt sort of like “LOOKOUT!” - and it came and crashed and I felt all parts of the thought at the same time. This is not uncommon for me with cannabis, but the speed and density of these thoughts was really something so my confusion and surprise were growing with each moment.

Then, while my girlfriend was showing me an SNL skit, I suddenly felt this bad turning in my stomach and very powerlessly realized that I didn’t know what my body was going to do next. Normally I think I would have told my girlfriend that I was feeling rotten and I’d go to the bathroom to try to puke or something, but I felt that with the rough day she had had it would be selfish of me to put even more worry on her shoulders, so I decided to sort of fake it and pretend like I was hungry when I was really trying to get something to calm my stomach. I should say that by this point she was also clearly very high but in a sleepy nice warm sort of way which wasn’t at all what I was feeling though maybe I looked like it, but in any case it was good to know that she was okay. I got up and instantly felt a lot better. Still I went straight to the kitchen, got an orange and ate it right then and there. I also drank some water. By now the physical strangeness had subsided a lot but a new uneasiness appeared in the form of scary thoughts of madness, having been laced, maybe needing to go to the hospital, remembering horror stories of bum hash experiences. I was just having it so strong, the thoughts were so strong and they were coming with big colorful images now, exactly like flashes from a dream, like a dream was leaking into my conscious experience. I really hadn’t been expecting this.

I went to the bathroom and washed my face in cold water and that too made me feel better, and soon enough I was feeling more in control of what was going on, the thoughts weren’t coming so fast, my stomach was fine, I had it together.

I went back to the sofa and I was there and it was warm and my girlfriend showed me some nice videos and then we cuddled and touched each other and honestly I was in the perfect moment of the high for it because I could feel every touch, I was really enraptured by the warmth, and it was beautiful and very tender and we fell asleep a little while after.

Rereading everything now I feel like maybe I wasn’t able to express why this experience stuck out to me so much. It really was intense beyond words like an acid trip can be and I felt just as powerless as in the strongest lsd trips that I’ve had. Of course it was very brief and I managed to get it together, but there was a moment there when I really doubted what I had been given and for the first time in my life seriously thought that at some point I might pass out from weed alone. I really think that cannabis and I have a nice relationship but I really should have respected it more than I did, especially when trying out new product.

PS: I’ve since tried this devil’s hash again and it’s actually perfectly fine, it’s just pretty strong and I had smoked too much of it. I remember having read something some time ago that most of the people who go into the ER because of “laced weed” are clean of traces of other drugs and are just way too high. I think it’s probably a good thing to keep in mind when you’re “greening out” that almost surely you haven’t been laced and are just very high, but of course it’s up to each person to determine when it’s time to call emergency services, even if it’s just to be sure…

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 116965
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Jan 28, 2023	Views: 627
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Cannabis - Hash (93), Tobacco (47) : Combinations (3), Difficult Experiences (5), Small Group (2-9) (17)