DOSE:

Datura

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

190 lb

As a naive and foolish teenager I decided to try datura. To my amazement I found it growing up and down the West coast-- very easy to identify. The following are brief accounts of several occasions starting with the first time I tried it while on a trip to Baja California with my church youth group.

While walking in the baja desert I found what was undeniably Datura, although I don't know which kind. It appeared to be the same kind that I later found growing all over California as far north as Sacramento. At any rate, I ate an entire fresh seed pod (seeds only) one night in the month of August while on this trip to Baja. Not much happened that night aside from a head change, blurred vision, and dryness of mouth. A night or two later, while drifting into sleep, I had a startling and scary experience, which through subsequent experiences with her, I am now able to attribute to the effects of the datura. As I drifted into a hypnogogic state, I began to experience the normal slide-and-fall that sometimes startles one awake. However, this time, before the slide-and-fall sensation, came an electric buzz starting at the base of my spine, traveling almost instantaneously up to the center of my brain, ending with a crackling pop! there in the center of my head.

At that very same instant I felt as though suddenly there was another body lying on top of me, and that I could no longer move. I tried to breath or wiggle, anything, but for a few brief and terrifying moments I was paralyzed. This passed within seconds only throgh sheer will was I able to jolt myself back awake. I don't know the cause of this phenomenon and have never experienced it the day of ingestion of the plant, always the day after or later. It is not pleasant but very frightening to feel as though you've stopped breathing and can't move.

On the way home from Baja California while sleeping at a church for the night in San Diego, I drank vodka, smoked a small amount of pot (a couple hits) and smoked a few bowls full of the same Datura leaves I had found in Baja. All I remember is that I lost control. I could not speak logically but spoke nonetheless. I vaguely remember telling gargantuan whoppers about the most mundane things. A concerned peer of mine sat and watched over me. I told lie after non-sensical lie. None of what I was saying was true or made logical sense. Furthermore, I had lost control of what I was saying. It just came out. I have few memories from that night. I was delirious.

...Another time, I smoked a lot of fresh leaves from Baja with some freinds in Willits, California. We sat in my room smoking and felt a euhporia that drove us to jump up and dance! We saw in hughess of red and had a definate head change. In the next few days, I continued my smoking of the leaves on a number of occasions. The effects seemed varied and unpredictable. At one point, during this Datura binge, between smokes, when I was sober for all intensive purposes, all of a sudden I experienced intense visions of my father bursting into my room on fire. These visions were in my head, in other words they weren't true hallucinations, but the clarity and color of the visions in my imagination, the pressing nature of them as well as the anxiety and fear that came on with them made the experience mildly tramatic. I could not stop obbsessing over the visions. They just popped into my head.

Another time, I ate an entire seed pod and smoked a bowl of pot along with it. I became delirious, not knowing really where I had just been but somehow getting to where I was going; not able to track my thoughts or speech from one second to the next, so much so that coherent thought and speech became impossible-- again I had reached the nonesense and lies level of expression; I even hallucinated briefly that I could see every pore of the side walk I was walking on and could see some clear aura of sorts flowing from the tips of my fingers into these cement pores.

Probably my last experience ever on datura came when I was 18 and in college. I pciked a bag of leaves along the Sacramento American River bike trail. I went with a friend to a lake and creek some 40 minutes away from town. We hiked along a creek and smoked the leaves as we went. We became exhausted and dehydrated, not to mention extremely lethargic. We didn't hallucinate and overall felt quite uncomfortable, as though we had downed a bunch of over the counter antihistamines. I drove (definately a bad idea) us back home to my friend's house. Some how i managed to stay awake for the entire drive. We sat and watched movies with some other friends while continuing to feel lethargic, groggy, dehydrated and over-all disphoric. Later, we had no complete memories of the whole day. Huge gaps in what we had said and did as reported by our other friends were gone from our memory. Nothing outrageous had occurred. We just couldn't remember what we had done other than the vague timeline of events as I have told them now.

In all these experiences I experienced blurred vision for 3 days after ingesting or smoking the plant material. The worst cotton mouth anyone could ever hope to experience was also a hallmark symptom of the 'poisoning.' Occasional closed eye visions accompanied these 'trips' as well as stronger bouts of delerium, disordered thoughts, total short term memory loss, and amnesia as well. A bizarre and unpredictable plant indeed. I would hesitate before ever trying this again. On a side note, I have not ever experienced any psychotic eposodes nor do I come from a family with any history of psychosis; i.e. I attribute the effects I felt mainly to the Datura plant itself.

Exp Year: 1995	ExpID: 24182
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 2, 2003	Views: 29,729
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Datura (15) : Various (28), Difficult Experiences (5), Retrospective / Summary (11)