DOSE:

inhaled

Ether

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

[Erowid Note: The "water extraction" method is ineffective in separating diethyl ether from the volatile hydrocarbon liquids/gases in "starter fluid". Our understanding of the literature is that there is no such thing as safe use of volatile hydrocarbon gases: their psychoactive effects are inseparable from nerve and organ damage.]

Ether.
To quote Hunter S. Thompson, 'The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.'

Oh...the deprivation it does indeed cause.

I found myself watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, seeing them trip, if you may call it 'trip', on Ether. How to do it? Where to get it? Thank-you for the internet. Within minutes I was at the gas station across the street buying a canister of your everyday starter fluid. Great. $2 and I was set. I went home, diluted the Ether in a plastic ziploc bag and was set to go. I poured it onto a rag and went inhale crazy. It was intense at first. Very intense smell I do mean. In the film they practically shove the rag up their nose, but the smell permeates the room so I get a sense of what I will be putting near your nose, and I start to not like it. I do it anyways and within 4 huffs, 4 good, decent Johnny Depp sized huffs, I'm gone. Gone unlike anything that I've ever been 'gone' on before.

I couldn't talk right. Echoes. Everywhere there were Echoes. My friend had Fear and Loathing on his computer so he put it back on to the Ether part. The Echoing was too intense. I turned and saw Seinfeld on the television. Better. Not intense echoing, but they still had a nice echo. As Ether does, it soon wore off. My friend was convinced to try it as I had just explained the past few moments. We both dug our noses it.

This time, I knew where the Echoing was coming from. My mind was a few seconds behind my senses. Everything I saw, heard and felt was like Deja vu. INTENSE deja vu. I had seen patterns, this odd green and red swirling saying something like GAME OVER. I saw it everywhere, making this swirling pattern out of everything saw. The TV screen, the computer monitor, this odd criss-crossing of the wood under the kitchen chairs. But, I had seen this all before. Somewhere. Online perhaps. Yea. Somewhere online I saw a movie of what this was like. But of course after coming down again I tried to search for this vision of this movie I had seen. Nothing. More times I huffed. Euphoria now, yet that deja vu still set in. The last thing I remembered that night was watching Fear and Loathing, all curled up and seeing scenes, that upon rewatching the movie, showed that those scenes had never existed.

Fast Forward about a month later...

2 of my other friends and I were again watching F&L, and we said Ether...why not. I had vials of it now. I was producing it to sell here and there. So I grabbed one and started in. This time however, I did more than I've ever done. I hit my plateau and kept going. I fell out of my chair. My friend was talking to me incoherently. He was trapped in a well he told me, he slapped my hand, I pulled my hand away quickly and almost took a third-person perspective on what was going on. My hand to my elbow fell off and started to slinky around. Just end over end, and my friend who decided to not participate watched my hand.

Suddenly he locked eyes with me and didn't move. I started to move my legs but they moved spastically, but I saw him doing it, not myself. I/He realized what was going on with the legs and started to hit them saying something like, stupid legs they need to stop. I/He watched them stop going so spastically, then into a square step-like pattern. I/He grabbed the legs and screamed 'I GOT IT!!'. I don't know what I got, but it seemed like the view I was looking at this whole mess from was a deep view into fate. I saw my friend doing these things in my mind, yet I would involuntarily do them immediately afterwards, like he was my voodoo doll of myself.

I suddenly say my arm reaching for the doorknob outside and I ripped it open and ran outside. I ran across the yard, no shoes, with snow on the ground. I saw things everywhere, this repetion of what had just happened, and what was going to happen. Again, I thought I had seen this online somewhere and could understand it was a warning someone had made about ether and what happens if you took it too much. your body just dies and your mind gets trapped in this world of a third-person view of fate and reliving what had just happened. This continuous loop of what would happen and what had.

I thought, 'I need to break this loop..run to the store!' that would change this line of fate. No...no shoes...Go to the house, no, the garage. The garage window. Break it. You wouldn't just break it for no reason. Break it. Break this like of fate. But suddenly I could see breaking this window would be a new part of the line of fate. No way to escape! Suddenly my dad opened the door and told me to get inside. I went in. he could smell the ether, asked me what it was and I realized I was out of that 3rd person view. I was saved. I said I don't know what it is, I was out in my car looking for my ipod cord. I went to tell my friends what had happened. They were scared because of the screaming and then the running outside. I tried to explain this fate thing, but nothing. I just curled up and went to bed.

To this day I haven't done ether that hard. Just small little hits, to get a small buzz. I was scared to death of being stuck in that place of fate, and am still not sure if it could still happen.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 49831
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 10, 2008	Views: 32,476
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Ether (131) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Bad Trips (6), Difficult Experiences (5), Small Group (2-9) (17)