DOSE:

inhaled

Inhalants

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

80 lb

[Erowid Note: Our understanding of the literature is that there is no such thing as safe recreational use of volatile solvents, aerosols and other street inhalants : their psychoactive effects are inseparable from nerve and organ damage. We have chosen to include these reports to help document the real world use of inhalants, but their inclusion is not intended to imply that they are anything but dangerous.]

From a very young age I was curious about drugs. I wondered what it was like to 'Get High'. I had this naive impression of a cartoon world of crazy fun. So when at the age of 11 a friend of mine asked if I would like to get high I was very excited about it. It was the beginning of the summer, and he mentioned it almost as soon as I came over that day. He brought me down to the living room in the basement. He had just tried it yesterday with his other friend, and when I asked how, he simply said “by huffing gas”. This was not something I knew about, I had expected him to say pot, but all the same this just intrigued me more.

Right as we were about to get the gas can his mother’s boyfriend Dick dropped by real quick. This was a quick startle for us, yet just intensified the excitement of doing this. I remember as I looked out the window, up to the front porch where my friend was watching Dick pull out the driveway. I looked at my friend, and mouthed “How many hits ?”, and he motioned back to me “Two”. Well this turned out to be an obvious misconception of what I was about to do.

So we are all alone, mid afternoon, and the gas can is on the floor in front of us. He simply wrapped his hand around the nozzle and began to breath in and out for about 5-7 deep breaths. As he let go he just sort of put his hands up in the air and goes “Wwwwooow”. I did the same, though tentatively at first, I did it maybe 3-4 times, and felt this light buzzing inside my head. My friend than returned to the nozzle, and must have breathed in and out a good 10 times. I sat there listening, mesmerized by the sound of the whistling can, watching my friends face become slacker and his eyes just completely glaze over. I panicked, telling him to stop.. “You’re going to kill yourself!” He let go, and sat back again, hands in the air, dizzy and swaying. For a moment he came to himself and said “It’s okay, it can’t hurt you, don’t be so paranoid, try some more you’ll see”

So I did. And this time I just kept breathing, I don’t know how many times I did it, but it must have been at least fifteen. Each time I did it, the borders of my vision seemed to close in. So that at the end of it, all that I could see was a small tunnel of clear vision amongst this mass of colorful sparkles and blur. Than the sounds began. Everyone who has ever really huffed gas knows the sound I mean. It’s unique for everyone, but for me was this strangely quick garble. It starts out light, just like a soft in-and-out buzzing. Something like a “Voo-Em Voo-Em Voo-Em”. As the volume increased it morphed itself into this sort of speech. “Voo-Em, Diddle-diddle-doot-em.” Very fast and rhythmic. I was completely blown away by it.

My demeanor on the matter of my friend huffing too much quickly took a different light. “Have more, more” I was saying to him. I giggled and watched tracers of the room as I turned my head. As I giggled I realized that everything in my head would echo. I quickly started to buff some more, not as hard this time, but each breath just intensified everything. “The Echoooooooooo” I just kept saying it, loudly. “The echoooooooo”. Fascinated by the auditory hallucinations, I suddenly realized what I was seeing. Looking at what was normally a black TV, became this extremely obnoxious bright pink. The kind that hurts your eyes. It was like one of those things where you wanted to look and you'd look away, and look back because you couldn’t believe it.

I soon after lapsed into a dream, a loop. Lit candles and heads spinning in circles, chanting, strange memories I never had. Watching myself as a child in a Halloween costume, at hand with some strange lady, knocking on the door just outside the room I was in. Many things that were indescribable happened as I guess my brain was dying. Than I just kinda came to, except my whole vision was this colorful haze. I was falling toward the haze, falling, my hands out in front of me... as I realized the sensation of falling was merely my vision coming into focus of the wallpaper in front of me. I look to the left and right-I cannot describe how it looked but I simply explained to my friend. Pointing to the left “This is Heaven”, and than to the right “And this is Hell”. Trust me when the couch takes a form of the duality of heaven and hell, and you look back on it, you know you were toasted. The rest was a strange loop of dreams until I basically came to as if awaking from a nights sleep. It was dark out by the time I had a decent handle on my brain again and I went home.

As great as the experience was, the two others that followed it got exponentially worse. The second time we did it inside the garage, around late November. I sat there and watched my friend collapse into a pile of bricks, amazed thinking how much that had to hurt. I don’t remember much from the experience, except that, and waking to a loud banging sound. The sound was my friends knees hitting the floor as he collapsed down on them. I was there lying on a pile of sharp Christmas ornaments, his sister looking at us saying “What are you guys doing?”, my only response being (in an amused drawn out voice) “Weeeee’re Stonnnned”. We both felt like shit the rest of the night, and I had a very hard time falling asleep.

The third and last experience made me decide this was eventual death. It was my friends birthday (less than two weeks after), and this time it was him, his friend, and myself. We went out into a big tent in the backyard, at night, and huffed inside the tent. My friend had this annoying habit of always knocking the gas can over and he also did so inside the tent, spilling gas all over us. I don’t remember very much after that, except my friends said they had to take me inside, as I was screaming at the top of my lungs “You fucker, stop it! Stop it!” What I do remember was everything was VERY quiet, and I felt very tired. I said something in a whispered voice when I hit my head on this light we had inside the tent. Than I remember watching the ground as I was being dragged, stumbling, into the house. This sort of gap and detachment between reality and what was in my mind scared me. I threw up several times that night, and decided to never do it again.

This stuff is extremely dangerous, after that I went to pot.

Exp Year: 1993	ExpID: 56956
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 11
Published: Sep 1, 2009	Views: 22,273
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Inhalants (29) : General (1), Retrospective / Summary (11), First Times (2), Not Applicable (38)