DOSE:

15 bowls

smoked

Opium

(tar / resin)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

hey, just got back from thailand where opium is alive and well. and not the red rock shit i keep reading about. in northeast thailand, despite governments efforts to eradicate opium, the hill tribe people still grow a lovely product. in the area where i was, the government has tried to switch the hill tribe people over to growing strawberries and ferns for export. of course there are still some secret gardens.

i was in thailand with my friend, S, who speaks thai fluently, so it was easy to find a friendly local to take us to the village. our host, J, was 37 years old and looked alittle worse for wear. he had few teeth and the ones he still had were black. we walked through a very muddy village in the pouring rain, past goats and children playing, to j's very simple bamboo hut. there was no power of course, woven mats on the floor, a fire in the middle of the floor with a hole in the roof for the smoke( no chimney), and an old women in the corner preparing food. j gave me a small cushion upon which to rest my head as i layed on the floor on my side. he layed down facing me, and placed a small oil lamp on the floor between us. s was translating for me and laughed because j told him the lamp was burning rendered pork fat. as i am a strict vegetarian, s was amused and thought i might not want to smoke because of this, but i have been an inveterate opiate abuser on and off for about 13 years and a vegetarian for only 7 years so i proceeded.

j produced a lump of opium about the size of one of those energy bar type things that everone eats these days. he allowed me to taste it, it was so deliciously bitter. it tasted just like the homegrown opium i have harvested, and like the opium i have smoked in india, but it was far superior. anyway, j would pinch off a small piece of the opium, maybe as big as one shelled peanut, and stick it on a piece of wire that looked like an unfolded paper clip. he heated the lump up over the burning lamp, and when it was hot and soft he smeared it around the hole in the pipe. the pipe was a footlong bamboo tube with a bulbous ceramic thing on the end. the ceramic part had a small hole on the side. j handed me the pipe and he held it over the fire. the opium starts to melt and sizzle and you suck at the pipe and get a wonderful lungfull of smoke. the taste is like flowers, not harsh at all. it does not make you cough or choke. as the opium melts it starts to clog the hole and you cant really get a hit, so j would use the wire thing to keep the hole somewhat open . after about three pipes i started to feel the opium buzz. i ended up smoking 15 pipes over the course of a half hour, and i was surprised by how intoxicated i became. j told me he smoked aobut 100 pipes a day, but only #2. #2 is the opium residue that runs into the bulbous part of the pipe when the fresh opium is smoked. this resin dries hard, not gummy like fresh opium (which is the consistency of hashish). the pipe disassembles to allow the resin to be removed and consumed. anyway, walking back to where s and i were staying proved tricky after this, especially with the mud and rain. j provided us with bamboo walking sticks to help. the opium was very potent. i felt just like i had done heroin. i use morphine semi regularly recreationally, but morphine is like a body high. this was more like a body /brain like you get from heroin. it lasted about six hours, with a short but intense vomiting session around the three hour point. woke up feeling fine and ready for more. after three days of smoking, s and i continued on with our asian trip.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 5884
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 27, 2001	Views: 99,724
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Opium (63) : Various (28), General (1)