Showing posts with label heroin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heroin. Show all posts
11.5.11
Sale demonios
"The sick is in your head," said Viktor. Dismissively.
"Yes, and so is everything else. You're in my head, Viktor. Get out!"
"Yes, and so is everything else. You're in my head, Viktor. Get out!"
24.11.10
Jai Kali Maa
Until 1837, every Friday a boy was sacrificed at the big Kali temple in Calcutta. The Kali-worshiping Thuggee strangled and buried as sacrifices their victims with lead-weighted yellow kerchiefs.
In the Kali temple beside Manikarnika Ghat in Benares where the funeral pyres burn fierce day and night one can openly buy brown sugar and opium and white heroin.
All this we know.
But is Kali a dark goddess?
In the Kali temple beside Manikarnika Ghat in Benares where the funeral pyres burn fierce day and night one can openly buy brown sugar and opium and white heroin.
All this we know.
But is Kali a dark goddess?
21.8.10
"You had learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."
(George Bernard Shaw)
There is a strange convoluted story that this thought encapsulates. I will tell it later.
I lost all sorts of things, including my mind. Hope that no one ever maliciously spikes your drink with datura (deliriant hallucinogen of nightmares). You will naturally wake up several days later on some temple steps overlooking the Ganges, totally cleaned out. Maybe with luck you will still have your clothes. With luck you will not have taken a vicious blow from a steel bar across your head laying it open to the skull, and have a vague memory of cotton thread stitches at Marwari, the people's hospital, the sensation of the needle going through your flesh and feeling no pain at all. Strange flashes of huddling in the night, naked in a Kali temple, talking to faces of entities floating inside the walls. No memory at all of being treated like a street lunatic or of being taken in by a compassionate rickshaw driver and given brown sugar as a tranquiliser.
These things you will discover later, after you wake up in a filthy room that you don't recognise, overlooking the sunrise over the river. Seemingly once again smoking filthy brown powder because there is a darkness that won't lift. Once again playing main suspect and chief investigator at the same time as you try to uncover where the missing days went.
If you are going to be an idiot like that, at least hope for chloral hydrate or Rohypnol, which are pretty good to knock someone out without the psychotic effects. But why spend the money when you can just grab a handful of datura from the garden?
Oh shit, and it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, I've heard it so many times before.
Everything happens for a reason.
Not necessarily a very good one though.
11.5.10
"Detox or Die"
This is the original BBC documentary about David Graham Scott taking ibogaine to cure his long-term heroin and methadone addiction, mentioned in these pages before. The fact is, I had never actually seen it, or bothered or maybe not wanted to watch it. It's only now that I see what Ed Conn, who talked me through the ibogaine space on the phone, looks like. On camera, at least. I actually only watched it after David posted it on Ed Conn's Facebook (cf. earlier post on Facebook friends I've never met - Edward is another one I would never turn away from my door.)
I recognise many things about the experience, as he describes it and films himself. I can tell where he is. It is odd I should never have watched it before. I knew about it, we published an interview with David Graham Scott, I researched everything about ibogaine back then when I was put in touch with someone who could get me some, but I never watched this before. It is really very good.
I recognise many things about the experience, as he describes it and films himself. I can tell where he is. It is odd I should never have watched it before. I knew about it, we published an interview with David Graham Scott, I researched everything about ibogaine back then when I was put in touch with someone who could get me some, but I never watched this before. It is really very good.
21.4.10
4.4.10
the demon-possessed can spit out nails, jagged pieces of glass, father amorth tells
i walk around spitting match-sticks
i am desperate. i buy lottery tickets. i would suck cock for a break.
i don't believe the things i find myself doing, and this time around, they don't even feel entertaining or worth writing about
life isn't a competition in brinksmanship. the palette doesn't have to be these colours of endless rainswept brutalist urban decay. there's no need to be shivering in these poisonous states
i should have taken photos or you won't believe me
it's just more of the same thing over and over again, a little bit more robbed of its magic, a little less beautiful
recursively
i walk around spitting match-sticks
i am desperate. i buy lottery tickets. i would suck cock for a break.
i don't believe the things i find myself doing, and this time around, they don't even feel entertaining or worth writing about
life isn't a competition in brinksmanship. the palette doesn't have to be these colours of endless rainswept brutalist urban decay. there's no need to be shivering in these poisonous states
i should have taken photos or you won't believe me
it's just more of the same thing over and over again, a little bit more robbed of its magic, a little less beautiful
recursively
8.4.09
[i miss being a heroin addict although i would never go back. life becomes so simple... the best year of my life, now in the delusion of retrospect, which i am not fool enough to fall for, was between summer '05 and summer '06, when i had a place to sit, a lot of interesting work, a doctor who wrote me morphine, and a sweet young girl... of course, you always have to pay everything back... this song evokes a deep nostalgia for that time...]
8.1.08
Essential corpse maintenance
The corpse is hungry, so force some food into it. The corpse feels desire, find it release. The corpse needs cleaning, scrub it and wash its coverings.
Keep that corpse stumbling forward until it lies down for oblivion, eventually for the last time.
Yes, it is a ghastly vision of life. Sometimes the light just hits the ground at the wrong angle, you know. You grate your teeth and see right into the core of things, but a core that is loathsome and humans should not know. Sartre called it the Nausea; I suppose at least that he was talking about the same thing. It is that moment of sickening realisation, that moment that I think Burroughs' title Naked Lunch refers to - that naked "frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork".
Keep that corpse stumbling forward until it lies down for oblivion, eventually for the last time.
Yes, it is a ghastly vision of life. Sometimes the light just hits the ground at the wrong angle, you know. You grate your teeth and see right into the core of things, but a core that is loathsome and humans should not know. Sartre called it the Nausea; I suppose at least that he was talking about the same thing. It is that moment of sickening realisation, that moment that I think Burroughs' title Naked Lunch refers to - that naked "frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork".
30.12.07
A note of appreciation to whoever
Hot cold hot cold hot cold hot cold
I watch the false dawn and then the dawn, windows full of winter sky.
She's soft and warm. Mumbles in a dream and holds on to me tight. I'm soaked in poison sweat of nightmares, my skin crawls, I twitch and shiver and kick. She doesn't mind.
I watch the dawn, window full of sky, her breaths measuring time, reassuring me that it's still passing. Time heals all troubles.
"Sometimes, give also thanks to God..." (Falakzeb the pimp and drug dealer)
I watch the false dawn and then the dawn, windows full of winter sky.
She's soft and warm. Mumbles in a dream and holds on to me tight. I'm soaked in poison sweat of nightmares, my skin crawls, I twitch and shiver and kick. She doesn't mind.
I watch the dawn, window full of sky, her breaths measuring time, reassuring me that it's still passing. Time heals all troubles.
"Sometimes, give also thanks to God..." (Falakzeb the pimp and drug dealer)
1.12.07
[ ... ]
time passes
[ ... ]
in some sort of nod to linear narrative: 'I went to a war zone and fell down some stairs'
and then something happened. i was enveloped in warmth and floating for quite a while. and i wake up to find, once again, horrifyingly, what small fortune i've flushed down the toilet of my veins this time.
oh it wasn't meant to happen this way again...
well it was fun while it lasted.
now make a point of experiencing everything very carefully to discover exactly what those things were again, those little pleasures that are meant to make life worth living... observe carefully and pass no judgement... and hold on wherever you find something warm and beautiful... whenever you find a moment where monstrous empty futility or the darkness and horror is unable to touch you...
time passes
[ ... ]
in some sort of nod to linear narrative: 'I went to a war zone and fell down some stairs'
and then something happened. i was enveloped in warmth and floating for quite a while. and i wake up to find, once again, horrifyingly, what small fortune i've flushed down the toilet of my veins this time.
oh it wasn't meant to happen this way again...
well it was fun while it lasted.
now make a point of experiencing everything very carefully to discover exactly what those things were again, those little pleasures that are meant to make life worth living... observe carefully and pass no judgement... and hold on wherever you find something warm and beautiful... whenever you find a moment where monstrous empty futility or the darkness and horror is unable to touch you...
21.7.07
Here be scorpion-smokers
[--> amazon.com]The three largest markets in the world by dollar volume, so it is said, are the trades in arms, oil and drugs. In Afghanistan these three intertwine with chaotic and unpredictable geopolitical, economic and chemical / psychopharmacological consequences that are felt far far away - in the boardrooms of global energy concerns, in the warm rush in a junkie's veins in London, in the weapon markets of the Bulgarian Black Sea.
The petroleum and natural gas factor in the civil war is explored in Ahmed Rashid's definitive Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.
The petroleum and natural gas factor in the civil war is explored in Ahmed Rashid's definitive Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.
And for the most comprehensive overview of the drugs connection we now have a strong contender. Look, it even clicks through to Amazon... go ahead and buy a copy... Until we get around to publishing the realgem overview of the Afghan drug scene, this book is thorough and may I say even scholarly without being dry. David MacDonald (formerly of the Afghan Interim Government Counter-Narcotics Directorate) tries to sort the scorpion tales from the truth while searching for the elusive smokers of scorpion tails.
These latter which you can find, scorpion smokers that is. As to hard and fast facts about the Afghan-global heroin trade, the international 'official' statistics and facts (UN, US Govt, UK FCO, international drug-enforcement agencies, intelligence organisations, consultancies and think-tanks) as far as the heroin / opium economy are concerned are all made up. All of them. It wouldn't gall me as much if I knew I couldn't make up even better statistics myself, and for half the money.
This being so, anecdotal evidence is worth more than any quantitative statistical evidence in this particular field, and here we have an overview presented by someone with obvious extensive personal experience of this complex subject...
(Ah, I do have to mention though, AREU have done some solid research on the opium economy focusing on the farmers themselves.)
(zippedy-doo-dah, zippedy-deh...)
(pretty poppies in badakshan)
10.5.07
Choose pain
(messages and rants to people who will never read them, part #1)
Cossetted, over-priveleged, ungrateful fucking pussies and cowards, with your absurd sense of entitlement, your greedy fucking eyes, and all the wealth that you don't even recognise as such thrown at you by the welfare state. You act as if waking in minor opiate withdrawals is the closest thing to hell on earth.
Oh no. Human experience gets worse, so much worse. I'll spare myself from listing all the blood-chilling ways it could be worse. You could be waking up in a ruined bunker with your rifle frozen to your fingers, your toes going black, the supplies are cut off and you've had nothing but thin cold cabbage soup and a few coffee-beans to chew on for the last two weeks, and there are ten divisions of Russians with bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks somewhere out there in the -20 C blizzard, coming to disembowel you and burn you and squash you into the ice under their tank tracks.
And you'd still have something to be thankful for, then: a chance of survival. If that's something to be thankful for. You could be alone, bound spread-eagled to rocks, the desert sun scorching your skin and stabbing your defenceless eyes like spikes (their obsidian knives neatly removed your eye-lids), praying for some wild beast to find you and devour you and end it all now. But there is no life here, in the burned desert, and no one will find you. Your strength ebbs, and long before you become crazed enough to do it, you won't have the strength to smash your own head on the rocks to hasten your terrible passing...
As stated here previously - take hope, ye people! - there is a painless cure: death.
At least you have the luxury of the option.
Choose pain.
Cossetted, over-priveleged, ungrateful fucking pussies and cowards, with your absurd sense of entitlement, your greedy fucking eyes, and all the wealth that you don't even recognise as such thrown at you by the welfare state. You act as if waking in minor opiate withdrawals is the closest thing to hell on earth.
Oh no. Human experience gets worse, so much worse. I'll spare myself from listing all the blood-chilling ways it could be worse. You could be waking up in a ruined bunker with your rifle frozen to your fingers, your toes going black, the supplies are cut off and you've had nothing but thin cold cabbage soup and a few coffee-beans to chew on for the last two weeks, and there are ten divisions of Russians with bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks somewhere out there in the -20 C blizzard, coming to disembowel you and burn you and squash you into the ice under their tank tracks.
And you'd still have something to be thankful for, then: a chance of survival. If that's something to be thankful for. You could be alone, bound spread-eagled to rocks, the desert sun scorching your skin and stabbing your defenceless eyes like spikes (their obsidian knives neatly removed your eye-lids), praying for some wild beast to find you and devour you and end it all now. But there is no life here, in the burned desert, and no one will find you. Your strength ebbs, and long before you become crazed enough to do it, you won't have the strength to smash your own head on the rocks to hasten your terrible passing...
As stated here previously - take hope, ye people! - there is a painless cure: death.
At least you have the luxury of the option.
Choose pain.
17.3.07
Deja morte: just like the good old days
[redacted]
I wish I could find words of such power that into two or three I could distill the essence, the flavour of the insanity... spreading out a sheet on the pavement near the market to flog all my redundant possessions, watching the Sunday strollers and the church-goers stop to flip through books or browse through bric-a-brac... living on the run out of a shoulder-bag with a laptop and a single change of clothes... begging 30p to get money for a Dunn's River Nurishment drink (vanilla, of course), ah that went down nicely, first protein and sugar molecules of the day, have another cigarette and then get on the phone to negotiate a grand and a half out of a newspaper editor for a story... checking into detox and then doing a runner, cold and clammy and then hot and shivering like an epileptic in the backseat of a cab racing north through London winterdark, swigging cognac that does nothing to take the edge off, and oh my God this city is beautiful at night, and some evil drum and bass is pumping from the radio and the devil has the best tunes and we're laughing together as we reach Holloway Road, only five minutes away from salvation of my eternal soul...
[redacted]
Time flickers back into existence, and the terrifying question of what to do with it all... get my kicks wandering store aisles and valuable things drop into my pockets by magic... It's ninja training,[redacted]
Perhaps because I spat on providence I found myself, not long afterwards, in a police holding cell, under arrest for something I didn't do, noticing they hadn't taken my belt from me and looking for somewhere to loop the end over... It was a bitter dark cold winter, trapped in London by bail and addiction... But the winters always are like that, damn this cold and Protestant north.
But the fearful, the absurd question of time... what should I be doing now?
Just breathe... That might be a good place to start... keep breathing, it's very important you keep breathing...
I am staying for a time with the Nietzschean psychedelic-fascist bitch wife (that's a term of endearment, here) one of the original characters on realgem and whose fault everything is and the malung bones is not far either... it feels much better here in South London, away from streets whose familiarity sickens me, like I have trodden them so many times I have worn holes in surface reality and don't want to see the nauseous squalid truth underneath...[redacted]
We shout and swear at each other... 'What is the chocolate spread doing there?' - 'What, it's not fucking doing anything... look at it, it's a fucking jar of chocolate spread... it's being taught to like being wherever it's put, right by that spoon, it has no fucking choice in the matter...' - 'No, I mean... fuckin hell, Mike... you're a weirdo.' - 'I'm making some fucking chocolate toast. Fuck, what?' [redacted]
I wish I could find words of such power that into two or three I could distill the essence, the flavour of the insanity... spreading out a sheet on the pavement near the market to flog all my redundant possessions, watching the Sunday strollers and the church-goers stop to flip through books or browse through bric-a-brac... living on the run out of a shoulder-bag with a laptop and a single change of clothes... begging 30p to get money for a Dunn's River Nurishment drink (vanilla, of course), ah that went down nicely, first protein and sugar molecules of the day, have another cigarette and then get on the phone to negotiate a grand and a half out of a newspaper editor for a story... checking into detox and then doing a runner, cold and clammy and then hot and shivering like an epileptic in the backseat of a cab racing north through London winterdark, swigging cognac that does nothing to take the edge off, and oh my God this city is beautiful at night, and some evil drum and bass is pumping from the radio and the devil has the best tunes and we're laughing together as we reach Holloway Road, only five minutes away from salvation of my eternal soul...
[redacted]
Time flickers back into existence, and the terrifying question of what to do with it all... get my kicks wandering store aisles and valuable things drop into my pockets by magic... It's ninja training,[redacted]
Perhaps because I spat on providence I found myself, not long afterwards, in a police holding cell, under arrest for something I didn't do, noticing they hadn't taken my belt from me and looking for somewhere to loop the end over... It was a bitter dark cold winter, trapped in London by bail and addiction... But the winters always are like that, damn this cold and Protestant north.
But the fearful, the absurd question of time... what should I be doing now?
Just breathe... That might be a good place to start... keep breathing, it's very important you keep breathing...
I am staying for a time with the Nietzschean psychedelic-fascist bitch wife (that's a term of endearment, here) one of the original characters on realgem and whose fault everything is and the malung bones is not far either... it feels much better here in South London, away from streets whose familiarity sickens me, like I have trodden them so many times I have worn holes in surface reality and don't want to see the nauseous squalid truth underneath...[redacted]
We shout and swear at each other... 'What is the chocolate spread doing there?' - 'What, it's not fucking doing anything... look at it, it's a fucking jar of chocolate spread... it's being taught to like being wherever it's put, right by that spoon, it has no fucking choice in the matter...' - 'No, I mean... fuckin hell, Mike... you're a weirdo.' - 'I'm making some fucking chocolate toast. Fuck, what?' [redacted]
5.3.07
Dancing with the Devil
yeah so this is to the Marcuses and the Deans, the Double-Ds and the Js:
(This YouTube video has the Immortal Tech track over a video-montage of weird Bohemian Grove, Skull & Bones and NWO related images and footage... the link is to the Infowars.com website... as endorsed by Abu Abdullah...)
"any motherfuckin coward can serve drugs,
any bitch nigger with a gun can bust slugs..."
(Immortal Technique, Dancing with the Devil)
don't cross my path again...
any bitch nigger with a gun can bust slugs..."
(Immortal Technique, Dancing with the Devil)
don't cross my path again...
(This YouTube video has the Immortal Tech track over a video-montage of weird Bohemian Grove, Skull & Bones and NWO related images and footage... the link is to the Infowars.com website... as endorsed by Abu Abdullah...)
28.2.07
The sick II
On an endless night of nauseating desperate lonely lust (“the lonely lust of devildom”), a sneering voice spoke inside a sick man’s mind: “GOODNESS? Fuck that, it’s nothing to do with goodness, it’s a LACK OF COURAGE. You wouldn’t have the FORCEFULNESS to drag that unspeakable feminist bitch inside, tie her hands back with her bra and fuck her. I know you fantasize it. I know she does – she told me herself. I know her inside out – there’s no reason you’d want to ‘respect’ that hypocritical slut.”
Jack Cinammon, deranged, was on his knees in the corner of the tiny bathroom, head swimming, staring at the fungus whose folds billowed out of the rotten corner where the moisture pooled. A vagina, it was – Jack swayed as he leaned his face, brows knitted in absurd concentration, closer to it – a vagina swimming in and out of focus, a vagina with luxurious folds in rich cream and beige.
Jack sat on his heels and stared at it, stumped by the miraculousness and marvel of God’s creation, of this beautiful and nauseating creature – creature? a fungus was most definitely not a vegetable, Jack knew, or thought he knew, or perhaps he was imagining it. Perhaps it was an aggregation of slime molds, an organism preparing to break apart into its component cells, each one of which would crawl off in a separate direction (some would devour each other) until it was time to gather together and meld again for purposes of reproduction.
“The sick is in your mind,” echoed a dismissive voice in a Russian accent.
Jack Cinammon, deranged, was on his knees in the corner of the tiny bathroom, head swimming, staring at the fungus whose folds billowed out of the rotten corner where the moisture pooled. A vagina, it was – Jack swayed as he leaned his face, brows knitted in absurd concentration, closer to it – a vagina swimming in and out of focus, a vagina with luxurious folds in rich cream and beige.
Jack sat on his heels and stared at it, stumped by the miraculousness and marvel of God’s creation, of this beautiful and nauseating creature – creature? a fungus was most definitely not a vegetable, Jack knew, or thought he knew, or perhaps he was imagining it. Perhaps it was an aggregation of slime molds, an organism preparing to break apart into its component cells, each one of which would crawl off in a separate direction (some would devour each other) until it was time to gather together and meld again for purposes of reproduction.
“The sick is in your mind,” echoed a dismissive voice in a Russian accent.
The sick
Yesterday I heard the machine grinding in the depths of my ruined abdomen. It’s bolted to my spine and supported by wires riveted to the inside of my lower ribs. Sometimes it spurts corrosive waste through my bleeding rectum, to drip down my legs and burn open sores on the insides of my thighs.
I don’t even know what its function is. If I carefully pry open the cracks in my stomach I can see parts of it, cogs and wheels and valves and tubes, gurgling and grinding. I think it’s expanding, pushing steel cables down into my legs and up into my arms.
The two bones of my forearm are slowly moving apart. The flesh between them is stretching and will soon tear, and I can feel metal parts moving around inside. My hands are almost useless, now, and starting to turn blue and nerveless. What am I turning into?
2.9.06
New
I have improved and updated scaling the north face of reality, the ibogaine story...
doc o has a blog, finally... and i've added a few more blog links, plus a new publication...
temporary aversion to sitting at the keyboard... i'll be around...
I have improved and updated scaling the north face of reality, the ibogaine story...
doc o has a blog, finally... and i've added a few more blog links, plus a new publication...
temporary aversion to sitting at the keyboard... i'll be around...
24.8.06
scaling the north face of reality
this account may be added to and improved check back. for another account of ibogaine withdrawal, see here.
the professionals among you will know that acute heroin withdrawal, 100-0mph in 0 secs howling bloody nails-tearing screaming cold turkey, goes something like this: Day 1 is uncomfortable, the first night don't expect to sleep. Day 2 is approaching howling bloody nails-tearing dope sickness and it's only getting worse. The second and then god forbid the third night will be pure fucking hell on earth. If you are lucky and aren't too far advanced in your addiction by the fourth night you will be getting your first patches of delirious sleep, waking from nightmares to more twisting in reeking sweatsoaked sheets. And it goes on... And the craving, the god-awful cellular scream ("a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones..." naked lunch)...
when i did my kick, i was on over 300mg morphine sulphate (approx. equiv. to some 100 ml methadone), plus anywhere between 0.25-1 gramme of street heroin per day on top (cheap, powerful, plentiful and pure in London since the US and Brits joined the interminable war in Afghanistan and bombed the fuck out of the Taliban...)
what happened to me was this:
sometime around the time of the last post i took 1400mg ibogaine hcl and lay down on my bed, preparing for whatever was to come.
several hours later there is a vague humming in my ears. my thoughts are a little disjointed, i feel tranquilised as if by one of those horrible psychiatric tranquilisers but still able to communicate normally. i feel a little disassociated and underneath that i can feel the junk sickness kicking in. then colours are starting to blur, and objects are tinged with strange colours. it becomes more difficult to hold onto a thought for more than two seconds. the music is playing upside down.
the delirious paranoia running through my mind is that it's not working. that i've been cheated. that there's something wrong with the stuff, cause i stored it for so long. panic building up. horrible sickness. wasn't this supposed to be painless? that i toss and turn in the grip of some ketamine-like delirium while the sickness cures itself?
where is the powerful psychotropic effect i expected from the drug? instead, there is a mocking emptiness, laughing, laughing at stupid me who wanted something for free. ("pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back, every moment you have stolen...") it is only afterwards i realise how truly powerful this drug is. it's a very low-level reprogramming drug in computer programming language terms...
i am lucky to have at the other end of a telephone a man who we'll call ed i've never met with a remarkable knowledge of ibogaine. the consultant. otherwise who knows what would have happened to me.
the next 48 hours are delirious. flashes: i'm just going in. ed is on the telephone: "i have a feel for ibogaine. i can reach out and connect to you now. i can hear you are in an ibogaine space." i feel i am in acute withdrawal space and abandoned by this supposed wonder cure. "it's a remarkable drug. have trust. trust in it. now settle down in your bed and stay there. you'll be there for at least 48 hours." i laugh and drop the phone. at the time it seemed the most blood-curdlingly terrifying idea i'd ever heard.
delirium of torture. no hope no hope for one second's comfort. nerves peeled and exposed, lying twisting and twiching in a stench of toxic sweat. how much longer? someone else is talking calmly: "... in some gestapo prison... having lights shined in your eyes, getting slapped every time you tried to sleep. then when you've been sitting tied to a chair in your own piss and shit for 48 hours, when any little slap hurts, they fix your hands to a table and out come the pliers for your fingernails... if you pass out, they'll chuck some cold water on you to wake you up before carrying on..." it's the funniest thing anyone's ever told me in this infinity of pain. how petty my situation really is. i am coherent enough to answer that some sophisticated modern tortures are completely chemical in nature... inject you with this to make you feel like you're drowning in pain, inject you with that so that you're immobile and put you in an immersion tank so that you're alone in the dark with your own screaming nervous system... (like this)...
a synchronicity too delicious to miss, or how i destroyed a house with the power of my will:
sometime as i lie twisting and in delirium on day 2, just around the time i find and lock my will on what i'm doing and laugh at how easy it really is, the old house in Camden Rd collapses into the street. builders are trapped inside. the road is blocked. people in intensive care.
the old house where all this begun. where realgem began. the old house that... some people didn't like. paulette, for example. and some other sensitives. they didn't like that house, didn't come there. well. it had a fucked up old history. long-time readers will remember... see archives Jan-May 2005...
the only reason i don't leave on day two and get heroin is because there are people there to restrain me by force if necessary and i am too weak and confused for any sort of subterfuge. "give it 24 hours" ed says. "trust."
visions of evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, a million generations of teeming slashing tearing bundles of will to live and pain, a million years of bloodsoaked evolution on the primordial plains of africa. i see smoke from the witch-pyres of the middle ages rising into the skies of europe. then reeking mud and barbed wire and cutting jagged steel across the mindless battlefields of the great war. all moving towards something... moving towards something... but where did intelligence first come from? the brutal fight of evolution, the generations before us over the eons clawing forward - i owe them more than this, i owe them greater tribute than to be caught by this stupid-trap of nature and to destroy myself...
by night 2 (don't get the idea it was pleasant...) i was actually improving, just when it should have been getting worse... by the morning of day 3 i am cheerful and smiling even if i still haven't slept and feel frazzled. eating handfuls of valium and smoking dope, giving me some respite. i do not look like someone on the third day of cold turkey withdrawal. by the morning of day 3 i have a bath by my own power and dress in a suit ready to go out to eat breakfast, feeling fine in my mind, and then promptly collapse like a skeleton.
doc o had said the day before this all, the last day of my junkie life: "i don't know why you're putting yourself through this psychedelic hell when you could so easily just gently reduce on methadone." look through the realgem archives and count the number of times... gradually reduce, relapse, force the dose down again, start scoring again... count the number of times... i was in a position and with the resources to maintain my life like this indefinitely. i just couldn't quit. couldn't, couldn't couldn't.
"it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it," he said when he dropped by on the morning of day 3. yes, in his very professional opinion, i looked nothing like someone in day 3 of acute junk sickness.
INTO THE INFERNO!
it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it.
ibogaine lets you face the dragon or the monkey and fight it head on in one ferocious test of wills. into the inferno!
people ask me what it was like, what was the trip like: it's a shamanic psychedelic, isn't it? but no, i had no visions of african gods or strange other worlds... some people perhaps do...
as i can now limitedly comprehend it, ibogaine works on a much lower level... near the metabolic, cellular, maybe genetic level... the theory has been put forward that psychedelic chemicals played a part in the evolution of intelligence, language in some sort of proto-human apes... after ibogaine, i have a strong intuitive feeling that this may be so...
this experimental medication does merit the description miraculous. within several days i am out and about, in the street... like a window has been cleaned, and the light is painfully intense, painfully intense is the world... but it's the world... once again swimming in the world of the senses, talking to people... throwing away money at people, talking to a homeless junkie and giving him a note to score, just cause i don't need that money for my habit any more... sitting on the street in camden one of the crack-niggers comes and waves rock in my face... the pusher-man... he won't leave us alone... so i ask him if he's got brown... yeah... so i tell him to get the fuck out of my face, hoping for violence, ready for violence... but it's sunlit high street and the day it's beautiful and it's just childish bravado in the face of "powder power..."
the ibogaine's psychotropic effect, which i initially was so disappointed with, manifests itself in the next few days, and in a much more subtle way than any mere psychedelic... my mind is sharp inside my worn-out body that i push to exhaustion... and still don't sleep, no, i don't sleep... god, sometimes i want to...
and all the synchronicities... the crazy coincidences, the chance meetings, the way everything is falling into place as if the universe was in synch with me again, the new opportunities that drop into my path, the people i need to meet there just when i turn the corner... but this is some effect on a more subtle level of reality... something, something beyond words or chemistry or pharmacology...
don't think it's the painless cure. there's only one painless cure and that's death.
i hope this is of interest to anyone who struggles with this strange sickness... anyone who is finding lady heroin too demanding a mistress...
the professionals among you will know that acute heroin withdrawal, 100-0mph in 0 secs howling bloody nails-tearing screaming cold turkey, goes something like this: Day 1 is uncomfortable, the first night don't expect to sleep. Day 2 is approaching howling bloody nails-tearing dope sickness and it's only getting worse. The second and then god forbid the third night will be pure fucking hell on earth. If you are lucky and aren't too far advanced in your addiction by the fourth night you will be getting your first patches of delirious sleep, waking from nightmares to more twisting in reeking sweatsoaked sheets. And it goes on... And the craving, the god-awful cellular scream ("a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones..." naked lunch)...
when i did my kick, i was on over 300mg morphine sulphate (approx. equiv. to some 100 ml methadone), plus anywhere between 0.25-1 gramme of street heroin per day on top (cheap, powerful, plentiful and pure in London since the US and Brits joined the interminable war in Afghanistan and bombed the fuck out of the Taliban...)
what happened to me was this:
sometime around the time of the last post i took 1400mg ibogaine hcl and lay down on my bed, preparing for whatever was to come.
several hours later there is a vague humming in my ears. my thoughts are a little disjointed, i feel tranquilised as if by one of those horrible psychiatric tranquilisers but still able to communicate normally. i feel a little disassociated and underneath that i can feel the junk sickness kicking in. then colours are starting to blur, and objects are tinged with strange colours. it becomes more difficult to hold onto a thought for more than two seconds. the music is playing upside down.
the delirious paranoia running through my mind is that it's not working. that i've been cheated. that there's something wrong with the stuff, cause i stored it for so long. panic building up. horrible sickness. wasn't this supposed to be painless? that i toss and turn in the grip of some ketamine-like delirium while the sickness cures itself?
where is the powerful psychotropic effect i expected from the drug? instead, there is a mocking emptiness, laughing, laughing at stupid me who wanted something for free. ("pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back, every moment you have stolen...") it is only afterwards i realise how truly powerful this drug is. it's a very low-level reprogramming drug in computer programming language terms...
i am lucky to have at the other end of a telephone a man who we'll call ed i've never met with a remarkable knowledge of ibogaine. the consultant. otherwise who knows what would have happened to me.
the next 48 hours are delirious. flashes: i'm just going in. ed is on the telephone: "i have a feel for ibogaine. i can reach out and connect to you now. i can hear you are in an ibogaine space." i feel i am in acute withdrawal space and abandoned by this supposed wonder cure. "it's a remarkable drug. have trust. trust in it. now settle down in your bed and stay there. you'll be there for at least 48 hours." i laugh and drop the phone. at the time it seemed the most blood-curdlingly terrifying idea i'd ever heard.
delirium of torture. no hope no hope for one second's comfort. nerves peeled and exposed, lying twisting and twiching in a stench of toxic sweat. how much longer? someone else is talking calmly: "... in some gestapo prison... having lights shined in your eyes, getting slapped every time you tried to sleep. then when you've been sitting tied to a chair in your own piss and shit for 48 hours, when any little slap hurts, they fix your hands to a table and out come the pliers for your fingernails... if you pass out, they'll chuck some cold water on you to wake you up before carrying on..." it's the funniest thing anyone's ever told me in this infinity of pain. how petty my situation really is. i am coherent enough to answer that some sophisticated modern tortures are completely chemical in nature... inject you with this to make you feel like you're drowning in pain, inject you with that so that you're immobile and put you in an immersion tank so that you're alone in the dark with your own screaming nervous system... (like this)...
a synchronicity too delicious to miss, or how i destroyed a house with the power of my will:
sometime as i lie twisting and in delirium on day 2, just around the time i find and lock my will on what i'm doing and laugh at how easy it really is, the old house in Camden Rd collapses into the street. builders are trapped inside. the road is blocked. people in intensive care.
the old house where all this begun. where realgem began. the old house that... some people didn't like. paulette, for example. and some other sensitives. they didn't like that house, didn't come there. well. it had a fucked up old history. long-time readers will remember... see archives Jan-May 2005...
the only reason i don't leave on day two and get heroin is because there are people there to restrain me by force if necessary and i am too weak and confused for any sort of subterfuge. "give it 24 hours" ed says. "trust."
visions of evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, a million generations of teeming slashing tearing bundles of will to live and pain, a million years of bloodsoaked evolution on the primordial plains of africa. i see smoke from the witch-pyres of the middle ages rising into the skies of europe. then reeking mud and barbed wire and cutting jagged steel across the mindless battlefields of the great war. all moving towards something... moving towards something... but where did intelligence first come from? the brutal fight of evolution, the generations before us over the eons clawing forward - i owe them more than this, i owe them greater tribute than to be caught by this stupid-trap of nature and to destroy myself...
by night 2 (don't get the idea it was pleasant...) i was actually improving, just when it should have been getting worse... by the morning of day 3 i am cheerful and smiling even if i still haven't slept and feel frazzled. eating handfuls of valium and smoking dope, giving me some respite. i do not look like someone on the third day of cold turkey withdrawal. by the morning of day 3 i have a bath by my own power and dress in a suit ready to go out to eat breakfast, feeling fine in my mind, and then promptly collapse like a skeleton.
doc o had said the day before this all, the last day of my junkie life: "i don't know why you're putting yourself through this psychedelic hell when you could so easily just gently reduce on methadone." look through the realgem archives and count the number of times... gradually reduce, relapse, force the dose down again, start scoring again... count the number of times... i was in a position and with the resources to maintain my life like this indefinitely. i just couldn't quit. couldn't, couldn't couldn't.
"it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it," he said when he dropped by on the morning of day 3. yes, in his very professional opinion, i looked nothing like someone in day 3 of acute junk sickness.
INTO THE INFERNO!
it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it.
ibogaine lets you face the dragon or the monkey and fight it head on in one ferocious test of wills. into the inferno!
people ask me what it was like, what was the trip like: it's a shamanic psychedelic, isn't it? but no, i had no visions of african gods or strange other worlds... some people perhaps do...
as i can now limitedly comprehend it, ibogaine works on a much lower level... near the metabolic, cellular, maybe genetic level... the theory has been put forward that psychedelic chemicals played a part in the evolution of intelligence, language in some sort of proto-human apes... after ibogaine, i have a strong intuitive feeling that this may be so...
this experimental medication does merit the description miraculous. within several days i am out and about, in the street... like a window has been cleaned, and the light is painfully intense, painfully intense is the world... but it's the world... once again swimming in the world of the senses, talking to people... throwing away money at people, talking to a homeless junkie and giving him a note to score, just cause i don't need that money for my habit any more... sitting on the street in camden one of the crack-niggers comes and waves rock in my face... the pusher-man... he won't leave us alone... so i ask him if he's got brown... yeah... so i tell him to get the fuck out of my face, hoping for violence, ready for violence... but it's sunlit high street and the day it's beautiful and it's just childish bravado in the face of "powder power..."
the ibogaine's psychotropic effect, which i initially was so disappointed with, manifests itself in the next few days, and in a much more subtle way than any mere psychedelic... my mind is sharp inside my worn-out body that i push to exhaustion... and still don't sleep, no, i don't sleep... god, sometimes i want to...
and all the synchronicities... the crazy coincidences, the chance meetings, the way everything is falling into place as if the universe was in synch with me again, the new opportunities that drop into my path, the people i need to meet there just when i turn the corner... but this is some effect on a more subtle level of reality... something, something beyond words or chemistry or pharmacology...
don't think it's the painless cure. there's only one painless cure and that's death.
i hope this is of interest to anyone who struggles with this strange sickness... anyone who is finding lady heroin too demanding a mistress...