LIST 10

12 Strange Drugs

1

C-4 explosive

It's hard to know what to make of the claim that you can get high from this plastic explosive. It appears in only one place that I've seen, a fairly level-headed book titled Uppers, Downers, All-Arounders, written by two people from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. They devote two sentences to the topic:

Modern veterans have been known to ingest C4 or cyclonite plastic explosives for their psychedelic effects. Tremors and seizure activity can result but usually not an explosion as it takes a blasting cap to set off the chemical.

Seems pretty outlandish, but perhaps it's true. A Marine Corps training document on explosives contains the following warning: “Do not ingest any explosive material.”

2

carbogen

When you inhale this mixture of oxygen (70 percent) and carbon dioxide (30 percent), your brain thinks that you're dying of suffocation, although you're actually getting enough oxygen to function normally. In the Seventh Day Adventist magazine Signs of the Times (of all places), Dr. Jack Provonsha writes: “Subjects on carbon dioxide report separation of the self from the body. And as with the [psychedelic] drugs and NDEs [near death experiences], there were reports of caves, tunnels, intensely bright lights, visions of other persons, luminaries, reliving of the past, and ‘spiritual’ experiences.” He then reprints the experience of a carbogen user as first relayed in Dr. L.J. Meduna's pioneering work on the subject, Carbon Dioxide Therapy (1950):

I felt myself being separated; my soul, drawing apart from the physical being, was drawn…seemingly to leave the earth and to go upward where it reached a greater Spirit with whom there was a communion, producing a remarkable new relaxation and deep security…. I felt the Greater Spirit even smiling indulgently upon me in my vain little efforts to carry on by myself, and I pressed close [to] the warmth and tender strength and felt assurance of enough power to overcome whatever lay ahead for me.

Psychonaut Myron Stolaroff took carbogen once a week for two years under a doctor's supervision. “I always approached the experience with enormous anxiety,” he wrote, “but got considerable relief when I explosively discharged repressed material. I would then feel great for a few days, but then relapse back to my previous condition.”

During the same time that LSD was being introduced into psychotherapy, carbogen was also used. Stolaroff says that around 200 therapists employed the procedure, and they even formed a short-lived professional organization.

3

catnip

Catnip isn't just for felines anymore. Most humans who've smoked it say that it's like a mild, mellow pot buzz. Nothing to get too excited about, but since it's cheap and legal, most recommend it.

4

clomipramine (trade name: Anafranil)

The strange thing about this prescription antidepressant—most often prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder—is the side effect it causes in a few people: spontaneous orgasms while yawning. A 1983 article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry presents the cases of three people who experience this pleasurable but disconcerting phenomenon. A woman in her late twenties said that she came every time she yawned. “She found she was able to experience orgasm by deliberate yawning,” the authors note. A man in his mid-twenties reported that sometimes when he yawned, he would ejaculate, even though he wasn't turned on at the time. “The awkwardness and embarrassment was overcome by continuously wearing a condom.” The final patient, a woman in her forties, didn't necessarily cream each time she yawned, but she would get so intensely horny that she'd often have to masturbate. In all cases, the effects stopped soon after the patients quit popping clomipramine.

5

DDT

When it was still thought to be pretty safe for humans, the now-banned pesticide DDT was used for kicks. As inconceivable as it now seems, a popular cocktail of the 1950s, a Mickey Slim, was made by adding a very small amount of DDT to gin. Since it attacks the nervous system, a dollop produced sensations that were kinda pleasurable in a fucked-up way.

6

DIPT

A tryptamine that's known for mainly affecting auditory sensations. An experiment in the classic book TIHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin relates: “Radio voices are all low, music out of key. Piano sounds like a bar-room disaster. The telephone ringing sounds partly underwater.” Orally taking a larger amount results in: “Abrupt sounds have golden spikes attached to them as after-sounds, but I can't focus in on any other sensory changes.” At a much higher dosage: “The voices of people were extremely distorted—males sounded like frogs—children sounded like they were talking through synthesizers to imitate outer space people in science fiction movies.”

A user named Borkhane writes: “At this level of DIPT effects, all music sounded absolutely terrible, with no harmonic structure intact at all. Music that was normally quite familiar sounded totally foreign. It was really like listening to a totally different version of the song, with the only familiar elements being the lyrics.”

7

poisons and venom

Several plants known for their hallucinogenic effects are quite toxic, such as the Datura family, which includes Jimsonweed. And, of course, you can make the argument that any substance is toxic if you ingest enough of it. Still, some natural substances known primarily as poisons—arsenic, strychnine, and venom—have been used in sublethal doses for their mind-altering effects. Information on this is hard to come by, and an in-depth study would prove fascinating. For now, we have these bits and pieces:

In 1817, when the Queen of Portugal was dying a slow, painful death, one of her slaves gave her a mixture of pot and arsenic which completely relieved her suffering.

In his classic 1885 book Plant Intoxicants, Baron Ernst von Bibra discusses the eating of arsenic by the mountain-dwellers of Austria. The two reasons given are that the poison “facilitates breathing while climbing…it makes them well ventilated” and “to obtain healthy and sturdy looks, to appear strong and robust.”

Also in 1885, Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art carried an article discussing arsenic use:

When a man has once begun to indulge in it he must continue to indulge; or, as it is popularly expressed, the last dose kills him. Indeed the arsenic eater must not only continue his indulgence, he must also increase the quantity of the drug, so that it is extraordinarily difficult to stop the habit; for, as the sudden cessation causes death, the gradual cessation produces such a terrible heart knowing that it may probably be said that no genuine arsenic eater ever ceased to eat arsenic while life lasted.

The 1902 book Morphinism and Narcomanias From Other Drugs discusses arsenic addiction.

Victorian-era cotton farmer James Maybrick achieved notoriety in 1992 when The Diary of Jack the Ripper was published. Now widely (though not universally) regarded as a forgery, this diary supposedly was written by Maybrick, who supposedly was Jack the Ripper. Whether or not Maybrick was the Ripper, he was an actual person who—as the diaries relate—was addicted to arsenic.

In his article theorizing that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been an arsenic junkie, Napoleonic expert Bob Elmer writes: “Arsenic was also used by some as a mind-altering drug, much as marijuana or cocaine is used today. In small doses it gave the user a feeling of well-being, strength, and sexual staying power.”

In 1909, while discussing drug use in the United States, the New York Times bemoaned: “…a legion of others habitually use belladonna, arsenic, and strychnine without consulting a physician.”

The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances reveals: “Holy men in India are reported to smoke cobra venom for its psychoactive effects…. [T]heir dried venom glands or crystallized venom is often mixed with cannabis when smoked.”

The Encyclopedia further notes that ten Native American tribes in California are known to swallow live ants as means of inducing visions. The ants bite the stomach lining, injecting their venom, and later may be vomited up, still alive.

8

rhododendron

A single species of rhododendron, the lavender ponticum, is known to create trips when its smoke is inhaled. The plant is quite poisonous, though, so this seems to be a case where ingesting sublethal doses of harmful plants—a la Jimsonweed and belladonna—gets you high by attacking the hell out of your nervous system.

9

saffron

The expensive flavoring saffron—the dried, crushed stamen of the Crocus sativas—is not often mentioned in the canon of mind-altering drugs, but it was the most oft-used ingredient in laudanum, after opium and alcohol, of course. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances notes that the famously orange-yellow flower “is known to have soporific and narcotic effects similar to those of opium.”

10

salamander brandy

Not be found on the shelves of your local liquor store, salamander brandy is noncommercially produced in parts of Slovenia. At least four ways—all involving cruelty toward the amphibians—are used. In one, the salamanders are placed on a sieve and brandy is poured over them until they drown. In another approach, the poor beasts are suspended by their back legs as brandy drips down the string and over their bodies. In all cases, the salamanders are so frightened and distressed that they excrete large amounts of poisonous slime, which then infuses the brandy. A reporter who tried the concoction describes his trip:

And then it…started unnaturally, colorfully glittering around the treetops and trees, which were weirdly, hysterically rushing into the depths of gorges…It was as if I were totally unburdened by the biology of extraterrestrial beings from some other planet and watched everything, the grass, the insects or a grazing cow in the vicinity…and absolutely everything seemed new and strange, and I wished to fuck something, anything. And in this almost full absence from this world…I chose the beech tree. Their trunks…seemed horribly erotic to me.…After this I finally crashed into the wet leaves and maybe even slept for a while. But damn, a few salamanders walked near by. And they said with their mysterious voices: look, look, who's there, not a salamander for sure…

Slovenian academic Miha Kozorog contests the view that this beverage is a traditional hallucinogenic drug. Instead, he believes it's a deceitful way of making brandy—the punch of the salamander mucus supposedly makes up for low alcohol content.

11

urine

Not just any urine, of course, but the wizz of a person who has partaken of the amanita muscaria mushroom (a/k/a fly agaric). At one time, Eskimos and tribes in Siberia were known to use this trick for a couple of reasons. First, since there wasn't an endless supply of ‘shrooms, this approach helped economize them. Not only would drinking the pee of someone who had eaten the mushroom get you high, drinking the urine of the first piss-sipper would also work. And so on, down through five people. An added benefit was that the more the mushrooms were processed through digestive systems, the less they caused cramps and nausea.

On a related note, New Scientist reports that reindeer also liked to nosh on fly agaric, so the Koryak people of Siberia would tie up the wasted animals until they stopped tripping, butcher them, then eat them for a second-hand high.

12

xenon

The noble gas xenon—which you might remember from your days of studying the periodic table—can be inhaled for a high similar to nitrous oxide (laughing gas). In a trip report on the website Lyceaum, an anonymous user notices “an amazing ability to zero in on ‘singularity’ thoughts and memories and hold them in suspension for ‘sentiment orgasms.’” This adventurous soul notes that, unlike laughing gas, there's no headachiness or “wa-wa” auditory hallucinations. “As with nitrous, I get the repeating themes of cycles as a major message. Probably because it is so connected with breathing; cycles of life / life-cycles / life is cycles: that's the message.”

Honorable Mention

old books

Okay, it's not the books themselves that can get you high but the fungus that sometimes grows on them. Damp, musty libraries with creaky, old volumes are breeding grounds for mold, including some types that can cause hallucinations and other effects, such as dizziness and vomiting.

Drug Quote # 9

“I am a great believer in the value of being high. High states of consciousness show us the potentials of our nervous systems. They help us integrate mind and body. They promote health. And they feel good.”
–Andrew Weil, M.D.