FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Drugs

Drugs Aren't Always That Much Fun

It's Friday, so chances are you'll be ingesting some kind of narcotic within the next 72 hours. It's likely that you are going to have an awful experience that'll put you off drugs for the rest of your life or until next weekend. To bum you out, here...

It's Friday, so chances are you'll be ingesting some kind of narcotic at some point within the next 72 hours. And it's likely that some of you are going to have an awful, soul-destroying experience that'll put you off drugs for the rest of your life. Or until next weekend. To bum you out and hopefully ruin your night, here are a few stories of when that's happened before. Who knows—maybe one of these will even happen to you this evening?

Advertisement

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

THIS IS HORSESHIT

I was at Bestival one year, hanging out in the campsite, taking ketamine for breakfast and generally having a hell of a time. The one problem with taking ketamine for breakfast, though, is that—by lunch—you can't move and your brain is like a sponge that's been slowly soaking up a vat full of Ernest Hemingway's ancient, 100 percent proof urine. On this particular day, I was pretty lucid, could communicate absolutely fine and didn't have nearly as much of that weird brain detachment thing you normally get on K. Only, I couldn't move any of my limbs.

My friend sat me down on a camp chair, fed me some water and helped me smoke a cigarette by lighting it for me and placing it in my mouth every time I wanted a drag. Everything was going OK, all things considered, until I felt a rumble in my stomach and remembered the bowl of festival chili I'd eaten the night before. Call it a sixth-sense, a power for premonitions or just being a human for 22 years, but it was at that point that I knew I was going to shit myself and there was nothing I could do about it.

I whispered this to my friend in the hope that he would escort me to a cubicle or, at least, zip me up in the privacy of my tent. Instead, of course, he gathered as many of our friends as he could and lined them up around me. I could feel my sphincter release and contract but couldn't do anything about it. So, staring at eight people dead in the eyes, I gave in and soiled myself in the midday sun.

Advertisement

THE MAGIC SCHOOLBUS

I was 15 years old and on my way into school with my friend, Chris. Chris's parents are an epitome of the hippy hangover, so he was raised to think that psychedelic drugs, incense, and sandals were totally normal things that every functioning member of society regularly partakes in. Chris had been mushroom picking with his dad and, like it was the most normal thing the world, munched a few at 8 AM, just as he was getting on the schoolbus. I'd never done shrooms before, but Chris seemed absolutely fine, so when he offered me a handful I figured I may as well get involved.

My first lesson was interesting. I spent the majority of it red-faced and giggling at everything the teacher was saying. He was in his mid-60s and was clearly far past the point of caring about what went on his classes, so he just ignored me and left me to chuckle away at absolutely nothing. The next lesson is where things took a turn for the worse. Sitting down, I felt like someone had tied my feet to the floor, which was a bit alarming. I remember my teacher asking me a question and just staring at her blankly with my mouth open, before letting out the kind of noise I've only heard pigs make during a slaughter when they emit their final squeal before being turned into bacon or pork chops or whatever.

Then I threw up. All over my desk. Bizarrely I didn't get in any trouble whatsoever, but I did learn that taking mind-altering drugs at school really isn't the best idea.

Advertisement

SAD MUNCHIES

I recently smoked weed for the very first time at a huge Halloween bash (I know—I'm about 15 years late to the party—don't judge). I was wandering around in a bit of a daze and found myself in the stairwell. I spotted a half-unwrapped, stepped on, crushed candy bar on the stairs a flight down. My boyfriend—who had also just smoked weed for the first time—sprinted towards it at full speed, before stumbling over himself and falling down the stairs into a crumpled heap. I screamed, not for my boyfriend, but for the candy bar. He reached out to grab it and I started bawling my eyes out, screaming at him to let me have some and racing down the stairs to try and grab the bar for myself.

I looked up to see a good 20 or 30 people I didn't know staring at me—some bemused, most laughing and pointing. I turned bright red and realized what the whole paranoia hype surrounding weed was about. I literally felt like all of my friends and family would here about it and leave me to spend the rest of my life being plagued by voices in my head and eventually die alone.

I spent the rest of the night alternating between laughing hysterically and sobbing uncontrollably, holding the uneaten candy bar the entire time. It was very confusing and incredibly embarrassing, but hey, at least I can say I'm probably the only adult in history to cry over confectionary.

TENT INVASION

I was at Reading Festival one year with a bunch of my friends and we'd all taken this really trippy MDMA. Like, really trippy. I thought the campsite was a multi-storey car park and the sky was its grubby ceiling. It was weird. Anyway, I also had this incredible, balls-to-the-wall coke on me and we'd all done a couple dabs, then I reached for it to do another and realized I must have dropped it somewhere while we were walking around. For whatever completely retarded reason, I figured it would be pretty easy to find a small, white wrap in a massive field covered in trash.

Advertisement

I went off looking for it, leaving my friends to go back to the campsite. Shockingly, I couldn't find it, so I ended up trudging back towards my tent, too. Because I was tripping balls, I had no fucking clue where I was, so spent the next two hours opening random strangers' tents and trying to get in, before they shouted at me and kicked me out. My friend has a recording of a phone call where he's directing me back to the site that I really wish didn't exist. You hear me say, "OK, OK, yeah, I think I've found it." Then another voice go, "Fuck off. You've tried getting in my tent four times now and I've told you it's not the right tent every fucking time."

Then you hear me stumble along to the tent right next to it and try to get into that, too, before the sound of a shouting man and me crumpling to the floor as he pushed me over. Top tip: If you're going to take drugs that make you see shit, it's probably best to stick with someone who can see reality for you.

TAXI DRIVER

A couple of years ago, some friends and I were getting ready to go out to the beach and had every intention of making it a relatively calm trip, because we all had school the next day. That somehow turned into every single one of us drinking at least a bottle and a half of wine each and picking up a few grams of MDMA. We stumbled into town and spent an hour or so in the smoking area of some terrible dubstep night club, before realizing we were all far too fucked up to spend our night standing around in a gated area, so decided to head to the beach. Two of the group said they were going for a walk and we left them to it.

Advertisement

The next morning, we woke up and the pair were nowhere to be seen. We joked that they'd probably got arrested and were stewing in a cell somewhere, but figured they'd just gone back to one of their houses to sleep off the gargantuan amount of intoxicants they'd consumed. We all turned up to college and dry-heaved our way through the morning. At lunch, when none of us had heard a peep from our two lost friends, we began to worry, so we called around to friends, hospitals, and police stations.

It turned out that the pair had walked past a hotel, spotted a cab driver running inside to get a client, leaving his keys in the ignition. Because doing dumb shit is always a good idea when you're fucked up, they decided to take the taxi for a spin and drove for a couple of miles along the seafront. The driver eventually realized how incredibly stupid they'd been and pulled over, leaving the engine running and darted off to jump over a fence to safety.

The police had been tailing them for pretty much the entire journey, after getting a call from the hotel's reception staff, so when the pair tried leapfrogging the fence and got stuck half-on, half-off, a couple of coppers helped them down and into a cosy cell for the night. The driver was put on probation for three months, lost his license, and given community service, while the other lost his license and had to spend 80 hours washing graffiti off walls. Moral of the story: Don't steal a fucking taxi.

Advertisement

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

More stories:

Accidents Happen When You're an Idiot

Urine For a Treat

Romance Isn't Dead, It's Just Getting Spit-Roasted in the Toilet