Drugs Can Also Be a Lot of Fun

You might remember we had a Real-Life Stories one week titled Drugs Aren't Always That Much Fun. And we were right – they're really not always that fun, especially if taking them leads to you shitting yourself in public or a three-month tag for auto theft. But they can also be a lot of fun, which I guess is why you take them. Here are some stories about people taking drugs and having fun in ways that aren't just sitting in the bath together and telling each other how much their friendship has grown.

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

A TRIP TO THE FARM

I went to sixth form college in a small countryside town, where there was very little to do but hang out with the stoner guys and sit in the park all day. Or go bowling if this guy with a crush on me was working and would give a load of us a free round. Anyway, in our second year this weird older guy started pulling up to the college gates in his Peugeot 106, blasting euro-trance and trying to chat up ever girl doing their best to ignore him.

I was having a cigarette outside one day when he pulled up and started his usual spiel on me. I remember him mentioning something about a rave that made my vagina seal up for about a month, but then he started bragging about this bottle of acid he'd just bought off some guy in Swansea. I don't know why Swansea was supposed to impress me, but I ended up talking the guy into giving me four tabs for free, with the promise that I'd come back and buy a lot more if it was any good.

The boys were all beyond excited when I told them, despite the fact that none of them had ever taken acid before. One of them did the gentlemanly thing and said he'd go without and look after the rest of us, leaving us with one tab each, which was convenient. He was a total pussy, though, which I think probably had more to do with his decision than any kind of desire to make sure we didn't start trying to peel our own skin off.

We each dropped our tab in the park and sat around waiting for something to happen. As soon as the giggles kicked in, we all hopped up and realised that the best possible idea would be to walk around and interact with strangers. Sadly, the night was drawing in and it was one of those towns where the only people you see past 9PM are commuters desperately trying to get home before their dinner gets cold and people who gaffa tape newspapers round their feet and wear them as shoes. Luckily for us, there was a petting zoo nearby. For whatever reason, the owners clearly didn't value their livestock too highly, because the only piece of security was an iron gate – padlocked, but about three feet high.

We all clambered over and spent the next two hours stroking lambs, chasing baby pigs and trying to not to freak ourselves out while looking at the llamas and debating whether they or dachshunds were the punchline to evolution's joke. I think one of my friends also got butted in the balls by a rampaging goat, but he was having far too much fun to care. That night, without a doubt, beat any nightclub, gig or rave I've been to since.

BASE LOVE

They say you're always chasing the rush from the first time you took something, but the second time I smoked crack was actually a lot better than the first. I was living at home in Brighton through the summer while all my friends were away travelling before they went off to university. To make the situation even more of a blast, my girlfriend had just broken up with me, so I was left to spend most of my days getting bored of video games and arguing with my mum.

After a month or so of that, I decided I had to chase down some kind of social interaction, otherwise I'd have ended up buying a pillow partner and wasting the rest of my life on Omegle. I'd never been out alone before, so to bridge the glaring gap of not talking to anyone for a month and spending my whole night trying to socialise with complete strangers, I figured I'd take a pill to perk me up and get me in a slightly chattier mood.

The great thing about ecstasy is that it always works, because queuing for a club I immediately met a group of friends who were down from London for the weekend. One member of that group – Holly – blew my mind almost instantly. She had the body of the imaginary girl I think about when I masturbate and a face that has since become my beauty benchmark against any girl I see. We stuck around with her friends until around five in the morning, or whenever it is that the birds start their fucking choir of hatred, when we decided to sneak off together down to the beach.

Now, I'd smoked crack once before and hadn't really enjoyed it. It instantly made me feel dirty and agitated, and I knocked it off as one of those "tried it but never agains". Of course, as soon as Holly told me she had some and did I want a hit, I became Brighton's prime freebase aficionado. We sat in one of the old rowing boats they have propped up on the beach, shared the pipe and felt magical. I then had the best sex I've ever had and jittered until the sun came up. When I woke up, surrounded by pensioners and children, Holly had gone. I didn't take her number or her last name and I haven't seen her since. So if you're reading this Holly, leave a comment and we'll hook up again for the most romantic crack-smoking evening you can imagine.

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

I came out when I was 17. I think the most shocked person in the room was myself, staring in disbelief at the knowing faces of my relatives. I guess that's what maybe made me go full queer instantly and drop any pretence of heterosexuality I'd clung to through my formative years. Anyway, the first time I tried cocaine was a couple of weeks later when one of my older friends suggested we all go out to Heaven. Only it was ketamine, not cocaine, and I did a huge line because I was overly keen to impress everyone I was with.

That sounds like it would be terrible, I know, but what can I say – me and ketamine turned out to be a match made in heaven. (A very bad pun that I wheel out any opportunity I get.) I spent the whole night discovering what it was like to not have to pretend to be somebody else, which I'm pretty sure didn't have anything to do with the ketamine, but at the time seemed like the key to the real me. In retrospect, that's the lamest thing I've ever thought.

When the lights came up, I was still ready to keep on going and followed a crowd through Trafalgar Square, up into Soho and on to someone's roof. I have no idea what time I eventually passed out, but when I woke up I was lying next to the man who I've been with for the past five years. So while it may be a bit schmaltzier than your other stories, I can safely say that the best night of my life was down to a mistaken line of cocaine.

SWIMMING IN ECSTASY

I got hugely into ecstasy when I was younger. I don't know what it was – the fact that it's cheaper, lasts longer and is a lot more fun than alcohol, or just because I never really got coke, K or any of the other drugs people were taking at the time that inevitably steered the night towards tense, boring conversations or absolutely no conversation at all.

One Friday night near the end of the month, my friends and I were all broke, but we did have a bunch of pills left over from the bulk-buy we'd done the previous week. Of course, we all dropped a couple and rode the familiar wave to clenched jaws and nonsensical babble. But another evening spent massaging each other and jerking around to a discman played through computer speakers was becoming less and less appealing.

One of my friends at the time worked at the local swimming pool and had a key the manager had given him to lock up after his shifts. After a little persuasion, he agreed to take us all there and let us in for an hour to have a splash around. Obviously that hour turned into six and full use of all the toys, lilos and noodles in the cupboards. Pills essentially turn you into a toddler – hyperactivity, short attention span, lack of self-awareness, loss of volume control, etc – but it's funny how quickly you can revert to your finger-painting self when presented with some cheap pool toys.

Before we realised the time, one of my friends burst into hysterics and pointed towards the front window, where there was a group of elderly people clutching towels with their noses pressed up against the glass. My pool employee friend immediately began shouting at us to clear off – I suppose in some vague attempt to trick the people outside into believing that they'd completely imagined what they'd just seen.

He lost his job about an hour later and struggled to find work for just under a year, but at least he had the knowledge that he'd give us the best drug experience of our lives to keep him tiding over throughout those 11 months of miserable poverty.

CANUCK CARNIVAL

I went to college in Canada and lucked out with a shared house right near campus. We became the de facto party location if there was nothing else going on, but we'd never had a particularly wild one because people were normally either going off somewhere else or slinking around after a night of far too much fun.

Me and my housemates were doing a load of coke one night and noticed crowds of people traipsing back from a college hockey game. I'm almost certain it was the coke doing the thinking for us, because we all assumed that the only sensible thing to do was to start blasting music out of our windows and beckoning everyone in to join us.

Soon enough we had what seemed like half the campus in our front room. It probably helped that someone turned up with a sound system hooked up to their car, but we maintain that it was our arm gestures and beautiful calling voices that enticed everybody in. After an hour or so, there were fireworks being let off in our front garden, people racking up lines on smashed pieces of mirror, beer bongs running from our inside balcony down into the front room and, apparently, a raccoon terrorising everyone in the kitchen.

I wish I'd filmed it because it would have made a much better movie than any dumb Hollywood college party film stacked to the rafters with actors old enough to qualify for a bus pass. But memory is enough to tell me that it was the best party I've ever been to, and that cocaine is only ever a good thing.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter  or visit his website at .

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