dopetalk
Core Topics => In the Media => Topic started by: clinton on November 13, 2015, 08:58:52 AM
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/culminating-my-dragon-chasing-days-at-a-southeast-asian-opium-den/article27154227/?service=mobile
The opium den looked like someone’s bicycle shed. Utilitarian, the way a grease gun is utilitarian: there to get the job done. You had to duck to enter.
The retired chief of police, who rented rooms to travellers, told us it would be safe to go – as long as we got in, did our business and got out.
We got in. Smoke and dust twirled toward the ceiling. A reverential quiet prevailed. On low pallets at either side of the room, users were stretched out, pulling on long pipes. Attending were opium “doctors,” keeping the drug burning over oil lamps. On a bench at the back, people waited their turn.
I’d taken a year off after finishing university and was with a friend, travelling Southeast Asia in an era when few North Americans were doing that. Everything was exotic, strangely scented, brilliantly hued. Fruit I had never even imagined was daily fare, tasting like perfumed custard. I was Alice in Wonderland.
We purchased our opium, tiny sticky balls the colour of figs, and headed for the bench. I was the only female in the place, aside from the round-faced woman who had taken our money and I was determined not to act like a girl. Beside me on the bench were other foreigners, clutching their opium, speaking English. They’d been here before. They knew how to smoke: The key, apparently, once you started inhaling, was to maintain a slow, steady in-breath so you sucked up all the vapour without a hitch and your opium doctor didn’t have to relight.
My turn came. How did I do this? I rose to my feet, I walked to the pallet, I lay down. I handed over my opium to the doctor. In the orange light of the lamp, his face was stretched like parchment, tight, ochre-coloured, straining over knife-edged cheek bones. His expression was neutral, as a man’s face is neutral on an assembly line. He put a pin through the sticky dark ball and gently rolled it back and forth over the flame. When it was ready, he popped it into the bowl of the pipe and nodded. I began to draw in the vapour, slowly, steadily.
A person who has never smoked opium can’t know how long it takes to suck up a whole ball of the drug, even a tiny one. Ten seconds? Ten minutes? I was going on faith that the opium eaters on the bench knew what they were talking about. And maybe they did. A man’s lung capacity is significantly larger than a woman’s.
Whatever my lung capacity, it was insufficient to the challenge. How much opium could there be in that little ball? I kept up my slow, increasingly strained inhaling past the point of a full lung, to the point of an uncomfortable one, right up until my lung was taut, thinking all the while that any second now I would be finished.
Then I exploded into a catastrophe of coughing. I sat up in an effort to breathe and frantically hauled in shattered fragments of murky air. It was impossible to get my breath. I panicked. Nothing mattered to me except air. Not dignity. Not street cred. Not the stories my friend would be able to tell at my expense. I wanted only the sensation of oxygen turning my lung tissues a healthy pink. I fought for it. The air shrieked into my lungs on the in-breath and was lost again in another raucous spasm of coughing. Tears poured down my face. My nose ran. Who knows, maybe I drooled.
And then I was outside, soaked with sweat. I had been revealed as hopelessly, possibly fatally, uncool. But I was breathing. At my command, air went into my lungs. At my command, it exited. How could I ever have taken breathing for granted?
Then another problem reared its head. Nausea. Crippling nausea. Walking didn’t help much, but we tried the beach. My stomach whirled like a prayer wheel. We took off our sandals and waded at the water’s edge. That didn’t help, either. We found a café. Cold lemonade, I decided, was the trick. The television was tuned to the Olympics, the 100-metre dash. The athletes were in their starting blocks, primed. The waiter delivered my lemonade. The athletes’ butts went up. I sipped the sweet liquid. The starter pistol cracked. I was out the door, possibly setting the world record for 100 yards run while doubled over. I saw the dirt road, I saw someone’s shoes. And then I vomited, copiously and at length. That helped.
Back in my room, I drifted in a fog, thinking nothing, aware of nothing. My drug-induced daze could have lasted a single night or 300 years; there were no markers to distinguish time. Perhaps I lived three or four other lives, maybe I ran with the wolves. I will never know.
At some point, I must have drifted to sleep because morning eventually arrived. The nausea was gone and along with it any inclination to try opium in any form ever again. I was grateful to feel the firm bamboo flooring under my feet. The jasmine tea steamed in its clay pot. The sun was up, the day reassuringly familiar. I felt as though I had survived a typhoon and was back on terra firma. What more could anyone ask of life?
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This reads like a post on erowid
Fucking noobs.....
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Haha right?
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STILL wanna try that!...does that make me crazy? Or just a damn fine addict! Even with her light weight vomiting, I could still imagine myself RIGHT THERE. Jealous of people who get to experience this...I really want to travel :-\ . Kat
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I wouldn't be worried about what people were thinking about me, I'd just like to try that sweet opium.
I remember the days of nausea from opiates but yea that's long gone. I actually remember back when I was a teenager getting some dental work done and I couldn't take the lil hydrocodone they prescribed because it made me feel sick and the nausea was worse than the pain.
Later on when I had done dope the first few times and was snorting there were times I was so nauseous I wanted to die. How twisted is it that I kept doing it anyway, until I had a tolerance and the nausea went away and I then felt like I wanted to die because I didn't have any.
I think a non-addict would probably be deterred by the side-effects long before reaching the point of physical addiction but my dumbass couldn't get enough.
12 years later and I've rode this carousel too many damn times. I'd like to get off this ride....and yet, if someone offered me a vacay to an opium den tomorrow I'd take it in a heartbeat.
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The thing is it really isn’t strong enough to give an addict with a decent tollerence that sort of experience. I mean don’t get me wrong it would be neat to go meet a bunch of little sticky balls but I think I might have done fucked my Opium world up when I started smoking fent patches and everything else that I stuck up my arm. Like I said it would be a great experience though.
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I just looked up to see who posted this and I was like oh fuck it’s clinton. I haven’t seen him in forever then I saw how old the thread was and I was like oh. Haha
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@Thoms right? That prompted me to ask about him in that thread but chipper says he is alive & well so that's great. As long as he's out there somewhere doing his thing whatever that may be, lol
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The title in the link makes me laugh, something about culminating of her time chasing the dragon. How old is this girl, shes talking like a teenager about worried about not looking like a girl, and not knowing when she cant inhale any more?
All in all, i wish it was me who got to have this experience and not someone who is just gonna complain about throwing up and not enjoy the high/nod.
Maybe one day it will be me going to se asia, i can dream anyway