So, how/why did you start using the needle?

[DreamerOnTheRun (OP)]

Hey guys, making my monthly rounds here at the forum. I've been alright, no better but no worse I suppose.  Hope everybody is doing okay. Usually start a topic once a month or so, so anyway:

Why did you start using a needle as opposed to just eating/snorting/plugging your drugs? I know theres a smaller group that started off directly with IV when it comes to opioids which is NUTS to me. Even being somebody who pokes myself 3-4x a day I can't see why anybody would jump straight to it.

With me personally, it's actually really simple.  Those of you who know me at all know I'm 99.9% a pharma guy and don't really touch any street dope.  For years my DOC was oxycodone, 30mg IR roxicodones to be exact.  And I loved how they felt kicking in ORALLY. I even preferred eating them to snorting them 100%.  Would only snort one if I needed to get well fast.  I only turned to the needle when a statewide shortage of oxycodone happened here for like 3-4 months straight, I couldn't fill anywhere, even willing to pay any price.  So, then I was introduced to Dilaudid (hydromorphone), so I probably don't have to explain this but to anybody who may not be informed, the oral bioavailability of Dilaudid is GARBAGE.  I could eat 20 & not feel as much as 2-3 roxis.  IV, and it's a whooooole different story.  So what made you guys take the dive?

(For the record, and I know almost if not all IV users here will agree; if you haven't started, DONT.  Generally speaking, the cons FAR outweigh to pro's.)

[Tainted]

i started IVing almost immediately. i tried snorting OC40s/80s a couple of times and didnt feel any euphoria, i threw up, but i didnt feel fucked up at all just naseuas. tried maybe 2-3 times with dope, sniffed 1-2 bags (enough to throw up, yet i didnt feel high, and my gf at the time was blowing 1/3 the amount as me and getting faded, neither of us being tolerant or taking any types of medication)

so i had a couple friends that IVed so one of em shot me up. and then it was off to the races.
i still remember, my buddy shot me up my first time and he missed the shot, but at the time i didnt really know what that meant, i dont think he did either, so he goes "you feel it it sohuld be instant?" i go "nope dude WTF i must be like immune to opiates or someth..HOLY SHIT NEVERMIND"

[Chip]

first time with opiates was Morphine IV.

well that was a ROA that worked well so I tried speed IV too.

my only reasons were naievity and curiosity. oh, and a sense of invincibility.

[Güey]

I pretty much went from smoking weed to IV hard drugs. I'm a bit older, and that's just how things were done, amongst my friends. I started with heroin before pill mills and the 'opiate epidemic.' Hell, I tried oxy for the first time just a year or two ago. I was underwhelmed...

Anyhoo, I was with some pals who had coke, and I was offered some and tried it.             They were IV'ng it so that's how I did it. It was one helluva rush, but I'm not really an upper kinda guy.

About two weeks later, I had the opportunity to try heroin so I did that, too. I was off to the races right away, and it's been 20+ years messing with opiates.

Also, smoking black tar heroin seems too complicated jaja

But yeah, I feel like I've done it backwards, compared to most people. It seems like lots of younger people start with pills, then H, then 'graduate' to IV'ng. I'm working backwards :-)

[MoeMentim]

I had a bth smoking habit in the mid nineties, never went to the needle, got clean for a long time.  In 2008 I'd been inhaling tar again for a couple years.  A friend in another city calls me up & says "hey, i have this friend who just moved to town & needs a connect."  I didn't want the hassle, I've always just supported my own habit by working & I keep my shit tight, never been in trouble with the law at all.  "She's hot as hell" & the fact that he was a good friend I agreed to help her out.  Turns out she was a nurse & just needed help from time to time when she'd used her scripts up early.  She was hot as hell & we became as friendly as a "connect friendship" could be i guess, nice girl. 

  Having been a connoisseur of drug experiences I'd always been curious about iv'ing but I had an aversion to needles.  Not too bad, I just flinched whenever poked by a doctor etc..  Being a nurse I trusted her & i talked her into shooting me up just to see what it was all about.  She insisted on giving me a lesson on safe injecting techniques even though I said "don't worry, I'll never do it myself, I hate needles."  The few times she did she was very conservative on the amount she'd load into the rig & with my tolerance I never really got the rush I'd heard about so it didn't bite me right away & I kept smoking while occasionally having her hit me when i copped for her. 

  One time when i was picking up for her I asked for a couple rigs & once I shot myself up doing closer to what I'd smoke in a sitting I lost my fear of needles instantly & have loved them ever since.  Still kept my shit together until I started doing speedballs & it all went downhill fast.  Lost a house, cars, motorcycles, life-long record collection I could have retired on, everything.  then it was a few years of constantly quitting & relapsing.  4 years since my last habit, chipped maybe 6 times, last over a year ago & I still daydream about shooting up all the time.  Not sure what the rest of my life will be like, even though I'm intent on staying clean it could easily go the other way.  Right now I'm not seeking it out but if i happened into it I bet I'd not have the resolve to resist. 

 DON"T FUCKING START.

[wanderingmind]

My first needle experience was coming down from a 5-meo-dmt trip.  As I was coming down from the dmt, I was feeling great and wanted to prolong that so I asked my buddy for some coke.  He used to snort dmt with some coke to cut down on the burn.  He told me he was out but had some nalbuphine.  I said, "Fuck it.  Hit me."   He gave me a small to medium dosage IM.  I didn't really feel all that much.

Fast forward a few months.  I'd been snorting H (sometimes straight fentanyl HCl) and it scared the shit out of me that I felt the need to use every single day, even if I swore I wouldn't.  It started to interfere with college and I was spending all my money on it.  I was able to stop snorting for a little while with minimal discomfort.  A couple weeks before the end of my sophomore year in college, my GF broke up with me after almost three years.  I was fucking devastated.

I hadn't used H in a month or two and decided that I'd start using it again...but, I was going to start shooting it like my friend.  His GF shot me up for the first time.  It was a smaller shot and I wasn't all that impressed...So, I tried myself.  When I did that first shot on my own, I felt like I had joined a new club or something.  Since then, IV has been my primary ROA. 

Looking back, it's crazy how fast my addiction progressed when I moved from snorting it to shooting.  Within a couple months, I was dropping at least $200 a day.  The friend I mentioned, the one who got me into dope, died a few years ago from an overdose.  I've known a lot of people that have died 

[traplord69]

I had the pretty standard usage curve, starting with oc80's which I would snort and then started smoking them which gave a really nice instant rush.  Then when the og 80's got switched to the op's around 2010 or so it became more of the 30mg roxis which I'd also snort and smoke.  I never in a million years ever considered shooting anything, at the time definitely looked down on it, "im not a junkie, I only smoke pills off of tinfoil" lol.

I ended up going to rehab in 2012 right around the time that the pill mills were being busted up.  The rehab strongly suggested that I go to a sober house following my 30 day inpatient which I did.  I went to a sober house in southern New Hampshire which is very close to a rediculous heroin hub in the Lawrence/Lowell MA area, man I still dream of that place.  I had tried heroin maybe twice prior to rehab and just snorted it, it was pretty underwhelming to me, seemed comparable to oxycodone with a less energetic feeling.  Everyone in the sober house for the most part was there for heroin and I made fast friends with a few of them.

My friend and I decided one day while still at the sober house that we would get high so we bought I think 6 half grams (smalls as they were called, bigs were a gram) for $180, they were $30 a piece.  I went into a cvs and bought rigs for my friend as he shot.  I smoked my shit off of foil and got quite high and then he offered to shoot me up.  I said what the hell and he hit me with a smallish shot which I didn't even remotely feel because I was already so high. So that was the first time.  After we got kicked out of the sober house later on, my friend, his girlfriend and myself got our own place and started making the trip to lawrence every day with them shooting their stuff and me snorting/smoking mine.  And then after a few weeks, out of curiosity I had my friends girl hit me again, this time I was sober and felt the amazing rush that were are all after.  I guess I just wanted to know what it was all about, like why do these people religiously inject themselves, there must be something to it is what I nievely thought.  That was it for me, I don't think I ever used any way but IV since then.  There's really just no turning back, even if snorting or smoking will eventually produce a similar high, I wasn't going to wait 5-10 mins for it to kick in, and not get the initial amazing rush.  That's my long winded story of how I started with the needle. 

[Thoms]

I just wanted to get hi and all we had was a little boxy and a little dilly. My girlfriend already shot up so I had her hit me. It was a few months before I shot again but after I got a great morphine rush with those pins and needles I was off to the races. Morphine, oxy, h, whatever we could get. Except fent we only smoked fent and my girl still over dosed. That shows how dangerous fent is. Neither of us had over dosed with a pin.

[Anti-hero]

Mine started with cocaine. It was befor crack.
Freebasing was for Richard Pryor.
Just felt that rush got that either taste
You use to get before they banned either
In cloumbia.
Shit fucked up my veins and I started using H to stop the geek. Fell more in love with H
Moved to a different city to get clean ( capital hill )
Worked for about 3 years then my grandpa died
Who was like my father.
Left alone in a house with nothing better to do
But X
Started doing that and acid then coke
Then back to pills plus heroin.
I got in a really fucked up.accident
When they were still telling you
You cant get addicted to them
Hahaha the joke was on me
Then am just now comming out of a 17 year haze
Me and my girlfriend are separating until
We both get clean
 We were before
We moved to crazy town
When you live in crazy town for so long
Normal shit seems crazy.
We've worked our habit down really far
Just cant seem to do that last push
So we decided to separate until we both got clean
Or stay apart.
Its only been a week.
We went to red lobster got a good meal
Scored a couple of grams had sex and drugs for two days then said good bye
Its only been a week.
But I love this girl like nothing I have ever loved
So Im going to do it she is two
Or there is no us anymore
That was my decision
I cant keep on wrecking her life.
So if I cant stay clean then I gotta go
And if she cant stay clean shes gotta go
But one thing we agreed on was
We cant keep doing this to each other.

[bonedust]

My answer is pretty simple--I have always never been a fan of sticking drugs up my nose. I snorted dope maybe like twice then thought "If I'm gonna do something I might as well do it right."
For some bizarre reason I knew I would be good at it and didn't need anyone's help and guess what, I was all too correct. The first time I was in the room I am in now and hit that vein on the first try.

Being a stubborn chick has helped me in the past but not in this case of course.
Sometimes being good at something will completely fuck you.

[Quipen]

I'm one of those rare people, who IV the first time they try heroin. I had been snorting/eating OC 80s on and off for about 2 years, but never even got close to a habit.
Then I moved out to WA, and literally within a week of moving here, I was shooting dope. Combination of wrong (right at the time, ha) people, and always pretty much knowing I was going to at least try drugs. I remember being in elementary school telling my older sister, when talking about drugs, "well, drugs have got to be pretty good right? there's gotta be a reason people do them, or else there wouldn't be so many people who use them and are addicted"

So even at a young age I knew as soon as the occasion presented itself, I would be trying heroin. It's crazy, I actually even remember not scratching when I had an itch, and I would tell that same sister "i'm practicing for when (not if, lol) i'm in handcuffs and wont be able to scratch my itches."

I mean, what the fuck? I have no idea where/how/why I heard about heroin, or how I knew what it was at a young age, but I truly believe it was decided that long ago that I would do opiates, honestly. It never seemed like a conscious decision at the time, though that could be from me wanting to be in denial, but honestly, it just felt... for lack of a better word right now.. normal. And all i could think was how many OCs I wasted by snorting/smoking/eating them.

[Thoms]

Icy has damn near 100% bio availability so you didn't really waste them. Well besides smoking them. You did waste those lol

[Thoms]

Fucking oxy not icy. Jesus

[dillydudeEL14]

What a great topic it's interesting to see the different ways people started doing the one thing we said we'd never do!  I remember my first shot it was dilaudid. I was 22 and working as a cashier at the time and had started using Roxie's again snorting.  My buddy who is dead now was an iv user and dilaudid was his doc. I would take him to score and he'd get me roxies and himself ds.  He told me this one particular day that his dude might only have ds.

I told him ok man just bring my money back I do not want ds . I repeated this several times and he said ok. Of course he came back and said well I got you a d man cuz I knew you wouldn't wanna be sick. I was really pissed. He had new rigs and I allowed him to shoot me with a half and honestly I didn't immediately like it. I think it was just due to the fact that I was so freaked out and couldn't believe what I had done.

After a half hour I chilled out and kinda liked it and had him shoot me with the other half and when I left his house I said hey man do you think I could have that rig? He gave it to me and the rest is history lol. I actually didn't do it again for maybe a month cuziwas getting Roxie's again but I got opana one time and did it to myself and then I was off to the races. Since then I have only not ivd a pill one time and it was because I was sick and my boyhooked me up with a d and a half a roxy for driving him. I didn't have a rig on me so I snorted the half roxy.  That is literally the only time since I've startedshooting that i have not ivd an ivable pill. And I even regretted not waiting the 30 minutes to get home so I could have shot it all together lol.