High

by David Sheff

  Like other drugs, ecstasy stimulates the flow of dopamine, but it also affects another neurotransmitter called serotonin, which is related to mood, sleep, perception, and appetite. Researchers have discovered that even a small amount of ecstasy can be harmful to the brain. One study showed that long-term use of the drug may cause the hippocampus region of the brain to shrink an average of 10 percent. The hippocampus plays an essential role in long-term memory.

  The stimulant effects of ecstasy enable users to dance for extended periods, which, when combined with the hot and crowded conditions usually found at raves, can lead to severe dehydration and hyperthermia (dramatic increases in body temperature). This can lead to muscle breakdown; kidney, liver, and cardiovascular failure; and death.

  Aftereffects can include intensely painful exhaustion, anxiety, and extreme depression. Repeated use of ecstasy may ultimately damage the cells that produce serotonin and can leave a person feeling strung out and sick.

  As we mentioned earlier, street drugs are sometimes laced with other drugs, increasing the danger to the user. Ecstasy is a drug that’s often adulterated.

  Molly is the term we hear the most these days. Molly is a white powder or crystal-like substance, whereas ecstasy is used to describe the pill or capsule form of MDMA. Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” made the term “dancing with Molly” famous, though in a sad irony, her song was released during the same week the drug killed two kids at a music festival in New York.

  LSD, MUSHROOMS, AND OTHER PSYCHEDELICS

  LSD affects serotonin, which is why the drug causes hallucinations, distortions in perception, and dramatic mood swings. It also raises body temperature and increases heart rate and blood pressure.

  Street names for LSD include acid, blotter acid, dots, mellow yellow, and window pane. It is the most common hallucinogen and one of the most potent mood-changing chemicals. LSD is often found on blotter paper, which is perforated into small squares that may be colored or have images printed on them and are dissolved on the tongue. LSD also comes in tabs, or pills, and clear liquid, usually in a small container, like a Visine bottle. It can also be found in thin squares of gelatin.

  The effects of LSD are unpredictable. A person’s sense of time can change. It can also cause frightening images and feelings.

  The psychedelic compounds psilocybin and psilocin are found in hundreds of species of mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms or shrooms. They’re usually grown in Mexico and Central America and have been used in native rituals for thousands of years.

  The chemical in the mushrooms is structurally similar to serotonin and produces its effects by disrupting normal functioning of the neurotransmitter. They can be eaten or brewed and consumed as tea. They sometimes cause feelings of intense nausea before the mental effects kick in. As with LSD, the highs from using magic mushrooms are also unpredictable, and they affect people differently. They cause distorted perceptions of touch, sight, sound, and taste. They also cause altered feelings that for some are enjoyable but for others can include terrifying thoughts and anxiety, as well as fears of insanity or losing control. Users are often unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

  Another psychedelic drug is peyote—also known as buttons, cactus, or mesc—which is a small, spineless cactus. Its principal active ingredient is the hallucinogen mescaline, which is also used in its pure form. The aboveground part of the cactus consists of disk-shaped buttons that are cut from the roots and dried. They’re generally chewed or soaked in water, which is then drunk.

  There are many synthetic hallucinogens on the street now, including 2C-B, 2C-T-7, 7th heaven, 7-Up, beautiful, blue mystic, and lucky 7. Because these drugs are produced in clandestine laboratories, they are seldom pure, and the amount in a capsule or tablet is likely to vary considerably. They’re sold in powder or pill form, taken orally or snorted. Since users don’t know exactly what chemical compounds they’re ingesting, overdoses are frequent—along with paranoid delusions and total loss of bodily and sensory control, which results in countless emergency room visits and sometimes even death.

  SYNTHETIC MARIJUANA, SPICE

  No, it isn’t really synthetic pot—it’s not pot at all. Spice, K2, black mamba, bliss, Bombay blue, fake weed, genie, and zohai are all mixtures of herbs, spices, and other material, typically sprayed with a synthetic compound chemically similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

  Labels on Spice products often warn that it’s “Not for Human Consumption,” but sometimes it also says that it’s natural, suggesting that it’s harmless. It’s not natural or harmless.

  Though synthetic pot users have experiences similar to those produced by marijuana—elevated mood, relaxation, and altered perception—and in some cases the effects are even stronger, many experience psychotic effects like extreme anxiety, paranoia, and hallucinations. Spice and other varieties of synthetic pot can be addictive, and people who stop taking the drug can experience withdrawal symptoms. They can also experience depression, violent behavior, delusions, seizures, and death. Users who have been taken to poison control centers show symptoms that include rapid heart rate, vomiting, agitation, and confusion. These drugs can also raise blood pressure and cause reduced blood supply to the heart (called myocardial ischemia) and have been associated with heart attacks.

  INHALANTS

  Street names for inhalants include gluey, huff, rush, and snappers. Products kids abuse to get high include model airplane glue, nail polish remover, correction fluid, cleaning fluids, air-conditioner fluid (Freon), hair spray, gasoline, and the propellants in aerosol whipped cream, spray paint, fabric protector, and cooking spray. These products are sniffed, snorted, bagged (fumes inhaled from a plastic or paper bag), or “huffed” (inhalant-soaked rag, sock, or roll of toilet paper stuffed in the mouth) to achieve a high. Inhalants are also sniffed directly from the container.

  Within seconds of inhalation, the user experiences intoxication, along with other effects similar to those produced by alcohol. Those may include slurred speech, an inability to coordinate movements, dizziness, confusion, and delirium. Nausea and vomiting are other common side effects. In addition, users may experience lightheadedness, hallucinations, and delusions.

  After heavy use of inhalants, users may feel drowsy for several hours and experience a lingering headache. Because intoxication lasts only a few minutes, they frequently seek to prolong their high by continuing to inhale repeatedly over the course of several hours. By doing this, they can suffer loss of consciousness and death.

  Even if a person doesn’t die, inhaling toxic chemicals can cause damage to the parts of the brain that control thinking, moving, seeing, and hearing.

  A boy who almost died of an addiction told us that if he couldn’t get other drugs, he’d take gasoline out of the lawn mower and huff it. “You go kind of deaf,” he said. “You just hear like a yowwowwow sound. It felt like my brain cells were popping.”

  BATH SALTS

  There’s a drug people use called bath salts, but it isn’t really bath salts, and it’s dangerous and illegal. Chemically, the drug bears some resemblance to both meth and ecstasy. It’s sold in powder form, usually in small plastic or foil packages, under various brand names. It’s smoked, snorted, taken orally, or put into a solution and injected. Short-term effects include severe paranoia that can sometimes cause users to harm themselves or others.

  Bath salts can lead to suicidal thoughts, agitation, combative and violent behavior, confusion, hallucinations, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, chest pain, and death. Indeed, there have been reported cases of people acting violently on bath salts, and many overdoses, including that of a seventeen-year-old California teen who snorted the drug with friends. He died, and his friends were hospitalized.

  POLYDRUG USE

  Because it’s so common and dangerous, we also need to mention combined drug use, called polydrug use. When drugs are taken with other drugs, including alcohol, they can be far more dangero
us than when they’re taken alone.

  Polydrug use greatly increases the potential for brain damage, heart attack, stroke, and overdose. For example, it’s been estimated that around five million people use alcohol and cocaine together each month. When cocaine is combined with alcohol, a chemical toxic to the liver is produced. Cocaine itself can cause heart attacks, but in combination with alcohol, the risk is higher. There has also been an increase in reported deaths of people who combine alcohol with prescription drugs, and prescription drugs such as Xanax with heroin.

  Another dangerous combination of drugs is heroin and cocaine, which is known as a speedball; it can cause heart attacks and respiratory failure.

  For more information on these and other drugs, see the chart in Appendix 1 at the end of this book. New drugs often appear on the scene, and existing drugs are given new names. It’s important to stay as up to date as possible. Being in the know is everything.

  Addiction

  · · · · · ·

  When you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t.

  —LUKE DAVIS, AUTHOR OF CANDY

  CHAPTER TEN

  Use, Abuse, and Addiction

  I can’t do it anymore. I can’t deal with this sh—. I’d rather be in oblivion. I’m going through withdrawals still and I’m pretty much hating everything and everyone now. I miss painkillers so much. They always make me feel right with the world. —LILLIE (BETHESDA, MARYLAND)

  KEVIN’S STORY

  So many stories about addiction begin the same way:

  “He was a good boy . . .”

  “She was a joy, moral and smart and funny and . . .”

  Of her son, Kevin, Jacqueline Periman says, “He was my beautiful golden-haired angel child.”

  The earliest pictures of Kevin were taken in the hospital on the first day of his life: his mother, striking, with long brown hair parted on the side, gazing into the blue of her son’s eyes.

  Kevin’s mother grew up in an addicted family, losing most family members to drugs early on. She tried to talk to Kevin about the prevalence of addiction in their family, and she warned him that he might be more susceptible than others. Still, there came a day when twelve-year-old Kevin, who had asthma, came home smelling like pot.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked.

  He said what many kids say: “I just wanted to try it.” And she believed him. When she caught him drinking a beer, he told her the same thing, and she believed him again. Kids experiment, she told herself.

  Kevin read a lot and loved Legos and science; in the evenings, he’d stand mesmerized in the backyard looking through a telescope he’d built himself. But then he became an adolescent and all that stopped. He seemed tired all the time. He was surly, and sometimes Jacqueline thought he might be depressed.

  Kevin became “different. He drifted away from me,” Jacqueline says. He was thirteen when she discovered that he had taken pills from her medicine cabinet. When she confronted him, he again said he was curious.

  During Kevin’s high school years, his drug use continued and escalated. His mom began hearing rumors from other parents that her son was dealing drugs. She confronted him. Kevin was adamant in his denial. “You know I’d never do anything like that.”

  In their neighborhood late one night, gunfire erupted. Jacqueline ran for her children in their beds, threw them to the floor, and held them down. It took a while for her to realize that the shots were aimed at their house. All the basement windows were blasted out.

  The next day the police came and arrested Kevin. They found a cache of drugs. He was charged with possession and dealing. He was also charged with burglary. He’d broken in to a car and stolen weapons—a crossbow and a sniper rifle. He was only seventeen years old.

  Kevin was released pending trial. One night, he slipped out, and when he came home he was “sort of crazy—paranoid, anxious.”

  His mom learned he’d taken meth. She searched his room and found spoons, needles, plastic bags with yellowish powder in them, cut-up soda cans, and pens without cartridges, which are often used as makeshift pipes for smoking marijuana, crack, and other drugs.

  Kevin’s court date came. A judge sentenced him to nine months in jail, and he served the time.

  The family lived in Missouri, but after that, Jacqueline says, “everyone felt he should get away from his drug-using friends,” so she sent him to LA to live with his grandparents. His grandfather was a doctor, and Kevin stole prescription pads and checks from him. Jacqueline pleaded with Kevin: This has to stop. Remember your uncles. You have good grades. You can go to college.

  His grandparents felt they couldn’t take care of him, so they sent him back to Missouri. Jacqueline met her son at the airport and was horrified. He was wired, grinding his teeth, emaciated. She begged him to check in to the hospital, but he refused. He’d turned eighteen, and she couldn’t force him. He locked himself in the bathroom. She called to him, but he didn’t answer. She waited twenty minutes. A half an hour. An hour. “I worried that he would die, so I called 911.”

  The police arrived and told Kevin to come out. When he didn’t, they told him to back away from the door because they were going to kick it in. They did. Kevin was on the floor stuffing drugs—cocaine—and paraphernalia into a cabinet. They took him away.

  Jacqueline went to work, and that afternoon she was paged and told that her son was downstairs. But he’d just been arrested. How could he be downstairs? Apparently, he’d called her ex-husband, who had bailed him out. She went downstairs as security guards were escorting him out of the building.

  Jacqueline says, “I’m bawling. He’s out there, ‘I wanna come home! Mom!’ Screaming for me. ‘Mom!’”

  She shook her head, and he left.

  Soon Kevin was arrested again and spent six months in jail, and then a drug court sent him to a rehab program. Jacqueline sent her son notes of encouragement. She sent notes from the family dog, Gryffindor. Kevin had loved the J. K. Rowling books.

  But she stopped hearing from him. When she did, she knew he’d left the treatment program and things were getting worse. He smoked pot and drank, used cocaine, bath salts, mushrooms, heroin, and, mostly, methamphetamine. Sometimes he would call—when he was stuck at a gas station, for instance—begging her to wire him money, which she refused to do.

  On the eleventh of February 2012, the door of an apartment building in Los Angeles opened and a boy stumbled out into the empty street. He collapsed into a nearby bush.

  A day later, Kevin’s grandmother received a telephone call. Some boy said he was a friend of Kevin’s. “I want to offer my condolences,” he said. “I’m sorry Kevin died.”

  His grandmother didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”

  The boy said, “You didn’t know?”

  There was a memorial service. There was an autopsy, and a toxicology report confirmed a long list of drugs in his body. A life filled with potential had been reduced to a list of chemicals.

  RUSSIAN ROULETTE

  No one who tries drugs expects to become addicted, but about one in ten or so people will.

  Who will?

  The honest answer is that there’s no way to know—it can happen to anyone. It’s true that some people are more likely to become addicted. Those with the risk factors we described earlier are. We mentioned drug use and addiction in a family: people with addiction in their families may have inherited what some scientists call “the addiction gene,” which is actually thousands of genes that interact with themselves and the environment to increase the likelihood of addiction.

  A boy told us, “My grandmother kept her alcoholism hidden—everyone thought she was just moody. But when she died, we found bottles of vodka hidden around the house—in with the sheets and pillowcases in the linen closet, in the garage behind the ironing board, in her underwear drawer.”

  People with the addiction gene probably have what Dr. Shoptaw calls “the sleeping monster.” Drugs wake it,
and there’s no putting it back to sleep.

  In addition to genetics, there are many other biological, environmental, and psychological risk factors that make it more likely someone will become addicted if they use drugs. These include mental illness, emotional problems, learning disabilities, and early childhood trauma. Also, the younger someone starts using drugs, the more likely it is that they’ll become addicted. Here’s a statistic worth noting: 90 percent of all addictions start in the teenage years.

  At first, people with addiction don’t usually wind up in the emergency room. They probably won’t know they’re different from most people. Lacking that dramatic, life-threatening reaction, many of those who become addicted think they’re like everyone else. So they use more. At some point, they probably suspect that their reaction to drugs is unusually strong, and perhaps different from that of others around them. But by then, their addiction may well have started to take hold.

  Sometimes the reaction occurs over time, but it can also happen with a single use—we’ve heard accounts of people becoming addicted with their first drink, line of coke or meth, hit of acid, swig of cough syrup, tablet of Vicodin or OxyContin, or even puff of pot.

  It can appear that people who are addicted are using because it’s fun, but after a certain point it’s no longer fun—quite the opposite.

  Hopelessness, depression, fear, and physical illness are persistent states for many of those who abuse drugs. There may be momentary respites the instant the effects of the drug are felt, but they don’t last. It’s no surprise that people in pain go back for more—and then more. They’re trying to stop the pain, if only for a moment. At that point, people aren’t choosing to use. Using is a symptom of the disease of addiction.