Charlie - Interview 02

Brief Outline:

Charlie tried various class A drugs at university and spent all of her savings on ketamine before weaning herself off when the effects became more negative than positive. Now she barely drinks alcohol or uses drugs but thinks that drugs should be legalised.

Background:

University student, taking a year off and working as a volunteer with a student drug reform organisation called Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

More about me...

Before going to university Charlie only drank alcohol sometimes. During her first year at university she became a more regular user of alcohol and she would go out drinking with her friends several times a week. She drank less in her second year though and thinks that this is a fairly typical experience among students.

 

During her first year at university Charlie also tried ecstasy for the first time. In high school she knew people who did cannabis, but she wasn’t particularly interested in it. After ecstasy, she tried ketamine, which she describes as an ‘interesting experience’ because she had never used a hallucinogenic before. She used ketamine around the time she was having relationship problems. She described it as a 'fairly addictive' drug and for the short time she used it, she says she took it too often and too much. She decided to stop using it because she realised that its effects had become more negative than positive. After using ketamine she experienced intense feelings of fear as well as having a very bitter taste at the back of her mouth. It also cost her a lot of money. Charlie spent all her savings buying ketamine and it amounted to several thousand pounds.

 

Charlie has also used acid and has had mixed experiences on it. She says her decision to take it the first time was ‘very unwise’ and she experienced paranoid delusions. She has also tried a psychedelic drugs called 2CE. She said that she won’t ‘go near’ cocaine because most of what is on sale is not pure. She is also aware that cocaine is produced and distributed in a way that involves violence, damage to forests and the environment, and exploitating people.

 

Charlie got all of her information about drugs from the internet. She said ‘I made sure I researched things thoroughly before taking anything’. She also bought some drug scales because she has always been very cautious about the amount she is taking and the effect it could have on her.

 

Charlie thinks that drugs should be legalised because keeping them illegal is more harmful. She thinks that drugs could be properly monitored by the athorities if they were legal.  She thinks that  young people are provided with bad information that aims to scare them off drugs but this doesn't work. She thinks health and scientific facts should be more important than arguments about whether it is 'right' or 'wrong' to take drugs. The government's priority should be to do public health campaigns, with accurate information, and schemes to reduce the harm that can be caused by drug use.

 

Charlie barely drinks alcohol or takes drugs any more. The main reason, as she puts it, is that ‘she likes living in the real world’. She also likes to be working on issues she cares about and says that regular use of drugs and alcohol would prevent her from being involved in them.

 

Charlie says that she is happy with how things are and finds drugs interesting to do with friends, but doesn't think they should be used as 'an escape'. She says that it is fun to drink or to take ecstasy on a night out, but advises others not to use them to try to forget what is actually going on in their lives.

 

Charlie started taking more and more drugs to cope with the strain of supporting her boyfriend through his emotional issues.

It was definitely a negative thing because I was using drugs more than seeing him and he weren’t particularly interested in it. He was in a bad place as well, just feeling depressed and sad a lot of the time, he didn’t know how to deal with it.  And neither did I.  I was running away from it – from him –  because I realised I was not happy with what was going on, and I couldn’t deal with the strain it was putting on me.

I was trying to deal with his problems, and the fact my course was going badly, and my drug use was getting greater and greater… I just couldn’t deal with it.  But a lot of it, I think, was that I was trying to support him emotionally and I just felt worn out and unable to cope.  And I think I got into drug use more, because I just – I didn’t know how to deal with it any other way.
 
The way in the end was to end the relationship but that wasn’t a particularly positive step. Though now it’s been a very positive one, we’re on good terms again. But at the time it was really hard for him, it was a blow when he was already going through a lot. But I couldn’t deal with it anymore and it was sort of. If I’d have tried to keep with him for longer then I think I would have had a breakdown myself. You know it was getting extremely intense and I couldn’t deal with the strain anymore of supporting someone else quite to that extent when I had my stuff to sort out too.

 

Charlie suggests that people should stay away from drugs and alcohol if they have problems.

It’s when you start to use drugs to escape what goes on or because you’re not happy with things that’s when it becomes an issue. I think you should be very careful if you’re feeling sad.  To be honest, I think the best thing to do is to not drink or to take any drugs until you’re kind of over it. Because yeah. I mean it can help you to escape but ultimately you’re better dealing with those emotions than you are running away from them. And I think most problematic drug use does come from people who are in a bad state emotionally and they end up taking them. I mean in a bad state socially or economically and they end up taking drugs.

Charlie thinks that ecstasy has helped her with her depression by showing her that you can see...

I always struggled with depression.  I’ve had some manic spells, some long depressive spells.  I don’t struggle so much with feeling bad for long periods of time so much now.  In high school and through college I was having a really difficult time being happy.

And ecstasy - ecstasy taught me how to manage things. It’s one thing if you’re depressed to think “things are probably much better than I assume they are”, but you can’t really see them as being good.  That goes even if you logically can see that there’s no reason to feel bad.

But with ecstasy, well, you take it when you’re otherwise depressed and you can see everything in a completely different way.  You are actually seeing things as a happy person.  And that helped to show me that you can see the world in different ways, maybe even control how you see it a bit.  I noticed there were triggers that made me start thinking negatively about things, and there was stuff I could do to stop those triggers.

Ecstasy for me has been really helpful in showing me how to manage having moodswings, how to deal with getting depressed and getting manically happy.  E put you in a place where everything is fine – even bad things.  It removes any drama surrounding any issues you have and you can just see them in a rational light.  It’s great.
 
I mean apart from that I have learnt to identify triggers which tend to make me think negative thoughts. And... I’ve learnt how to dupe like for example if I’m. Most of the time I was very, very tired for a lot of the time when I was at school. I wasn’t sleeping very well. I mean, you know I had a very bad diet but now I notice if I start to notice the patterns of those thoughts emerging over the course of a day and I tend to go to bed early or I tend to put on a comedy show on the TV or listen to something funny. Like I’ve learnt how to manage things a lot better and that isn’t something that I did before I took ecstasy. And ecstasy did say, it showed me, you know, like the things which you may have anxieties about - you don’t have to have anxieties about them. You know that isn’t an unchangeable part of you.  Aging and experiencing more of life has obviously had its part to play but I think E has done a lot for me too.
 

Charlie describes an acid trip that started as euphoric and happy but ended as a bad trip.

And the week after I dropped acid for the first time which was a very unwise thing to have done. It was going very well. We went for a walk in a park this was in the evening.
We were very euphoric and happy and chatting. We went on a walk through the park and one of the friends that I was with got paranoid because she saw a car in the car park and she was sort of getting scared that the police were going to come and get her which is fairly common kind of delusion, I guess.  And that paranoia sort of built up between the three of us and we all headed back to my house. But she carried on being anxious and I picked up on that really strongly and started having a bad trip too.

At one point I was in my room looking for something and the others were in the living room.  I heard them talking really loudly about me, in really negative ways, and that didn’t seem right, it seemed unlikely – but it made me feel terrible.  So I went to the living room and hovered outside the door to hear what they were saying and they stopped.  So I went back to my room and they started again, but very loud.  And I realised that to hear them that loudly in my room they would have to be shouting.  That was horrific.  I went to speak to them and they told me that they hadn’t been talking about me.  And then I realised I was just hearing voices, having paranoid delusions.
 
How did you feel afterwards?

Well, I cried for a few hours after that trip.  It was so scary, I was terrified.  But I think those tears, well, I’d just broken up with my ex that day so I think that was coming out too.  It was a stupid idea to take acid right after a breakup!

The next week I was in a much better place, so we did it again. And it was an absolutely wonderful experience this time. We did it during the day. We went to a park, and we spent the entire day in the park sitting looking at nature and we just had a wonderful, wonderful time. We felt happy and euphoric and it was amazing to just sit and look at the grass and ponder the world.  So it was a very different experience and a much, much better one.
 

Charlie compares the organic, swirly visuals she experienced with LSD with the more geometric patterns she saw when taking a chemical called 2CE.

And this is acid?
 
That was acid, yeah.  I took psychedelics the next weekend and the weekend after that, too – a month of psychedelic use!  This time we took 2C-E, which is a research chemical.  It’s longer-acting than acid and quite different in effect.  Acid gave quite swirly, organic visuals but 2C-E was highly geometric.

The effect it had was quite different, too.  Acid made me feel a bit confused sometimes, and it could be hard to get the right words out, but 2C-E changed the way I was thinking completely!  It felt like I was thinking in metaphors, and conversations had a very real feeling of flow – a physical feeling, flowing like water.

The first week we tried 2C-E it was really, really, nice  The week after, it didn’t work out quite so well and one of the people I took it with had a big freakout like with acid the first tie.  So we didn’t use anything for a while.

 

Charlie thinks that keeping drugs illegal causes more harm than good. She says that criminal gangs grew in the UK because of drug dealing.

I believe the social harms of keeping drugs illegal outweigh the social good of trying to stop people taking them. So you should make them controlled and regulated. Have very strict controls on advertising. Have very strict controls on where you can sell them, who you can sell them to. You’d want to give it to local city councils for example so as to control the licensing like you do with the Licensing Act for alcohol. And then you’d have a system where drug users can get the drugs that they want without necessarily having to go through all the criminality, the impurity, and to be honest that’s where a lot of the risk is. You also cut out a large proportion gangs. Gangs grew up in the UK because of drug dealing.

There are areas in loads of cities that turned bad because of large-scale drug dealing and that’s where a lot of gangs came from in the UK.
 
If you legalised the system, you get rid of a lot of incentives to deal drugs – you cut out a lot of the profit.  And that would remove the motive for a lot of crime.  Most of the problems with drug use have only occurred since drug use became illegal, 40 years ago.

So I very much I consider the social harms outweigh the social benefits of keeping them illegal.
 

Charlie says that governments are ignoring the scientific evidence. She thinks that there are health risks associated with drug use but alcohol is a bigger health issue.

I’m concerned with health issues but not as much as I think the government are. Because there just, there isn’t a huge amount of research and the government. I mean the government’s position is untenable. People get fired for essentially saying the government is wrong. And when you’re firing people who are scientific advisors like Professor Nutt – then you’re not dealing with the facts or the science or the health implications.  Instead, you’re basing policy on the fact that most people think drugs are bad, and that’s a moral issue. That’s not a health issue.

The health issues with drugs are important.  But to put them in perspective, the biggest health issue is alcohol.  For government so spend so much energy using the power of force against drug user and dealers is ridiculous when they do pretty much nothing about alcohol.  It shows you that the government is not taking a principled stance, but a convenient one.
Drugs get demonised more than alcohol probably because the alcohol industry has a lot of money, a lot of lobbyists and a lot of clout.  Drug dealers might have money but they don’t get to influence politics.
 

Charlie says she doesn’t take cocaine because she doesn’t want her money to fund organised crime, wars and deforestation.

Also, I have become much more aware of the ethical issues with drugs as of late.
 
Meaning?
 
Well cocaine is produced in South America, Latin America and people. Like it’s basically it’s the subject of a massive war. Many, many people get killed along the way of making a gram of cocaine. Like there’s serious deforestations for every few grams of cocaine there is a certain amount of deforestation that takes place to grow the crop. You’re buying into. All the money you pay is going towards serious organised crime. There is no cocaine sold by “nice people”. It’s all run by massive crime networks who do people trafficking. I don’t want to put money into that.

I’m not interested in funding killing people which is exactly what you do if you buy cocaine. And that’s another reason why I haven’t really gone near it since I had, I bought a few times just to see what it was like but I’m not interested in taking it anywhere regularly because it’s so linked to massive military campaigns.
 
Other drugs have these issues too but maybe not so much.  Cannabis does have some issues around trafficking. More cannabis is grown in the UK now, which is good, but there’s still human rights issues.  Some cannabis farms make use of trafficked people working for low wages or kept as slave labour.  Legalising and regulating cannabis production would remove the market for that, too.

Ecstasy as well, most of the ecstasy in the UK comes from the Netherlands. It’s mostly produced in mainland Europe or in labs in the UK and there’s not that many drug mules involves in the shipping process.
And so the ethical issue is another reason why I take the drugs that I do rather than cocaine.
 

Charlie is happy with using alcohol and drugs as an occasional ‘enhancer’, but doesn’t rely on them to make social situations easier.

I’ve barely been drinking and barely taking many substances recently.
 
It’s been much lighter and much, yeah much happier, much happier generally which means I have less of a desire to take substances.  They’re interesting as a social lubricant or they’re something interesting to do with friends but they’re not an escape.  It’s fun to do – it’s fun to drink, it’s fun to take Ecstasy if you go on a night out but it’s not got the same kind of trying to forget what’s actually going on in life. It’s more of an enhancer to what’s going on.
 
Like I’ve come to value an awful lot being present in my own mind and body I got into and I’m just getting into Buddhism again actually in that Buddhism is very much about being present in one’s body.
 
If you use drugs very often I think you tend to drift a lot more because you’re spending more of your time intoxicated. You’re spending less time interacting with people. I’d much rather for example, learn. I’ve always had issues with some sort of social interaction. I’ve never been particularly able talking to strangers. I get anxious in social situations. And drugs have been a way to ease off that a little bit. And now I’m in the place where I’d much rather learn to interact and go through all that instead of using drugs to make it easier. Because ultimately I don’t want to need a crutch to get by. See yeah there’s a very strong element of wanting to be in control.
 

Charlie says that drug use is a fact of life and unlikely to go away.

I’ve barely been drinking and barely taking many substances recently.
 
It’s been much lighter and much, yeah much happier, much happier generally which means I have less of a desire to take substances.  They’re interesting as a social lubricant or they’re something interesting to do with friends but they’re not an escape.  It’s fun to do – it’s fun to drink, it’s fun to take Ecstasy if you go on a night out but it’s not got the same kind of trying to forget what’s actually going on in life. It’s more of an enhancer to what’s going on.
 
Like I’ve come to value an awful lot being present in my own mind and body I got into and I’m just getting into Buddhism again actually in that Buddhism is very much about being present in one’s body.
 
If you use drugs very often I think you tend to drift a lot more because you’re spending more of your time intoxicated. You’re spending less time interacting with people. I’d much rather for example, learn. I’ve always had issues with some sort of social interaction. I’ve never been particularly able talking to strangers. I get anxious in social situations. And drugs have been a way to ease off that a little bit. And now I’m in the place where I’d much rather learn to interact and go through all that instead of using drugs to make it easier. Because ultimately I don’t want to need a crutch to get by. See yeah there’s a very strong element of wanting to be in control.
 

Charlie says it’s unhelpful to discuss drugs in moral and legal terms. She thinks drugs should be viewed as a health issue.

There’s an entire harm reduction movement in drugs world, where the message is' here are the different ways you can reduce the harms drugs cause to you.  There’s a lot of tips around drug use which would be distributed more widely even in the context of an anti-drugs campaign.  Stuff like, don’t snort using a fiver, it’s really infectious – don’t share whatever you snort through, tenners or straws.  Test your pills with a testing kit.

There’s lots of basic practical advice that isn’t widely distributed.  The problem is people think that’s condoning drug use.  I’m not quite sure why people think it’s condoning drug use, but the general line is ’You can’t tell people how to reduce the harms because then you’re accepting that they’ve taken drugs in the first place, and you shouldn’t because drugs are bad’.  Which is stupid really, because the entire point is to make drugs less bad.  It’s like, “Don’t tell people things that make drugs less harmful because drugs are harmful”.  It’s rubbish.  You can’t be moralistic about this kind of stuff, it’s a bad attitude to take if you’re serious about health.
 
And I think most health professionals probably aren’t moralistic about it. Most people in the drugs field certainly aren’t moralistic about drug use because they couldn’t do their jobs if they were. But the government is very moralistic, as are a lot of the press and especially the political right.  The government decides its policy based on the fact that if they changed it, they would get voted out.

Drug users need everyone to stop seeing drugs as a moral issue or a criminal justice issue.  It’s a health issue.  And when people see it as a health matter, you can give out this kind of information more freely and people aren’t going to be going, ‘Oh it’s condoning drug use’. Because it’s evidently not, it’s just trying to reduce the harm to people who take drugs. Even in some cases, you know, not killing them as much which is only a good thing. But the moralistic people (the ones who have the loudest voices) stop that information from being given out.
 
 

Charlie thinks that the information provided by 'Frank' is good but she feels the language is negative.

Talk to Frank is the government’s main resource on drugs.  It’s OK.  In the US they don’t even admit that drug use can make people feel good.  Government drug websites there totally ignore that Ecstasy makes you feel good – anyone who got their information from a US drug website would wonder what the hell it was called Ecstasy for.  They’ll say – Ecstasy gives you headaches, makes your muscles use a lot of energy, can make you shiver, can give you insomnia, a racing heartbeat… but never once mention the fact that it makes you feel good.

That’s insane and a lot of countries have official information like that.  The UK is a bit better.  The health information that Frank gives out is reasonable.  It’s reasonable, but – well, what they say may be factually correct but the way they put emphasis is quite sneaky.  They always emphasise the negatives, make them sound really bad, common experiences, that would strike at any time and there’s nothing you can do about it.  Frank doesn’t tell you why the bad things happen, just that they do.  So the information isn’t that intelligent.

If 40 people die a year from Ecstasy in the UK and you have (I think) one million uses per weekend, then intelligently you’re looking at an astonishingly small number of uses causing death.  This makes it a relatively safe drug.  But in the discourse Frank perpetrates, drugs “go wrong” randomly and for unknown reasons.  You can’t control them.  And sometimes that’s right, but for Ecstasy, there are pretty clear ways people die – they drink too much water or too little water, they take too many pills or they have a severe allergic reaction.  That last one happens so very very rarely, too.

Frank doesn’t help you make sense of that.
 

Charlie realises that in the past she spent too much time using drugs and not enough time...

It was definitely a negative thing because I was using drugs more than seeing him and he weren’t particularly interested in it. He was in a bad place as well, just feeling depressed and sad a lot of the time, he didn’t know how to deal with it.  And neither did I.  I was running away from it – from him –  because I realised I was not happy with what was going on, and I couldn’t deal with the strain it was putting on me.

I was trying to deal with his problems, and the fact my course was going badly, and my drug use was getting greater and greater… I just couldn’t deal with it.  But a lot of it, I think, was that I was trying to support him emotionally and I just felt worn out and unable to cope.  And I think I got into drug use more, because I just – I didn’t know how to deal with it any other way.
 
The way in the end was to end the relationship but that wasn’t a particularly positive step. Though now it’s been a very positive one, we’re on good terms again. But at the time it was really hard for him, it was a blow when he was already going through a lot. But I couldn’t deal with it anymore and it was sort of. If I’d have tried to keep with him for longer then I think I would have had a breakdown myself. You know it was getting extremely intense and I couldn’t deal with the strain anymore of supporting someone else quite to that extent when I had my stuff to sort out too.

I was spending too much time on drugs and not enough on really socially interacting a huge amount – or doing much work.  That’s why the relationship failed in the end.  Now I’m finding that I don’t have as much time for drugs.  I’m in a new relationship and I’m pretty busy a lot of the time, so drugs kind of have to be a special occasion anyway because I just don’t have the time to use them.
 

Charlie started using drugs at university when she started hanging round with certain groups of...

I didn’t use drugs in high school. I had some friends who did cannabis, mostly. There was friend of mine who went to lots of raves and did an astonishing variety of drugs when she was 16. I’d say university is the place where lots of people do get introduced to drugs.  I know more people who use drugs now than I did in high school.

Of course there’s probably a few reasons for that – my social group is very different now.  At uni, you get to choose who to hang out with in a much bigger way and so I’ve gravitated towards other people who have an interest in drugs.
 

Charlie describes the first time she tried ecstasy and the problem of impure ecstasy pills.

In the second half of the year, my parents were away one weekend.    Two of my friends who had taken Ecstasy pills before had been mentioning MDMA for a while so I decided I wanted to try it.  They’d been taking pills since college, but I’d never gone near it.  I had friends who used cannabis in high school as well but I didn’t want to take it.  I was interested in reading about it, though. 
   
There’s a book called ‘Street Drugs’. I think it was written 1992, 1993 which is a tome of about 500 pages.  It’s written by a drugs worker about all the drugs he had encountered, and the problems they caused but also the history of the drug’s use and where, the properties of the drugs as well. It was pretty balanced illustration of drugs' positives and negatives.  I was quite well versed in drugs, I just didn’t have any particular desire to use them.

So it came to halfway through the first year of university – near Easter.  So we went in for 2 grams of Ecstasy in powder form.  I remember the powder being quite novel to them, I think it was when powder MDMA wasn’t so widespread as it is now.  The pill market was rubbish at this point, they were really impure.  And the powdered MDMA was sold at a reasonable price so we got some and took it when my parents were away.
 

Charlie researched ketamine carefully online before trying it. She experienced an ‘out of body’ sensation and intense visuals.

I’d heard about ketamine online.  I’d never tried drugs that gave you hallucinations before.  It was an interesting new experience… we bought a few grams off the dealer.  We’d found that dealer via business cards posted through the letterbox, interestingly enough.  I don’t know quite he’s managed but he hasn’t being caught yet. But that’s a very cheeky marketing strategy and he was quite a cheeky guy. Anyway, I bought some ketamine and got two of my friends around and we had an interesting time on it.
 
And at the same time I bought some drug weights because I was always very cautious about the dosages. I wanted to know how much I was taking so I knew, had an idea what kind of effect I would expect. And again I researched everything very thoroughly online.
 
When you say interesting experience what do you mean?
 
I don’t remember exactly what it was like… It’s a very disassociative drug. It’s very… it makes you feel very free of your body.  It’s an anaesthetic so you can’t feel quite as well - you feel quite numb. I’ve very much gone off it now but back then it was an interesting experience because, because you can close your eyes and you get quite intense visual, not quite dreamlike but very intense visual effects which you can learn to control.
 

Charlie found that snorting ketamine irritated her nose and throat.

And can you tell me about the sort of side effects of?
 
Well, I snort ket because I can’t really swallow it – I felt like I want to be violently sick afterwards if I accidentally eat it.  The main side effect of snorting, though, is the drips down the back of your throat and you’re left with a nose that doesn’t quite work.  The drips, well, you end up tasting them, and it’s kind of horrific and highly unpleasant.

Once you’ve started snorting, the taste wears off a bit – because you’re anesthetised.  But the first few snorts are horrible, horrible!  Sometimes I think of taking it again but the idea of that taste totally scares me off.  Obviously there’s other reasons, too, like fear of taking it too much, but the taste – ew, the taste alone is enough to make me not want to take it again.
 

Charlie decided to give up ketamine because of the negative effective it had on her. She was using it more and more.

And why have you gone off it?

 

Well basically after that point I. It’s quite, it’s fairly addictive and I ended up buying more and more and when it got to about February, March I was in a relationship which was going wrong and I ended up buying far more of it than I should have and taking a lot more than I should have. So I ended up with. I wouldn’t say I was dependent but it was sort of semi, semi-dependent getting that way towards using it just too regularly and too much.

 

You were using it because of ?

 

Well at the time I wasn’t really reflecting on why I was using it. I just was but it seems fairly clear now that I was using it because things, I was using it as an escape rather than anything else. I wasn’t particularly interested in alcohol at that point. Like I’d tried ketamine and alcohol a few times and the mix is really not a pleasant one. I think I was sick twice after that and I never mixed them again. I have friends who do mix them and they are fine with it but I could never deal with that.

 

I found the negative effects outweighed the positive effects by the end. It’s not a very pleasant drug. You can get quite intense but very, very gripping fear on it because you can sort of lose your sense of self, and you can have very intense and fascinating hallucinations - but the unpleasantness of it and the physical effect is that you have very, very bitter taste at the back of your mouth and tongue which makes me want to retch a little. And I found that wasn’t really what I wanted to take anymore. I didn’t really want to take a drug and then lie down and just not do anything, just look into the back of my eyes.

 

Well I was afraid, I was afraid. I still I wouldn’t want to go near it [ketamine] again. I could do it every now and again but it’s the case of the effects not really weighing up with the...

 

What makes you, what is in the addiction that makes you afraid of?

 

It was the compulsive way I was using it. I was doing it and then watching a DVD or something, or I was doing it and I was just doing small amounts quite, quite frequently in the evenings sometimes and there wasn’t any particularly good reason for doing it. It was just a matter of habit. If you form a habit it’s hard to break, you know? I don’t think, it really isn’t physically addictive but psychologically it’s easy to get drawn into it. My tolerance increased really fast and I needed more and more of it to get similar levels of effect.