I Did a Load of Cocaine Completely Sober, for Science

Credit to Author: Mac Hackett| Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 14:11:10 +0000

Alcohol and cocaine is a combination as old as cocaine – so, in the grand scheme of things, not all that old. But for a certain section of Friday night fundamentalists, calling in a bag after a couple of pints has become tradition, beer and gear an alliance now as familiar as vodka and Coke, snakebite and sick or drinking ten ciders during a football derby and punching a police horse in the face.

This, for obvious reasons, is not a good thing. For a start, when you mix alcohol and cocaine, a new substance – cocaethylene – is formed in the blood, which may be more cardio-toxic than cocaine alone. And with cocaine purity rising – along with cocaine-related deaths – you’re already in a fairly dodgy position to start out with. Plus, getting into the habit of buying a gram every time you’re at the pub is as harsh on your wallet as it is on your heart – and snorting coke makes you stay up longer, which inevitably means more booze.

For many, though, it’s habit: you drink to the point that you need help straightening out, so call it in to help you do just that. For a fifth of those callers, the coke arrives quicker than a pizza. With temptation so easily satiated, you can see why people often choose to ignore the overdraft text alert and vastly increased risk of cardiac arrest.

But take alcohol out of the equation: would you ever call it in otherwise? For a percentage of dependent cocaine users, the answer is obviously yes. But for the majority of the estimated 875,000 people who used the drug in the UK last year: no, probably not, because doing gak when you’re otherwise sober must be horrible. Who would want to take the money they could spend on a Michelin-starred main course and instead actively chase an anxiety attack?

Me, for science.

BUYING THE COKE

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LINE THREE

Wow, I really love this panpipe playlist, and I really want to tell lots of people about how great my panpipe moods playlist is. It’s such a fucking great playlist.

The anxiety has fully wafted over my body and there is nothing to blunt its thrashing static, so it just sits inside my chest and buzzes me out in actually quite a paralysing way. I want to talk about everything, but my mind is racing too fast to even conceptualise sentences and it all just sits in there, running around and around in my brain.

LINE FOUR

Have you ever been so fucked you can’t talk? Doing coke sober is a way to fast-track that feeling, if that’s what you’re into. By that, I mean: if you enjoy feeling like you’re in a K-hole, but with a more stifling, urgent and generally horrendous atmosphere.

It’s like the edges of my consciousness are an electric fence. I feel trapped inside my own mind and incredibly fidgety and uncomfortable, while also not really being able to do anything but more coke.

CONCLUSION

Do not do this. And if you are going to do coke and drink at the same time – which, again, is not without its risks – don’t overdo it (and read The Loop’s harm reduction guide first).

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/rss