How the RCMP Helped Cause Nanaimo's Overdose Epidemic

Heroin's not exactly an easy substance to acquire.

Well, I mean - that depends on how much you're buying. It's pretty difficult to obtain massive quantities (well, before the advent of the dark web, but I'll get into that some other time) regardless of whether you're the R.C.M.P. or an importer. Both cops and kingpins are looking to find the most heroin with the least risk- kingpins to distribute it, and avoid the R.C.M.P. who want them jailed and their drugs left to wither in 'evidence lockers.'

RCMP plus a Red Scorpion gang member. Who called Shotgun?

Not everybody or their grandpa are willing to jump up and take over as an importer once somebody high up the ladder gets busted. This means the underworld will be missing a crucial figure for at least a few days and, naturally, heroin supplies will dwindle or be improperly distributed. The importer's lackeys are going to have to pick up their slack; their closest kin will have to fill their shoes - maybe permanently. The drug game is a hierarchy (hence the term kingpins, perhaps? Gosh, I'm clever) and without someone holding the throne, the narco-kingdom falls into chaos. Chaos means more pressure put onto the folks left in charge, and more stress.

So as supply and demand dictates, the scales will become unbalanced. The lackeys, now having to compensate for the lack of an importer (or their importer, now having to make up for one of their idiot lackeys getting busted with a half-kilo of heroin,) are pissed off. Drug users are pissed off because either prices will rise, or quality will decrease as the supply chain cuts their product to ensure the supply is met. The demand isn't going anywhere, but the supply's been dented. Users and dealers alike will become desperate and seek alternatives. If a kingpin's underdogs take over their thrones, things will change - and this was highly evident after huge fucking bust in 2012 in which three quarters of a kilogram of heroin was seized by the R.C.M.P.

Enter the era of fentanyl.

Mmm. Sweet, dank, fentanyl.

That's right - fentanyl was hardly ever detected illicitly in Nanaimo before 2013, but after this massive heroin bust, fentanyl started leaking into the streets. Fentanyl's appealing for a lot of reasons - it's a hell of a lot cheaper, a hell of a lot stronger and, by technicality, a hell of a lot less illegal. Once people grew desperate enough for something to satisfy their need for strong heroin, they came upon fentanyl - and it caught on fast. Fentanyl accounted for 5% of reported overdoses in 2012 before the bust, bumped up to 25% by 2014. Paul Hasselback, a central Vancouver Island health officer, said that "we in Nanaimo are carrying an oddly disproportionate number of those [fentanyl related] deaths." That's for sure - 18 people on record died in 2013 from fentanyl in Nanaimo (keep in mind these stats are vastly undervalued - I know almost 18 people firsthand who died in 2013.) 27 died in Vancouver. Nanaimo has 84,000 people. Vancouver has over 600,000.

Now think - if the same bust that occured here in Nanaimo in 2012 occured in Vancouver, it wouldn't shake the foundation of the drug trade at all. There are bigger busts that have happened in Vancouver of course, but if the significance of Nanaimo's drug seizures are as disproportionate as the amount of overdoses per capita, then even busting a single figurehead in town could result in a huge increase of fentanyl. That certainly seems to have been the case - when I returned home from Halifax, fentanyl was a regular thing. It wasn't just an 'unknown substance in heroin that kills people" (a lot of people thought they were dying of allergic reactions when fentanyl first came about.) Far from it - fentanyl was common knowledge, and some dealers even offer a choice between fentanyl and heroin. h.Most people choose fentanyl - if it's strong enough.

There were a couple high-end dealers busted in December. That story didn't make the papers, but it did make a huge fucking difference in Nanaimo's drug culture. Immediately after their arrests, fentanyl overdoses began popping up like they had in 2013. Again, only a small percentage of deaths make the statistics, but it's become so common to hear among users that "Jim dropped last night," or "Mark overdosed," or "we had to revive Chris" that nobody even bats an eye anymore when we hear about another dead user. I've become desensitized to the loss of close friends because of the ridiculous amount who have died over the last few years. People are, literally, dropping like flies.

The bright side to this carnage, while not vibrant, is still there - the increase in overdoses has led Nanaimo and other cities in B.C. to offer overdose prevention courses and offer naloxone - a potent substance that reverses the effects of opiates - in an effort to curb overdoses. After a long federal battle, the  BC government has allowed naloxone to be available over the counter. That's a fucking awesome step towards beating stigma and helping users stay safe, and will certainly prevent overdoses, but one really has to wonder if it was necessary for so many people to die before this medicine became available without a prescription.

So, there we have it - we now have the supplies available to prevent overdoses that were unnecessary in the first place. If the local narcotic suppliers hadn't been forced to substitute heroin for another substance that carried less risk to import, most of these fentanyl overdoses simply wouldn't have happened. People would have kept shipping their heroin in, selling it to their junkies, and the trade - however illegal and taboo - would have flowed smoothly. Police intervention has created a massive ripple effect and its effects are still being felt to this day. Sure, the RCMP got almost a kilo of heroin off the streets a few years back - but is the ensuing death of hundreds of citizens a worthy price?

Thanks, guys!

Addicted to Heroin? Fuck the Stigma, Get a Prescription

Seriously. Okay, well it's not that easy, but who can even argue against regulated heroin use as a proper method of maintenance when the alternatives are methadone and suboxone? Methadone seeps into your bone marrow and destroys your fucking body and suboxone is a dozen time stronger than heroin with a much longer withdrawal period. I get it. Legal, prescribed heroin is an outrage and is preposterous - but have you studied the alternatives? Do it. Look into other opiate maintenance programs. Then get back to me.

Let's just inject our methadone anyways, k?

Also, this totally deserves its own paragraph. Y'know when someone's smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol while pregnant? You want to smack the smokes right out of their hand, don't you? Then why the fuck is acceptable to expect methadone patients to have deformed babies within the bounds of legality and yet the thought of someone using heroin while pregnant is shameful and infuriating?  Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not advocating use of either during pregnancy - but the fact that there are programs in place that warn you: "Hey - you're addicted to methadone and your baby might fucking die." Tells me that the introduction of a less-harmful heroin maintenance program is a GOOD IDEA.

Can you say handcuffs? Suboxone and Methadone are, for a lot of people, life sentences. I can't list names here, but a friend of mine had a close connection with one of the people in charge of the Methadone program in Halifax, and his words were that "Methadone is a treatment practice designed to take money out of the drug dealer's pockets and put it into the government." I mean, it's not like we didn't already know that... but it's kind of a shock to hear it from the mouth of someone who helps control the freakin' program.

So, with all that in perspective, maintaining your heroin addiction with, say, heroin, seems a little more sensible, no? I mean, you're already pissed off at yourself for being addicted to heroin, why the fuck do you want to get yourself wired to something stronger? No offense to any of my homies on Methadone maintenance right now -  I respect your choices and opinions, these are just mine. That said, heroin used to be mass-produced as an over-the-counter cough prevention agent and painkiller - also touted as a 'non-addictive alternative for morphine addicts.' That reputation was quickly destroyed and its use was restricted, but it seems that its making a resurgence - so clearly the FDA isn't working to meet the same agenda as it did a century ago when it outlawed heroin.

So, (even though I'd much prefer to maintain my addiction with kratom - more on this in my next article,) Vancouver has recently become the first North American city to offer prescription heroin to addicts outside of clinical trials. The heroin's manufactured in Switzerland, where this sort of treatment is already available (along with Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and Denmark.)

The only catch is that you have to get your shot done at the doctor's, similar to early-on Methadone treatments where you have to go to the clinic everyday to get your juice. This says that the addicts using the treatment are determined to maintain their use in a safe and regulated environment - as opposed to having to score from street dealers, bang their shit using dirty needles, wake up dopesick only to find out their supplier's out of town and they're going to spend the next 24 hours shitting their only pair of pants. Yeah, it's a good alternative.

A lot of the controversy comes just from the stigma surrounding the word heroin. Heroin. Say it to yourself out loud. H E R O I N. The word is so deeply associated with ruined lives, pain, sickness and death that it almost invokes the same feeling as unspeakable racial slurs or the name, 'Voldemort.' Well, it looks like it's going to change again - eventually - once the general population realizes that heroin's hardly different from any of the other regularly prescribed, habit-forming opiates: oxycodone, hydromorphone, fentanyl, you name it. They're all dependency-causing drugs that can ruin the life of someone less-informed.

HOWEVER, when you look at these two charts right next to each other,

you may ask a few questions. Are the deaths from prescription pain relievers so much higher because the public is less informed that they're just as fucking dangerous as heroin? Everyone's taught since childhood to stay away from heroin, but nowhere on the D.A,R.E posters of 'drugs that you and your mother should avoid' do you see OxyContin or Dilaudid.

So if heroin becomes widely available as a prescription... does that mean the death toll from prescriptions will rise, because a bunch of heroin overdoses will now be from prescribed junk? Or will the statistics decrease, because more people with chronic pain will realize that their medicine is classed in the same category as heroin, the devil they've been told to hide from their whole lives.

Who knows? All we can say now is that since starting the program, a lot of Vancouver's heroin addicts have moved off the street and into stable housing, citing that the drug's prohibition was a large cause of the issues surrounding it. Now that they can get their fix legally instead of self-medicating in a dangerous underworld, they can look towards focusing on the other aspects of their lives.

Really, who can complain about that?

The Heroin Addict's Detox Kit

UPDATE 2016/05/21: I quit a fentanyl/heroin habit using some of the medicines listed in this article, along with an a abundance of Methylphenidate (Ritalin) which really helped me get up and at 'em during the days. Aside from a few sweaty nights weaning off fentanyl and back on to regular heroin, the detox process itself has been a breeze. I've been lethargic and anxious, and the anxiety is just from the absurd dose of ritalin I've been taking. My kit included: Imodium, Kratom, Phenibut, Clonazepam, Seroquel, Clonidine, Ritalin, (I lucked out on the prescription meds, but similar alternatives can all be found online for cheap) Adrafinil, L-Theanine, Weed, and DXM. Things for post-acute withdrawal and weaning myself off the pharmaceutical shitstorm this withdrawal created were kava-kava, passion flower (makes a kickass anxiolytic tea, stronger than kava imo), more weed, more L-Theanine, more adrafinil.

It's a pretty big kit, but I'm writing this during the peak of day 2 of acute withdrawal and I can't feel anything bad. Restless legs starts to creep up on me sometimes but I'll just take a small dose of kratom and that'll be gone fast.



Quitting heroin is a bitch.

A real bitch.

www.substance.com

There's worse opiates to detox from - fentanyl, it's analogues, W-18 god forbid that ever becomes widely distributed, tramadol... whatever. you name it. Detoxing from any opiate is fucking hell, but if you play your cards right, it doesn't have to be.

Honestly, I feel bad for everyone who doesn't have a detox kit as varied as mine because it makes the process a WHOLE FUCKING SHIT LOAD EASIER. A friend of mine hitchhiked to the mainland as his escape from heroin - commendable, I've done the same thing. However, when checking in with him via text, I felt affluent about my meds - he was suffering and shaking and crying, I was laying in bed writing a novel.

It took me over two years to compile this entire list, and that was part of the reason people thought I was going off the deep end or denying my inevitable addiction - nope, I just didn't want to go through hell again. Let us compare - 

Method 1: Cold Turkey

SYMPTOMS: You will be plagued day and night with cold sweats, soaking through you shirts. You'll stink like sweat and shit because you'll have explosive diarrhea for three days straight. You'll be starving hungry but even the thought of food entering your stomach will make you throw up. If you wait too long to start using your detox kit, then you won't be able to keep anything done. Your legs will be twitching, shaking. Your skin crawls day and night so you can't even lie down comfortably to forget the rest of the symptoms wracking your body. Tears constantly stream out of your eyes, mucus from your nose. You. Want. To. Fucking. Die.

The dosage in this chart is absolute garbage but the timing's pretty spot-on

Method 2: Cold Turkey with a Detox Kit (and a slight wean)

First reduce your dosage a bit. Not too much, and not for too long otherwise you'll just end up back where you were. You probably won't be able to get everything listed below, but if you do:

SYMPTOMS: slight chills and sweats, and extreme lethargy.

So WHAT DO YOU NEED?

Most IMPORTANTLY

Kratom: Kratom's the leaf of a tree grown in southeast asia. Its main constituent, mitragynine, is actually a mild opiate - so, it's capable of killing all your withdrawal symptoms (given your tolerance isn't TOO high. If it is, use NMDA antagonists to reduce it until kratom can be felt.) Some say to be careful because you don't want to get addicted to kratom - I say fuck that, if you end up addicted to kratom then just jump off that because it'll be a hell of a lot easier than quitting heroin. Hell, if you have access to kratom, you can throw everything else on this list out and just taper off using kratom and nothing else.

A strong NMDA (n-methyl-d-aspartate) antagonist. Opiates stimulate NMDA receptors which create a flood of calcium and calcium-dependent processes which help inhibit the response of opioid receptors & messengers. Taking NMDA antagonists before you dose your opiates makes them a hell of a lot stronger (and can save you a lot of money, or kill you, depending on how responsible you are.) It will also prevent the onset of tolerance and withdrawal, though the mechanisms of why are unclear and evidence is primarily anecdotal (though I support NMDA antagonism as my #1 tool for detoxing. 

Modafinil (or one of its prodrugs). This can't go without saying. Without modafinil (well, I'd use armodafinil because its available legally online and converts directly into modafinil via your liver, whereas modafinil's a massively expensive prescription)  I'd never be able to get out of bed. It's  a stimulant, very unlike amphetamine - it doesn't amp you up, it simply gets rid of your lethargy and allows you to complete daily tasks without feeling uncomfortable.

Anti-cholinergics counteract the choline  rebound that occurs after abrupt cessation, causing a large number of histamine-related sickness symptoms (runny nose, watery eyes, sneezing, allergy-like symptoms)

CCK (cholecystokinin) antagonists of which I really don't know any besides Proglumide, which isn't easy to obtain.

Anti-adrenergics counteract the adrenaline rebound, which causes some super fucking unpleasant things like restless legs syndrome, crawling skin, etc.

Benzodiazepines like valium or xanax greatly take the edge of and ease some physical symptoms.

Weed, son. Weed. If it doesn't fix damn near everything, it'll at least make you capable of coping with it. I'm not a pot smoker - it makes me deathly anxious - but smoking pot during an opiate detox is one of the best ways to kill the nausea and make yourself comfortable.

www.zmescience.com

Anyway, those being the important ones, here's a list of the most prominent substances you should get before you detox.

NMDA ANTAGONISTS

Memantine/Agmantine

Strong NMDA antagonists. My favourite. Significantly (almost dangerously) reduced my tolerance to baseline after four days of using agmatine, after which dropping off cold turkey left me with minimal symptoms.

DXM 

Second favourite NMDA antagonist, stupidly strong. Easy to take too much and end up tripping balls though. It's the most easily available in OTC cough syrup, listed under medicinal ingredients as dextromethorphan hydrobromide. Make SURE your bottle contains NOTHING but DXM in its list of active medical ingredients, and consume 60ml of DXM (2-4 doses) 2-3 times a day for a week before quitting and during detox. This will reduce your tolerance and your withdrawal symptoms drastically. 

If the package says DM it usually contains DXM as its only medicinal ingredient

ANTI-ADRENERGICS:

Clonidine

Prescribed for withdrawals from a number of drugs. Helps with physical symptoms and helps a LOT with getting you to sleep.

OTHER CRAP THAT HELPS A LOT:

Proglumide and CCK modulators

Proglumide's an old gastric ulcer drug that has been shown to slow build up of opioid tolerance. may be a partial (non mu) receptor specific opioid ligand, and an extremely weak and strange analgesic that can only exert its mild analgesic effect when a person knows they are taking it --a property usually reserved for placebos, but when patients are told about it, it is slightly stronger than placebo! Weird. 

AMPA/KAINATE modulators

Ampa/kainate receptors are related to glutamate and n-methyl-d-aspartate neurotransmission, and a wide spectrum modulator easily available is l-theanine, (already mentioned above). 

A dual antagonist is tezampanel.

Calcium Channel Blockers

Pregabalin is known to selectively block calcium channels, and this contributes to its non-opioid painkilling properties. 

OTHER CRAP THAT HELPS A BIT

L-Lysine

Works better for potentiating benzodiazepiness but works for opiates as well as having a mild anxiolytic effect itself. In itself it is an extremely mild NMDA antagonist.

Gotu Kola/Kava Kava

Natural relaxants that can provide a nice buzz, calms adrenaline and lowers related symptoms, and can help you get some sleep.

Ashwaghanda

Mild NMDA antagonist. I use 1-2 grams twice daily or half hour before dosing. Available at health food stores or in the supplement section of some grocery tsores.

Why Nanaimo's Fentanyl Overdoses are Stupid

So, here's a piece of irony. At the time of writing this article, I'd just fled the city I lived in to get away from a huge fentanyl problem. I came back home, to Nanaimo - where there had always been a problem with heroin - to find it jam-packed with fentanyl. It's a port city, densely populated with low-income welfare bums, drug dealers, hippies lathered in patchouli, and business-class folk dreaming of relocation - and people hoping to make a cheap buck at the cost of someones' life.

Paula Bronstein/Getty Image

So what's the deal with Fentanyl in Nanaimo?

It's absolute horseshit. Garbage. It's sold as an alternative to heroin , by the point (.01) - supposedly a tenth of a gram. Some people have the decency to let others know the difference between fentanyl and heroin, but a lot of people - users and suppliers - don't have the slightest clue. I've called someone out for selling a mislabeled product at lethal doses and his response was, "uh... I didn't know they could be different."

The fucking RCMP doesn't even know a damn thing about fentanyl, which is a shame. The article says 87 grams of fentanyl was seized, worth around thirty grand and equated to be about 1,400 doses. That's so stupidly inaccurate that I can't even begin to wrap my head around why these people in charge of decommissioning drugs around here. Just because the 87 gram rock you seized had fentanyl in it, does NOT mean it was an 87 gram rock of pure fentanyl. Does a 750ml bottle of whiskey contain 750ml of alcohol? No. Here's some quick math.

• Fentanyl is medically dosed at 20mcg (yes, micrograms) per kilogram for general anesthesia. That means knocking someone the fuck out to the point that you can cut them open and they won't notice. Let's say I weigh 60 kg; a dose to put me into a borderline overdose (aka anesthesia) would be 1200mcg or 1.2 milligrams. MILLIGRAMS.
  THAT MEANS THAT A 1.2 MILLIGRAM DOSE OF FENTANYL WOULD KILL A STREET USER WITHOUT MEDICAL SUPERVISION.  IF THE COPS FOUND 87 GRAMS OF FENTANYL, THAT WOULD BE 87,000 MILLIGRAMS, WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO KILL THE ENTIRE FUCKING POPULATION OF THIS CITY.

If 87 grams of pure fentanyl was sitting around someone's house, people would die just from being there because the goddamn stuff's potent enough that inhaling airborne particles can send you into an overdose. The cops would have absolutely and completely died during their oh-so-accurate 'identification process,' just from rustling the packaging this alleged 87 grams came in.

(Let me also say that I'm well aware that fentanyl comes in a liquid form, pre-dosed for hospitals and pharmacies. This is not the fentanyl that street dealers are dealing with en masse. What they're getting is powder, sourced illegally from some backend lab out in China.)t

The point (ha) I've tried and failed to make to users, is that the shit being sold as fentanyl is dangerously labeled. Here's why -  even if heroin, for some absurd reason, was of a hundred percent purity, it would provide a massive hundred milligrams of DAM (diacetylmorphine, aka heroin) per point.

Conversely, if a "point" of fentanyl was 100% purity you'd have a hundred milligrams of fentanyl - ten thousand fatal doses of the stuff. This is bloody important, and nobody seems to pay attention to it.

"Oh, I'll grab a point of fentanyl Johnny McDealer."
"Sure, I got the best shit in town."

No you don't. If you had the best shit in town, all your customers would be dead (which, in contrast to when I first wrote this article, is a really fucking common occurrence in Nanaimo these days.) More recent and readily available analogues of fentanyl and opiate derivatives - like W18, roughly 10,000 times stronger than morphine, and carfentanyl, of similar potency - have been made available online for even cheaper than fentanyl, which was cheap as fuck to begin with.

Why not deal with something safer?

The idea of a thoughtful, selfless drug dealer is a nice sentiment (and sympathetic dealers do exist, to a degree) but it's never going to be the standard. Drug dealers want money from people, knowing to the fullest extent that they're profiting off their misery.

You could buy enough fentanyl to kill a small city's population for a few hundred bucks (and no, I won't tell you how.) Now, you can get shit that's dozens of times stronger for even cheaper. Seriously, if you handled W18 in a respirator suit through a glass wall wearing gloves, you could kill someone just by having them breathe in the dust off your suit. Maybe even through their own respirator. 

So, yeah. More likely your point is 99% of some unknown crap (caffeine anhydrous is a popular cut, allegedly to provide stimulation  strong enough to power through the overdose that the dealer's selling  to their customer) and a few micrograms of what you actually want to pay for.  That leaves you roughly 1% for the actual active product.

This could kill fifteen people

1% of 100mg leaves a huge fucking margin for error when it comes to drugs this strong. If one junkie's loading his shots of 'fentanyl' with a half point each time he picks up, he's going to keep doing that. One day his dealer doesn't mix his shit well enough and there's a hotspot in the dope where there's five milligrams of fentanyl instead of the couple hundred micrograms El Junko is used to. He/her loads up their half point shot, gets ten times his expected dose, and hits the floor.

This is exactly why so many people are dying. That's why the university and the methadone clinic have started handing out free overdose kits. Shitty dealers, dumb misunderstandings, and overconfidence. Ignorant suppliers don't care if their customers understand their product as long as it sells, and cocky junkies like myself would mutter on our way off, "dealers always say their stuff is really strong." The difference comes into play when their stuff IS really strong, and you're not expecting it to be.

So on one hand we have our resident idiots who are oblivious to what fentanyl is. They have no idea that their point of "fentanyl" contains less than 0.1% of what they're actually paying for. On the other hand, we have Mr and Mrs. Gung-ho, selling a fentanyl product DOZENS of times stronger for the same price, himself just as unwittingly misinformed as the people buying his product.

If these two groups of people meet, things are going to get extremely messy, extremely fast.

(Update: these groups of people are completely fucking interspersed now and there's a tragic overdose every single day.)

How does a thoughtful junkie inform a careless one? They can't. I've had friends die and be resuscitated twice within the same day. Some people don't care or just won't listen.

I've always been loathe to people telling me that death from overdose is caused by stupidity. Sometimes - such as I just described - it can be, and it's not always the stupidity of the user. Most drug users that I know are cautious, caring and concerned for their well-being and that of others. But when unwitting dealers are selling unwitting customers insanely strong dope, mistakes are going to get made and people are going to drop like flies - as they have been.

To tie it all off...

(yes, terrible joke, I know.)

The city's just vastly uninformed about the availability and strength of fentanyl. They're unaware of how EASY it is to just buy a thousand doses of one of fentanyl's cousins for a hundred bucks, buff them down, and have a thousand flaps of 'heroin' that sell for twenty bucks a pop.

A lot of these analogues aren't even illegal yet. I'm not one to support drug prohibition, but this is idiocy.

Aside from warning friends and users - ADAMANTLY - about preparation and safety, there's not a lot  one can do. It's hard to tell an entire populace of addicts about the "insane strength of this new dope," because I'll just sound like every other pusher and they'll seek the stuff out. There's signs everywhere warning about fentanyl. People know its name but not its structure. Telling people "if you inject this stuff, you will quite literally die," is often taken as a challenge. That's what we like to hear our dealers say.

Know your limits, though. Play within them - or else.

RealOverdose

Welcome to Neurosis

I was sober for almost fourteen years. Fourteen!

Hey - wait... didn't this used to say... ah, fuck it

Then I started high school. It's been a decade since, and I can't even remember exactly what it is I'm fighting to find again. Sobriety? I know that's the ultimatum - finding a balanced mental state. But how am I going to know when I find that balance? I've been fucked up for just as many years as I've been sober, and the fucked up years are a lot fresher in my memory (contrary to obvious allusions about blackouts and drug addicts having negligible IQs. Though, mine did drop a few points throughout high school.)

Is God just going to take a break from signing the roster at the Pearly Gates, part the goddamn clouds (sorry, bad sentence to blaspheme the Lord) to come down and give me a smack on the face?

"Hey - Nigel! You're sober again! You can stop diffusing all the crap out of your bloodstream now. Stop trying to inject Ayurvedic medicine into your heart chakra. Seriously. Stop.


Honestly, I'm pretty sure my blood type changed from O-Negative to PCP-Positive.  That's gonna take some time to return to homeostasis. I've been pumped so full of noxious fumes that I might as well have been huffing a bellows full of meth smoke for ten years.

This is a good thing, though  - if not for my blatant disregard for my body, brain, and future, I wouldn't have any of these crazy ideas kicking the shit out of each other in a deathmatch of the medulla floating around in my head that I can now force upon you lovely readers.

If I've killed (or am killing? will continue killing? perhaps started an amphetamine-induced free radical chain that will melt my cerebrum?) this many brain cells, I need a freakin' outlet. Something productive's gotta come out of this. A peep into my mind, upon first glance, would show an outsider an fractured and abstract view of reality, garbled with indecipherable verses and unimaginable images.


This blog's going to be my attempt to pull these paradoxical processes out of my brain and convert them into laughable, thought-provoking and maniacal leisure reading. For folks who have either dabbled, are considering dabbling (PS: don't do it) or were smart enough not to dabble but still like to observe the repercussions of those who do. Behold - the DARK SIDE of the SPOON.


(get it? because when you cook... crack.. the underside of the spoon gets black... and.... y'know, the dark side of the moon...Pink Floyd... did drugs... shut up it's clever)