I am the opposite of Hamilton Farnsleyworth, or whatever the name of the drug bison is that Vice employs to unbalance his mind. I’m only in my teens and I’ve only been doing drugs for about two years and now I have to quit because every time anything moves in front of my eyes I see track marks and I can’t have a shit without checking behind the shower curtain. Here is a small encyclopaedia of how not to get high if you’re looking to have a nice life and not feel like your sanity is bubbling out from your ears.

Magic mushrooms
Over Christmas last year, me and seven friends went to Amsterdam for ten days. Looking back, ten days was a really stupid amount of time to go for, but hey, that’s what we did. Because we’re all really broke, we stayed in a hostel right in the middle of the red light district, but because half of us were chicks, it wasn’t like it was convenient for us to have a lot of sex with immigrant slaves or anything, it just meant that the atmosphere surrounding us was always full of anger, abuse, paranoia and stupid fucking canals.

Anyway, on the second day we all ate loads of shrooms. Because I’d done them before I was supposed to be the shamanic guide, but I don’t think I was as supportive and awesome and fatherly as everyone had hoped. There are no hills between Amsterdam and Siberia, so it was really cold and we had to go and hide out in our hostel with bars on the windows. In this nasty bunk bed-filled dorm, one of us was stupid and hippy enough to put Dark Side of the Moon on, and as it dipped into one of its characteristic psychedelic swoons, we all feared out.

For me, thrilling casual hallucinations quickly became a remorseless onslaught of sharp edges and hurtling silhouettes, which were only made worse when I shut my eyes. Dan and Rachel ran out of the room. Apparently they went to a coffee shop and bought a bunch of spliffs, and as Dan passed them to Rachel she’d rip them apart, so eventually he abandoned her (it took us three hours to find her, she can remember being on a boat, but that’s it).

We all sat in the room shouting at each another and hallucinating horribly until someone had the presence of mind to go and buy some chocolate and we sugar rushed our way out of it.

E
We got back the day before Christmas and I spent a nervy, quiet few days with my parents before New Year’s Eve dragged me back out. We’d got a bunch of pills, and once again, as the only one of us who’d ever done the things before, it was my job to talk people through it – something I fucked up when one of my mates puked, looked up and said, “I just puked blood”. Looking back, he clearly hadn’t, but was feeling messed up and confused. But I freaked out, thought my head was going to explode, and demanded my girlfriend lead us to the nearest hospital on the other side of the Thames (some of us are too young for pubs, so we were drinking with London’s fancy-dressed public). We asked a policewoman to get us through the crowd, but she told us we were idiots for taking pills in the first place and, basically, we could go screw ourselves. When we did get there we were all rushing but pretty much would have been feeling fine had we not been walking through stardust in the middle of a New Year’s Eve massacre. My girlfriend met a man who had thrown himself off the bridge at midnight because his dad had killed himself on Christmas and I sat next to an old lady with a champagne bottle in her head (what made me feel really lame about that was that we got to see a doctor before she did, because wounds are less unpredictable than potential drug poisonings). Anyway, we all survived.

Speed
Later that January, I went skiing with my school, we got a coach and flight back and I didn’t sleep the whole way. When I got back I went to my girlfriend’s. Her parents were away and we fucked, for the first time ever, which was awesome. When we came back downstairs, one of her brother’s friends was racking out speed, so I took a big celebratory bump, and ten minutes later I was convulsing on the bathroom floor. My girlfriend didn’t sleep that night as she just had to stop me shivering myself out of the bed.

Coke
A month after that we spent a weekend doing lots of coke for the first time ever. Although I don’t think it was that much, it was clearly too much for me. We decided to do a line during Saturday afternoon before we went to our friend’s party. On the bus there I lost my vision and my hearing, and finally collapsed on the top deck. My girlfriend and Dan dragged me off the bus and I came to. Then I kind of ruined the party by spending the whole night with my face on the dinner table.

Weed
After the magic mushrooms of December, I’ve been feeling pretty psychologically unpinned, but I’m a stoner by habit and, after spending two years of my life getting high before 9 AM and stoned at bedtime, that habit wasn’t going to change (even after the silly diary of my drug disasters that you’ve just skimmed through). Eventually, though, it went wrong for me and dope. On my 18th birthday my dad got me and my mate tickets to Upton Park, and my mate got me an extra-big skunk joint, which we shared before getting the tube there. That tube journey was my downfall, a 45-minute visit to hell. Once we were at the game I was pretty certain I was going mad and was waiting for the stadium to whirlpool into another dimension of insanity that I’d then spend my life living in while my friends grew older and forgot me.

That didn’t happen, and I habitually kept smoking dope, only now I was having mushroom flashbacks every time (not fun ones). One time, I was watching TV with friend while he played with his irritating fingerboard and soon he was moving in terrifying stop-frame motion. After that I stopped smoking dope, but the flashbacks persisted. At Glastonbury this summer I was sober around my high friends and heard someone whisper my name. I turned round and no one was there. That was pretty scary.

I haven’t even really drunk since then, and I’m feeling OK. I just thought I’d point out that not everyone has the right mind for drugs. I think I’m over them now.

BEN STANFORD