Beyond the valley of the dolls

by: Kate Carraway

February 03, 2010 9:02 PM

Comments: (15)

I’ve got fun with pharmaceuticals down to a science

The first time I smoked pot was mythic: on my birthday, in a dark forest, with my def posse of preteen girls, all suburban rebels with long, dirty hair and torn jeans. The marijuana high, though, was just buzzier than a Camel cigarette’s, nothing like I thought it would be. Soon enough there were other drugs, all relatively better.

But then, then! I was shot through with Valium when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. I remember bliss, doing some retardo dance with my hips and giving thumbs-up to the technician a bunch of times. While my mom drove me home, I hazily drooled so much blood on my SPIN magazine that I thought the large red splotches were part of a new design scheme. Then I threw up in the powdery snow on the driveway. When the Valium wore off, I knew what my new thing in life was: pharmaceuticals.

As a pill hobbyist, I’ve learned that the most important thing about recreational pharma is restraint. The anti-anxieties and analgesics that are very often taken, uh, therapeutically are engineered and prescribed for genuine physical and emotional problems and using — from legitimate or black market access to diazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam and the rest of them — can too-quickly develop into addiction. Be easy. When I have an occasional panic attack, I need psycho-tropics for real. When I have a randomly free Friday night to sink into, I want them for fun.

Used to be that my Getting Fucked Up repertoire involved one or two pills with a cocktail, taken to enhance a bath or masturbation or Nabokov (pharma is nothing if not a solo pursuit), but that, increasingly, seemed like too much of a dice-roll, so my pill-taking is now done exclusively sober (unless I forget about the Prosecco at five, down a Perc at nine, remember at 11 and contemplate ipecac).

The sedatives, my favourite, offer a slow high: a half-hour ago I took some codeine, and I feel like I’ve had a half-glass of red wine with a shot of lead. I guess it’s because they are engineered in labs, but the pills are just so reliably good, with such a predictable high and, since they are, you know, doctor prescribed (to someone), they feel generally safer than drug-drugs and hardcore boozing. (My ex-boyfriend often suggested that my periodic fun-pharma was somehow worse than his frequent binge drinking, but let’s be real.)

The ritual of drug-doing is embedded in its appeal. My historical favourite is the craft of dipping an opened safety pin into a vial of hash oil, spreading it onto the delicate paper, sprinkling just enough tobacco on top and rolling it into a putrid, high-potency cigarette; good tequila may not require the salt and lemon, but the wrist-licking prologue and puckered rind-sucking coda transforms a drink into a sex act.

A common ritual of pill-taking doesn’t exist (you just... swallow), but the tricky, members-only sport of prescription-less pill procurement replaces it. Maybe some people do take up their Gmail spam on offers of VIAGRA, VICODIN, VALIUM!, but the real currency of pharmaceuticals (among casual users, not Oxy fiends) is friendship and access rather than dollars.

Poking through my small stash, I can trace product to somebody’s breast implants (Percocet), someone else’s wisdom teeth (Tylenol 3), my own legit prescription (Ativan), something I traded pot for (Percs, again) aaaaand some V-letter stuff that was shamefully and classically pilfered from a rich-people party (yahtzee!). My pharmacological white whale is morphine: when my dad got it once after surgery, I was scorched with jealousy. He didn’t share.

Not much unlike pot smoking, which I am a bored expert on, clandestine pill-popping (and a working knowledge of pharmacology) feels rogue in a glamorous John Cheever-meets-Valley of the Dolls way. It lacks the morning-after tragedy-cred of bar-bathroom nose powdering (or bar-bathroom intercoursing) while still being a little big dangerous, appealing to demure drug braggers who want to be just a little bit sexily scandalous. The pharmaceutical cachet can be a welcome transgression in lives that are as prescribed as the pills are supposed to be. And, yeah, it’s a way to use and still be somehow above-board. They’re still drugs, of course. The best drugs.

» What’s your poison? Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or tweet @katecarraway. Follow EYE WEEKLY on Twitter.

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My Life, My Fault

Beyond the valley of the dolls

Kate Carraway