TheBongPlace: The Marijuana Blog

1. C4 Explosive

It’s hard to know what to make of the claim that you can get high from plastic explosives, but it appears in a fairly level-headed book titled Uppers, Downers, All-Arounders, written by two people from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, so if some hippie has tried it, then… more power to him. They devote two whole sentences to it in their book, saying:

“Modern veterans have been known to ingest C4 or cyclonite plastic explosives for their psychedelic effects. Tremors and seizure activity can result but usually not an explosion as it takes a blasting cap to set off the chemicals.”

Well that’s good to know… you won’t level your entire block, just one half of your brain. A Marine Corps training document on explosives contains the warning “Do not ingest any explosive material.”

2. Carbogen

When you inhale this mixture of 70% oxygen and 30% carbon dioxide, your brain thinks you’re dying of suffocation, although you’re getting enough oxygen to function normally. People who have studied this shit like Dr. Jack Provonsha state that “Subjects on carbon dioxide report separation of the self from the body. And as with the [psychedelic] drugs and NDEs (near death experiences), there were reports of caves, tunnels, intensely bright lights, visions of other person, luminaries, reliving of the past and spiritual experiences.” During the same time that LSD was introduced into psychotherapy, carbogen was also used for its similar, if much shorter term effects and at its height, up to 200 therapists used the procedure.

3. Catnip

Catnip isn’t just for felines anymore. Most humans who have smoked it say it’s like getting a mild, mellow pot buzz. Nothing to get too excited about, but it’s cheap and legal, you just have to fight off your cat for it.

4. Clomipramine (trade name: Anafranil)

The strange thing about this prescription anti-depressant– most often prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder– is its very strange side effect it causes in some people: spontaneous orgasms while yawning. Yes. Orgasming from a yawn. If I owned a restaurant, I would totally put this in the food just to see how many people eat some spaghetti and then come all over themselves. But I digress.

A 1983 article in the Canadian Jouranl of Psychiatry presents the case of three people who experience this pleasurable but disconcerting phenomenon. A woman in her late 20s said that she came every time she yawned and found she could induce orgasm just through forcing herself to yawn when she wasn’t tired. A man in his mid-twenties also had the fun side effect, but through multiple times of yawning and coming in his pants, he had to wear a condom all the time lest he end up with semen stains all over his pants while at say, work. In the third case, a woman in her thirties didn’t orgasm every single time she yawned, but if she didn’t she would become so incredibly horny that she often had to stop what she was doing to masturbate. In all cases, the side effect ceased once the patients stopped taking the drug.

5. DDT

When it was still thought to be pretty safe for humans, the now banned pesticide was used for kicks. As inconceivable as it is now, a popular cocktail of the 1950s called the Mickey Sim, was made by adding a small amount of DDT to gin. Since the chemical attacks the nervous system, a very small dollop produced sensation that were pleasurable in a fucked up way.

6. DIPT

DIPT is a tryptamine that’s known for mainly affecting auditory sensations. An experiment in the book TIHKAL by Alexander and Ann Shulgin notes “Radio voices are all low, music out of key. Piano sounds like a bar-room disaster. The telephone ringing sounds partly underwater.” Orally taking a larger amount results in “Abrupt sounds have golden spikes attached to them as after-sounds, but I can’t focus in on any other sensory changes.” At much higher dosage, “The voices of people were extremely distorted– males sounded like frogs– children sounded like they were talking through synthesizers to imitate outer space people in science fiction movies.

7. Poisons and venoms

Several plants known for their hallucinogenic properties are quite toxic, such as the Datura family, which includes Jimsonweed. And of course, you can make the argument that any substance is toxic if you take enough of it. Still, some natural substances known primarily as poisons– arsenic, strychnine and venom– have been used in sublethal doses for their mind-altering effects. A couple fun historical tidbits that illustrate the use of poison to fuck one’s shit up:

In 1817, when the Queen of Portugal was dying a slow, painful death, one of her slaves gave her a mixture of pot and arsenic which completely relieved her of her suffering.

In his article theorizing that Napoleon Bonaparte may have been an arsenic junkie, Napoleonic expert Bob Elmer writes: “Arsenic was also used by some as a mind-altering drug, much as marijuana or cocaine is used today. In small doses, it gave the user a feeling of well-being, strength and sexual staying power.”

The Encyclopedia of Pscyhoactive Substances points out that holy men of India smoke cobra venom for its psychoactive effects. Also noted is that 10 Native American tribes in California are known to swallow live ants as means of inducing visions. The ants bite the stomach lining, injecting their venom and later may be vomited up, still alive.

8. Rhododendron

A single species of rhododendron, the lavender ponticum, is known to create trips when its smoke is inhaled. The plant is quite poisonous however, so this seems to be a case where ingesting a sublethal dose of a poisonous plant gets you high by attacking the hell out of your nervous system.

This is the only one on the list that I’ve had experience with, though sort of by accident. When I was going to college, I was living in Asheville, NC, which is up in the mountains, where there’s a crapload of Rhododendron and one day while hiking in the woods, I found a branch that was in the perfect shape of a hobbit pipe and even hollowed out down the middle by decay or ants or something. Well, I took it home and tried smoking pipe tobacco through it and ended up for the next 30 minutes having an insane out of body experience that my soul was just barely hanging onto my body by a thin silver thread. It was terrifying and I don’t recommend it.

9. Saffron

The expensive flavoring saffron– the dried, crushed stamen of the Crocus sativas– is not often mentioned in the canon of mind-altering, but it was the most oft-used ingredient in laudenum, after opium and alcohol. The Encyclopedia of Pscyhoactive Substances notes that the famously orange-yellow flower “is known to have soporific and narcotic effects similar to those of opium.”

10. Salamander brandy

Not to found on the shelves of your local liquor store, salamander brandy is noncommercially produced in parts of Slovenia. At least four ways– all involving cruelty toward the poor amphibians– are used. In one, the salamanders are places on a sieve and brandy is poured over them until they drown. In another approach, the poor beasts are suspended by their back legs as brandy drips down a string and over their bodies. In all all cases, the salamanders are so stressed and frightened that they excrete large amounts of poisonous slime, which then infuses the brandy. The effects are visual hallucinations and feelings of wanting to fuck anything in sight. Those crazy Slovenes.

11. Urine

Not just any urine, but the piss of someone who has partaken of the amanita muscaria mushroom. At one time, Eskimos and tribes in Siberia were known to use this trick for a couple of reasons. First, since there wasn’t an endless supply of shrooms, this approach helped economize them. Not only drinking the pee of someone who had eaten the mushroom get you high, drinking the urine of the first piss-sipper would also work, and so on down through five people. Plus what else are you going to smoke when you live in the northern Arctic? Plus, it’s a free warm beverage. Score.

12. Xenon

The noble gas xenon– which you might remember from the days of studying the periodic table– can be inhaled for a high similar to nitrous oxide (laughing gas). In a trip reported on the website Lyceaum, an anonymous user notices “an amazing ability to zero in on singularity thoughts and memories and hold them in suspension for sentiment orgasms.” The adventurous soul notes that unlike laughing gas, there’s no headaches or auditory hallucinations.