Читать книгу The World According to Vice - Vice Magazine - Страница 46

It has long been known that smoking weed gives people the munchies, so logically it should follow that deactivating the receptors in the brain responsible for getting high would give you anti-munchies. Pharmaceutical researchers tested a drug called rimonabant with just such an action and found that it was incredibly effective. The drug was approved in Europe and appeared to be one of the best weight-loss drugs in history. Rimonabant is inexpensive, effective, and totally non-addictive. Unfortunately, in addition to giving users anti-munchies it was found to have a prominent side effect called anti-happiness, aka suicidal depression. In the months following the drug’s clinical trials, there were over 70 patients displaying signs of suicidality, two completed suicides, a host of seizures, precipitated multiple sclerosis, domestic abuse, and a man who strangled his daughter.

When you smoke weed, it stimulates parts of your brain called cannabinoid receptors. This may seem obvious, but our brain has these receptors for reasons other than getting stoned. Our cannabinoid receptors have an array of crucial regulatory functions in the unstoned brain. We depend on a cocktail of natural weedlike chemicals called endocannabinoids to regulate inflammation, appetite, and maintain some semblence of emotional stability. When you take rimonabant, not only is it impossible for you to get stoned on weed, it’s also impossible for your body to feel its natural endocannabinoids. I have heard more than one stoner speculate about a future where the government requires rimonabant implants at birth to prevent the population from “expanding their minds”. Unlikely, but one must wonder what it would feel like to live in such a world!

Since normal drugs are generally taken socially at night, I decide to do my anti-high experiments first thing in the morning and alone. But I’m curious about how my friend Sam would respond to rimonabant so I persuade him to try it with me. Sam has smoked weed all day, every day, for the last five years. When I suggest he take a pill that would make it impossible for him to get high for at least 24 hours, he is not too keen on the idea. But after asking about 50 or 60 times and offering to buy him weed in return, he cautiously accepts my offer.

Both Sam and I take a whopping dose of rimonabant three times higher than the maximum dose prescribed for weight loss. After swallowing the pills, Sam goes out to meet his weed dealer in Manhattan. A half hour later, he texts me to say he’s having an attack of “explosive diarrhoea”. I’m also feeling the onset as a subtle but persistent anxiety. Sam comes back to my apartment and shakily loads a pipe. He takes a deep hit, waits, and shakes his head, saying he feels “absolutely nothing”.

We decide to go out and get some food at a Polish diner. Upon walking into the restaurant we realise that our waiter is an incredibly slow guy we’ve had in the past who never refills the small water glasses. Both of us tense up. I order an egg-white omelette and Sam interrupts me to say, “What are you talking about? You want the whole egg. Why would you just want the whites?”

“I usually get egg whites. They’re good. Is there something wrong with that?”

Sam turns to the waiter. “He wants the whole egg.”

I look down and see that my hands are trembling. I remember reading studies that suggest rimonabant lowers the seizure threshold. I don’t mention this to Sam. My omelette arrives and I start to feel nause-ated the moment I look at it. The omelette is made with a sickeningly orange American cheese. I might actually vomit. Sam has a healthy appetite. In the past I have seen him eat a whole chicken down to the skeleton, but on rimonabant he picks at his omelette for a few minutes before loudly protesting, “If someone does not get this omelette away from me I’m going to vomit… I’m going to fucking vomit and then I’m going to die!”

I am the least high person in the universe. Photo by Maggie Lee

We leave the diner and anxiously walk down St Mark’s. I stop inside a bong store and touch my fingers to the glass like a peasant outside a department store on Christmas. I have never felt so un-high in my life. I must admit that my thinking is unusually clear and I could see a lower dose of rimonabant being helpful when studying for a test—well, it could if it didn’t make me feel like I was about to simultaneously cry, puke, and have a seizure. The fact that this is a widely prescribed drug is unbelievable. The idea of taking this daily is insane. It would be less than a week before I killed someone.

In the late afternoon I try smoking some weed. I take a deep hit, feel a transient sensation of threshold stonededness, and then whatever it was passes in less than five minutes. Sam is not willing to let the rimonabant win, and throughout the day he continuously attempts to get high, taking hit after hit after hit from an aluminium cigarette. Around midnight, I hear him take a deep toke, sigh, and scream, “Damn it!”