Читать книгу The World According to Vice - Vice Magazine - Страница 47

Psychedelics like LSD were used in many early models of psychosis. Even today, the majority of scientific literature refers to psychedelic drugs as “psychotomimetics”, meaning drugs that mimic psychosis. Much psychedelic research has to be done under the guise of studying schizophrenia or related disorders. There is obviously a difference between schizophrenia and tripping on LSD, but the idea is that if drugs could be developed that did the opposite of LSD, they would be effective treatments for psychotic disorders. Antipsychotic drugs work by blocking the stimulation of dopamine and serotonin receptors, which are targeted by practically every enjoyable drug in the world from methamphetamine to cocaine to LSD. When the serotonin and dopamine receptors are blocked it effectively turns you into a zombie. Maybe you know a girl who takes Seroquel or you took it yourself once. It’s not fun. Just keeping your eyes open is an enormous struggle. Although, if you’re a paranoid schizophrenic, antipsychotics can chemically dull you enough to keep you from acting on violent impulses. They are also useful for aborting a “bad trip”, and unlike Xanax or Valium, which only calm you down but don’t actually stop you from tripping, antipsychotics stop the trip dead in its tracks.

At the Chinatown needle exchange, where I am apparently a regular. Photo by Jess Williamson

Before getting out of bed I take 4 mg of risperidone, a dose high enough to make a 300-pound homicidal maniac slumber peacefully. I get up and go out to get some vegetable juice. I walk down to the East River and look out across the water. After ten minutes I’m starting to feel sedated. I lie down in the grass. It starts to rain so I get up again; this time my entire body feels leaden. I have to think about picking up each leg as I walk. Pick up leg. I’m getting really wet and I don’t know if I will make it home. Pick up leg. A cop car drives by and slows down as it passes me. I feel painfully awkward because I know that I’m walking in slow motion through the rain without an umbrella, but I can’t move any faster. The cop car speeds off.

Pick up leg. I’m a pharmaceutical masochist. Curiosity—the things you’ve made me do! I’m the least high person on the planet. In the history of humans no one has been less high than me. I take a Ritalin and it does nothing; I might as well have dropped it down the sewer. Pick up leg. A ten-year-old on Grand Street says that I’m “walking like a fag”, to which I respond, “What’s up.” I stumble into my apartment building and crawl up the stairs. I crawl to my door, crawl inside, and pass out on the floor into the deepest, blackest, most deathlike sleep I have ever experienced. I wake up eight hours later feeling like I just had a successful lobotomy.