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Local Drug Scene

17:22 / 20.12.03

I'm writing this out of curiosity caused by the 11-year sunspot cycle thread and mention of 'shrooms becoming popular again.

So...What is the drug scene like where you live?

My neck of the woods is Western MA.

Pot is widely available, quality ranging from fair to excellent. Prices are average to a little bit more expensive than normal. Quite a few growers out here who know what they're doing. (Hash & hash oil are very hard to come by though.)

LSD is around, but scarce. Mostly weak/speedy blotter kind. Not really worth it IMHO...'Shrooms are impossible to find now. (Late 80's and early 90's they were easy to obtain, mostly from migrating deadheads and rainbow gathering types.)

Other types of hallucinogens are equally impossible to find.

E is available, mainly in nearby larger cities with late-nite club scenes, but prices tend to be a bit absurd.

Lots of coke, crack and heroin for those who are into it. Those in the know say that the H is pure enough to snort/smoke, but not being into it I couldn't rightly say. Prices are absurdly cheap though.

Crystal meth is around as well, as are usual assortment of prescription uppers/downers, painkillers and such. Not my thing either.

Locally, I'd say coke is the "in" drug these days, judging by what I've seen. (Personally, I prefer pot/hash and quality acid, but that's just me.)

18:16 / 20.12.03

It waxes and wanes according to local police policy, doesn’t it? I think there have been court rulings recently which have clarified the UK law on mushrooms. Clarified in the sense that selling mushrooms has been confirmed as being perfectly legal as long as they aren’t dried, or something really stupid like that. It’s a loophole which will probably only be closed when it becomes politically useful to do so, ie when there’s a clamour in the Daily Mail that Something Must Be Done.

Could be wrong, of course. Personally, I’m not at all fussed about commercially available drugs. ‘Wouldn’t trust a mushroom I haven’t picked myself, and in any case haven’t been mushroom picking in years. I was just reporting what I hear around and about.

18:42 / 20.12.03

Not quite on topic- but our local police policy; trying to arrest my friend for waiting 5 minutes for his girlfriend to come out of work every night, searching him for smack, taking his lighter out his bag and asking if he takes drugs with it.

21:39 / 20.12.03

I live in norway, so this might not be of particular interest.. but hey.. I might as well share..

theres mostly pot.. which is very accessible due to the large amount of your typical alienated and unmotivated youth.. some speed, even some heroin, but this is reserved for a few well known hardcore junkies.. E might be accessible sometimes.. shrooms might be around sometimes aswell.. LSD is unheard of.. I would say that pot is the "in" thing at the moment, have been for quite a while actuallu..

EE

20:58 / 22.12.03

I live in Detroit. Anything you want you can get, except acid. There are plenty of substitutes, though: mescalin, shrooms, foxies, some new thing that's supposed to be like mescalin but doesn't make you sick and has better visuals...one of the plus sides to living in a shithole like this. Sometimes I find stuff that I've never even heard of.

00:49 / 23.12.03

Uk midlands - mushroom season was a big disappointment this year, where as last year my particular spot was incredible. On the other hand you can get fresh mexican shrooms online with next day delivery

. pot, gbh, Es & ketamine are all about. lsd is less common, annoyingly. i would imagine crack, smack etc. are available if yr into that 2. There was an article recently on the news about how people going to clubs etc. are generally more interested in doing stuff like gbh, ketamine, coke etc. than just Es. a m8 of mine sells a bit o' K and recons theres loads of demand, so its probably true.

04:28 / 23.12.03

Melbourne report

Loads of Ice and crystal meth. Which has produced loads of cranky iced up clubbers who don't like dancing and just walking endlessly across dancefloors (producing Kwality nightclubbing vibe! YEAH love it!

). Still lots of pills, though often crappy. Occassional MDMA powder/caps which are always fun.

There is coke but its pricey.

Acid is making a comeback of sorts. Microdots have been doing the rounds recently. Some liquid, though I swore off acid and its kin a while back so I can't vouch for quality.

Lots of the candy raver kids are doing GBH and K. A lot of GBH in clubs as well. GBH is also being used as a date rape drug, which is pretty scary.

A ton of smack landed on Melbourne many moons ago leaving us many junkies.

Of course lots of pot, usually of high quality. Being grown in the hills by hippies and their children.

14:56 / 24.12.03

Pittsburgh

Pot is regular in good and average qualties, though I'm getting my kind from DC atm anyway.

Coke is plentiful.

Mushrooms are irregular, but present. Someone recently was industrious enough to make carmel from them, which has been making rounds, bless their souls.

LSD is non-existent, and has been so for several years now. Pretty much ever since that last big bust of one of the big chemists that cook the stuff. There's been a little through now and then, but its hard to find and expensive when it does turn up.

Ecstacy was dry as bones for a long time, but is suddenly all over the place again. Looks like a big lot of powered MDMA hit the local scene, and is occasionally getting pressed into pills and resold. But happily, you can get the powder by the gram, too.

Foxy was popular for a bit before it was scheduled. Other fun stuff like 2C-E (probably what the "like mesc but better visuals" stuff EE had was) and Iprecytle(sp) has been about. GHB and similar is around a bit too, but not terribly popular.

Don't know about H personally, other than there's enough about for people to support their habits.

I'm otherwise really looking forward to NYE

13:46 / 01.01.04

Did mushrooms develop that whole 'eat me an you'll trip your tits off' thing as a defence mechanism? Me thinks it not working.

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:51 / 01.01.04

Well, a dose of toxins that fucks up a 15 stone mammal's head might be rather less agreeable to a 6-ounce mammal... wasn't there a theory that it was to encourage primates to eat them (like catnip), so they would then spread the spores?

Gaymastajay - I'm interested in the use of heroin in the Nordic nations. When you say "a few well-known junkies", do you mean you can actually identify by sight every junkie in your locale? How many would you day there are? And do you think it's just an availability issue, or is there another reason why heroin usage is so low?

17:47 / 01.01.04

On the other hand you can get fresh mexican shrooms online with next day delivery

Where would that be from then?

Just out of interest you understand..

17:58 / 01.01.04

Haus - yes, you can actually identify them by sight..there are two kinds of junkies here really, you have the heroin addicts, speed phreaks etc, and you have the dope heads(which are also looked upon as junkies by most of the community)..

I would say there are a minimum of 5 hardcore junkies, here(heroin, speed etc.)and its not an availability issue, heroin usage is so low becuase of the fact that it is frowned upon among the "upstanding citizens" aswell as by the weed/mushroom users..my hometown is very small though, so the situations in the bigger cities is naturally very different..

14:01 / 02.01.04

Helsinki/Finland

The drugs scene in Finland in general is based on shit hash ("paskalaatta", "hatsi") and speed ("vauhti", "piri").

The shit hash is brought in via Copenhagen or Amsterdam, and the speed comes from Estonia and St Petersburg, I'd guess.

In the past 10 years there have been fads, trends and new arrivals:

extacy ("esso", "nipsu") (never in large amounts) with the rave scene, for real since about '92

GBH ("gamma") because it was legal up 'til, what, -98 or something, still available, mainly in the club scene

LSA in the form of flower seeds, because of them being legal, made it into the papers and became a short-lived fad in around -97

N2O ("ilokaasu" (=joy-gas)) in the rave scene, especially with the goa-trance or psy-trance-scene, also faddish in wider circles every now and then, when a new croud "finds out" about it

"research chemicals", whatever happens to be available for mail-order legally, has been a thing for the past one-and-a-half years or so, mainly in the psychedelica crowd (trance and others)

heroin ("hepo", "polle" (=small horse), "herska") became a big thing in the city of Turku in around '99, especially in a fairly isolated heavy metal-crowd that for some reason had lived on there, infected a lot of the rest of the city, and led to a lot of deaths among fairly young people, which led to the semi-legalization of:

subutex ("subu"), a brand-name opiate substitute, used as a substitute orally or as a drug intravenously or snorted, which here has nearly totally replaced heroin, due to availability and low punishments, as well as non-availability of heroin, reportedly due to the drought of smack from Afghanistan. However, the afghan-smack is supposedly making a comeback.

cannabis ("kukka" (=flower), "blossi") homegrowing has become a significant fad in connection to the birth of a new genre of fin-reggae-dub, since 2000

cocaine ("koksu) in very small circles, made popular and more wanted than ever by a huge hype when a young media-magnate-to-be, Jussi Ahde, was shown live on a home-video on Finnish evening news saying "Hi, my name is Jussi Ahde, I'm about to snort coke, and if anyone ever makes any money on this video, I'll take half of it." They didn't make any money, but were busted instead. He's a karaoke-show-host these days.

14:54 / 02.01.04

pachinko_droog, where in W. Mass are you? i went to Hampshire College from 1993-1997.

anyway, i'm in sunny San Diego, CA right now.

drugs here are mostly pot and E, which is pretty easy to get. prescription painkillers are popular too, generally mixed with alcohol, and are definitely on the upswing. stippers and hipsters love them their pain pills.

shrooms are not too hard to get, and becoming more and more common. hippie-flipping (shrooms + E) is becoming especially popular and seems to be making inroads with the club kids.

acid has been really, really hard to get for at least two years now. other psychedelics are pretty hard to get, though (supposedly) i might be getting access to DMT soon (~crosses fingers~).

coke and speed are also pretty common. coke has been making more and more public appearances in more and more places where it wasn't a few years ago, and speed is really easy to get and pretty cheap. in certain circles it's very, very common. K is reasonably common also, though apparently it used to be easier to get in Mexico than it is now.

G was popular a few years ago, but it seems to have waned significantly.

22:51 / 02.01.04

Courtesy of discussion on a BBC article:

I think they should rename LSD to LS1 to reflect how easy it is to get drugs in Leeds City Centre.

And:

This is the only city where you can find a dealer coming to your door by car, selling everything you can ask and much more.

So...

... Where are they?

Besides being offered some on the way to Leeds festival a few years ago (when, shock horror, the lineup was actually really good), not a sign of anything. Perhaps being too shy to ask people doesn't help, but the few times we have done (from blatantly trashed peeps) the response has always been, "Sorry, anywhere but here," or, "Usually, but not tonight". Oh, except for a friend's brief trip into the cybergoth room at the Wendyhouse, returning with a few small pink pills.

(Er... oh, never mind.)