I Don’t Do Drugs.
I don’t do drugs.
That said I made and brought about a dozen weed infused rice krispie treats to Coachella weekend.
Let me reiterate, I don’t really do drugs.
Last year I fell into a proverbial windfall of marijuana when my old boss moved to Australia and bestowed upon me most of her stash, as well as her impeccable recipe for weed butter based rice krispie treats. In fact, I still have a jar of the stuff living in my kitchen cabinet, accompanied by a really nice pipe left by a loser I dated for a couple weeks.
Let me be clear, I have never purchased drugs, or drug related paraphernalia, and yet I have a whole cabinet shrine. It’s just that I don’t really do drugs. I never have.
At Coachella two years ago, my best friend and I had discussed the possibility of taking REAL drugs, like MDMA, or Ecstasy, but agreed we wouldn’t seek it out. If it happened to land in our hands, we would take it. Real Zen. But in reality, who the hell was just going to GIVE us expensive drugs? We are both pretty cute, but come on.
So this time we came prepared. She had purchased both MDMA and Adderall. I had never taken either drug, because if you remember, I don’t really do drugs. In exchange, I brought the weed rice krispie treats. Having booked luxury hotel rooms, purchased (not me of course) good drugs to shove in our bras, and brought plenty of layers for the unseasonably cool weather, we were ready to tackle our psychedelic experience like real adults.
The second night of the festival was when we decided to take the MDMA. I was incredibly nervous, but reassured myself that I was with people I trusted and nothing would go wrong. As my friends took two pills in one gulp, I erred on the side of caution and just took one. An hour into Florence And The Machine, and I wasn’t feeling a damn thing. Like a pro with over-inflated confidence, I popped a second pill.
I guess I understand glow sticks, I thought to myself as I watched the stage lights pulsating. I didn’t feel terribly different, although I uncharacteristically did enjoy being threaded through the crowd as my friends locked hands in a human chain as a means to pass through the hoards of half-naked twenty-somethings.
Before I had a chance to really let those two little pills work their mind-altering magic, I popped half of an Adderall. My best friend shared the rest, as she expertly broke the capsule in half with the quick pinch of her fingernail. We were all going to The Neon Carnival because my friend had scored us wristbands into the exclusive, celebrity-ridden after-party, and we needed a little something to help us party until four in the morning. We were in our late twenties, after all.
If you’ve never taken Adderall, don’t; it’s essentially the Bud Light of speed. It’s so fucking amazing. I felt more alive than I ever had, and somewhere around three in the morning I thought, now I understand how people stay up all night. I was awake. I was present. I was READY FOR ANTYHING. But let’s be clear, just because I enjoyed it, doesn’t mean I’m someone who does drugs.
On the ride to our last day of adult Candy Land, my best friend and I chowed down on the last of the rice krispie treats, in anticipation that they would kick in at just the right time.
Halfway into the Gotye set; you know, to hear that one song, I started to feel really weird. I slowly picked my knees up like a horse, as I tested out my new legs made of solid lead. Time and space seemed to slow down, as I turned to my best friend and said, “I think I’m really high.”
She nodded her head and said that she too was really high. I asked her why these rice krispie treats were so much stronger than all the other ones from the same batch. We had been eating them all weekend and felt completely fine. She had no idea why, but what she did know was that Melanie Griffith was there with her daughter. She was absolutely positive this blonde woman in a hat a few rows ahead of us was in fact, the wife of Antonio Banderas. For some reason, this both excited and frightened her.
Melanie wasn’t the only celebrity we hallucinated during that show. Ben Covington (the character that Scott Speedman played in Felicity) and Ben Lambert (a kid I knew in elementary school, whom my friend and I stalk on Facebook because he’s a hot ginger) also made appearances. Thing was, both Bens were the same person, which proved to be the most fantastic epiphany we’d ever had in our whole twenty-seven years of life.
When Gotye was done singing about somebody that he used to know, I announced that I needed churros. We somehow made our way to the line for churros and ice cream and stood there, desperately trying to make coherent conversation. I bent down to find my wallet in my backpack. When I found the cash, I had no idea what to do with it. I had literally forgotten how to use money, and I was spending way too much time bent over trying to figure it out. My friend was convinced her twenty dollar bill wasn’t going to work for a six dollar ice cream, so she settled for the five dollar churro, because that math makes total sense.
As we walked to our next show munching on churros that were drying the shit out of our mouths, my best friend said she felt so weird, almost like she was rolling. We stopped and looked at each other. It hit us; we were rolling. Apparently, unbeknownst to us (obviously, I don’t do drugs), if MDMA is still in your system, other drugs (the rice krispie treats) could trigger a rerelease. I texted my mentor in Australia to confirm that this was truly a thing, and she assured us that it was exactly what we were experiencing.
Not since the incident with the Bens twenty minutes earlier had I experienced such an intense epiphany. WE WERE ROLLING. This changed everything. Once I realized what was happening to my body, the cloudiness I was struggling through passed. Everything made perfect sense. But it made too much sense; I got scared. I wasn’t prepared for this. I didn’t know if I wanted to be rolling. My heart began to race with anxiety, until I gave myself a mental slap.
“Heather, this is only going to be two hours of your life. Get a grip and just have fun. It’s just drugs.”
So, that’s what I did. I went to watch Girl Talk throw down some sweet mash-ups as I rolled in and out of mental awareness, compulsively touching my back pocket to make sure my cell phone was still there. I was deathly afraid of losing my phone while my brain was exploding. I stood in one spot, mesmerized by the flashing lights as my best friend kept telling me to “come up” and join her. She was standing on a square metal base of a railing, one inch above the grass. She told me later that she imagined I thought I was dancing really big, when in reality I was holding my arms tight to my body as I slightly swayed.
At the end of the show, a confetti canon was set off. “We’re in a snow globe!” I said to my friend. “It looks like CGI,” she said back to me. “It’s real though,“ I replied.
It was real. The whole thing was real. I did drugs.
Would I do it again? Maybe. I suppose if it was handed to me, I might do it. I’d never seek it out, because that would mean that I do drugs, and me, I don’t really do drugs.