Who Has Gone Before Me: Trip Report Reviews

Ok, so the point here is information sharing with regards to the mushroom experience. Soon I'll get more into sharing my own experiences, but I think it's important to acknowledge the community at large, and I think the best way to do this is by reviewing here what I've found around the net. I'll be reviewing trip reports. Sounds like fun yea?

Well our first trip report comes to us from Erowid, entitled A Fucking Awful First Trip is Not ALL Bad by Milkman sTan. Essentially it is this guy's first experience on half an eighth he split with his cousin sometime in 1999.

My cousin and I decided to trip for the first time the night before a Phish concert. We assumed we would find more drugs, when we'd get there. He and I WERE good friends prior to the trip...

He and I had picked up an eigth of shrooms. We had been told by the person who sold us the shrooms, that you shouldn't take a person who flips out to the hospital unless they are comatose or violent, because the hospital can't speed the drugs out of your system. You must wait it out.

This reads like a fairly typical first experience from someone with no experience, doing it without having anyone else with any experience around, and while ignoring the good advice of the (I assume) one person with any experience that they had talked to before embarking on this trip. Of course this begs the question, why did I pick this trip report? I picked it because it is so typical. This is the kind of trip report you read where the person comes back and says, "I had no idea what I was doing, my [crazy] friend and I took this drug, and crazy shit happened." In other words, while we're grateful to have people go through this experience and be willing to share it, but if the most we can get from that is: hospitals are awful places to trip and crazy shit can happen if you eat mushrooms, then I don't think it is particularly useful. Sorry.

We began the evening with a good start. We didn't drive and we didn't get into any hostile situations, until he 'came down early'. I was fucking nuts and had been all evening. It hadn't been a problem, but I was acting very oddly. I didn't know who my parents were. I was making no sense. I lost touch with the greater part of reality. No real visual halucinations ('cept tracers), just raw confusion. However, my cousin was the one to panic. He was afraid I was O.D.ing or I was permanently nuts, and he drove me to the hospital.

It's impressive to me that people can lose their minds this much on half an eighth. I know it's possible, I've seen it in first timers that I have babysat, but I'm skeptical that it's all the mushroom and not also largely a psychosomatic response: "I feel really weird, I ate mushrooms, the mushrooms are making me feel weird, omg this is really weird and I'm going to freak out, omg I'm freaking out now, ahhh."

My cousin kindly informed the hospital that I was overdosing on shrooms. They led me to the Emergency Room where they tried make me lie down on a table; they were planning to pump my stomach, unbeknownst to me. I resisted. They insisted. A struggle involving swearing, biting, much thrashing 'bout, and a good half dozen people including doctors, security guards, and nurses who forced me down on the table.

Thank you for this! This raises the exact point I'm trying to address, and that is, "Most people have no fucking clue when it comes to mushrooms." Where do you even start to describe what's wrong here? First, the cousin totally ruined everything by assuming the mushrooms were doing the worst thing possible: kill someone. Most of us don't have access to the amount of mushrooms it would take to overdose. Second, the hospital is treating this poor guy like he's in a PCP rage! A half dozen people, including security guards, who have to force this guy onto a table? What the hell do they think is going to happen, he'll turn into a werewolf and eat everyone? And then they tie him down, pump his stomach, and sedate him! Come on! If he is already tripping that much, his body has absorbed the active ingredients, and all a stomach pump is going to do is agitate the situation.

So yea, this is a trip report where roughly a dozen people who have no clue about mushrooms encounter a young man who is very well acclimated to experiencing strong effects from psychedelics. They basically ALL freak out because no one knows what the fuck is going on or how to handle it. I mean shit, they punish the guy right there on the spot for doing something any curious human would! They strap him to a table, pump his stomach, and inject him with a powerful sedative, and the poor guy was tripping through the entire experience. That is fucking torture in my book. This is why it is important to develop a better understanding of mushrooms.

I tripped again, under more supervised circumstances (with experienced trippers and steady rolling friends) to prove to myself that I would have been fine without the hospital's help. I went nuts again, but all went well, I merely learned I have a great susceptability to shrooms, and I have experimented with many other hallucinogens (LSD, anti-histamines (Benadryll/Dramamine), DXM, Estacy, and Morning Glory seeeds.) since then, and had a damn fine time, too. I still trip off shrooms; I have learned to survive the confusion that ensues, plus it is cheaper because I require less. I also learned very strong coping skills. Oh, well. What doesn't kill you only makes you stranger... Er, I mean stronger.

At least it has a happy ending (despite the fact he missed his Phish show). This could very well have been the baptism of an intrepid psychonaut, destined for beautiful, mind expanding experiences. Props to Milkman sTan for pulling through this one and deciding it was worth a second chance.

Now this is what I would consider a very conventional trip report. I say conventional because it is described in terms of the conventional, it reads like a police report more than a trip report. There is very little said about the experience itself and that is what the point of a trip report is supposed to be! I'm not sure any of us are particularly interested in what it would be like to lose your shit on mushrooms and get hauled to the emergency room by our dip shit friends. I'm only marginally interested in how the guy reacted to the mushrooms; yes it was intense and it made you temporarily insane, that's what they do. What I want to know is, how did the mushrooms react to all this? What did the mushrooms think about Milkman sTan and a trip to the hospital? This, in my mind, is what a trip report should be. I know it's a tough requirement, but we're talking about the report of an internal experience, and so expressing it in terms of the external, convention world really misses the point. I won't fault the Milkman for this though, he was new to this, and someone should have taught him better.