Experiences - DXM, kratom and cannabis: Wretched, morbid, frightening

[cornsail]

I'm posting this, because I've never seen anything on this particular combination and my friend SWIM's experience was brutal.

Background:
SWIM had used DXM on many occasions, 800mg or so at maximum, but usually much lower. SWIM has experienced moderate dissociation on DXM, but generally didn't find it unpleasant.
SWIM had been taking 100mg per day of zoloft. SWIM had only used DXM once on zoloft taking around 320 mg, which resulted in a normal 2nd plateau experience. SWIM may not have done this if he'd been smart enough to look into potential interactions between the two before hand.
SWIM had smoked cannabis a handful of times and been everywhere from mildly to extremely high. SWIM experiences mild dissociation and paranoia if he smokes too much, but not to a distressing extent.
SWIM was new to kratom and had only used it once on its own, which was subtle, but pleasant.
SWIM has used salvia several times and small amounts of LSA.
SWIM is male / 155 lbs.

Prelude: Kratom and Cannabis
SWIM had an amazing time with kratom and cannabis. He lay in bed as beautiful, intense waves of numbing, floating sensation flowed through his body. There were minor auditory hallucinations (his body seemed to interpret the sounds of background hums as voices until he payed close attention) and closed eye visuals, as if peering in on dreams from a distance while awake. His mood was decidedly happy and peaceful.

The main event: Kratom, Cannabis and DXM
Since SWIM had kratom, smoke and DXM around he did some quick research on how well they combine with each other. He could find nothing on the three together. He found people saying DXM and kratom synergized well, some saying that DXM amplified the effects of kratom. There also seemed to be a general consensus that DXM and cannabis went pretty well together although could be highly dissociative at high levels. That was good enough for SWIM.
SWIM started out by taking what he considered a small but solid 1st plateau dose of syrup, 180 mg (SWIM figured this amount was low enough to be safe, despite the zoloft). The first plateau usually makes SWIM relaxed, warm and empathetic while retaining high functioning. Right afterward SWIM added boiling water to about 1g of 15x kratom extract and let it sit 15 minutes, then drank it down.
An hour later, or perhaps a bit more, SWIM was feeling pretty sedated and ok, but nothing all that strong. He decided to take a couple hits of pot at this point (from the same batch as the previous experience). A few minutes after taking a couple solid hits from the bowl, SWIM became extremely high. Or I should say SWIM was feeling some effects from the THC very strongly. There was no body high, just perceptual intensity and time lag. SWIM started to watch an episode of The Office on itunes that he had missed on TV. Dwight was annoyed that no one was paying attention to his fire safety lessons, so he decided to create a lifelike simulation of a fire and make his co-workers learn from experience. He created a source of smoke, and made the door handles hot. Everyone was panicking. They started smashing windows. They thought they were going to die. Oh my god. Was this funny? It was awful, morbid, horrible. Dwight finally announced that it was just a drill, but now Stanley had had a heart attack and wasn't breathing. How f--ing terrible. The characters faces seemed cold, dry and alien. SWIM turned it off. He felt like crap. He lay in bed just trying to wait out the bad feelings. Something he felt reminded him of salvia. He thought it was the combination of intensity and bodily discomfort that salvia tends to inflict on him. Familiar parts of the DXM experience were there, much stronger than they would be for a normal 180 mg dose, but other parts were not. NONE of the good parts were there. No warmth, no love. All of that was stripped away leaving everything hard, cold and unpleasantly strange. SWIM rested his head on a blanket and it almost felt like resting it on bricks. He lay on his back. The combination of sedation and feeling of not quite being in his body made the idea of doing anything other than lying down rather out of the question. Patches of warm and cold seemed to swim around his body. He could hear a rhythmic grinding noise that seemed like it was coming from just outside the apartment. There was also a faint ringing in his ears and a hint of soft high pitched music coming from somewhere.
SWIM thought he felt a constriction in his chest. He worried he might have a heart attack, as he'd already been feeling like he might be dying. He started thinking about death and what people would think finding him dead all due to mixing some stupid drugs. He'd never been afraid of death, but this was no way to go. The idea of people thinking he died because he was an idiot trying to get high was terrible. He tried his best to relax and avoid those kinds of thoughts.
SWIM closed his eyes and the dream generating portion of my mind was alive with images, more vivid and expansive than the last experience. It's hard for SWIM to remember details, but nothing seemed particularly meaningful. He remembers a tall thin white structure in the darkness--perhaps a tree or a doorway--with dozens of pale naked human like beings flying out of it, some to the right and some to the left, creating a sort of moving pattern. Strange creatures talked but didn't say anything comprehensible. He kept feeling like he might be dying and mumbled "please let me live" to whatever powers that be might be listening. Whenever he noticed that his heart was beating fast or that his chest felt numb he would get particularly scared, but he made an effort to fight off panic. He knew panicking would just make his heart beat faster which would make him even worse off. He closed his eyes again hoping he could sleep somehow. The images always flowed when his eyes were closed. He almost felt himself drifting off to sleep when he saw a sudden image of a being pop up behind his bed and tug on his foot. He distinctly FELT his foot being tugged and opened his eyes, startled. Nothing was there. He thought maybe the thick comforter he was under had shifted in a way that hit his foot and that the image of the foot tugging entity was generated by his mind as a response. He didn't really know. He knew from the prior experience that kratom and cannabis can make his body interpret real sounds and physical sensations in strange ways. He tried to sleep again, but again he was startled out of it, suddenly having the strange idea that someone had come into his room. He tried keeping his eyes almost closed, instead of all the way. This seemed to be a better way to go, because there were no visuals.
SWIM did seem to sleep for a little while. He just remembers something snapping him awake. This time there was no image, sound or delusion. He just suddenly became awake, his digital clock staring at him in the midst of the darkness. Something was different now, something was particularly not right. He glanced around the room feeling both an extreme sense of being "in the moment" and dissociated from himself. He was now filled with a new kind of innexplicable fear. It wasn't fear of death or anything physical for that matter. Perhaps it was a fear of being himself. Perhaps it was just fear for its own sake. The dissociation and heightened sense of awareness of the moment definitely seemed related to the fear, but it is hard for him to explain. Again he tried to calm down, reminding himself who he was and what that felt like. Not too long after this things started dying down. SWIM thinks the experience started wearing down about two hours after he inhaled the cannabis.

Epilogue: Naked Cannabis
The night after this bad trip, SWIM was hanging out with his roommates and watching television. A bowl was getting passed around. He took a hit and felt okay. He laughed and laughed watching some particularly funny scenes. Maybe an hour later SWIM took another hit from the bowl and things started going wrong again. He became highly stoned, but again there was no good body high to go with it. Unlike his usual susceptibility to the munchies under the influence, he didn't feel like eating. Dissociation, paranoia, insecurity and feelings of worthlessness started hitting him to a ridiculous degree. He was 'special', different, a fucking joke, people just put up with him out of politeness, he had no place being here. SWIM recognized these thoughts and feelings as the result of a bad reaction to the pot, but they were very f--ing powerful and he could escape them only by shutting himself in his room, lying in bed and waiting them out. There was a little bit of heart racing and head flushing again, but physical discomfort and fears didn't phaze SWIM too much this time. Lying in bed, he wondered if these "revelations" about how much everyone despised him were true, whether they would carry on past the trip and if his life would be different afterward. Not surprisingly, they did not carry past the trip, although he doesn't doubt that these feelings were based on some real parts of his psyche.

SWIM is still trying to make sense of these experiences. He figures that the combination of DXM and cannabis is probably what caused him to have a bad experience. Either that or the DXM reacted badly due to the zoloft. The cannabis and DXM seemed to be stripped of their comforting qualities while their dissociation and intensity were amplified. It's not just that the good bodily sensations were not there, but almost that they were at war with each other, creating discomfort and sending around strange waves of warm and cold. SWIM made efforts to relax and enjoy the trip several times, but it was simply not a state that could be enjoyed; only endured. The happy feeling brought on by kratom was not there either. SWIM is not sure what role the kratom played in all this. Certainly its combination with cannabis made for a repeat of the closed eye visuals and auditory hallicunations.
SWIM wonders why he had such a bad trip with cannabis alone. Was it a "flashback" brought on by association? It didn't seem that that could be all there was to it. Was it the remaining DXM in his system, reacting with the pot once again? Did a bad interaction of DXM and zoloft do something to his brain, changing the way it reacts to pot? SWIM is not sure, but perhaps he will try pot again in a week and see if he has another bad reaction.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Interesting report of difficult experience with unusual combination of drugs
	Very interesting. Thanks for posting

[bigloc]

In swims experance dxm and zoloft didnt have a bad reaction but eveyones bodys are not the same. The discomfort you felt from the pot may have been what some people call a "white out" but that happens to swim when to much is smoked and swims tolerance has gone down. Also do you think that taking zoloft has affected you experance when taking hallucinogens, because swim has a feeling thats a big part of his pets insanely high tolerance.

[Sushi]

OP should check DXM sub-forum for threads on combining DXM with Zoloft (Sertraline) and SSRIs in general. There are quite a lot of them but to put it shortly: they are those things swiy DO NOT want to combine. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) or any serotonin releasers (MDMA -or Ecstasy in general- also amphetamine as far as Alf remembers) combined with DXM can lead to serotonin syndrome which is a very unpleasant and serious condition that can result in a fatality.

DXM + cannabis = safe, great synergy

DXM + SSRI = always risky and potentially very dangerous
DXM + kratom = ??, no idea, does kratom affect serotonin at all? Those threads would suggest that there should be no problem with combining kratom with DXM and kratom with SSRIs:
kratom and DXM
Questions about Kratom and SSRI's

Combining SSRIs and DXM, on the other hand... :
Dextromethorphan + SSRI: yes or no?
Want to take DXM on an SSRI...

[lucian]

First time Swim's friend's tried dxm he shut his eyes and it was like a lucid dream, he was able to be in another room as if he was there. Sometimes SWIM's mate has lucid dreams (unaided by chemicals and the such), sometimes he has sleep paralysis, and other times he has what can only be described a 'dark' lucid dream. In sleep paralysis people often feel entities enter the room and touch you, in SWIM's mates 'dark' lucid dreams there is just a sinister molevalent presence and he knows bad stuff is about to happen. Where as in a lucid dream one knows they are dreaming and can to some extent influence the content of a dream, in 'dark' lucid dream one knows they are dreaming buts feels powerless to the narrative and cannot even wake up. Both have the lucidity, the clearness, but normal lucid dreams for SWIM's mate are normally in sunny daylight, where as the bad ones are at night time.

SWIM's mate also gets similar 'golden flashes' that he gets lucid dreaming from some opiates i.e opium. It's possible that SWIY's drug interaction caused something similar? Just a thought.

SWIM's mate also smoked weed with DXM and got the fear pretty badly before the DXM started, then he had the weird lucid dream like state prior to MDMA like euphoria. Be careful with DXM though, SWIM's not sure about it seems to feel bad for SWIM's mate.