Injecting gives you the fastest rush but you also get higher chances of less pleasant stuff — HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, dirty hits, vein collapse, overdose, thrombosis, abscesses, local infections and so on. You do your body a great favour by choosing less risky means of getting the goods into your body.
If you insist on injecting, remember to practise safer injecting techniques, and also give your veins some time off with these alternatives. It should be stressed that how you get the drugs into your body won’t change whether you develop a physical addiction or not.
Snorting drugs
Sniffing drugs is usually safer than injection in terms of the relative danger of transmission of blood-borne viruses. However, the membranes in your nose are very delicate and can rupture as you snort so you should always have your own snorting equipment that you don’t share with anyone else. Don’t use dollar notes as you don’t know who has used them before you.
As with injection, there are still things to watch out for. Have a clean preparation surface to prepare your drug for snorting. Toilet seats are a definite no no! If your drug has been cut with all sorts of adulterants, you don’t really want these going up your nose as well. And don’t overdo the snorting. You can really mess with your nasal membranes if you go at it for days on end. At the first hint of trouble, get yourself to a doctor. Sinus infections are not a lot of fun.
Be careful with snorting heroin. By the time it kicks in, you may have already taken enough for an overdose. Smoking it is a fair more controllable method.
Smoking (chasing the dragon)
Smoking has a lot going for it in terms of less harm done, particularly when it comes to heroin. There is no risk of getting viruses such as Hepatitis C and HIV. There’s less chance of overdose. It doesn’t give quite the same rush as injecting, but it’s stll very fast and gives you the option to extend your high by topping up every hour or so. You should only use new foil and pass your cigarette lighter flame over both sides first to get rid of any contaminants.
Swallowing
Swallowing tends to the safest and slowest method ingestion. It is safer as the body has a much greater chance to filter out impurities. As the drug comes on slower, the effect tends to last longer as well, making it a favourite technique on the dance scene for speed and ecstasy. Speed has a pretty nasty taste so some people choose to ‘bomb’ — wrap a cigarette paper around the speed to reduce the taste.
Pills like benzodiazepines are best swallowed as they have heaps of chalky fillers in them. These fillers won’t irritate the stomach, but are bad news for veins or nasal membranes. There is no rush but the high should reach the same intensity and last longer.
Swallowing is pretty ineffective for heroin — it loses half its strength when it is converted to morphine in the stomach.
Shafting (rectal)
There’s a huge number of veins in the anal passage extracting all the nutrients they can into the blood stream before you head off for number twos. In fact this ability to pass things into the blood stream quickly means that shafting can retain much of the ‘rush’ that users get from injection. Some find that trading off some of the rush for much less health risks is an excellent deal. If you get off on drug preparation, getting your mix and fit ready retain some of the ritual as well.
If you are shafting a mix, we recommend limiting it to 1.5mls of fluid. While squatting, gently insert the syringe (without the needle of course!) until it is just inside the anus then ease the plunger down. A bit of vaseline or lubricant will help if there is any pain. The sphincter muscles should be strong enough to hold the mix inside while it is absorbed. It might pay to do a trial run with water first if you are worried about losing your mix.
While we are talking about shafting, women have the added advantage of shelving, where you can insert your drugs in the vagina. This is similar to the rectum, in that you have plenty of blood vessels behind a very thin wall of cells, so the drug passes into the blood stream very quickly.
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