SINK OR SWIM
the most prolific drug user of all time
editorial by knina strichartz
When I first began accessing user message boards in the very late 1990’s, there was one poster who always would blow me away. I started reading about his saga on bluelight.com and he seemed to have a comment for every thread, every discussion, and every topic. He wasn’t just on bluelight, but every new message board which began to pop up with questions and threads on the subject of drug use. I mean, this guy was beyond anything I had ever imagined. He walked the line and seemed to have zero fear and zero discretion with what he was willing to try for the sake of experimentation with drugs.
I remember reading a post of his where he talked about using different liquid beverages to dissolve substances for IV injection. He listed ones he had already experimented with, which included, “sprite, coke a cola, orange juice, ice tea, lemon juice, apple juice.”
I couldn’t understand how it was possible for someone to inject with orange juice, but I was also a naive baby who had yet to learn the proper process of break down. But he did even crazier things than shooting OJ. Mixing a certain number of mg of this thing with that thing, asking if people thought it was safe to take a whole box on Benadryl on ten Klonopin and 2 Oxy 30s…
He wrote about plugging and breaking down pills, putting tampons soaked in alcohol up his butt, and ingesting possibly toxic plants for supposed psychedelic effects. I read every post he made.
I didn’t know if he was just a total lunatic or some type of drug god, but I constantly questioned how he was still alive, and where he got the time and money to indulge in all his insane escapades and experiments.
He did have his scares though, god or not. The other half of his running post saga contained stories of and panicked questions about an accelerated heart rate, massive sweating, and throbbing head pain with possible bleeding from the ears. I wondered just how long he would be able to stay alive with all the symptoms he had suffered. The advice people responded with never seemed to be very helpful or even sensible like “go to the hospital”. Instead, it was mostly suggestions of home remedies like “eat a spoon of ginger and sit on an ice pack”, which I figured must have worked, since the placebo effect was just the right cure for what seemed like pure hypochondria at times.
I was absolutely certain he had more than a few mental health issues. For one thing, there was the way he wrote his posts. He always referred to himself in the third person. I had a high school Spanish teacher who did the same thing, but it’s not really a common practice. He spelled his name with all capital letters whenever he typed it. I assumed the combination of the two things had some strange narcissistic and delusional significance attached to it. I wondered what he looked like and the specifics of his life. For about a year and a half I was fascinated with this daring and brazen lunatic, and reading his posts took up the majority of my time spent online. That was SWIM, the coolest and craziest drug user I never knew.