I am sitting in the back seat of a stolen car, on both sides of me sit teenagers smoking spliffs. The driver, who says his name is Mike, is also smoking a spliff, though I would consider it to be more of a 'blunt' or 'doob'. The air in the car is thick with delicious smelling smoke, my head is becoming heavy with the illegal atmosphere. Hard techno music is thumping the subwoofers behind my seat as the car zips along the M25, I do not know the precise location of our destination though I can hazard a guess that there will be no wi-fi hotspots. The conversation in the car is minimal. I can't help but be reminded of the beach landings on Normandy in 1942, the sense of ritual quiet as each soldier prepares for the coming onslaught. Not that I was there, but I have seen Saving Private Ryan which I was told by film-makers to have been an accurate representation of the event. The lads in the car smoking cannabis could have potentially fought on those lousy beaches themselves had they had the poor luck to be born eighty years earlier. Instead it was the twenty first century and the war being fought was to get out of your head at the weekend. Are these drug taking youths any less brave than the soldiers of world war two? I was about to find out.
The car rolls to a stop in the darkness. Mike and his friends get out, I follow a few steps behind, not used to tracking across the slippery night soil in my Armani shoes. We are heading towards a forest. Up ahead I can hear crazy music and the laughter of young people. I ask Mike how often he comes to these parties.
"All the time, yeah? Even when I'm not here, I'm still here. Just in my imagination, yeah?" He says, offering me the drug spliff. I take a few drags and pass it back, holding the smoke in until we reach the edge of the clearing. In front of us are perhaps a hundred or so teenagers dancing in the darkness whilst a DJ plays white label bootlegs from the back of the van. The only lighting emanates from mobile phones and cigarettes. I ask Mike what happens now.
"We go find the man." He says, leading the way through the throng of people. It isn't long before we find a drug dealer. I stand awkwardly a few feet away, I am at least ten years older than most people here. Mike returns with a smile on his face and small bags of powder in his hand.
"Let's get stupid." He hands me a gram of the new drug that is popular with teenagers nowadays. I lick the back of my hand, gently tap out some powder and proceed to snort it up my nose. I have just taken about a third of a gram of 6-2sb monosulphoboridium diemthlamide. Otherwise known as 'turbo bully', or 'turbs' for short.
Turbo Bully was first synthesized in 1996 by scientists in Botswana in order to try and increase libido for animals in captivity. The drug itself didn't have this affect, though it did make the animals act strangely. It wasn't until Turbo Bully was accidentally taken by humans that scientists knew exactly what it did. The drug first dilates the central nervous system, engorging areas of the brain that lie beneath the neocortex. It quickly increases libido and relaxes the muscles, whilst inhibiting emotion and cognitive functioning. As well as this are feelings of euphoria, dipsomania and mild panic. All of these combined have made Turbo Bully into the ideal drug for partying youths trying to get high on their own supply! The thing that seperates Turbo Bully from cocaine, ecstasy, methadrone and other amphetamines is that it's effects last for four days, making it an extremely cost effective way to get off out of your head for a bank holiday weekend. I can already feel the effects of the drug taking hold as I wade into the crowd.
Bodies, faces, light, music. My own body and mind is rolling along at a frantic pace, as if fat snakes have replaced my skeletal structure so that I writhe like some subterranean thing burning in the sunlight. My awareness is fleeting, sometimes moment of extreme lucidity take over only for my consciousness to return into the drug fuelled nightmare of the night. I find Mike again at some point and ask him how much I was meant to take. He laughs when I say I have took the whole gram, which begins to send me into a kind of panic. By that point I had been trying to dance for a while and failing miserably, barely aware at the disgusted looks of the teenage faces that surrounded me as I rolled in the dead leaves and mud, groaning. I black out. It is morning and I am walking alone down a country road, unable to remember how I got there. The drugs effects are still powerful, my brain feels as if it has a direct connection to the internet, but the internet of the late nineties. Things take on a slight 'geocities' aesthetic, all I can think about are gifs of screaming skulls and wireframe models. I try to rest in a field but find that sleep is impossible. I am more wired out of my mind than I have ever been and only eight hours have passed.
I find myself at a motorway service station, I must have walked it. In my hands I am holding a copy of the radio times. I open it up and see doctor who smiling at me from the glossy page. I tear his face out and stuff it in my pocket. It may be useful later. There is a loud ringing in my ears.
Somehow I have gotten onto a coach. I do not know it's destination and feel too scared to ask anybody. I push myself as close as I can into the chair I am sitting in and look in awe at the traffic speeding past, unsure as to what I was doing. It is too much for me and so I go and sit in the toilet located at the rear of the bus. I look in the plastic mirror and see myself, pale, gurning, pupils dilated, a cut above my eyebrow. The visage of a rave maniac. I decide the best thing for me to do is to try and get home.
I'm unsure of the next sequence of events exactly, but I have tried to piece it together from various notes I had made on both my arms, answer phone messages to my friends and family and my credit card statement. Somehow I had ended up in Glasgow and decided to get a train back home. I must have gotten on the wrong train or forgotten where I had lived as I ended up in Blackpool. From here I travelled down the coast until reaching Wales, where things get strange. Though I do not remember what happened to me in Wales, I have the feeling I may have engaged in some sort of animal combat, perhaps against pigs or cows, though I'm unsure exactly. By the time I got back to England I was dressed in some clothes I had found in a bin bag outside a charity shop doorway. Using a combination of taxis, public transport and a rented motorbike I finally reached my house. After checking the date I had found only two days had passed, I still had another 48 hours left in the narcotic adventure. I cannot properly convey the feeling of dismay I felt at that moment, though it seemed to me that the effects were less strong and at least I was home. I had also gone deaf in one ear. I spent the next two days between my bed and my bath, listening to radio four and drinking herbal tea. There were occasions where I wondered if I had gone insane and that maybe there was no such drug as Turbo Bully, though I dismissed these ideas as ridiculous. Of course it existed. How else could I explain the nose bleeds, the tinnitus, the fidgeting, the jaw clenching, the constant sweating, the hallucinations, the discolouration of my glans? As the fourth day started to end I reflected on the question I had posed earlier, if taking drugs in modern Britain was in any way similar to WW2. And I can safely say after my experiences that not only is taking drugs more challenging, it is also more worthwhile.
