Jack's Pharmie Connection

Jack Handey: I was fresh out of high school when I started running drugs for Frank. My job was simple, I found contacts, dealers who pushed pharmaceuticals, I delivered the drugs, Frank and I split the cash, they never knew his name. They only knew I had a supplier who I had to check-in with for the prices because I wasn't allowed to make those decisions alone and he and I never talked on the phone. All decisions were made between the two of us, face to face, without anyone else in the room. I only communicated to the distributors via pay phones and they contacted me through my pager. Cell phones weren't in yet and I wouldn't have one for another few years. I was free from most any obligation. This is just how I liked it. I could discuss the street prices with Frank, tell him we should cut the price by a third, then I could turn around and only cut them a quarter to the distributors. Frank didn't know; fuck, I made him so much money he didn't care. Before I started raising my own profits like that we were each brining in $900 a week, tax free. How could we not? We had no overhead, the product was good, and the clients knew it.

Frank the Wop was a manager at a veterinary supply warehouse. You wouldn't believe the shit they give your pets. We had a variety of pharmaceuticals at our disposal. We had 500mg vials of injectable Dilaudid. We had Dilaudid in pill form (2, 4, and 8mg). We had all three strengths of Valium. Xanax we could only get in the lower two strengths. We had Halothane, which is used to anaesthetize animals along with Ketamine. The Halothane was Frank's favorite. I've seen that fat bastard huff up three bottles in a day. He was always giving me "samples", bottles he had opened and dipped out of; 60 Xanax here, 20 Dilaudids there. They didn't sell as fast as the Valiums. He'd give me 200 of the peach Valiums at a time; they didn't sell like the blues. It was the perfect time to be 18. The rave scene was dying off, but the drug culture was becoming mainstream. Everyone was taking something. What's a few Adderall to study? Some Valium to celebrate after the exams. Party too hard all night at Headliners, no problem, here's some Dorcium, some Rohyphynol, Nitrazepam, Phenobarbital, Xanax... we had pills for days. I don't really remember much of my early college days, but I knew I wouldn't make this kind of money doing IT work. The saddest part was I knew it wouldn't last for long.

My girlfriends, no matter their religious convictions, never seemed to mind. It was amazing how surprise flowers at work with a note saying, "We're going out tonight, wear something nice" with a gift card attached to Macy's, it was really amazing how quickly you can make people forget you were doing anything wrong. It was easy to make them forget that you were one dark tail light away from being a convicted felon. They came and went. Most of them hardly making a ripple in the pond. Friends, girlfriends, acquaintances, dealers, junkies, buyers, customers, whatever you want to call them, people just became controllable objects, movable pieces in a game I no longer found any pleasure in playing. Nobody was real. After a point of binging on Dilaudid and Xanax to forget your troubles, nothing seems real.

One day I'm in class and my pager starts blowing up. It's Frank, he's putting "911" at end of his messages. He never does that. He also never pages me during class. He knew I could get kicked out of a class if it was audible. Hell, the man had my class schedule posted beside his phone. Class let out and I used a payphone in the UC to call him. He was frantic. He told me he had to talk to me immediately. He said I had to take all the bottles, contact everybody, and make sure there were no lot numbers left on any of them. He told me he had gotten caught at work and had destroyed all the evidence. To recap exactly what that means, Frank had crushed and destroyed a case of 10mg Valium, a case of peach Xanax, and 35 vials of beautiful, beautiful IV Dilaudid. The junkie in me was sobbing, the businessman was throwing up, and the "good person" knew how close he was to prison. Apparently, Frank didn't do his job. He had been checking in Diazepam as Diazenol. Diazenol was something veterinary specific, only used in animals, and it wasn't controlled. It was much more expensive than Valium, so even though the numbers wouldn't add up exactly, 24 damaged cases of Diazenol was acceptable, 112 cases of "lost" Diazenol was not. He had forgotten to remove them from the system and his boss questioned him about the missing cases. Frank simply left work, keys on the desk, and faxed his letter of resignation from Kinkos. It was never reported to the DEA because the company would have lost their license to carry scheduled substances.

Had we really sold that many? Let's do the math on that... 112 cases x 24 bottles per case x $120 / bottle... $322,560 !?!??! Sweet mother of God! Had each of us really split that and blown it in the last 18 months. That was just the Valium. I think at this point my opulent lifestyle had grown out of control. All those nights of binging on cocaine and ecstasy with the nameless, faceless strangers. Meeting washed up professional athletes: wrestlers, tennis players, football and basketball players, it had never been enough, but was so much at the same time. I had watched a former professional wrestler shave down three 80mg Oxycontin with his pocket knife, mix them in with a gram of blow, and snort it all in a matter of seconds. How had I come to this? Why was it just now bothering me? All good things must come to an end. I wouldn't talk to Frank for over a year until we knew we were clear.

First Contact with the Otherside

This is Di-Methyl-Tryptamine. DMT is produced by your pineal gland every night when you sleep. It is responsible for those dreams that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. DMT changed my life. It is considered one of nature's most potent psychedelics. It is used in the South American brews Ahyuasca and Hoasca. Although found in nature in the root bark of the Mimosa hostilis bush, among others, it is produced by our own bodies, yet our government deems it a Schedule I drug. It is just as illegal as crack or heroin. To be deemed Schedule I a chemical must have the following criteria:
1)The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
2)The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
3)There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision..
Now that you know a little about DMT, I will share with you one of my most positive and life changing experiences.

A few years back a young chemist, and close friend of mine, A-Boy, and his "assistant", Jack Handey, were going to cook up some DMT of their own. Many are the adventures of Jack and A-Boy. They committed several felonious acts. I must make the distinction between their manufacturing and my use. I have never manufactured for the distribution to others a Schedule I substance. They had purchased some mimosa hostilis root bark, a non-polar solvent (xylene), and NaOH (lye). They crushed the root bark, covered it with xylene, and poured some amount of lye to the mix. Jack then took off the top "watery" layer and let the xylene evaporate and he was left with this picture which he uploaded to erowid.org at a later date. **EDIT: This process is not as simple as it sounds. It is a lot more than just mixing up some ingredients inside a jar, shake, and bake. This process took a few weeks of hard work including ingredient gathering, equipment gathering, reviewing of safety procedures, etc. Oh, and please don't try this at home, unless of course it's legal where you live. If that is the case, let me know where you live.**

Having said that, A-Boy carefully measured out 60mg of this substance on scales in his lavatory made clandestine laboratory he had setup at the time. Handed me a pipe with the 60mg of yellowish material and told me, "Go lie on my bed, LIE on the bed, do not attempt this while standing, smoke as much as you possibly can, and don't fight it whatever you do. Also while we weighed out 60mg the scales are +-2mg. Just thought you should know." When A-Boy tells me this while peering over his glasses and giving me his "Payne, I'm not fucking around" look, I take him seriously. I began to melt the yellow shards down and breathed in the fumes. My lungs were filled with the sweetly-acidic yet plastic tasting vapors that burned. It was like the Hydra had blown into my lungs. I tried hard not to cough but I felt as if I had been poisoned. A-Boy caught the pipe as apparently I had stopped physically responding to any stimuli. He later told me I took on a zombie like stare for a few seconds and then fell back onto the bed. Suddenly my ears were filled with sounds no human should have to endure I can only attempt to describe these to you: high pitched screeching sounds, sirens that seem to come and go so quickly it was as if a thousand ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars were all passing eachother in different directions in the bed room. Bells started ringing, and then I heard it, a firecracker. Not one of those shitty bottle rockets that just pops. No sir, this was the grand finale. Again, I want to state that all hallucinations up to this point were auditory in nature, nothing had changed visually and my mental state was simply confused, until the sound of that "firework" going off. Then all sound in the room ceased faster than it had started. You could hear a pin drop. The room was encompassed by a grey light and I was the only being in the room. A-Boy and Jack were gone, but I never saw them leave the room. Jack was leaning in the door way and A-boy was sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, watching me with anticipation. Where did they go? From the corners of the room a darkness began to grow. This darkness swallowed the room so that there was no longer anything, just dark and then "they" came out. These imp-like creatures began to grow from the corners. I could not see their faces. All I could see was their dark figures, humanoid, but smaller. Occasionally I would get a glimpse of what I thought to be teeth or a smile but their faces had no noticable details. They began speak to me in a language that I could not understand. They were using their hands write some kind of heiroglyphics in the air, like they were trying to teach me something or tell me something. I stared equally amazed and confused. What do they want me to know? This seemed to go on for hours, but I was entranced in watching their movements. Then they started laughing at me; they knew I was clueless. The room came back into perspective slightly as one of the "imps" or "DMT-elves" as we've come to call them came forward. He said in English, "You are too consumed by this physical world. What is important is that it is only one of the many phases in your existence. The molecules in your body are made of the same atoms as the wood in this floor. This physical existence is only very temporary and it is the shortest, most trivial portion of your existence. You worry about it and what others in it think too much. Be a kind person. That is all we can tell you now. You are not ready for the rest." As they had emerged from their corners they went back, as if I was watching everything in reverse, with them any darkness was gone, replaced with grey light, and then I opened my eyes.

A-boy was there in one of his oddly contorted positions. "So Payne, what did you think?" All I could say was, "How long, how long were they here? How long did I talk to them? It felt like hours as they tried to explain to me things I had no way of understanding. How long was it?" He replied, "You were out for 5 minutes and 32 seconds." I thanked him and excused myself from the room. At this point I was completely sober, and felt no after effects other than being ravenously hungry. I went back to my apartment where I ate, ravenously. I believe that the DMT turned on a part of my brain that we don't ordinarily use and allowed me to communicate with beings in another dimension. In any event, I felt better about myself and my situation after and have not felt that I've been in a position in life where I am ready to learn more from them. I'm sure I will one day, but not yet.