How to use drugs — safely — from the guy who tried them all | Dominic Milton Trott

• Methamphetamine is a stimulant, it's prone to extreme highs. It’s a very, very pleasant experience, but in the morning I was drained. Oxycodone, it's an opioid but induced a sort of mellow effect. Ephenidine, it's a dissociative. Changa, it's a psychedelic drug. Heroin, I found that to be enjoyable; however, I vomited after a few hours. The worst experience? Nutmeg, which is a spice used on food, but if you consume more of it, you enter a delirious state. Basically, you've been poisoned.

It never even occurred to me that I would do anything like this. I thought, maybe I will take the odd drug occasionally if the circumstances presented themselves, perhaps. Take lots and lots of drugs? Nah.

(Upbeat music) I'm Dominic Milton Trott. (Peppy music) Over a 10-year period, I self-administered 157 different psychoactive drugs and wrote a book called The Drug Users Bible. It documents the vital safety information for each. I lived a relatively normal life. Got a job as a programmer, I worked for a bank, started an internet company, a startup.

Eventually, I got to that time of life where I started reflecting upon, there's gotta be more to living than this. I was asking fundamental questions about the nature of life and reality, and that’s what led me into researching psychedelics. There were references to a drug called ayahuasca, a botanical. That produces a four or five-hour visionary experience. And it was during the research for that particular adventure that, obviously, the forums and the social media platforms made it hard to miss the fact that posters would occasionally just disappear off the radar. They’d made a mistake and they died.

And that’s when it started to occur to me that there's a real problem here. The problem is that people are dying of ignorance. They’re dying because they’re making fundamental mistakes. It was so obvious that this was a lack of fundamental access to data, safety data. If I could actually make something more fundamental and deeper, like a book, it might make a difference and save some lives.

It was then a case of, what drugs are people taking? What are the popular drugs? The Drug Users Bible includes the onset time, the duration, proper dosage, and anything else which might be central to mitigate and reduce the risk of users. I provide a subjective experience report of what it was like for me. The reason that’s important is, first, to give people a feel for what it’s going to be like. But also, to have some sort of idea of how much loss of subjectivity they’re going to actually experience. Is there a compulsion to take more? Am I gonna lose my sensibilities in terms of balance? Am I gonna be safe in a public place?

I developed a process, a procedure, the ten commandments of safer drug use, to follow rigorously to try and reduce whatever risk there is with whatever drug you were taking.

Number one, research, research, research. You’re gonna take a drug, if you are gonna do that, and embark on that course, know what you’re taking. Know what its effects are broadly or lightly to be.

Test it is a specific third step, and the reason is, is however confident you are in your supplier, you can't be 100%. A lot of drugs have different effects depending upon how much you take. And always remember that you can take more, but you can't take less.

A lot of the time, you’re putting a strain upon your body, your heart, your organs, and yourself. If you're already feeling ill, or you're not quite well, don't do it. Things do go wrong, and if you do have a problem, if you become ill, or there's an issue, or you overdose, then the first thing that the emergency services need to know is what have you had. So it's a wise precaution to have that somewhere prominent on your body.

Ignorance kills, and it certainly does in this arena. If your son or daughter are gonna take a drug, would you prefer that they went into this blind without any safety knowledge at all? Or would you prefer that they were armed with risk mitigation procedures, accurate dosing information, onset values, and all the data that will help them to take it and...