I smoked Spice Blend a few years ago.  It tasted like marshmallows and made me feel only mildly euphoric.

I have not smoked salvia.  I’ve heard mixed things about it.  But I have smoked something that was purportedly JWH-018 or some other chemically similar cannabinoid agonist.   I smoked it twice.  Both times I tripped balls.  And they were not fun balls.

First a little about JWH, fake weed.  It works on the CB₁ and CB₂ receptors in the brain, with some selectivity for CB₂. This makes it different from marijuana as the active ingredient there, THC, primarily binds to CB₁.  Result of this difference for me = bad trip.

I smoked a large joint the first time.  It was cool at first; I felt moderately high and ate munchables and cleaned my room.   Then I fell asleep for about 40 minutes.  I woke up feeling panicky and ended up calling a friend to talk me down from it.  I wasn’t hallucinating but something about reality just felt “off” and I didn’t feel like being alone.

Despite this meh experience, I didn’t want to waste my 20 dollars, so I ended up smoking the rest a week or so later.  The second bowl in, I started feeling a little weird, so I decided to take a warm shower in hopes of calming down.

Mid-shower things started feeling really weird.  The easiest way to describe it was like the movie Being John Malkovich, like the scene where Lotte is first sucked into John Malkovich’s body and watches him shower from a first person point of view.  I watched myself slowly grab the shampoo bottle, put it back down, lather.  Grab the conditioner bottle, put it back down, lather.  There was something about the mindless, repetitive nature of the tasks that was really abstract and dehumanizing.

I wrapped a towel around myself and walked to my bedroom.  I sat on the bed and looked at myself in the vanity mirror.  I ran my fingers through my wet hair.  I’m not sure how many times I ran my fingers through my hair but there was something about the sensation that was intriguing.  I sat there, wrapped in a towel, dripping wet and tripping out, thinking I was in some sort of purgatory where the only items of reality that I had control over were my fingers and my wet hair.

After what was only about 30 minutes but seemed like eternity, I became aware of the fact that I could control myself.  I walked to my closet, picked out clothes, got dressed, and lay back down on my bed, coming down from the experience.

It’s not something I would do again.