Story of the drug residues, again

6:27 PM 3/2/11

As soon as I sit down to write this - actually, it started before that. I was napping and they woke me up and told me to write. As soon as I sit down and prepare to type, I feel the sensation of my mind being read and controlled, so that not a single word can be written from my own mind.

I have to tell the drug residue story again. There is no short way to tell the story, but I'll try to make it short anyway.

At my other apartment, I grew some medicinal plants indoors. I grew St. John's Wort, and I also started growing tobacco. I also handled, and tried to plant several other seeds, including coffee, tea (camellia sinensis), cacao, ephedra sinica, and butterfly weed. I wasn't planning to eat the butterfly weed - it was going to be a flower for decorative purposes.

I wanted stimulant drugs because of my severe fatigue. I have had problems with fatigue for a while, but it was very severe at the time because of black mold in the air at that apartment, and also because St. John's Wort causes excessive sleeping (hypersomnia).

I don't know how many of the seeds caused the problem, but I only became aware of it while handling the ephedra seeds, because they were the most noticeable. I was planting them, and then all of a sudden had a severe reaction as though I had actually taken the drug, but I had done nothing except touch them.

I knew about herbal drugs going through skin already - I had learned that St. John's Wort goes through the skin. But I thought it was a rare exception. It turned out that many herbal drugs go directly through the skin.

Over time I observed that the seeds and the envelopes that they came in had left spots of residue where they were left sitting, like on the carpet where the envelope had been, and places that I touched during and after handling the seeds, and so on. Tiny traces of seed residue were enough to trigger severe reactions afterwards.

I learned to notice this every time I was handling, or just breathing the air next to, seeds, and also bottles of herbal drugs on the shelves in the grocery store. You can have a mild reaction without ever taking the drug. Vapors and residues surround the plant, the seeds, and the containers that they are in.

I tried to clean up the residues in my apartment. I had the worst reaction to ephedra, but many other plants left residues too. I got footprints tracked all over the carpet from it, and when I shampooed the carpet, it merely spread it around over a wider area, so that every inch of the apartment floor was covered with a thin layer of residues that I reacted to. I had to do drastic things like cover parts of the floor with cardboard so that I could live in there.

The residues do not decay over time. It's true that they oxidize and change somewhat, however they are still active drugs that cause symptoms. Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are known to have an extremely long shelf life, and they remain unchanged for decades and are still just as active as they were the first day.

So I got the drug residues onto many of my belongings, and have had to throw many things away. They are still on many of my things that I've kept, and I still have reactions often, although not as badly or as often as I used to.

I also notice drug residues (now that I know they exist) when I go to the doctor's office. When I went to the doctor and sat in the chair next to a desk, I got something on me that remained on my clothes and continued to cause a reaction after I got home. It felt like some kind of antidepressant.

I learned to notice various residues at my friend Peter's house. He uses a lot of prescription drugs, including insulin, and I get hypoglycemia just from touching his insulin, which I have done a couple of times while handling or trying to help him fix his insulin pump. Once, the hypoglycemia made me feel so horrible I thought I would have to call an ambulance the same way Peter always has to get an ambulance for it.

That wasn't a short story, it was a medium length story. But that is what the drug residues are about, and that is why I'm still talking about them after all this time. They are very hard to get rid of. The best way to get rid of them is to throw away as many of your belongings as you can.

They influence my moods and cause me to become more manic. However, when I am being manic, when I am suggestible (which is usually caused by St. John's Wort), I do whatever 'they' tell me to do, and that means that the words that I write are not my own.

I often agree with the words, at least somewhat, but I disagree with the particular way of saying them, or the particular goals and methods chosen for how and where to say them. They are a distorted and partial version of the truth, and not the whole truth, and not the uncorrupted truth.