When you think of recreational drugs, you'll probably go to the headline substances: cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, meth, mushrooms, acid and heroin. They're the most obvious ones because they're the ones we never stop hearing about.
Some people experiment with drugs without the faintest idea of what it will do to them, except maybe for their mate saying 'you'll have the best time, man'.
Well, one bloke has decided to try those ones and many more so that he could write a book about his experiences and warn people about the potential dangers of each one.
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Dominic Milton Trott wants people who are keen to try different substances to know exactly what they're getting themselves into before they put it up their nose, in their mouth or in their vein.
The father of two from the UK has tried a whopping 157 drugs and has detailed his experiences in The Drug Users Bible.
The man in his 60s explained that it all happened when he retired and started asking questions about the meaning of life. Dominic stumbled upon the drug ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic derived from a plant in South America, while looking on YouTube.
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After a bit of research, he traveled to Peru and took the drug during a shamanic ritual, which opened his eyes and helped free himself 'from the shackles of fear'. He wasn't scared of experimenting a bit more and, after a bit of research, was frustrated at the lack of information out there on safe drug use.
Dominic told LADbible: "I spotted on the forums that real people were dying and disappearing off these sites and it would sometimes get back that they made a mistake or took the wrong dose or they didn't know the onset times or all sorts of things that can lead to fatality.
"I started creating a spreadsheet of my experience and my research. I meticulously researched the drug, what the dose would be and so on and so forth and I recorded it."
Then, the idea of creating a book about his experiences popped into his head.
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"Why shouldn't I?" he asked. "Why shouldn't I project into the public consciousness safety information when I feel capable of doing that."
So, over the course of about a decade, Dominic started seriously researching, taking, experiencing and documenting as many drugs as he could find. The former banking and IT worker scoured the globe for psychedelics, stimulants, anxiolytics and sedatives, intoxicating depressants (including opioids), dissociatives, cannabinoids, nootropics (Smart Drugs), oneirogens (Dream Herbs/etc) and others that are unclassified.
Some of them were easy to obtain and others not so much.
Before May, 2016, loads of the research chemicals were legal in the UK, meaning Dominic could order them without any trouble. The illegal ones saw him travel to different parts of the planet where he could get them a little easier.
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If you ask him what drug he thought was the best, he'll always counter it with this question: "It depends on what you're seeking at the time."
On the whole, he would argue that the ayahuasca was the most transformative and revolutionary drug that he tried.
"When you see things from a different perspective and then return to normality, you have that knowledge and that perspective and you carry that with you and that's what changes people," he told us.
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"That's what changed me: seeing society and culture from outside; once I returned back into society, I changed my overall perspective."
He would wait at least a week before he would saddle up for another experience but sometimes the period in between taking another drug would be longer if he had to do more research or source it.
As you'd expect, while Dominic got to have some amazing highs, he also had some that left him in pain, both mentally and physically. He said two classes of drugs that were awful were deleriants and synthetic cannabinoids.
When he tried to get high off nutmeg (yes, that's a thing) he said it was easily one of the worst experiences he's ever had.
"I woke up in the night and I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the toilet," he tells us. "My fingers were going into the wood and I was pulling them out and everything was spinning, my head was hurting. I was ill for a week.
"It's dysphoric, it's fear, it's trauma. These particular psychoactives are deadly and very toxic. You're essentially poisoning yourself."
Dominic also says his experience with meth was troubling because he realised just how addictive the substance can be.
"I knew there would be this tendency to continue taking it," he tells us. "I made sure that once it was gone, it was gone. The next day I was drained and I found it took a long, long time to get back to normal."
The synthetic cannabinoids like Spice or Black Mamba, which have caused loads of issues in parts of the UK, were also horrible for Dominic. He described the high as a magnifier for any anxiety that was floating in his brain.
He recalled 'lying in bed in the foetal position just hoping for it to end soon'. At one point he wondered whether the trip would ever end.
But it's these moments that Dominic says are so important because it allows him to encourage others not to try it. He worries that kids get hoodwinked into trying lots of different things without knowing what they're getting themselves into.
The retiree added that if his kids wanted to experiment with drugs, he would rather them be armed with knowledge rather than blind faith that everything will be okay.
Which also begs the question: what did his kids think of their dad casually going on these massive trips and trying some pretty hectic drugs?
"The kids were maybe embarrassed because I think kids tend to want parents to be grey and disappear into the background and be totally normal," he explained.
"So I don't think they went out and told their friends and said 'oh dad's on drugs'.
"Once the kids and the people who know me understood it wasn't just a jolly experience and was actually a harm reduction and providing information exercise it was accepted."
Dominic strongly believes governments and law enforcement agencies need to take a different approach to drug harm minimisation. He says he shouldn't have had to compile his experiences in a book because the relevant agencies should have that information out there already.
But, at the end of the day, Mr Trott says if one person's life is saved from reading his information then everything he went through will have been worth it.
Featured Image Credit: LADbibleTopics: News, Interesting, Drugs