First, some history.
Artane is a prescription drug used in the treatment of Parkinsons' and Parkinsonian symptoms such as those caused by CNS depressants like Haldol and Haloperidine. The active substance, Trihexyphenidyle Hydrochloride causes effects similar to alcaloids Atropine, Scopolamine and Hyoskyamine, found in Datura, Belladonna and Mandrake. Believe it or not. Because the effects of the drug are mildly (at least compared to the plants' effects) psychotropic, Artane was widely used by Greek drug users during the 1970s and 1980s, up to the 1990s for the usual reasons prescritpion drugs are used. For a while, its' popularity was such that it gained the monicker of "the Greek trip". With the turning of the century, the chemical brotherhood turned to other subtances, namely XTC, and Artane fell from grace. Artane was considered best taken with Hypnosedon, the downer of choice of the toxic community during the same period, and when Hypnosedon was replaced in the preferences of the public by Buplecal, a stronger and better pill than Hypnosedon, there wasn't much use for Artane anyway.
Artane is a difficult pill to take on its' own. The adverse effects, like those of its' prototype plants, range from the desired euphoric, to the completely undesired psychotic and it can get downright ugly in some situations, especially when combined with heroine (when it really drives you mad with frustration). The usual medicinal dosage for Artane varies from patient to patient of course, but, as it doesn't cause addiction or tolerance, the dosages for non-medicinal purposes, are also adjustable to the users' expectations. Generally, 5 to 10 mg are enough for a good high, with little of the adverse effects. Hallucinations can begin at doses as low as 2 mg though. Caffeine and cannabis are often used to enhance the experience, hence the term "Artane-soup" describing the practice of throwing the pills in a Coca-Cola bottle when two or three users are forced to share a limited number of pills- the effect on everyone is better than just cutting the pills and dividing them up.
Rumours connected with the use of Artane, range from the dithyrambic to the horrified bad-trip. This is largely due to user expectations- Artane is not a feel-good pill. It turns your brain into swiss cheese, and makes fondue of it. I have heard people claim that no matter how many of the pills they took, they never had any effects on them, but in several cases I was able to witness that a) the persons reporting thus didn't really have an infinite supply of Artane to try on for size and b) they were just thinking that they were sober, when they actually were far out there in space huggling with the little gray men.
The trip starts with a feeling of "ants crawling under the skin" of the user (myrmikiasis), and their eysight blurring slightly at the edges. This blurring gets progressively more intense, depending on the dosage. At some point, the users' field of vision is simply covered by a gauzy veil of "fog", on which hallucinatory images begin forming. For the first half hour after taking the pill, the user feels disoriented, and lost. The first of the adverse effects make themselves apparent: acathesia (an incessant fussing, getting up, walking around and then sitting down again, searching in your pockets to make sure there's nothing there, readjusting your clothes and so on, just like a princess sleeping on a pile of matresses with a pea under them) ; erythriasis (reddening of the skin) ; hypertension (noticeable by your eyes turning red) ; sebharroea (your skin becomes oily) ; apathy ; mild prosopagnosia (where you find it really hard to recognise people as either familiar or not, but mostly produced by the optical distortion) ; short-term memory loss (the "what was I saying" behaviour, were you start a phrase, and forget its' begining somewhere in the middle of it) ; kinaesthaetic disorders (everything feels heavier, or has a feeling of being "more concrete" than normally, walking becomes slow and pointedly deliberate in a quite characteristic manner, as you feel like you 're a meter and a half taller than usual and five kilos heavier) ; xerostomia (drying of the salivating glands, which causes a very distinctive tick of the oesophagus, described as having "knots" in the throat, which you constantly try to swallow) ; depression of the respiratory system, which leads to a fuller respiration cycle (as you draw really deep breaths and exhale slowly and deliberatly, which enhances significantly the effects of smoked cannabis, and the pleasure of smoking tobacco) ; euphoria ; and of course, hallucinations, and delusional thinking (verging on the psychotic/ paranoid hysteric).
Of all the effects, the disorientation and the hallucinations are the ones more saught after. Small wonder: the hallucinations one gets with Artane are simply unique in the field of light-weight prescritpion drugs. As they 're not even meant for mental patients, and there were still some apothecaries unable to understand what use the pills would be to a kid looking for a good high during the 90s' it was still possible to obtain the odd bottle without a prescritpion, stating that it was "for my granps" or similar excuse. Normally though, they had to be obtained via the usual channels, and when the producing company finally realised what a good pill Artane was, they changed it with a much toned-down version, free of the desirable adverse effects. Pitty.
My own experiences with the good white pill, started at about 1990. I was one of those who thought, initially, that "it hadn't gotten me". Right. I remember sitting in a bus, and looking down, between my legs. I could see a mass of noodle-like fibers, writhing in a tangled mess, like someone had spilt a plate of spaghetti on me. However, the next day I 'd go on with the same old story "damn pill didn't do anything to me", and I didn't have any more until three years later.
This time it got me all right.
That day, I was at a friendly house, and someone happened to have a couple of pills. I asked and was given, one 2 mg. tablet. I downed it, and I chatted along with the others, waiting for the pill to act. Half an hour passed, and I wasn't feeling anything different, so I got on my bike and went to the park at Maroussi, where we used to hang out. I parked the bike, and walked into the park. It was dark, a good hour past sundown, and a warm summer night, with not a single breath of breeze on the air, or a cloud on the sky. I glanced at the trees in my left, absentmindedly, and with a heart- rending suddenness, they shook all together, with astonishing fury, like a tornado had just hit them. There was a noise of a thousand leaves rustling in a hellish gale, and I saw the trunks and the branches of the trees bend and wave madly. The force of this motion, and the sound connected with it, was such, that I ducked for cover, scared shittless. A split second later, everything was calm and normal. There was no wind, the trees slept, and I was standing in a theatrical position, my knees bent, my arms raised to protect my face, and my eyes openned wide, looking around in astonishment.
Finding Artane was hard, at first. Some guys had them, and they allways shared them, but you never knew when they would be there, and if they 'd have any, not to mention how I never really liked asking. You could go buy them from Omonoia square, in the center of Athens, but the place was Junkies' Nest, and I didn't like junkies. Not to mention you had to pay the ridiculus sum of 150 drachmas (half a Euro) apiece for the fivers and 100 for the deuces (for all you zombies out there, I mean the 5 and 2 mg tablets respectively). The bottles of 100 pieces were sold at 5000 dr. when they only costed 1500 in the Pharmacy. There was a good doctor, in Kanningos square, a neurologist, who, for a standard visit fee, would gladly write you a prescription for Artane (or Hypnosedon, Jactus and other stuff for that matter) if you could come up with a marginally believable excuse (something better than "I have a headache"). But he also insisted to be shown your ID card, and note down its' serial number, so everyone knew that in case the cops got on to the whole bussiness, they would have a ready-made list of the names of all people who had ever been there for a prescription-high. This didn't really stop me and my friends at first, but then the doctor stopped giving out Artane prescriptions, and he only gave ones for opiates, like Hypnosedon, to junkies who needed them to get throught the first and worse days of their withdrawal symptoms (a real pillar of the community that doc). At that point, me and two friends made a bunch of false prescriptions and bought some bottles, but that source dried out too, after a while. Then it was back to the half-tablet-a day regime for some time. At about that time, the junkies in Omonoia stopped bothering with the pill. Every time I asked for Artane, I got the same reply "what do you want with that mad-pill? Wouldn't you rather some dope? Hypnosedon, maybe?". In the end, it became so frustrating trying to find the pill, that I started taking a substitute, Akinetton, also prescribed for parkinsons' and similar conditions, also hallucinogenic and mildly euphoric, but offering in every aspect a much lower quality trip than Artane.
To me, Artane was the closest thing to a pleasure pill I ever tasted. Remember that scene in Barbarella, where she meets Orgasmatron, and he offers her an orgasmic pill? Well, Artane was something like that for me. There is a weird story on this. I knew lots of guys who liked Artane, but I was the only one who ever experienced sexual stimulation under its' influence. I wasn't the only person though. At a time when I was straightly male, I heard several discussions on how the Travesti (the street walking she-males) were absolutely crazy about the pill. And the story was true. When I eventually became a Travesti myself, I verified the popularity of the pill among the species. Somehow, it turns us on, and it doesn't have that effect on normal guys. Don't ask me why, I haven't the faintest idea. I just know that as an aphrodisiac it's way better than coke or even dope, at least for this she-male here and definitely cheaper in any case.
I had many occasions to have sex under Artanes' influence. Mostly, it was with girls. I 've never felt so complete a sexual sensation in my whole damned life, as in those cases. I 'll try to give a description, but don't rely too hard on it. It's really hard to explain.
There was this time, I was under the influence again, when I was hit upon by a girl I knew- crazy Katerina. We were in a Rock club, the Renegade, somewhere in Chalandri. My home was half an hours' ride from there on my old and derelict moped. That night, I had Katerina on the back. I was driving into the night, in the summer heat and humidity, the lights of a few passing cars leaving the afterimages of fireflies on my pupils, and the sound of my mopeds' exhaust pipe whispering obscenities in my ear. The yellow-lit streets were unwinding lazily, and Katerinas' hands were busy on my crotch. I was having an erection. At least it must have been an erection. I couldn't remember ever having felt any part of my body so intense ever before, or after it for that matter. Her skin lotion, some Body Shop ointment, was all over my ollfactory nerves, I tell you. I couldn't think of anything but the way she smelled. And the way my prick felt. It felt like a chunk of burning ice, go figure. It stayed that way for the whole duration of the ride, and even when we got home, and spent some time getting cozy and undressed, it hadn't subsided an ickle. At last I took my underwear off, and Katerinas' eyes...
OK. You 're not gonna believe this, if I keep it up this way. Let me provide you with a little disclaimer here. I never was a "big gun". Nor did I ever have any preoccupation with sizes or styles. When I had sex with girls (just as with guys), I did it for my own pleasure, and I do mean my physical pleasure. Considerations of superior or inferior manhood never had anything to do anything with it. Big or small, I could allways get all the satisfaction I needed from my dick (yes, go shock yourselves, I was not Gender Dysphoric, now fuck off) such as it was, small and sweet. But the truth is, when Katerina saw my dick that night, her eyes went wide with a horrified surprise. She guffawed, and blurted out "what's that thing you got there!? I can't take that thing in me! It's gonna tear me apart! It's gonna rip a hole into the matress through me! I 'm not fucking with you!" and yes, she was allways expressive like that, that's why we all loved her. We did fuck. She did feel a bit tight.
A while later, Katerina and me were just friends (she had her sights on someone else), but we had gone to my place anyway. I was on Artane again, and we went to a room in the basement, because my mother slept on her bedroom next to mine, upstairs. Somehow, probably because I was really stoned, I started talking about ME, while we were lying on the bed, in the dark. I could hear my voice coming out hoarse, because all my anguish for being a guy and probably condemned to be that way for eternity was stuck in the middle of my throat and it was giving me a sore. I told Katerina how I didn't really mind that she didn't want to have sex with me anymore. Then I blacked out. I came back up, and said I didn't really like to fuck girls, because although I liked them, sex wasn't what I liked in them. I blacked out again, then came back up again. I went on, saying I preferred to be fucked to being the one doing the hard job. I sank back into the black. I surfaced, to listen to her telling me that she didn't believe that about me since we had fucked and she knew I liked it, before sinking again. I surfaced. I told her "I don't give a shit what you believe. That's the truth about me. I want to be a woman, not a guy". I blacked out. I surfaced. She was on top of me, and she was taking her blouse off. I winced in bewilderment.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Take your clothes off" she said, "we 're gonna make love".
Having sex with Artane was like being wired into the mind of the other person. I could feel their body as if from the inside. I think it's accurate to describe the sensation as an extension of proprioception inside the confines of another body. I felt the weight of their flesh and bones. I felt their muscles moving under my skin. I felt their balance. When I put myself inside them, it was as if I was putting it inside my own body. I felt it both ways. In me and around me. On top of that, the usual hypersensitivity multiplied every sense tenfold.
I didn't usually like to take Artane when I was on my own, but there were times when I couldn't resist the urge to take a couple of pills and dress up when I had the house for myself. I remember one time in particular, because it was a while after I had decided I was going to go for it, and expose myself to the world. I had shaved the fur off my face, and cut my hair short, and I had started depilating my legs and chest. I had this stupid wig, and a short dress of crushed velvet I had borrowed from my mothers' wardrobe. The shoes were mine, at least, one of my first ever really mine feminine items... you know how important that shit feels when you start out. Well, I had put all that on, and I was looking myself in the mirror, trying to find the right angle. You must know what I mean. Artane made the lines connecting me with my reflection almost tangible. It felt as if I was in the mirror. And, guess what. In the mirror, the completion of my quest, was standing in a hazy hallow. My blurred vision twisted and turned to form an unreal image of myself, which, when I managed to keep it stable for more than a few seconds, revealed the concentrated extract of all my female fantasies looking back at me. My body was feeling so smooth, depilated as it was. The velvet cloth did that thing we poetically call "caressing", but I had never before known what the word meant. When I looked down, the added height from the shoes' heels made me feel like I was hanging from a hydrogene baloon. I spent hours looking at myself, trying to home in on the perfect hallucinatory reflection in the mirror, carressing my hairless skin and hugging various hypersensitized parts of my body.
Artane had its' fun sides. Actually, the sexual thing set apart, Artane was all fun for me.
I mentioned the Notorious Knots everybody felt when the effects started kicking in. Well, somehow, I was free of them. See, I had told myself from the very first time I took the pill that I wouldn't get the damned things, and so I never did. Everybody else practically choked on their knots, and I was looking at them, smilling suavely, the little bastard. Once, me and John had just dropped a couple pills, and I gotten the munchies. John was hungry too, but he had trouble swallowing water, and the mere suggestion of solid edibility revolted him. I went over to the kiosk, however, and bought a sandwich from it. It was one of those ready made deep-freezed items you get from kiosks' refrigerators, in Greece. They 're dry like five days horse manure, and I believe they taste somewhat similar, thought I can't really prove it. I brought the sandwich back in the park, to where John and I were seating. John looked at it with dread. "What are you gonna do with this?". "Why, eat it!". He stared in desbelief as I took the first bite. I sat there chewing on it with pleasure and gobbling big pieces of it like it was mousse au chocolat, while John was kicking the air making choking noises beside me, unable to stand the spectacle of a person eating under the influence of the same thing that prevented him from swallowing his own non-existent saliva.
I came to the conclusion that self-suggestion had a great deal to do with the exact effects Artane had on any particular person. As I said, that's how I avoided the knots. I convinced myself that I wouldn't have them. Of course, that was the time when I first tried the pill. That time, I had also told myself I was not going to feel anything different because of its' effects. And, what do you know. I didn't, although I was soo stoned. I just didn't know it, and it took me some years to realise it when I remembered that tangle of noodles on my lap. I guess, if you let the drug help you with your self-suggestion, it's too late to suggest that you 're not going to let them effect you in anyway, no? Anyway, further proof of the auto-suggestion follows.
One day, me, Nikos and Alexis were sitting on a park bench, waiting for the influence to set in. At last, I start to see the first blurrs falling lazily around my vision, when Alexis stands up, yelps "I gotta take a crap" and runs away. Nikos and I start laughing. Then Nikos explains how Alexis always has to shit whenever he takes Artane. I laugh at that. It's never happened to me, I tell him. "Yes, I know, it had never happened to me before, but now, after Alexis told me, I want to take a crap too, every time we take the pills". I laugh at that, but after a while I laugh even more, cause Nikos gets up and scurries of to find a toilet himself. I stay behind, on my bench, laughing my stoned ass off at how stupid my pals are.
Guess what happens next.
I feel something moving ominously in the lower part of my intestines.
I feel the call of the wild.
I 'm up, screaming.
I need a toilet.
FAST.
And ever since then, the same thing happens every time I take the damned pills. It was like clockwork precision or whatever. Like Pavlovs' dogs or somethin, only I 'd much have preferred salivation to this. I ended up taking paper kerchieves with me every time I knew I was going to drop the pills, cause I knew what I was up for. And if you think I 'm just missing things up, and Artane causes the same thing to everyone... well, it doesn't. I checked it. Again and again. I was just the three of us whose asses were cursed that way. Me, Nikos and Alexis. It was Alexis' fault. He started it all, the little buggerer...
I did have hallucinations with Artane, but somehow I allways got the impression they were rare. That's because I was expecting to see dragons and elves or what have you, and I didn't really count the things I did see as hallucinations. Of course, if I saw any of that stuff without having taken anything, I 'd have sought medical help immediately.
For example, there was this time with the homunculi on that piece of paper. I was at a cafeteria with some friends and Artane. One of the others had just finished a pack of tobacco, and he or she had crumpled the wrapping and left it beside the ashtrey on the table. Some conversation was going on around me, in which I couldn't really take any part, when I realised I was staring to the little ball of crushed paper and cellophane. There was something weird happening to it. First off, it was surrounded by a blurred glow, like a badly applied Phshop filter. I sensed a hallucination coming. Then, I noticed some motion on the wrapping, and then I could see little white men, like the stick figures they use for the symbols of Olympic sports, and they were running around the crumpled paper, working on it in some way, for some unfathomable vision. I yelped and jumped up. The homunculi disappeared.
We used to call this sort of hallucination a "flash", like in "a flash of lightning", and nothing to do with the programme. I have to say that semantically speaking, "Flash" is quite accurate in describing those experiences. Most lasted only a brief moment, and they litterally exploded in the middle of your perception like a bomb. They did whatever they wanted to do to your mind, and then disappeared, leaving you bewildered, looking around for what was there just a moment ago, possibly trying to explain to sober people what had just happenned, something really hard to do if you wanted to leave the "why" out.
To tell the truth, the reasons I tried Artane was that I was trying to find some Datura, initially failing which, I looked for a substitute. Learning that Artane was based on Daturas' active substances, the idea of taking the pill became attractive even at a tender age at which I sincerely believed that drugs were "bad" for your health. In the long term, I have no doubt that drugs were actually bad for my health, generally speaking, but even more so very precisely meaning my mental health. I have done things under the influence that I wouldn't if I was sober, but that's normal and expected, and it doesn't belong to the pathology of drug abuse. The real mess I made of my head became apparent once I stopped taking anything. At that point I realised how much my mental capacities had dropped. I had become obviously dumber than I used to be before taking anything, and I still remain that way (I 'm sorry, I couldn't catch that witty remark, thank you). Besides, I had grown with the drugs, emotionally, I drew a good deal of my personnalitys' strength and stamina from my hallucinations and euphoric trips, and I felt lonely, frightened and bare without all the supernatural joy I had once experienced, as if I had been kicked out of the garden of delights, or like the gates of the spirit world had slammed shut in my face. I had learned to perceive a reality based on the experience offered by "mind altering substances" and it was really hard for me to stop seeing the world through that scope, not to mention I didn't really want to stop it. But, as I was starting on hormones and I knew they would bring chaos inside me, both emotional and mental, I figured it was a bit risky to keep stuffing my body with anything I found lying around. So I was sort of forced albeit on my own accord, to stop them. Of course, a habit built over several years, is a hard thing to let go of, and I didn't completely abstain from the odd spliff now and then... OK, who am I kidding? I kept on doing drugs even well after I had started on hormones, I just took waay much less than I used to, in rare occasions, and with great prejudice. This is probably still affecting me in some way I have yet to understand -I still see dreams in which I drop pills or smoke joints, or even shoot dope.
The things are still in my mind.
Not that I have any problem with that...
Let's just hope they enjoy the company.