effects of drugs on aspies?

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I don't know about weed personally (although from your description it seems like that's a pretty typical reaction to weed, Asperger's or no), but alcohol definitely makes it more difficult for me to mask my symptoms. Luckily, it also makes people more forgiving, since they're thinking "oh, it's just because he's drunk" and they actually say things a lot more clearly.

It also gives me some symptoms that I usually don't have. Like my freshman year, a girl I knew wrote on my Facebook saying "You didn't get me a rose!" pretending to be angry (long story short, Tech has a tradition that involves new fraternity pledges giving roses and singing to the new sorority pledges). It was obviously clear that she was only joking, as I couldn't be expected to just ignore the girl who was in front of me. But I got very intoxicated that night (all of the following is secondhand, I have no recollection of it), and I showed up in the middle of the party with a rose (no idea where it could have come from, I hadn't seen one all day) and I was very concerned" that I get it to her. Intoxicated me had lost the ability to interpret her message and jumped to the only logical conclusion: oh crap, she's mad at me."

Sweetleaf, what I hear you saying is that having AS and being stoned are two completely different experiences?

Thanks, that is actually incredibly helpful.

Can you maybe fill in the blanks for me:

"When they get high, NT's typically ______" (or "never _____")
"When they get high, Aspies typically ______" (or "never _____")

Or maybe MJ makes NT's more like Aspies, and Aspies more like NT?

I think weed brings aspies and NTs closer together. It's quite normal for stoners not to say much and stare at the walls

I've almost quit caffeine (after drinking 15+ cups a day). I've been tapering it for around 3 weeks, mixing in decaf to my instant jar whenever its half full, so it's virtually decaf only now, but with enough to avoid a shock withdrawal.

I am getting lost in my mind more than before, scarily so. I'm back to sitting for up to half an hour at a time to just put on a sock. There was me thinking it might improve things..
I was hoping I would sleep a bit better, but although I'm getting to sleep perhaps 30 minutes earlier on average, I am waking up more in the night.

Jason

I don't think marijuana can really change peoples brain wiring to neurotypical or autistic...I think it is possible marijuana could possibly make some people come off as more of one or the other while under the influence. Not sure though.

I have to smoke a lot of weed, and it has to be the expensive super-potent stuff, for it to have any effect whatsoever. Finally, after a couple hours, I'll start hooting like the Joker and having the time of my life. Up that point I don't even really feel a buzz, or if I do, it's nothing that booze can't accomplish. I really wish it was easier and cheaper for me to get stoned. There's no inbetween for me; either I get to hootin' like the Joker or I just sit there annoyed because nothing's happening. It sucks. At least being from California helped, because it's easy to get the good stuff in the first place. The weed here in Italy is weak sauce by comparison.

When it comes to booze, if there's a party or gathering with tons of booze, I'm liable to drink too much. To the point that I black out and turn into a maniac, and unless friends are there to cut me off, I can lapse into that state all too easily. Bad, rather regrettable things have been known to happen. I can't say if my Asperger's has anything to do with that. It's probably more due to the fact that I didn't really even drink until I turned 25. So there I was, in my mid 20s, learning the ropes about drinking... the same ropes that everybody else learns by the time they're 19. Knocking back a couple of brews at home isn't a problem, though. And just me and a buddy or two shooting the s**t at a bar, also not a problem.

I've never tried anything beyond that. For a while I was bugging my friends to help me try shrooms and LSD, but they never got around to it. I still want to try, but I don't want to do it alone. I don't want to try any of the hard stuff (horse, coke, meth, etc.), and I don't want to try pills. I'm too scared to try E, unless it had the Official Dutch Gov't Stamp of Approval or something.

Italians love to gather mushrooms. Many are very nutritious

Last edited by Surfman on 27 Mar 2012, 12:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree about the "bringing closer together"--I found that it helped me be less obsessive/fixated, more tolerant of going with the flow, and, as Sweetleaf said, it helps with executive function. On the contrary, "normal" people seem to get more obsessed, are able to have long, convoluted conversations, and can get more introverted. However, with time, I started to get more anxiety and physical symptoms, like a weird sort of headache (which I'd get sometimes even when not stoned), that made me unable to make use of those positive sides.

Alcohol definitely does loosen me up, and I can be less bothered by things, but in a different sense. Drinking makes the world feel "far away", sort of like lying in a soft bed, while when high, I am well aware of what is happening, but not as attached to the outcome or to the needs of the ego. Sometimes when I am frustrated/angry, alcohol can re-route the negativity into sadness, which can be productive in that I'm not fighting the world, but hoping.

Wow you had an amazing caffeine addiction. I definitely like it, because of its uplifting and "ambition-fueling" effect, but never could have nearly that many cups a day! And I do find that without it, despite being less intense, my repetitive mind-looping and tendency to sit and stare gets worse.

Can anyone expand on the "maryjane helps with executive function" statement? Seems counter-intuitive to me.

I prefer to stay away from drugs. There are other ways that I can get myself stimulated that don't involve drugs. Coming on WP is one good example.

I find yours an interesting perspective: weed, or drugs generally, as an intensifier of what's already there. I would suggest also that it is thoughts and feelings that are kept at bay or under control by the sober or conscious mind that perhaps come more to the fore when under the influence.

I'm interested, in this context, that you say that negative feelings and thoughts exist to let you know that you're living a way that you don't want to live. Would you like to elaborate on that? I can see here the possible therapeutic vale of marijuanna in helping one identify more vividly what is bothering one or what one really wants or what is most important and so on.

Well its quite simple when I smoke cannabis it is much easier to get up and do what needs to be done, typically I am quite distracted by anxiety and my brain not seeming to have an off switch, not to mention Depression can certainly slow one down, since the cannabis decreases both of those for me it results in increased executive function...because I don't feel like crap or all anxious so I can actually focus on things more relevant to the moment at hand.

But everyone is effected differently by drugs....so I can't say it would do that to everyone.

A lot of the time when people are in a bad mood, or depressed, or even just bored, they will try and drown those feelings out with something else, like TV, video games, drugs, anything to avoid looking at the reason why they are feeling that way, because they want to forget about the fact that they are supposed to be doing something about it, because they feel like that is too hard or beyond their control.

Most people already know this but they are so used to it that they take it for granted. People are usually taught that they should just forget about trying to get what they want out of life when things don't go the way that they wanted. They are told to just live with it.

A person like the OP, who wants to use video games and weed as a form of escapism from "life's failures" may play their games and temporarily forget that they felt bad about those failures. They will try and occupy their mind with the happenings of a fictional game world, but eventually they will have experienced all that this illusion has to offer them, the novelty of this new world will wear off and it will become less interesting over time. As it does, the negative feelings about life's failures will return, because hiding from these feelings did nothing to remove their source. The person is still a living creature which is pre-programmed to require a certain measure of success in life in order to feel satisfied, fulfilled, or comfortable, and failure to do so will always be accompanied by negative emotions.

They may try other illusory means of escape, and attempt to convince themselves that their negative feelings don't matter, but again they are bound to eventually start remembering that the reason they feel bad about failure is because they want to succeed. They grow bored of these illusions and distractions because illusions and distractions are not what they really want. Success in life is what they really want. They don't want to waste time with games or TV or drugs, they want to continue trying to build a life.

With or without weed, a person who is wasting time on something that they don't really want to be doing, will eventually realise exactly that, when their body and mind grow too accustomed to the distraction, in the same way that a person may develop a tolerance to a painkiller and need a higher dosage to continue to kill the pain. Pain always has a purpose though, letting you know that something is damaged and not functioning as it should in a healthy body or mind.

I'm not sure how to expand any further on this idea. I already feel like I'm stating the obvious and being really condescending/patronizing.

I guess it could be said more simply... You only feel the pain of hunger because you have the desire to eat. It is a suffering that exists to keep you on track and remind you of what you want. If you try to ignore it, you will die. In the same way, when you try to find a cheap way to suppress your unhappiness, or a cheat to get around it, you are only cheating yourself, since that unhappiness is just a reflection of your own desires, of what you personally want, it's not some evil oppressive curse that always just seems to haunt you for no reason.

Where weed comes into all this... Well, it's like I said before. It acts as a magnifying glass for just about any kind of sensory activity. Everything that is "nice" looks/feels/tastes/smells/sounds enhanced in every way, every thought seems more profound and appears in greater detail... But when you're already too accustomed to the positive effects of weed, you will take them for granted, notice them less, until they won't distract you from your negative circumstances any more, and all that magnifying glass is going to do is show you how bad everything is, in ultra High-Def Bluray detail.

Drugs are great for keeping high spirits when you're trying to achieve difficult goals, and can help you stay positive as you work toward them, but if you're not going to try anything and you're just going to let yourself sit and rot, drugs aren't going to change that, all they're going to do is turn the experience of "rotting" into an intense and inescapable psychedelic nightmare.

Thank you for elaborating as you have. Yes, the basic idea is one I've probably considered in some form before and, as you say, is perhaps somewhat self-evident. However, I like the way you present the idea with a clarity and certainty that is appealing, and I think I have lost sight of this particular insight, for my own life, in recent times.

I'm not so sure what you're saying is so basic, though. I mean, you are extrapolating the idea of bodily feedback into the psychological realm, and while I think that must be a valid analogy to a large degree given that our minds are also parts of our body inasfar as the mind is produced by the brain, I'm not convinced that things are so straightforward.

For example, I'm not sure that many people's minds or my own will ever switch off from a sizeable amount of ruminating. It is perhaps too idealistic to suggest that such discord can be dealt with in the same way that hunger can be dealt with. With hunger, we know that it is food that we need. Simple. But with cravings of a psychological nature it might be a lot harder to work out what sort of food will make them go away. I think, practically, it can be beneficial, at least some times and at least in the short or even medium term, to push away the sorts of thoughts and feelings that we don't want. I mean, that's what we actually do a lot of the time, right? We perhaps try to get to the bottom of things and sort them out but it can seem never ending and so the coping strategy of using distractions comes in.

I'm just thinking aloud, really. Don't get me wrong. I think there's a lot in what you're saying and I'm going to look at this further. Just a few thoughts here to probe a little further into the potential for the sort of analysis and prescription we are talking about to be an effective means to bring about actual change for the better.

Well yeah, sometimes people have to think pretty hard to figure out why they're unhappy. If they've been distracting themselves too long, they might have ended up convincing themselves that success in some areas of their life was unimportant, so much that they started taking this for granted and never even considering that they could have been mistaken.

For example, sometimes people go around saying "money can't buy you happiness" and things like that, after having been poor for so long that they began to hate the rich, and convinced themselves that wanting money is a bad thing, for bad people, even though it is the only thing that could ever save them from being poor.

Their unhappiness is caused by a lack of something they need, which they have convinced themselves that they don't need, and it can be hard to realise that a change in values and beliefs must be made if there is ever to be any improvement on the situation, and just as hard to realise which beliefs to change.

There are methods for people to recognise the unconscious workings of their mind, like the analysis of projection (nothing particularly magical or weird, it mostly involves looking in detail at why you do and say the things you do), and weed does actually help quite a lot in that kind of thing. The feeling of profundity in stoned thinking can make it easier to focus on your thoughts and realise where they came from, what caused them etc. It becomes possible to recognise assumptions that you are making, which you might not usually realise you're making.

If you are interested, Carl Jung wrote some interesting stuff about recognising unconscious contents, and figuring out how to re-incorporate them into the conscious mind, after they have been laying dormant and unused for a while. "The archetypes and the collective unconscious" was a good book of his, which I think talked about that subject. I'm sure that there have probably been a bunch of other psychologists who have written more about it since back when this was published, but it's an interesting book either way.


Also, about the feeling that your mind will always be restless or unsatisfied in some way. Well, even when you satisfy your hunger today, you're still going to be hungry again tomorrow. That doesn't stop you from enjoying your food when you have it.

That kind of feeling of dread is usually intensified by your dissatisfaction. If someone is hungry but is short on food, they will be unhappy about it, and that kind of unhappiness can influence their thoughts, and make them start thinking that everything in life is terrible, even things unrelated to food, and it's not worth living. These beliefs about life can seem so accurate and undebatable but they vanish when a person starts eating regularly again. The inescapable hunger that previously seemed like the end of the world, turns back into a simple appetite, a perfectly harmless part of yourself which exists to remind you of what you want.

It is no great burden to be stuck with that reminder, it's no more of a burden than knowing what your tastes and preferences are, it only seems like a burden from the current vantage point, of someone who doesn't yet know how to eat regularly, and is overly hungry as a result. Once you get it figured out your mood will change, and so will your perspective.

I shouldn't be using so many metaphors on an autistic forum but I'm not sure how else to communicate the idea.

Freaken wow!

Personal growth as related to drug use, is also a combination of other factors such as daily enjoyment of life, good nutrition and exercise.

Personally, I would rather be a cannabis user with no coffee, junk food, TV or meds and other bad things to take in your body, than the other way a round.

I see it that as a sensible scientific choice

Primary spiritual experiences in serene settings, brought about by ethnobotanical use of mushrooms, peyote, morning glory et al, have been in use my man in all societies for millennia, maybe 10's of thousands of years. Even Anglo Saxon, African, Asian and Spanish et al, have made use of these medicinal, spiritual and mentally developmental plants.

introverted stoner? personally one of the reasons i smoke pot is because it helps me be more extroverted, i socialize very well after smoking, unless i smoke too much because then i cant stop laughing to speak