Uncomfortable Labels by Laura Kate Dale

Author:Laura Kate Dale
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2019-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Drugs, and why I started taking them

While I’ve spoken above about addiction to chemical substances that are generally not feared as addictive and are socially acceptable to dabble with, I’m now going to talk a little about my experiences with substances that are more traditionally perceived as addictive.

I have as an adult consumed MDMA, and while I unequivocally believe the experience was a net positive in my life, I have had to wrestle with questions of addiction regarding the drug. MDMA, typically taken as a recreational party drug, is illegal in many countries in the world, including my own. While its primary use recreationally is to flood the brain with feelgood chemicals and create feelings of increased openness and empathy, clinical trials in the US suggest that it activates many of the same areas of the brain that function in non-standard ways in individuals with autism. From a brief appraisal, it’s easy to see how a drug that induces feelings of positive empathy might be beneficial to individuals on the autism spectrum in a dry, abstract sense. For me, it was a world-changing experience, not just during the trip itself but for months afterwards. The biggest thing I immediately noticed upon reaching the high brought on by a recreational MDMA dose was an instant quieting of the world. For someone who has lived years with sensory overload issues, I found myself able to walk through a crowded room, tuning out the background noise and not feel overwhelmed. I could smell an orange without feeling dizzy, I could see a crowd as individual people not a chaotic mass of noise, I could eat foods with more than one texture, I could wear clothing with tags in the neck. I could mentally sort noises by importance and tune out the things I didn’t need to focus on. For the first time ever, I was able to experience what a quiet world is actually like. I was able to sit down and just enjoy the sound of a world at rest. This wasn’t a dulling of all my sensory inputs; it was an increased ability to tune out the static and focus on the important, and that was something I had never experienced before. It was turning down the static dial, but keeping the important information up full. While these aspects of respite from autism were strongest during the high from the drug, they persisted after the high had ended, allowing me to enjoy a few days of a world finally quiet. They gave me the quiet space to reflect on my mind, and to appreciate how much I have to push through in life. I was initially distressed by the realisation that I would have to go back to a world of sensory overload once the drug was out of my system. A friend got me to see that conversely, until then I’d lived my whole life not knowing I could ever get this kind of respite from sensory overload and other autistic spectrum symptoms.

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