The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Five years ago I bought twenty grams of mephedrone from the internet. It's a white powder similar to cocaine. I've only ever used it a couple of times.

Since no one was home today, I thought today would be a good time to use it again.

So I got the bag of mephedrone from my dad's loft. I've been hiding it up there, in a box of my belongings. I know it's bad to hide a class-B drug in my dad's loft but I'm sure no one will ever find it. My dad rarely goes up there.

I took the bag of mephedrone downstairs and tipped some of the powder out onto the kitchen counter. Then I snorted it using a rolled-up bank note. Immediately the euphoria kicked in. Everything felt more vivid and real. It was like my senses had just been kicked into overdrive.

What to do now? I couldn't just stay in the house. So I stuffed the bag of mephedrone into my pocket and strode out into the street.

I decided to go to Birmingham’s Broad Street. Broad Street is a street in Birmingham's city center famous for bars, clubs, and nightlife. I thought this would be the perfect place to go. Even though it was 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

So I started walking to the train station. But I only made it halfway there when I saw people coming out of the local secondary school, Kingsbury School. Today was Saturday so the school should be closed. But it wasn't closed. The gate was open and adults were leaving. They were carrying towels and dressed in shorts, sports bras and tank tops. They must have just finished a fitness class inside the school.

On a whim, I decided to go inside the school. No one paid any attention to me as I strode down the tarmac drive. The last of the people were leaving the building and saying goodbye to each other as I walked straight past them and went inside the school building.

Now I was walking around a deserted school. The corridors were empty.

I pushed open an exit door and went through it.

The door led to a playground. It was a big concrete courtyard surrounded by tall iron fencing. I turned around just in time to see the exit door swing shut by itself: creeeeeeeak. And then I heard a click as the door closed and locked itself.

I scanned the playground. There was no way out. The whole playground was surrounded by tall metal fencing.

I tried climbing a tree. If I could reach the branches, I could jump over the fence and escape into someone's garden. But the branches were too high to reach. Plus I wasn't in good shape for climbing trees, having done no exercise in the past several years. You would think the mephedrone would have given me increased strength or agility, but no.

Then I saw a metal pole. I could shimmy up the pole and get onto the school's roof.

But I couldn't shimmy up the pole either. It was too difficult. My lifetime of sedentary behaviour had left my body weak and useless.

It seemed I'd be stuck in the playground all weekend. On Monday morning, the schoolchildren would find me huddled in a fetal position on the tarmac and poke me with sticks. Then the headmaster would chase me out of he playground with his cane.

Then I noticed a CCTV camera. I waved my arms desperately at the camera for help. But no one came. Today was Saturday and no one was watching the cameras.

I couldn't believe it. When other people take drugs, they go out to clubs and have a great time. Yet when I take drugs, I end up locked in a school playground. Where's the fairness?

Then I saw it: an escape! There was a gap under a fence just big enough to crawl under. I lay down in the dust and dirt and wriggled under the fence like Steve McQueen escaping a Nazi prison camp. Miraculously, no one saw me, and I was free!

Now, finally, I could go to the train station, get the train to Birmingham city centre, and party hard in New Street's nightclubs, even though it was still early afternoon and the clubs wouldn't be open for another six hours.

But now I was feeling thirsty. Mephedrone dehydrates you. So I double-backed and went to a pub to get a glass of water. While the bartender poured the water into a glass, I said, "Did you know that bars in Spain don’t give out tap water?"

"What?" she said.

"I said, Did you know that bars in Spain don’t give out tap water?" I repeated.

She looked at me as if I were weird.

I downed the glass of water in one single gulp, put the glass on the counter, left the pub and continued my quest to reach the train station.

Finally, after walking a mile, I made it to the train station. But the mephedrone was wearing off by this point. I no longer felt the ecstatic high.

The train came and I got on. I sat down, put my headphones in and listened to music while the train slowly and laboriously made its way through Birmingham's inner-city slums. I tried to make the feeling of euphoria come back with music, but it was gone.

When I eventually made it to Broad Street, I felt the first twinges of despair. What no one ever tells you about mephedrone, or cocaine either for that matter, is that the high only lasts ten minutes, after which you feel anxious and miserable for hours. If people told you that, then you probably would never take mephedrone or cocaine, and that would indeed be the sensible thing to do.

I went to a men's bathroom and snorted some more mephedrone. Immediately I felt great again. I also felt thirsty again. So I went out of the bathroom and queued up at the bar. I had a white circle of mephedrone under my nose at that point but I didn’t know it. The people in the queue must’ve noticed it because they stopped talking and seemed nervous about me. I don’t know if the bartender knew I was on drugs because he gave me the water I asked for without mentioning the white circle under my nose. I downed the water in one go and left.

I saw a club that was open. Two bouncers were standing outside.

I approached the bouncers, and I asked, “Is it free to get in?”

You would think the mephedrone would have made my voice big and booming, like the voice of a circus ringleader, but instead my voice came out quiet and squeaky.

The bouncer said, “What?”

“I said, is it free to go in?”

My voice was as quiet as a field mouse's.

The bouncer was looking at me strangely, Then he bent his head to take a closer look at my nose. He saw a white encrustation on my nostril, the telltale sign I had snorted powdered drugs.

Scared, I started to walk away as fast as I could.

“You should lay off the drugs,” the bouncer called after me.

I spent the next couple of hours walking up and down Broad Street. The high had worn off long ago and now it had been replaced by increasing amounts of despair and paranoia.

I was also feeling thirsty all the time. I stopped in a Wetherspoons to get a glass of water. This Wetherspoons was packed. There were people everywhere. I got my glass of water and tried to find a quiet place to stand. But as I looked around, I saw, amidst all these people, the manager glaring at me. He was standing halfway up the stairs and he had an angry and hostile expression. I looked away and looked back, and yes, he was still glaring at me. So I downed the water and left.

I walked up and down Broad Street, not knowing what to do. I believed that the police were tracking me and it was just a matter of time before they were going to stop me. I still had a small bag of mephedrone in my pocket. If the police stopped and searched me, they'd find it, and then I'd be in trouble. Mephedrone was still a class B drug and the maximum penalty for its possession was five years in prison. I didn't want to spend five years in prison. I didn't want to spend five minutes in prison.

So I decided to find a place where I could hide the bag of mephedrone and come back for it later. But everywhere looked too conspicuous. I saw a traffic cone and thought about hiding it under there, but I imagined someone coming along and picking the traffic cone up and finding my bag of drugs. I found a hedge at one point, and I was going to throw the bag in there, but I imagined the police were watching me, so I didn't do that either.

Then I thought about snorting some more mephedrone, but I decided to just call it a night and go home.

When I got to the train station, the next train to Erdington was in 40 minutes, so I went to a pub to calm my nerves. It was only when I went to the toilet in the pub that I looked at myself in the mirror and immediately saw a large white ring of powder around my nose. I had been walking around town like that for the past two or three hours. I washed it off entirely.

The train back to Erdington took absolutely ages. It was agonizing. The train was packed and I was lucky to have a seat but that's as far as my luck went. There were delays for some reason and I was forced to sit there in this hot, cramped train while coming down from a drug. My body felt awful, like how the addicts in Trainspotting feel when they go through heroin withdrawal.

When I finally got back home, I felt okay again. I finished the evening by playing Catan with my family. No one suspected I had taken drugs earlier that day.