Legal Ways to Get High: Energy drinks, Coffee, and Cough Syrup

It seems the newest trend in getting high is legal drugs. When I was a teen, we gravitated towards booze and pot when we wanted to get sh*t-faced, but today’s youth seems intent on finding the best legal way to get high. We had to wait outside the gas station to bribe a bum to buy us booze. Kids today, however, can walk in and get these “legal” drugs at gas stations, pharmacies, and on the internet with ease. As an added bonus, most of the legal ways to get high will not show up on a drug test.

Legal Ways to Get High: Energy drinks and Coffee

While energy drinks have been around since “Jolt” came out in the mid-80’s, they didn’t get really popular until the early 2000’s. Today, energy drinks are a 10 billion dollar market, and they are mostly marketed to young people.

Energy drinks and coffee both contain the same “high”-inducing chemical-caffeine. However, energy drinks often contain ingredients that enhance the caffeine in the drink. Or they contain guarana, which is a source of caffeine itself.

People don’t usually think of caffeine as a dangerous drug, but some energy drinks contain well over the recommended dose. In fact, the FDA recently confirmed reports that 5-hour energy could be responsible for as many as 13 deaths last year.

This legal way to get high can induce euphoria, but it can also cause nervousness, irritability, insomnia, abnormal heart rhythms and agitation. You can become dependent on energy drinks and coffee, and withdrawal can be a real bummer. So yes, caffeine is one of the legal ways to get high, but the mild euphoria you may feel isn’t really worth it.

Legal Ways to Get High: Cough Syrup

The first time I met someone in rehab who told me he was “in” for cough syrup, I seriously thought he was joking. I was still shaking, coming off of heroin, and totally irritable.

“Is that a real thing?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

Yes.  It was real enough to land him in a 30 day treatment center, anyway.

Cough syrup contains dextromethorphan, aka DXM. If you take it in sufficient quantities, you can hallucinate. I’ve heard you will also likely vomit, but I guess that’s the price you pay for this legal way to get high.

Of course, I always wondered why these people didn’t just take acid or shrooms, but cough syrup is legal, so it’s probably easier to get. I can understand using DXM once, out of curiosity or out of desperation, but I could not believe it would be someone’s drug of choice.

Between the puking, diarrhea, and muscle spasms, this doesn’t sound like a very fun legal way to get high, but to each his own, I guess.  And according to experts, the addiction to DXM is psychological, not physical. Keep in mind, however, you have to take a ton of cough syrup to get high: DXM only becomes a hallucinogen at 12.5 to 75 times the recommended therapeutic dose.

Tweet