Hey Sexies,
Have you ever wondered if drugs are being used at Swingers parties or Sex Positive events? In this episode we talk with Sex On The Fringe Blog about their experiences with drugs and sex in an effort to bring you some more information on this taboo topic.
In this 1 hour episode we have a very candid conversation about drug usage, what constitutes D October 2020 in Miami
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Love, Peace and Respect.
xx
C&D
We are a swinging lifestyle podcast, we talk about sex, being a hotwife and non-monogamy, please ensure you are of legal age to be listening to our sexy stories.
Transcript
You're listening to Swinging Down Under, a podcast about the swinging, non-monogamous lifestyle from two crazy Australians with over four years of lifestyle antics to keep you entertained, informed, angry, happy and horny. Join our international swinging adventures. G'day guys and welcome back to Swinging Dead Under podcast. Today's topic is drugs and the swinging lifestyle. It is a little bit of a taboo subject. So here I'm going to give a trigger warning to everybody out there listening.
If you are suffering from drug or alcohol addiction, please do contact your local country national service regarding that.
This episode, of course, if you do not wish to listen in to us talking about drug usage please do skip this episode and carry on listening to another episode of swinging down under we do appreciate that it is a taboo subject but it is something that is at the forefront of many forum posts and questions on people's minds about swinging and drug usage so we felt that it was a good opportunity for us to talk to some fellow content creators shane and erin from sex on the fringe blog and talk to them about their experiences with sex with swinging and with drug use as well so we hope that you enjoy this episode please do keep an open mind as you're listening to it and if you have any questions about this episode or want to talk to sex on the fringe blog please do head to the show notes and you can find all the contact ask details there.
I do also want to give a quick shout out to all of our new Patreon members. Thank you so much, guys. April has actually been a fantastic month. It's been, we've had the most signups that we've ever had since starting the Patreon account, I think two years ago. So we understand at the moment times are a little bit interesting in the world and we really appreciate your support now more than ever.
So thank you very much everybody for your continued support of the podcast, of downloading us and of listening to us on Instagram and everything else and all the other ways that you guys interact with us. It has been a godsend during these isolation times. So we hope you enjoy and we'll be back with our next episode soon. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Welcome back. We are here with Shane and Erin. They are from the Sex on the Fringe blog. Welcome to the podcast, guys. So happy to have you here. So happy to be here.
Now, you guys, you know, we said before, we're talking before we got on the air today, day four, oh, sorry, week four of isolation, you have realized that you enjoy each other's company. That's good news, right? Yeah, no, we weren't surprised. But I think we were both surprised how working from home, our schedules would sync extremely well. And now we're actually having dinner and lunch together. We're seeing each other more and she hasn't wanted to kill me yet. So that's good.
We're here anyone over there taking dictation yet um no no um kate has taken the occasional dick but no dictation sorry that was that was there that was coming out in the wind that was a slow clap that was hoping someone would take the swing yeah yeah that was a lob for sure oh god okay so we're having a lot of fun already but today's episode is all about uh drugs and the lifestyle i'm going to introduce uh erin and shane a little bit here uh hang on so back to cooking who's got the meth lab we haven't gone into meth yet when we run out of everything else, we will start making meth.
I'm going to do the intro, the bios, because I really like them. So I'm going to do that right now. So Erin is a down-to-earth introvert and got pulled down the rabbit hole by her wacky husband. I'm guessing Shane wrote this. She hopes to normalize the taboos around drug use and kinky sex. Shane is a fitness nut and an avid psychonaut. I want to come back to that. Just as the gym is a way of working on the physical body, so too psychedelics work in the mind or empathogens. I really want to come back to that as well. Helps strengthen emotional connections.
You are a professional writer, editor, and proofreader, hence why Sex on the Fringe blog. I love it. Thank you. Hey, so hang on, hang on. Is this like a plumber?
Because know plumbers houses they're always the worst plumbed in the world so does that mean your blog is like the worst version of your writing is this is this what it's about i'm the spell checker so oh really so you do this even though he's like it himself so i'm also extremely bad at editing anything I've written because I know what it's supposed to say and I type extremely quickly and so I have very bad typos and spell things horribly so she has to read everything that I do I love it which is really weird because I'm a professional a professional proofreader, but I can't proofread my own work unless I've let it sit for about a week.
I feel like it is truly a plumber. My father's a mechanic and his cars were constantly breaking down. So I feel like it's the same deal. The collars, children have no shoes. Exactly. Yeah. I've literally got nothing. I've got nothing. Sorry, but you were going into, you wanted to ask about the Psychonaut and Psychonaut, is that right? Yes, I do. Yeah.
So before you go, because I really want you to explain, you know, obviously your lifestyle journey to help the listeners get a sense of, you know, you guys both, I know that you were high school sweethearts, so we're definitely going to touch on that. Psychonaut and pathogens, can you just give me a quick rundown so I don't have to use the Google machine to figure out what it is that you're talking about? Yeah, sure. Psychonaut is the term normally used for people who use psychedelics as a way of exploring human consciousness.
So like using LSD, psilocybin, which is found in mushrooms and other natural plants. I don't consider these just fun. They are fun. They can be fun. But you can learn a lot about yourself and about the world through them if you use them as a tool.
And I've always been a fitness nut ever since about midway through college is when I started getting into it and I feel like and marijuana is in there as well but I feel like by using these substances you can actually get yourself into a mental state very similar to people who've been doing meditation and other forms of that kind of mental exercise for decades. And these substances can get you there and you can explore that with these. And empathogens are those substances that help you become and basically promote empathy and connection with people.
So MDA, MDMA, and other things like that are empathogens in that when you take them they make you feel like the people around you are if you're in a room full of strangers you would suddenly be as comfortable around them as you would with very good friends if you're taking it with a loved one like when aaron and i take it together relaxes all inhibitions which as we shared on the through a couple of blog posts. We had, even though we were together from high school, we had problems being open with each other about certain things because of shame and embarrassment and worry about our own kinks.
And you take something like MDMA and you can then talk freely because I'm no longer feeling self-shame and I'm no longer feeling embarrassment and I can feel free and open to express myself and I know that she's feeling the same thing and is in a place of total acceptance and unconditional love that she can accept whatever I'm saying, take it, absorb it, process it, and then communicate back just as openly.
And so after 10, 15 years of marriage, when we started taking MDMA, we were able to talk openly in a way that we would never have been able to, or I shouldn't say never, but it would have taken, hadn't yet probably would have taken decades more being together before we got there. So in both cases, the drug was an access to like decades of self-work and got us to someplace mentally and emotionally faster. Thank you for explaining that.
That actually makes a lot of sense because we have, Daryl and I both read some studies on, you know, LSD usage, particularly around people with PTSD trauma in their life, you know, and working through some of those historical issues and how, you know, we've seen, you know, historically, obviously, people use that in some of that treatment. So that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you kind of connecting those dots for me. Thank you. All right. I'm going to head over to Erin now. So Erin, you guys were high school sweethearts. You've been together for a really long time.
You've just figured out you like each other because you're in quarantine. So that's fantastic. Good job on that. Run us through your journey from high school sweethearts, getting into non-monogamy and kind of where you guys sit today. Okay. So you can imagine this. Shane and I went to a Catholic high school, and we are in our freshman year religion class. And I'm sure it's hard to believe, but Shane was a smartass. Even then, and we had a teacher who appreciated his fart out assiness, but she would tell me to turn around and smack him occasionally when he was mouthing off.
Your teacher was helping you flirt. You know, that's one of the signs of flirting is that like, that little, you know, like tapping. Yeah. I often say we should have gone back and told her that we got married eventually. So we were, we were good friends through most of high school.
we didn't actually start dating until we were seniors in high school um and then we so we just we started dating and we never stopped so we went through college together and got married a couple years after college and so here we are as far as non-monogamy goes that is typically the case started in college with some mostly girl-on-girl fooling around and same-room sex. And we've been kind of in and out of it to some extent ever since. And that's a good point too.
You say you've been in and out of it because I think sometimes when people talk about being in a lifestyle, they say, you know, we're in the lifestyle and this is kind of a part of who we are. It's a hobby. Whereas other people will say, hey, yeah, we've been, I guess, some manner in it for 10, 15 years because we have a, you know, a fun time here and there, but it's not defined. It's not like we're hunting out new dates every month or whatever, right?
I still, for me, I still consider if somebody's open to just having the conversation and never being involved in it, if they're happy, if they're okay with people around them being involved in that sort of lifestyle, then I think they're part of it anyway, to be honest. It's just an open-minded concept. Right. And the importance kind of shifts in your life as other things take priority. So it's always there in the background, but how involved we are in it changes. Yeah. Well, there's a whole lot of swingers that are sitting indoors by themselves at the moment. That's true. Right.
It's screeching halt right now. Yeah. And so in terms of your drug usage, you said that before you took some MDMA together, When did you start introducing that into your sexual activities? And then also tell us about possibly the usage of it with other partners out there in the lifestyle as well. Okay.
So our first MDMA experiences were with a couple that we were, that was the same couple from college that we first started fooling around with they actually introduced us to most of the drugs that we've done over the years right so our first mdma experience was also our first full swap experience yep wow yeah it's quite a combo there folks no we had soft swap prior to that that, but it was the first full swap experience. So I don't know which story to tell first. Do we talk about the cautionary tale? No, I think the cautionary tale is for later.
Yeah, so the first time we did MDMA, our friends live in California. We knew them through college and they moved out there. And we had, through college, through our 20s, we had done a few same-room experiences and a couple of soft-swap. We'd gone on vacation with them. We'd go out to the West Coast a few times when they were out visiting their family that was still in this area. We would get together, and we would have experiences and they would, uh, lifestyle experiences. And then they were saying, Hey, you guys should try MDMA. This stuff's really awesome.
And they were, they were telling us about their different drug experiences. And they were the ones who actually first even introduced us to weed when we were in our early twenties. So they were our gateway into most drugs.
And even when we had weed for the first time it was a wait this is what we've been warned against all of our lives this is what is supposed to make us useless individuals in society it's this is nothing so when they were like you should try mdma it's not what you understand ecstasy to be we believed it because they'd been right about marijuana so we were out there for a long weekend in california with them uh we were rolling on mdma and that's when it was kind of like hey you guys want to try swapping because we're all here enjoying having parallel play like we usually do but maybe maybe we introduced that and we were like sure and we did and it was went really well And you guys I guess you were friends for a long time so there was a definite element of trust there I'm assuming right friends we had been friends with them for over ten years there was definitely a level and trust everything there you guys still catch up today yes absolutely still in contact with them we haven't been out to California a couple of years now, but for a while, we were going out there once a year, twice a year.
And even if we were out there on our own vacations, we would always make sure to catch up with them in some capacity. Whether that led to anything or not didn't really matter. That wasn't the point, but we're good friends with them. Yeah. That's pants on, pants off friends, right? It's fun. I like it.
Absolutely i like it absolutely and and so i mean in terms of you know let's talk a little bit about uh your blog so you guys started a blog sex on the fringe.com people can go check it out it'll be in the show notes as well and it was i guess it's a very different blog you know i i know that you know now coming in late 2019 and now into 2020, we are seeing a little bit more coverage of recreational usage of drugs in the lifestyle. And your blog was, I'm going to say, one of the first resources that I saw that was just dedicated to it.
So run us through your thought process behind creating it, what the intention is or what your mission is, I guess, around it and what the future of it might look like? I'd say that since our experience was that after we researched and tried some different drugs, we had the realization of, you know, we've basically been lied to our whole lives about this. Drugs were put in this like one category of being bad. And if you do, then you're bad and your life is going to be ruined and all these big, scary things.
And we sort of wanted to normalize it in a way that, of course, we don't want to have anybody ever feel pressured to do anything, but, you know, do your own research and try things. We were in our thirties before we tried any of this And obviously, we're still, you know, gainfully employed, you know, members of society and our lives are great. And we've been able to make it a part of our life. And we feel like more people should experience that and are missing out on it by just buying into what we were sold as kids as this is just a bad thing to do.
And the blog kind of came from us talking about that because we're not out amongst our circle of friends, either as swingers or as drug users. We have some friends who know about some of our drug use that we brought into it because we knew that they would be accepting of it or they'd already indicated that they had experience or had interest. But most of our friends don't know that we've done psychedelics or that we've done ecstasy. And they probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that I've done that, but they would be kind of shocked to hear that Aaron did it.
And there have been several times that we said, well, this is a shame that we can't have these experiences with some of our friends. One of our friends in the past few years ago passed away from a very sudden brain cancer.
And we were just thinking like, how great would it have been if when we were all together after that, like in the year afterwards, if we could have taken something like MDMA together and really just been open with each other and being able to have that really raw experience of just being unashamed and being able to express our sorrow and our love for our friend and for each other and not have those normal human condition boundaries blocking us from saying things. Because, I mean, how often do you say to your friends, you'd be like, man, just I love you. It doesn't count a lot.
And the fact that we feel we have to hide this from our friends shows like where we are socially with it. So the blog was like our way of these are the stories we wish we could tell the people we know, because we've had such great experiences and it's brought us closer and we could see how these could benefit all kinds of relationships. But we're still worried about telling our friends because we're worried about what they would think of us if we told them. It can be very healing in a way. We've had a lot of fun with it, sexually and otherwise, but it doesn't have to be sexual at all.
It's a very emotionally connecting experience that you can have with vanilla friends or, you know, anyone that you're close with. It's interesting that you're talking a lot about shame. I did not grow up in a religious family at all. In fact, quite the opposite. My father is still to this day, he smokes marijuana at four or five in the morning and continues smoking marijuana all throughout the day. So that's... Only leaf though. He only smokes leaf because he feels like it's more natural. I don't know. But whereas, you know, so I grew up around that.
I grew up knowing what marijuana was, what drugs were from a very, very young age. Darrell, on the other hand, kind of similar to you, he went to a Catholic school. I mean, did you feel that there was that same... I think our histories are very, very different in terms of drug use. And that's purely because I grew up in a very small town where if anything happened, everybody found out about it. So there was an immediate... And unfortunately, like you guys have mentioned, whether it be anything out of the socially accepted norm, which in a country town is... Alcohol. Well, even alcohol.
Even alcohol. anything out of the socially accepted norm, which in a country town is- Alcohol. Well, even alcohol, even alcohol use at a young age. I mean, remember, I didn't drink until I was 18. That's right, yeah. So granted, I wasn't the- Which just blows my mind, by the way, but anyway, carry on. And 18 being the legal age in Australia, so I literally waited until the legal age. So my exposure to drugs was actually really quite low because you couldn't get it anywhere. I mean, and the people who were getting it were well known as the people who were getting it.
And unfortunately, whether they were or not, they were pushed into the bucket of, well, they'll do nothing with their lives. So there was a lot of social ramifications to actually doing that. So my exposure to drugs really didn't happen until actually, well, until I moved to Sydney, no, sorry, moved to Brisbane and met somebody down there and she exposed me to it. It really wasn't prior to that I'd really had virtually zero. But like Shane and Erin were saying though, was there a sense of shame by your schooling or your upbringing? Not really, not in my schooling, no.
Sexual shame was certainly something in the schooling area, but not around drugs. In fact, the smartest guy at my high school who graduated top of the class and is now a doctor, a professor at, I can't remember, one of the major universities in the US, actually, like, you know, pick a name, MIT or Brown or whatever, it's one of the majors. He's now a doctorate professor in there. He was using, I still remember in year 11 and 12, he was using LSD to help him study prior to exams. Now, I'm not sure even with the research I've done that LSD becomes a good study tool.
I don't know if you were microdosing or not because for microdosing, if you're microdosing LSD or psilocybin, that's one of the things that the West Coast and the Silicon Valley things, it's a huge nootropic brain-boosting thought process thing. And we have yet to actually write any of our microdosing stories. I have a couple of weird... Our life was improved six months later due to something that happened the day that I microdosed. Weird connections like that. Pretty good stories. But microdosing on LSD in order to increase your study capacity is totally a thing. Yeah.
The whole microdosing thing might have been, but he certainly wasn't microdosing. But it worked for him. Look, it really worked for him. I think it's funny. It's a cartoon where there's a modern cartoon where a kid's smoking pot because it helps him slow down and, you know, relieve some of the issues that he has with his ADHD and things like that.
And, you know, I think looking back at him, he was probably looking at what I know now about autism and my mother actually deals with autistic kids as part of what she does at school, looking at him, I believe now he was borderline autistic, and he was using some of these drugs to help him deal with that and actually give him some focus. So I know that sometimes the drug effect on the autistic mind is sometimes different to what the drug effect is. I'm trying not to use the word normal because an autistic mind can still be a normal mind.
It's just running at a different rate to what others are. So it was really interesting now looking backward and seeing, well, perhaps he found a way to make his mind work better by using things to help either speed him up or slow him down depending on what he was trying to achieve. And yeah, it's really interesting looking backward now and not understanding what it was at the time and not understanding that he was mildly autistic at the time either.
But now I look back and I can see there's just all these tells around how he related with people around him, that he was absolutely on the spectrum somewhere, but had found a way to deal with it. That's really interesting. All right. So, we've spoken a little bit about your history. We've spoken about just drug uses in general and kind of a little bit of art. He doesn't talk to me anymore because he's too smart for me. As in as you weren't taking enough LSD. Yeah, that's right.
Now, I actually put some things up on Instagram and I want to just kind of tie these into our conversation because I thought that the responses were particularly interesting. I asked a question, I said, swinging and drug use, because again, I go back to some of these forum posts where people say we're interested in a lifestyle, but, you know, is there a lot of drug use? We're not sure. And so I said, have you seen drug use at a swingers slash sex positive event before? You know, I wanted to include things like kink and BDSM, et cetera, into that as well. 62% of people said they have seen it.
That surprised me. I was expecting it to be a little bit lower because when I get asked this question, I'm like, look, I don't necessarily see it a lot. Maybe 20%, maybe 30%. I would say quite lower than 62%. I mean, in your experience, do you think that's a relative number percentage? 62% have said, yeah, they've seen it.
That seems high to high to me as well but i guess that depends if you want to be that obvious that depends if you want to include marijuana use because there are there we're very centrally located to a few different clubs but we have two that we we pretty much frequent one of them is a non-smoking uh establishment like no smoking at all. It has to be outside. The other one allows for vaping inside, but not actual cigarette smoke. And I know that a couple of the people there, when they're vaping, they're not vaping regular e-cigarettes. They're vaping weed.
So you can tell that some people, in that sense sense if you're in certain places that allow vaping there's going to be weed use i think there's only one time that we were actually aware of someone looked really out of it high in a way yeah we're like she did not seem drunk we looked at her like she's definitely on something and it looks like she's on a pretty high dose of MDMA from the way she's pretty much grinding on the bouncer. She was coming in the door and she was getting, I think she was at the door check, getting checked to make sure she didn't have anything anywhere.
And she took that the wrong way entirely. And that was the only time that we actually saw someone and were like, wow, that person seems like they're actually on something. Yeah. I'm glad that you echoed that as well, Erin, that you think that number is high.
Because when I saw it, first of all, I thought, I don't think that I've ever seen those kinds of numbers at a lifestyle event um known it for sure either i mean like you said we saw the one time but we've never been around people that that mentioned it or yeah we've yeah it's not really been talked about much and uh and shane good good lead in there with your well it depends on what you're talking about because of marijuana um i'm gonna i actually had some responses i i did a follow-up question i said have you seen it? And then I've said, what have you seen?
And, um, it depends on what you're talking about because of marijuana. I actually had some responses. I did a follow-up question. I said, have you seen it? And then I've said, what have you seen? And just to give you guys an indication of what the responses were, the number one response was marijuana. And it is interesting because obviously in the United States of America, you do have some areas that have legalized the use of things like gummies.
So the sway of these numbers could be perhaps locations where people can use gummies and then go to the club and it's more accessible and I guess more spoken about. And I don't know, Daryl, what do you reckon? Well, I mean, given that I absolutely consider anything that affects your body in a positive or negative way in what you're taking is a drug. So I'll wheel it all the way back to caffeine. It's a drug. It has effects on your body, on your mindset, on that sort of things. That's just my opinion. And people feel free to disagree with that.
Alcohol, for what I've seen in clubs, in events, in lifestyle events, the biggest prevalence of people doing the wrong thing or people being out of their heads or whatever, whatever you want to call it, is not anything harder than alcohol. Alcohol seems to be the crutch that people use in these lifestyle events to give themselves a little bit more confidence. And that's typically the one that I see. So if you're talking about drugs for me, I'd say it's probably 100%, but I'm now talking about a lot of low-level drugs as well.
You're talking about things that would just alter you, your personality. Yeah, that alter your personality. I mean, yeah, there's an awful lot of people out there. And look, we've been in situations, and I'm sure a lot of people have, where one of the people in the couple that we're with may be a little bit less interested in this lifestyle than the other, and they tend to soak a little bit of alcohol up to try and bridge that gap. And certainly that's worrisome for me.
I've only ever been in two situations, I think, since we've been in the lifestyle where I've called a play session and said, I can't do this because somebody's not close enough to right of mind for me to believe that there's a good positive consent scenario. So certainly one of those was, well, actually both of those had alcohol as a major contributing factor rather than being anything stronger. Well, let me read you the other responses too. So like I said, we've got a lot of marijuana written here as well.
One of the people actually said weed and then in brackets if you count that and i think that that was a similar response we got from a few people and then other people said uh coke mdma coke cocaine one person said leather conditioner i think she was having a bit of fun with me um cocaine molly ghb lsd mushrooms i got an mdma Coke. I've got Coke, MDMA, GHB, speed, ketamine, weed, alcohol. So that person also is referencing alcohol.
So, you know, I think it was interesting, the broad spectrum as well of drugs, because again, you know, visiting events, going to parties and stuff like that, I don't think that with, I mean, I can count on my hands a number of times I've actually had anybody reference cocaine or MDMA or pills at an actual lifestyle event. Except for Crazy Cokie Lawyer. Except for one of our early dates with Crazy Cokie Lawyer. But I mean, I think there's probably a bit of a difference too between large events and house parties.
I mean, can you tell us your experience with maybe your personal experience as couple on couple versus maybe going to a club versus maybe an event in the lifestyle? If you can maybe share a bit of a broad range, that'd be great. Well, we have no I don't know. your personal experience as couple-on-couple versus maybe going to a club versus maybe an event in the lifestyle. If you can maybe share a bit of a broad range, that'd be great. Well, we have no experience personally with drugs and clubs because we haven't done that. Yeah.
We've done extremely low levels of an amphetamine to be like, okay, we're staying up because we're going out late and it's been a late Friday and we're going out. So having something that is a stimulant to keep us up for it. But we generally don't take drugs ourselves in order to go to club experiences. We have a post on that. And it mainly falls into the amount of time it takes and driving and other things like that, getting to a club and getting it home. But also a lot of things that you need to consider with any kind of drug is your set and setting.
That term is used a lot with psychedelics, but it applies to just about everything in life, how you were going to handle your situation. And if you're at a club and you have, you've taken something, you're in no condition to drive, but the drug is changing your ability to enjoy your situation, you might not have a way to get out somewhere comfortable. So that's something I would caution people against. If you don't know what your, your comfortable tolerance is with anything, it would be difficult. Like we find that too much of a, an unknown variable.
Don't do anything for the first time in a club setting. That's for sure. You need to know what you, what your reaction is to substances. Well, we feel we probably could give ourselves a good dose and we know what it is. Uh, Aaron's, Aaron's gone to wedding receptions on extremely low levels of MDMA because it eases her social anxiety and allows her to enjoy the experience and being sat at a table full of people that she doesn't know and she can engage with people.
If she were on that same low level at a club, she could more easily go up and talk to people and jump into a conversation or people come and talk to us, engage extremely comfortably. And if I'm not on anything, that would be fine and we'd be able to do that. But we don't want to have to leave a club at the end of the night in an intoxicated state and then go home. We've not been to any hotel takeovers, but that's one of the things that we've thought. If we did a hotel takeover where we have a room that we can go back to if one of us isn't feeling comfortable, then we can do that.
It allows us to have that safe haven that we can then retreat to comfortably. Yeah, that is interesting that you're mentioning about the space that you're in as well and cautioning people from using it for the first time in a space like that. Because I think there can be moments where there's a and someone, you know, wants to say, hey, do you want some of this? And you might want to try it.
But I wholeheartedly agree that that's very dangerous territory, you know, doing anything for the first time anywhere new, particularly if it's in a different state or heaven forbid, different country, the ramifications medically on that, you know, could be huge. So I've got, yeah, I've got two things out of that that I want to ask. So first one being around mixing. So what's your stance on mixing of drugs, whether it be again, back to alcohol and the other drugs that you're talking about?
What do you think is the, especially somebody new coming into this or somebody trying things for the first times, give me some learnings from your experience. So do it very carefully. If you're going to mix alcohol with anything, again, I would say these things need to be tried, if not in your own home and somewhere that you feel very comfortable and safe. We do sometimes sip on a little bit of wine when we're doing MDMA, but we don't feel the need to really mix it with anything. I always caution people with alcohol and MDMA.
Alcohol can lower your inhibitions so that you do silly things and you might do extremely stupid things around your friends. MDMA makes you feel that a stranger is your best friend. You combine the two and anyone could be dancing naked on a table in a bar because you think that you're hanging out with your best friends and you're drunk. That's not a great combination. But if you do that at home with your spouse or your significant other, it's fine. You just have to be really careful again about set and setting. But I'm going to throw out a resource here.
If you're looking to combine anything, I would recommend you go to Tripsit.me. If you Google Tripsit.me chart, they have an amazing chart that shows various drug combinations and reactions. So you will see like an MDMA and cocaine. No, don't do that. That's extremely dangerous. You'll see MDMA and LSD. Oh yeah, they'll make each other better. That's candy flipping. You can have an amazing time doing that. This chart is color coded. It has so many different drugs on it and that includes antidepressants, anti-anxiety med, and stuff like that.
It's a go-to resource for making sure that the drugs you're taking in combination are actually safe to take because there are certain things that combining the two, you just shouldn't do. Thank you for that. Actually, I've opened that up on my computer now too. So I will drop that in the show notes to have a look at. I just found that website. So cheers for recommending that. And, you know, I did also appreciate the fact, Shane, that you said, you know, if Erin was taking something, you might not, you know, because you're obviously looking after her and making sure that she's okay as well.
So that's really important. So the second part to my question, or the second question to my two questions is more now, it's again around safety. Again, with my lack of exposure to this world of drugs. I'm curious as to how you, and I know the word guarantee is probably a little bit loose, but how do you manage to keep, you're talking about microdosing and things like that. And I know with LSD as an example, you can take huge doses without really there being too much drama, but how do you know what you're getting?
Because to microdose, you obviously have to know what the percentage is that's coming in, or at least have a good understanding of that. Oh, you're talking about the strength? So say if they had like an MDMA? Yeah, I mean, you've got to know the strength, but you've also got to at least have a reliable, a reasonably reliable source. Oh, I love this question because I've got something bad after. I'll let you guys answer it first. Okay. Well, I guess I'll take this one again just because I'm the drug purchaser. He's the scientist here.
I use the dark net and I order all my stuff online through different dark markets. these are the rating systems on these are very important and a lot of people use them very judiciously to make sure that you are rating a quality vendor. So I only make sure I'm buying from someone who is a trusted vendor. Sorry, Shane. Hold on one second. Is this like Yelp for drugs? Is that what you're telling us? It's more like Amazon. I was going to say, come on. So we've purchased off Silk Road previously. Yeah, exactly.
But it's more like amazon i was gonna say but come on so we've purchased off silk road uh previously but it's no longer around anymore of course but there's like silk road eight yes um there are different names yes um but yeah it's the the markets are all set up so that you have many ways to rate vendors and vendors go through a lot of effort to make sure that they're giving you good products because that, you know, four out of five stars, like that's everything if they're going to get purchased from again. Every time I purchase something, I test it.
I have test kits to make sure that it is what I purchased. And so, and then we. I would never give anyone something, if we were going with friends and we were hanging out, they wouldn't have something that I'd already tried myself because I know how I should react to 120 milligrams of MDMA. So I can take 120 milligrams myself, think, okay, this was 120, this felt like 120, and I reacted appropriately to it. I can now give this to someone at that amount. So it's very much trusting the vendor, but also testing it and self-experimentation, again, at home in a safe environment.
I have a journal that I keep of every drug experience that we have, what we take, how much we take, and our reactions to it, and a little bit of a log of the night and everything just so I can keep track. So I know exactly what we have and how much we're getting off of it. You're a title nerd. I've actually had friends who were like, I would not be doing this if I didn't have complete trust in how much of a nerd you are. And the fact that you're interviewing me halfway through an LSD trip in order to find out what I'm experiencing. And writing it down because you're just super nerding out.
That's awesome. It's a good lead into what I wanted to mention as well. We've seen, we seen we've heard it you know people say like oh you know you know bob had this so it's going to be fine for me and it is interesting because i mean at the end of the day these are products that are not you know mass produced by by by big pharmaceutical companies they're not in in pill packets where they're all in the same container and you know the batch that they're from and and therefore the strength is the same as the one sitting next to it.
So my only thought around that sometimes is when somebody says, hey, I've tried this and the batch must be fine. I mean, the pill that I've taken versus the pill that you've taken, even though we've bought them from the same supplier, I mean, they could be completely different, right? So I mean, when somebody says that to you, do you trust it? Do you not trust it? What's your thoughts around it? I usually buy powder. That way I can measure it out because I usually start with like 140 milligrams and Aaron starts with 120 milligrams because we're slightly that different in how we react to it.
So buying pressed pills that are 70 milligrams each doesn't really do it for me. I like having the exact control um i would agree that someone handing out the same thing, if they bought a hundred of one type of pill and are handing them out, they could be different. But a lot of times, from my experience, when vendors are selling something, they're selling off of one batch of it. So you're likely to get things that are similar. I have a funny story, if you guys would like to hear it, about batches being similar. Years and years ago, I was living with some flatmates.
What do you want to say there, Daryl? I know exactly what you're talking about. I was living with some flatmates, and we went to a place in Australia where they're known for selling hash cookies, essentially. And you go into the middle of- You buy them just about beside the police station. Yeah. So you go in there and you stop in, it's in the middle of the rainforest. You stop up there and you buy some, you know, you get lunch and then you go to the local park area. Why are you not saying the name of it? Nimbin. It's Nimbin in Australia. And it's very- It's well known.
Nobody's going to be surprised. Very funky. Anyone who lives in Nimbin, they're making half of their money out of selling pot. That's just how Nimbin works. And we went up there. We took a drive up there, and my flatmates and I and Daryl, and we- Sorry, anyone from Nimbin. We bought hash cookies, and we bought three sets of three because they get sold in three. In the car ride on the way back, we decided to have a cookie each, and- Daryl was driving, so he didn't. Daryl was driving, so he didn't. He was not having cookies. 45 minutes later, nothing.
So I think I had another half a cookie just to check. 45 minutes later, nothing still. So we wrote these cookies off as being nothing more than, you know, we spent $15. Tourists got ripped off. Tourists got ripped off. So we put them in the fridge. About a week and a half later, my flatmate's sitting there. She texts me. She was having a cup of tea in the afternoon, felt like something sweet, went into the fridge. She knows that these cookies were hash cookies, but she wrote them off as not actually being hash cookies, as just being regular cookies.
She had all three of them, texted me, I'm going to say maybe half an hour, 45 minutes later. And obviously her batch actually did contain hash because she was off her head and then had to go to dinner and survive a dinner party date. Yeah. So that's my funny story on assuming that just because you've got two products sitting next to each other that they're exactly the same. And in actual fact, they definitely weren't, not for her. Yeah, well, there's two different things. When you're talking about pressed MDMA pills, they come in extremely large batches.
So if you have 100 of those that are all the same and look the same press, probably the same. When you're talking about a hash bakery that did a dozen cookies or whatever at a time, that can be a little bit different. But also edibles. Oh, my God. Oh, we've had so many varied experiences with edibles that we don't typically go for edibles anymore. We had one time we were hanging out with friends, we were watching a movie. And at the beginning of the movie, we each ate a square of the big pan of brownies. About halfway through the movie, everyone was like, wow, I don't feel anything.
Let's have another brownie. So we all had another brownie. Me being a dumbass, another, like by the time we got three quarters to the movie, I'm like, I still don't feel'm having another brownie about two hours later after the movie was over we were all sitting out on the beach we sat there like we were looking at each other aaron and i's the tides rolling in we were like oh the tide's coming in we should probably move before we get wet yeah and then 10 20 maybe an hour goes by tides moving and we should probably move before our stuff gets wet. Yeah. And then 10, 20, maybe an hour goes by.
Tide's moving and we should probably move before our stuff gets wet. Yeah. The brownies didn't hit us for hours. Edibles are such a weird thing, depending on what you've eaten, how much you have in your stomach, like what you're eating with them. Every time we take an edible, we're like, okay, let's start timing it. We're not going to feel this for three hours. They, they are a completely different animal. Okay. Well, that's good advice. There you go. And while we're sticking with just health and drug use, of course, I know you guys are medical professionals.
So just throwing that out there and no one on this call actually is a medical professional, but I also asked a question around, you know, swinging and drug use, do drugs at a sex positive conventional event, do they concern you? And again, the results were surprising. 53% of people said, yes, they do concern them, but 47% said no. You know, so I thought that was pretty interesting that, you know, you're getting that kind of mixture. And I asked a follow-up, what does it concern? What is a concern of yours?
And most, I'm going to say half the people, I'm not going to read them all, but half the people said, look, it's grown adults making their own choices. Well, I have at it. If they're not impacting me, I don't really care. One person said, actually a couple of people said, look, it depends on the kind of drug use, using your gummy experience here. A person said a gummy to let loose is very different than perhaps a line of cocaine. And then a few people kind of said, look, generally speaking, consent boundaries might be a concern of ours.
It's a bit difficult, I know, for you guys to answer because you don't tend to go out to clubs and events using this. You obviously seem to be doing it more with people that you know or just together. But if you were talking about that health impact or consent or decision-making, I mean, do you have any advice for if you were on the drug yourself? And the flip side of that, if you were approached by somebody or were playing with somebody who looked like they were on drugs, do you have any advice for how to manage that?
Well, I think that, again, it's sort of the problem of lumping all drugs into one category, but also knowing your levels.
So like, for example, Shane mentioned that I'll occasionally do a low dose of MDMA at the social event if you were to meet me on on a low dose of MDMA you would have no idea that I was on anything I wouldn't even seem drunk so somebody who was was you know had too much to drink would be way more impacted than I would be on a low dose of poly so it's knowing yourself and knowing how you react to things, I think is really important before you do anything in a larger event, especially a lifestyle event where consent might be an issue.
I can definitely see Daryl's point about people being too drunk and not feeling comfortable with, you know, are they really here? Are they really able to consent? So I think that it's, again, really important to know how you react to things before you do them in that context. It is interesting too, because I think, again, kind of going back to the times when we've actually seen drugs at an event. And look, this is, you know, this is undoubtedly a taboo subject, guys. You know, we're not pretending everything's roses. This is taboo.
And like you said, you don't even tell some friends because you're concerned about the ramifications of that. But honestly, I would say that I have far outweighed the number of times I'm going to show you what I'm going to do. We're not pretending everything's roses. This is taboo. And like you said, you don't even tell some friends because you're concerned about the ramifications of that.
But honestly, I would say that I have far outweighed the number of times I've seen people in excess on alcohol doing the wrong thing or hurting themselves or hurting others than I absolutely would have seen with drug use at events. You know, we just came back from a trip around the States. Forget at events. I mean, I think just looking at your life, looking back at your history, the vast majority of the violence that's been around things that you've been involved in has not been driven by anything other than alcohol. Yeah. Let's talk about some of your personal experiences about drug use.
Let's maybe talk about something that was good. Actually, let's talk about something that was sexy. So to kind of sexy it up a little bit, when you guys were using it, something awesome, something sexy, what do you guys want to share your personal experience? Most of our MDMA experiences typically get pretty sexy. Just the two of us. Just the two of us. Most drugs make me horny. So MDMA, I'm like, some people can't get any kind of arousal level when they're on MDMA. It's one of the effects of it. And some guys find that they cannot perform at all on MDMA.
I typically don't have that experience to the point where I can usually tell when the MDMA is kicking in because I immediately get turned on. So usually an MDMA night starts out with me getting very gropey and then a lot of massaging, a lot of very intense touching, caressing, and complimentary expressions of each other's bodies, and then getting on to just really intense sex. And it flows between being just very close and loving and cuddling and then flowing right into really intense, passionate sex. Usually, we don't typically get very kinky when we're rolling. You don't need to.
Everything is so intense. Vanilla sex is just amazing. Yep. MDMA. So leading on from that, have you guys, I suppose, have you lived a fantasy or have you discussed a fantasy whilst being involved, whilst being on one of the drugs you've mentioned that you wouldn't have experienced or discussed without that? I don't know if it's something we wouldn't have discussed, but I'd say that the most successful anal sex that we've had was on MDMA. We haven't been able to duplicate that without it. So it had been discussed, but the success was there. Yeah.
There have been a few things that I've mentioned to you that I've told you about fantasies or porn that I've watched or other things that I find to be a turn on. That we've talked about, but have we done well? Well, yeah, I would say that I'm expressing to you certain things that I'm not necessarily asking you to do, but I'm just telling you that these are things that I focus on. We share fantasies a lot. Yeah, we do. We share fantasies a lot.
We actually, at one point, before we made the blog, which the blog was actually talked about across several different roles, we talked about erotica and writing erotica together which is something that i always intend to do more on the blog but haven't gotten around to but that was one of the things that we were always talking about is writing out our fantasies together to share with each other in that form it's funny you say that i actually so kate's last single guy experience that was in miami I actually asked her to write that out as well because we were trying something different because I like to be involved and typically that means visual involvement for me.
But we were trying to shift to imagination involvement. Unfortunately, what Kate understood as writing the events was a little bit more structured and formal than I was hoping. So I was looking for something a bit more novel-like in terms of how it was written and her structure was a lot more factual, I suppose. So maybe, I think maybe next time I might see if I can get a stone first before she writes it and she might actually speak about the feelings and touchings and expressions and, you know, all those sorts of touchy-feely things that I really wanted to know about.
Maybe what I should do is try to record it on like an audio on my phone or something and just talk. I think once my fingers hit the keyboard, I become much more analytical about things and maybe if I'm... Yes, I've read your emails. If you meet Kate through email only, she's a very different person and in fact has more than once been pulled up by managers in the past in saying, well, that was a little too curt, your email, which is not her at all. So it's a very different persona. I tend to do the opposite in work emails. I get told by managers, you know, you don't know that person.
Yeah, maybe pull it back a little. Maybe those jokes are not appropriate for someone in an organization. No, no, that's, yeah, Kate just throws a smiley face on the end of a really harsh sentence and thinks that fix it. Get your shit together, smiley face. Have a great day. Why is it you're not prepared for any meetings you come to, smiley face? Oh, shit. All right, guys, like talking about, you know, drug usage in the lifestyle and your experience and everything else has been great.
I mean, but in terms of, you know, obviously you've got the blog and you're trying to take away some of that stigma around it, you know, what we've kind of discussed today. I mean, one of the big takeaways for me is, you know, just because you're using drugs doesn't mean you're using drugs at an event. You know, if you meet Shane and Aaron at an event, then they're not going to be necessarily on drugs. And I think that is a lot of the misconceptions around it.
But how can we, you know, listeners, content creators, you guys write in the blog, how can we both help to normalize sexuality for one, but then maybe try to share and take away some of that stigma about drug usage? I think that one of the things that we've talked about is trying to normalize it, which, again, is just for us talking about specific things and specific experiences. So it isn't just drugs in general, but it's this is what we've tried and this is our experience and this is what resources that we've used that people can look into it for themselves and decide what's right for them.
But I think that just talking about it more openly would be a huge step. People just it all the time on profiles, drug and disease free. Well, what does that mean? Because we know a lot of people smoke pot. So you see that on so many profiles that it can't possibly be true for everyone. That's a good point. People are smoking pot that are putting drug and disease free on their profile. So maybe we don't default to that. Drugs aren't one big scary thing. There's a lot of different things under that category. And I tend to agree with Daryl where drug and disease free, oh, you don't drink coffee.
Yeah. Right. Or drink alcohol. You're not having alcohol. You're not on antidepressants. You're not on an anti-anxiety med or anything. You don't take painkillers when your back hurts. Where are we drawing the line when you say you're drug-free? I understand. To me, that means, oh, I don't want someone who's shooting up heroin coming over to my house and potentially casing the place. I don't want someone who's addicted, who's going to be worried about it, but that's not what drug-free means. So I dislike seeing that. When someone puts that in their Thank you.
addicted who's going to be worried about it. But that's not what drug-free means. So I dislike seeing that. When someone puts that in their profile, I don't judge them for saying that. But that's one of the places that I think we need to be a bit more cautious in the lifestyle is don't immediately assume that just because someone is a drug user, a recreational drug user, that means anything to their personality. If you met us and we didn't bring it up, you would never know that about us because we don't present as the meth addict or something. Right.
Which is why we feel almost a responsibility because we are such normal seeming people that I think people would be surprised if they met us to hear about some of the things that we've tried. So we're just trying to put it out there more, make it more acceptable. Equally how, you know, people might be surprised that, you know, you've been with other couples before, you've played with a single before, you frequent swinger clubs. I mean, I get what you're saying. You do that? What? Shit. I mean, not recently. No. No. Yeah. Well, yeah.
I mean I mean, certainly if you're frequenting swingers clubs right now, the other side, the drug-free maybe, but the disease-free might be more of a problem as well. I do get what you're saying about the stigma around it though. When people see the word, well, we're drug and disease-free, you're right.
I mean, there is a certain, even now, as now as i say it there's there's imagery that pops up in my head and it is you know heroin usage or things like that it's not necessarily either that or the flip side to that which is maybe um you know big big party uh party drug people which you know they can't go out and and they're consuming alcohol and they're consuming drugs and they're taking you know doing a lot of coke here and then and then doing whatever.
I think that there is a, as you're kind of explaining on this call and what we've seen in talking to you is that there's a very different subset of that. You know, it's almost like as much as the lifestyle is a diversity, so can be recreational drug usage. And a lot of the drugs that were mentioned in your survey of what have you seen people do, GHB, ketamine, cocaine. If these are done at a level that you know what you're doing and you know the source, so you know, hey, I can do this and be...
I can do two lines of this cocaine and feel energized and ready to go out there and I can meet people. And that's going to let me put away my anxiety and my self-doubt in order to get up the courage to talk to people. But people aren't going to know that I'm on anything. That's the same as just medication that people use. It's a way of self-prescribing. The problem is that any of this can be easily overdone. And if it's shared and you don't know your levels, you don't know what you're taking, that's when things get dangerous.
But if you have it from a controlled source and you know how you react to it, like GHB, to me, taking GHB is like having a couple beers, which means instead of having four beers, I have two beers. I've lowered my caloric intake. I've lowered my alcohol. I'm not going to have a hangover the next day. And I'm just as buzzed as I would be otherwise. And I know that about myself so I can safely take that. So I'm curious now, we've established the bottom end of where we register the drug chart down in caffeine, as I mentioned before.
I'm curious, where do you think is, is there a top end line to drugs that are, you know, that you guys would rule out and say, we're not willing to go above here no matter what, no matter what we can do, no matter how well we know it, no matter how well we know where it came from. I'm just curious as to whether there's, you know, because for me, even if I look at alcohol, there's a limit in terms of what I'm willing to ingest, and I self-police that. So I'm just curious about the top end when it comes to heavier drugs and things like that.
I think that we look at it as things that are physically addictive. So MDMA is not physically addictive. We don't do anything with needles, heroin, anything like that. So just to dig into that a little deeper because I know there's people out there, myself included, except for the prep work that I did coming into this, the difference between physical addiction and other addictions, can you help out our listeners? The way that I would explain it would be if you are normally at your normal happy quotient, it's borrowing happiness from the next three days in order to get it now.
So you have tripled down on your current level of happiness. And depending on how you react to it, the days afterwards might feel a little bit of a letdown. You might feel a little bit gloomy because you've taken a little bit of happiness from those days in order to get it now. For people who need that boost in their life, who feel down, who aren't feeling good in their normal existence, they can Thank you. order to get it now.
For people who need that boost in their life, who feel down, who aren't feeling good in their normal existence, they can feel that living in that moment, in that level of feeling good, it just feels too good for them to let that go. So they keep chasing that high because they then felt good and then they stopped feeling good. And it's the same way with even alcohol. Some people who are caffeine addicts, they just get droopy if they're not on caffeine. So that's a mental addiction. It's an emotional addiction.
It's not a physical addiction the way that you have something that's going to make you crave it. It's just that you're chasing that feeling of feeling good. Gotcha. Okay. Understood. Yeah. God, that was interesting. I'm sitting, I'm sitting back nodding. I know you guys can't see that, but yeah, definitely interesting. And, and look, I mean, I, we often, I, we joke around that, you know, I'm a caffeine addict and all of this sort of thing. And obviously there is a very different connotation to actually being, you know, an actual addict as well.
And so we recognize that when we say, you know, I'm a caffeine addict, but I get what you're saying in terms of, you know, filling that lull because there's been times I think when, yeah, we haven't, I've specifically said, okay, I'm not going to have any caffeine for like two weeks. And I definitely noticed it. I noticed the difference pretty drastically, actually. That's definitely interesting. Thank you. All right. Let's now shift away from drugs. Let's now get to know you guys before we start to wrap up the podcast today.
I'm going to go with the random question generator, which I've already pushed the button on. And what I want to know, and I'll start with Erin first, when you were a child and you were thinking about, gosh, I can't wait to be a grownup, what was that one thing that you thought was going to be the best thing about being a grownup when you were a kid? I'd say being able to make my own decisions, control my own life, and that was true. That did end up being the best thing. Did you have quite a controlling childhood or controlled childhood then? Yes, and I also have a very large family.
I'm the oldest of eight younger siblings. Wow, so a lot of responsibility. Eight younger siblings. Yeah, and it was chaos all the time. So I just wanted a quiet house where I could decide how things were going to be. And that's what I have now, and it's as great as I thought. See, if I had to answer that question for you, I would have thought that you would be able to sleep as late as you wanted. Well, that C, control. Yeah, exactly. That is covered under control. Yeah, control your own destination own destiny. Yeah.
Well, I'm still not in control of that because this morning at 8.30, 8.45, Kate woke me up and said, you've got to get ready for the podcast. And then 20 minutes later, when I finally had rolled over and managed to put on my glasses and slowly stare at my phone, she's like, get out of bed. You've got to have a shower, brush your teeth. Because apparently that's important for me to speak into the microphone. You didn't need a shower for us. Yeah, no. I do need to brush my teeth because unfortunately the pop filter on the microphones gets to be a little bit manky. Oh, that's so great.
What about you, Shane? Same question. Oh, what did I – I didn't want to have to be around my brother anymore. My brother and I don't have the best relationship. The best way I can describe it is if he called me up right now and said, I need you to help me bury a body, I'd ask him how many shovels I need to bring. And I would go do it. It would be no questions asked. However, if he called me up and said, hey, do you want to go get a beer and some wings? I'd be like, I'm busy. Well, I know now who to call if I need a body buried. I have five locations already marked out. Really?
Is one of them used? Sorry, I have five, no, wait, sorry, I've used one. I have four locations already marked out. All right. Well, that's been fantastic, guys. Really appreciate you again coming on the podcast. As we mentioned earlier, this is Shane and Erin from Sex on the Fringe blog, so that's sexonthefringe.com. You can find all the links that we've spoken about today and their website and their Twitter and their Cassidy profile all in the show notes. For you guys, again, one last thing. Is there anything else that you want to add in drugs and lifestyle?
Any last bits or tidbits of information or anything you want to leave the listeners with today? I would just say much like with sex education, teaching abstinence only leads to people experimenting on their own, which can be dangerous. If you teach harm reduction, you teach proper education about what these substances do, what the dangers are, and how to minimize those risks, it's safer to take. And also legalization of all these would regulate the system. A lot of the propaganda that we've been taught flat out lies in order to create fear.
And a lot of these substances are now being reviewed for medical purposes by an organization called MAPS. You know, right now, MDMA, LSD, and other psychedelics are very quickly turning from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 and Schedule 3 because of the high potential for medical use. Look at that. Look at the research and make your own choices. That's good advice. All right. I think that's it. And we've managed to download your brains in just half an hour. That's actually been an hour and a half. Thanks again, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
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