Bullet Points: 8 Cheap Highs

Huffing 

Huffing is a broad term for getting high off of any sort of inhalant. This is the grand daddy of cheap highs, the one that, in fact, your grand daddy probably utilized. Any time you've sniffed a marker for a bit too long, you were huffing. The classics, outside of markers, are aerosol cans and airplane glue. When I was a kid I actually over heard my dad and his friends laughing about how they used to fill a paper bag with spray paint and glue and pass it around. Which IS funny, but it's also pretty stupid.

The downside of huffing is that the brain damage it causes by far outweighs the high you get. Also, you can die pretty easily from huffing solvents. There's even a medical term for this sort of dying--Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome. Which is not something you want to be mentioned in your obituary. Regardless, if you've got a handle on your shit, it can't hurt too badly to sniff a marker every once in a while.

Dextromethorphan

In small doses dextromethorphan is medically useful as a cough suppressant.  That explains why it's the active ingredient in robitussin and coricidin and many other over the counter cough relief meds.  The thing about dextromethorphan, though, is that when you take a whole bunch of it at once, it does a lot more than just suppress your cough.  It suppresses your concept of reality.  Indeed, users of dextromethorphan indicate there are three main plateaus to the drug.  The first is the low-level intended medical effect.  The second level is kind of like being extremely drunk.  And on the third level, you trip your balls off and lose contact with the real world.  The funny thing is -- and I actually do find this funny, in a sad sort of way -- those that push themselves past this third plateau don't always come back.  The dissociative properties of the drug have been known to cause those who partake in frequent high doses to have a psychotic break, whereby the mind-body connection is irretrievably severed in such a way that the person affected will never again really understand reality.  Personally, it trips me out that one second I could be coughing, and the next second I could stop entirely.  Far out, man.  

Sugar 

Kids been done knowing this for years--sugar gets you fucking high. When you take lots of it at once, your blood sugar shoots to the moon and you get an insulin burst. Now, we're not talking about eating at lot of candy and drinking a lot of soda (though that COULD do the trick). Crazy little kids who don't have the hard currency to experiment with cocaine have been leading the charge for real sugar highs for years.

The key to a low cost, real sugar high is getting the most sugar to your blood stream as fast as humanly possible. One crafty kid who goes by the net handle "Satons Son" devised a method for getting high off of powdered Gatorade that involves a lot of the stuff and running a lot. Other kids have loaded sugar cubes into inhalers, turned to snorting Lick-a-maid. And don't get us started on "sugar cubing ."

Be careful, though. Sugar is apparently addictive. Kinda. And if you actually get hooked, you'll end up either super fat or with diabetes.

Nitrous Oxide

"Hippie crack," as it is affectionately and irrationally known to many of those who use it, is nothing like crack and has never been a favorite of hippies.  Therefore, anybody who uses "hippie crack" probably deserves the possible asphyxiation that comes from using it.  In a dentist's office, the highest concentration you can expect to get is around 70% nitrous, with the remaining 30% pure oxygen.  Due to the fact that this is the same ratio of oxygen as exists in the atmosphere, you experience some of the euphoric "go ahead and drill my mouth apart" sensations you'd experience sucking on a whippet, but without any risk of cutting off the oxygen supply to your brain.  Still, it's pretty hard to die from nitrus inhalation unless you do something really stupid like strapping a mask to your face.  Eventually, you'll pass out, and then who's going to take your mask off?  And a bunch of dentists will show up at your funeral to laugh at your corpse and flossing habits.

Nutmeg

The spice, not the drink (we know the drink has alcohol in it... duh). Apparently, you can trip and have hallucinations off the common spice. Two tablespoons and a 5 hour weight should do the trick, according to all sources online. By the five hour mark, you should be tripping balls.

Most people just take the powder with water but we found some losers who somehow smoked it. Also, if you are on any MMO inhibitors, you can die. Wow, nutmeg is serious shit. Apparently the active ingredient in nutmeg, myristicin, is a poison, so you're tripping off of the effects of poisoning yourself. Yummm.

Salvia

I have never smoked Salvia Divinorum, which is an herb native to Mexico believed to have divine powers by local tribes, but of the probably ten people I've talked to who've tried it, only one recommended it.  The rest said it either freaked them out, or just complained that the momentary effect wasn't worth the fact that their mouths tasted like dirt for the rest of the day no matter what they did to cancel that taste out.  So be warned.  For those of you who are still enterprising, though, and who live in a state that hasn't yet added salvia to a list of controlled substances, salvia is a powerful but short-lasting psychedelic.  Users often report out-of-body experiences or being transported to another dimension, which is another way of saying that your brain is temporarily broken and can no longer relay messages accurately.

Let me digress for a second to make this argument:  if your computer monitor breaks and starts sending you a scrambled-ass signal full of random digits and squiggly lines, has your computer been transported to another dimension of consciousness?  OR IS IT JUST FUCKING BROKEN?

Back more directly to the matter at hand, if salvia isn't illegal where you live, you should be able to find it at just about any smoke shop.  It's not supposed to be very dangerous, though we wouldn't recommend operating a steam shovel or anything for at least a few minutes after smoking.  Also, don't tell us about it; we're just going to judge you for it.

Jenkem

This is the most preposterous budget high we've ever come across. Some of you may've heard about this drug when it hit the news late last year. For those who don't remember or who've never heard of it, Jenkem is a drug formed by fermenting human poop. It's a hallucinogen that goes active when you, get this, breathe in the fermented gasses of said poo.

While the kids in the US are crafty, they didn't come up with this one (they merely discovered it and used it). It was Zambian street kids who first got high this way.

Jenkem is easy to make, hard to take. The crafty little Zambians scrape turd and piss from inside sewer pipes and store the (literal) shit in plastic bags for a few weeks. After that time, the bag is filled with fermented poo fumes that numb you and get cha high. 

The Choking Game

The choking game is exactly what it sounds like, except for the game part.

This isn't something adults do, as even the dumbest adult spends the majority of his or her time trying to avoid getting choked out.  The choking game, though, is sweeping the country of teens and tweens, who are apparently really eager to experiment, and also apparently really too pussy to steal a couple beers like everyone else has always done.

And so, they play the game.  When I was a kid, I invented a lot of games with my friends.  We would play a game called "Driveway to Driveway," which was a football variant where one person would have the ball and run from one driveway to the adjacent driveway, trying not to get tackled.  Each driveway was one point.  It got pretty brutal, what with the brick walls and concrete everywhere, but it was a fucking game.  It was simple, but there were rules.  You get tackled, you throw the ball up in the air, the game continues.  You get the point.

Here is the choking game in it's entirety:  I choke you until you pass out.  If you wake up without brain damage, you choke me until I pass out.  Continue until discovery, death, or permanent retardation prevents further choking.  That's not a game.  At best, it's a fucking advanced interrogation technique.  But apparently, when you come to after being choked to within an inch of your life, you feel a little giddy.

Again:  learn how to steal a beer.