• Over a 10 year period, Dominic Milton Trott self-administered 157 psychoactive drugs and documented his experiences on each one. He then created the book, The Drug User’s Bible, to inform curious minds about safe drug use.  
• With steadily increasing rates of both illicit drug use and overdose deaths, one can easily argue that the country is losing the War on Drugs. And making matters worse is the fact that illicit drug research is incredibly scarce, due to the legal difficulty of obtaining substances.
• In Trott’s opinion, overdose deaths occur primarily because people lack access to information on safe drug use. So with a focus on harm reduction and risk mitigation, his book documents things like onset time, dosing, and the duration of effects.
• This video is from Dope Science, a Freethink original series about exploring the latest scientific research around illicit drugs and how shifts in cultural attitudes are unlocking new opportunities for improving the health of millions of people.

DOMINIC MILTON TROTT: Methamphetamine is a stimulant, it's prone to extreme highs, is a very very pleasant experience, but in the morning I was drained. Oxycodone, it's a opioid but induced a sort of mellow effect. Ephenidine, it's a dissociative. Changa, it's a psychedelic drug. Heroin, I found that to be enjoyable, however I vomited after a few hours. The worst experience, nutmeg, which is a spice used on food, but if you consume more of it you enter a delirious state. Basically you've been poisoned. It never even occurred to me that I would do anything like this. I thought, maybe I will take the odd drug occasionally if the circumstances presented themselves, perhaps. Take lots and lots of drugs, nah.

I'm Dominic Milton Trott. Over a 10 year period I self-administered 157 different psychoactive drugs. And wrote a book called The Drug Users Bible. Documents the vital safety information for each.

I lived a relatively normal life. Got a job as a programmer, I worked for a bank, started an internet company, a startup. Eventually got to that time of life where I started reflecting upon,

there's gotta be more to living than this. I was asking fundamental questions about the nature of life and reality, and that's what led me into researching psychedelics. There was references to a drug called ayahuasca, a botanical. And that produces a four or five hour visionary experience. And it was during the research for that particular adventure, obviously the forums and the social media platforms, it was hard to miss the fact that posters would occasionally just disappear off the radar. They'd made a mistake and they died. And that's when it started to occur to me that there's a real problem here. And the problem is that people are dying of ignorance. They're dying because they're making fundamental mistakes. It was so obvious that this was a lack of fundamental access to data, safety data. And if I could actually make something more fundamental and deeper, like a book, it might make a difference and save some lives. It was then a case of, what drugs are people taking?

What are the popular drugs? The Drug Users Bible includes the onset time, the duration, proper dosage, and anything else which might be central to mitigate and reduce the risk of users. I provide a subjective experience report of what it was like for me. The reason that's important is first to give people a feel for what it's going to be like. But also have some sort of idea of how much loss of subjectivity they're going to actually experience. Is there a compulsion to take more? Am I gonna lose my sensibilities in terms of balance? Am I gonna be safe in a public place? I developed a process, a procedure, the ten commandments of safer drug use, to follow rigorously to try and reduce whatever risk there is with whatever drug you were taking. Number one, research, research, research. You're gonna take a drug, if you are gonna do that, and embark on that course, know what you're taking. Know what its effects are broadly or lightly to be.

Test it is a specific third step and the reason is, is however confident you are in your supplier, you can't be 100%. A lot of drugs have different effects dependent upon how much you take. And always remember that you can take more, but you can't take less. A lot of the time you're putting a strain upon your body, your heart, your organs, and yourself. If you're already feeling ill, or you're not quite well, don't do it. Things do go wrong, and if you do have a problem, if you become ill, or there's an issue, or you overdose, then the first thing that the emergency services need to know is what have you had. So it's a wise precaution to have that somewhere prominent on your body.

Ignorance kills, and it certainly does in this arena. If your son or daughter are gonna take a drug, would you prefer that they went into this blind without any safety knowledge at all? Or would you prefer that they were armed with risk mitigation procedures, accurate dosing information, onset values, and all the data that will help them to take it and navigate it safely. All these people are dying, I'd have had to carry that with me if I hadn't have done the book. That was the entire objective of the book. And I know to some degree it's been successful, but obviously there's a huge potential for it to save a lot more lives.

NARRATOR: Thanks for watching. For more Dope Science content check out our website, and subscribe to Freethink for more videos every week.