The dissociative drug PCP, better known as angel dust, has fascinated me for years.
It wasn’t always that way. Initially, I observed this strange substance with casual interest only, a kind of scornful amusement. I’d seen the videos of PCP sending users on naked rampages through the streets. I’d heard the stories of how its users can develop superhuman strength, or like to gouge out their eyes, or similar feats of insanity.
In my mind, I had relegated PCP users to the level of glue sniffers—impoverished losers who did dangerous, destructive, bottom of the barrel drugs because they couldn’t afford anything else.
It wasn’t until years later that I realised how wrong I was.
Ketamine, my drug of choice at the time, is a chemical cousin of PCP. According to one post I read online, ketamine has the trippy elements of PCP but with none of the godly egotism and invincibility that it carries.
That was all I needed to hear.
I bought every book I could find on PCP and read every article out there. As my interest turned into fascination, I began corresponding with PCP users, and learning about the drug’s subculture. In 2021, this led to me co-writing an article for VICE, looking at why PCP in America is a regional taste, and then to writing a book, “Angel Dust Memories: True Tales of PCP in North America”.
PCP has had a more significant impact on American culture than many would give it credit for. From its influence on the seminal New York graffiti, hardcore, and hip-hop scenes to its place in the world of the outlaw motorcycle clubs such as the Hells Angels and street gangs such as the Bloods and Crips, there was a lot of information that I wanted to document. During this time, I spoke to many PCP users and people involved in the PCP trade. As you can imagine, I heard a lot of stories. For various reasons, I couldn’t include some of these stories in my book, but they were stories worth telling. So here we are.
Mare from Kansas City
“I find sleeping on wet to be a blast as long as the devil’s bitch ass isn’t talking to you. The wet puts me in a fetal place where I won’t move in the least and will find myself daydreaming my way to sleep.”
I’m talking to Mare, 41, from Kansas City.
One thing I’ve noticed about PCP users is they’re a pretty varied bunch. For every gang affiliate or drug dealer, there is the eccentric, the artist, the loner, the introvert. Mare, not his real name, certainly falls into the latter category. He hates parties and people, he tells me, but for some reason, he takes a liking to me.
Mare looks like an average white American man. However, his background is far darker than those of his contemporaries. Despite constantly cracking jokes, he reveals to me a long history of adolescent problems, escalating aggressive behavior, chronic depression, and multiple personality disorder. Not that you would know it just by talking to him.
Mare moved to Kansas City, Missouri, in the Spring of 2001, after his parents got divorced. His mother had extended family living there, and he found the vibrant metropolis of over half a million people open and welcoming, and has remained there ever since.
“On the surface, it’s one of the most peaceful, friendly places a person could visit,” he says. “Very stereotypical American Midwest. But if you peel away some of those layers, Kansas City can get pretty interesting. We have a large LGBTQ, Mormon, alternative population. There are also some large immigrant pockets that make certain areas of the city feel like you’ve left the country. We are a metal music hub, we have big comic and furry conventions. Gun shows out the ass. We have several of those far right sovereign citizen lunatic groups.”
Moreover, Kansas City has more than its share of drug problems. This Midwestern hub has become an important destination for drug trafficking as it sits in the middle of the country, with major highways in all directions.
“Drug cartels, the mafia, Black and Hispanic street gangs, and bikers are all over the place here,” says Mare. “People would be shocked I think.”
On the streets of Kansas City, where he spent a lot of time hanging out with friends, drugs were everywhere. Getting high was something that he loved to do.
During this time, he stumbled across PCP, or “wet.”
The drug was sold in liquid form in small vials, alongside pre-dipped cigarettes. Users preferred to use Mores, a longer, leaner brown cigarette.
“I decided to buy a few sticks to see what it felt like,” says Mare. “During this period and since then, weed just kind of stopped working for me in a way that it always has or does for others. I needed something stronger. And yeah…I found it.”
Mare became a frequent user of PCP, and soon copping it became a regular first step to having fun. If it smelled, tasted, and “had the tornado I look for when buying it,” he knew it was the real deal, he says. It blew his mind that anything on earth could feel that good.
Or that bad, for that matter.
“PCP has given me the best high experiences of my life as well as the most terrifying. The onset does indeed give someone a euphoric effect that it is easy to see why someone would use the drug. However, after this euphoria the drug completely does a 180 and becomes a very terrifying experience more often than not.”
Although PCP is a bit different every time he uses it, there are a few things that seem to remain consistent, he says:
“One of those is something I like to call the Alice Effect, taken from the central character of Alice in Wonderland and the cakes that she eats that changes her size from tiny to gigantic. I experience this in one way or another each time. A person’s sense of scope becomes horribly twisted. I will sit in a normal-sized room and go back and forth between feeling like I fill the room and can touch all the walls without moving, to the room shifting and morphing into a large banquet hall. On the way to the bathroom, I will round the corner and the hallway seems to grow to ten times its original length. At times, this has been so daunting that I will say ‘fuck’ and turn around and go back to the couch, or worse think about just pissing on the floor and dealing with it later.”
“Because of the paralytic aspect of PCP, many times friends have found me in the bathroom several hours later, just chilling. Sometimes I’m still trying to use the facilities, other times that effort of trying to leave them becomes so daunting that I just hang out in there and entertain myself. For some reason I find white bathrooms and white or unfinished laundry areas fascinating when I am fucked up.”
An evening’s entertainment sitting on a toilet? Talk about bang for your buck.
On the other hand, it’s not always been the good kind of weird that he’s encountered on his mind trips.
Mare has experienced the dark side of PCP many times through a range of bizarre and unpleasant effects.
“I’ve been told by many users that like myself, if we are watching something violent on TV, like a Saw movie for example. We can almost feel all the pain, horror and degradation that the characters go through.
“Another terrifying thing at least to me occurs as it’s wearing off. I will lay there and my entire body will vibrate from the paralytic wearing off, as well as it seeming like I’m looking directly into a strobe light when I shut my eyelids.
“Users like myself will wake up each morning confused and jittery. This is usually accompanied with slurred speech in myself and others even though it’s been several hours since use. Paranoia and anger is also something I personally feel from the drug the next morning.
“All of this probably sounds terrifying right? Well the euphoria is so strong and intense at onset that you can’t help but seek it out as you put the rest of the horror show in the back of your mind, hoping it doesn’t happen each time we smoke.”
Mare has endured this love/hate relationship with PCP for over 20 years. But that’s not the only drug he’s dabbled in. He says he’s done “every drug under the sun,” and also battled a 15-year addiction to pain killers and heroin because of college football injuries. In other words, he’s been immersed in the drug subculture for years and has met its hordes of curious people: the junkies, the derelicts, the freaks, the weirdoes.
How do PCP users stand out
Over the years, Mare became a part of the fabric of Kansas City’s PCP scene, where he got to know a lot of wetheads and their quirks. For example, Mare says that two of the wetheads he knows are disabled black men; another one is a white kid who’s basically a Juggalo (a fan of the rap due Insane Clown Posse); while others are not the kind of people you’d want to know personally. He describes PCP users as “a counter culture within a counter culture;” an insular community of curious, and often downtrodden people. Ultimately, though, he feels they are no less capable of functioning in society than other drug users, assuming, of course, that they choose to do so.
When it comes to smoking PCP, he says, there’s a specific way you’re supposed to do it, a method called “freaking the cigarette”.
“What you’re supposed to do with these Mores is you take a pair of scissors and clip off probably 2 centimetres from the edge you’re gonna light and then you freak it by rolling it in your fingers to loosen up the tobacco so more air flows through it. Some of the tobacco will fall out of the paper and you just like gently tap it in. And that little bit of tobacco that is hanging from the very end is really all that should touch the fluid because otherwise the paper sucks it up too quickly.”
In his opinion, this is the ONLY safe way to dose it. He’s learned that the hard way, he tells me, recalling two times when he wandered around naked in the darkness of his bedroom, debating the devil.
“Both of those nights were the scariest moments I’ve ever had high,” he says.
People with antisocial personality disorder get bored easily and often turn to drugs and alcohol to ease their boredom and tension. Mare confirms himself in the above dispositions. In his own words, he needs a bit of chaos and craziness in his life, or he’s just not going to function. PCP helps with that.
“I think I probably go back to wet for the challenge and escape of it. I’m a pretty OCD and controlling person a lot of the time. On no other drug or drink have I lost control on. I’ve always been able to hold my shit together to watch over others getting high. With PCP, I can’t really control what happens.”
You can purchase “Angel Dust Memories: True Tales of PCP in North America” by Sam Iravani on Amazon here.
