Indonesia is not exactly a drug-friendly country. When we were landing in Denpasar our steward asked us to fasten our seat belts, raise our seats, and lock our tray tables before cheerfully announcing that bringing drugs into Indonesia is an offense punishable by, among other things, death.

So I was surprised to learn that betel nut, an addictive, cancer-causing stimulant, was legal. Obviously, I had to try a legal drug. Assuming that I could locate it. I thought there might be the equivalent of hookah bars for tourists interested in walking on the wild side, but that was just a fantasy. I’d have to assemble my own ingredients. Thankfully, my reprobate older sister, Nef, served as my trustworthy wingman. I wouldn’t have to fly alone.

Betel nut is chewed in a home-rolled pouch called a quid, the side effects being euphoria, alertness (which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for tweaked), red stained teeth, and cancer of the face mouth. Sign us up! Although to be fair, we were in no danger of doing enough betel nut to suffer anything but the alertness and euphoria.

There are three main ingredients to a betel nut quid: the betel nut itself, which is the fruit of the Areca palm, a touch of slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, and if you’re wondering where ancient peoples shopped for their chemistry ingredients, it can be made from seashells), and a betel nut palm leaf to wrap it in.

You remove the nut from the husk and cut it up. Take a pinch of the slaked lime and spread it on the leaf. Before rolling it up, connoisseurs add spices like cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. The slaked lime has a chemical interaction with the betel nut that jacks up the stimulant effects, but the spices are strictly for flavor.

OK, time to shop. We were headed to Pasar Beringharjo, the downtown traditional market, for some other spices, and I bet that we’d be able to find the ingredients. That turned out to be harder than we’d thought. Unlike most of the traditional markets we’ve been in, where everything stocked is displayed, there were shops with backstock in Beringharjo, so the ingredients we were looking for weren’t visible. Not, to be fair, that we were 100% on what our shopping list even looked like.

Now I had to somehow ask for slaked lime, but she was on to me, so that part was easier. A baggie of calcium hydroxide appeared, along with a pantomimed rendition of how to prepare it for use. Next stop, betel leaves, or daun sirih, as the locals say. Our spice merchant, however, was not a one-stop-shop, so we set off in search of the fabled leaf. We couldn’t find it in Berinharjo, which is a very big market.

A few days later Nef and I walked over to our neighborhood market, Pasar Kotagede, asked for daun sirih, and found the leaves almost instantly. The hooch vendor offered us a large bundle for 100,000 rupiah, about $6, but when we asked for four leaves she just gave them to us. We’d done it! We had our kit and were ready to go on our first Indonesian drug-fueled bender. It’s what big sisters are for. I think.

To be fair, the betel leaves may just be a convention and not a requirement. They don’t appear to offer anything chemically necessary to the process, and any chewable leaf might have done the trick. But it was nice to know that we had everything the recipe required.

Lacking cardamom and the like, we dressed our first quid with rendang seasoning and honey. It still tasted excrescent. We chewed for about 15-20 seconds and spit it out. I had a medication once that my doctor said would be absorbed more efficiently if I chewed the tablet, and it tasted kind of like that. My doctor was an idiot, by the way. I think he just enjoyed telling me to do stupid shit.

So Nef and I sat around looking at each other, doing that “Do you feel it yet?” thing. We admitted, after a bit, that there was a mild buzz, sort of like a Benadryl. Nothing, though, that you’d risk cancer and addiction for. Not when you could just chop and snort a Benadryl.

Many years ago, early 20s, San Francisco, in our LSD days. We’d gotten a new batch that no one in our group had tried yet, so I agreed to be our first guinea pig. My friend Bob came over to mind me with my roommate Stav, and I took a liberal three hits to start the evening’s festivities.

This was our first experience with windowpane acid, little gel tabs for you whippersnappers. All of our previous experience had been with blotter, little squares of paper infused with psychedelic wonder. You don’t savor blotter. You give it a quick chew and swallow. So that’s what I did with the windowpane. After about 45 minutes I felt myself edge slightly into tripping and then recede.

Obviously pretty weak acid, so I took another two tabs, to see if I could get any action. This time, I left them to melt under my tongue. Which, I later discovered, is what you’re supposed to do with windowpane. Approximately a nanosecond after Round Two dissolved all five hits came on at once, like a freight train straight from the 60s. One minute, standing in the kitchen and talking like a person, the next minute mute and supine.

Bob and Stav sprang into well-trained action, shuffling me off to lie under the covers in my darkened bedroom. Then, realizing that they had a long haul ahead of them, they did the only rational thing: baked marijuana brownies, so they could be really high, too. Side note to my side note, they couldn’t get the oven lit, so they took the tray of brownies to our downstairs neighbors and asked them to bake them for our party, since our oven was broken. Our downstairs neighbors were three lovely Catholic nuns, who I am certain, that evening, we consigned to hell.

Bob and Stav knew better than to leave me fully unattended, but I was enjoying an actual out-of-body experience in my darkened room, so their presence didn’t register at first. When I finally noticed them I articulated the desire to speak to Dorothy, who was deployed to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival during our Gap Year. I think I articulated that desire by croaking “Dorothy” until they dialed her up.

I believe my intention had been to communicate to Dorothy the truly cosmic wonderland I was inhabiting, but the only sounds I could force my mouth to make were “I… can’t…” I repeated that several times before Dorothy, more than a little alarmed, asked me to give the phone back to Stav. I think she told her not to leave me alone for a second, lest I choke on my own tongue and die.

The story has a happy ending, of course. Bob and Stav ate the brownies, and I eventually came back down to earth. Later, we discovered that the acid was unusually strong, 300 micrograms/dose. I had accidentally ingested a gargantuan 1,500 micrograms of prime LSD. And lived to tell the tale. That tremor is just nerves.

My point being, I felt like I had the earned authority when I turned to Nef and said, “Dude. We underdosed.”

Further research, which, I suppose, might have been better executed before attempting our first betel nut experience, indicated that a) we might not have kept the quid in our mouths long enough, and b) we might not have used the ripest nut. Apparently, you’re supposed to chew the quid to start the process and then tuck it between cheek and gum for about five minutes. To really activate the cancer. As opposed to our method, which was to chew the fuck out of the quid for about 15 seconds until it dissolved into a gruesome mouthful of paste that screamed SPIT. ME. OUT. NOW!

We vowed to do better. Next time.

Next Time

As it happened, our next attempt fell on the seventh deathiversary of Nef’s husband Alan. There was a man who knew his way around a third-world bender, so there was something poetic about paying homage to his spirit in an exploit he’d have happily joined.

The interwebs still failed to divulge any meaningful dosage information. I even looked on Reddit. That’s turning over all the rocks. It felt like we needed to hunt down an old toothless, red-gummed man and pay him to be our trip guide. Absent that, we did the next best thing. We guessed. What could possibly go wrong?

This time, like the acid trip, we took a little chew and tucked the quid into our cheek pouches with a timer set for five minutes. After which Nef confessed to a buzz and I felt nothing. To be fair, I usually feel nothing, but I was hoping to feel something. Anything.

After about half an hour Nef suggested that, as I outweighed her by a hefty margin, perhaps I hadn’t had enough. She prepared another quid for me, which I readily agreed to, deeply committed as I am to never learning anything from my previous mistakes. Hey, you make your choices and I’ll make mine.

And… nothing. After all that, not even a Benadryl buzz. For me, at least. Nef: “I feel good.” Me: “My tongue stings.” Dorothy thinks I exist on “such a high plane of Wow” that nothing can get in, but that doesn’t explain my inclination towards my best friends, the opiates. Still, I’m not tempted to smuggle the rest of the betel nuts back to the US, so it’s not like there’s no upside.

And somehow, despite heroic efforts, I avoided fully recreating my acid overdose. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat the journey, if not the destination.

The Last Laugh

As a coda to this experience, as if it was in need, we had tickets for a traditional dance performance at the Prambanan site the night before Nef’s departure, and had made arrangements with the driver who had taken us to Sadranan beach to get us there and back.

I’d reached out to him prior to see if he knew where to get betel nuts, as drivers are notorious for knowing where the contraband is to be found, and he told me his brother could procure some for us. He got back to us a few days later to say he’d been successful and to find out how many kilos we wanted.

None. We wanted none kilos. We wanted a few nuts to try, not kilos to set up an international operation. I explained this, and got no response for several weeks, when, while checking in to confirm our ride to the performance, he mentioned that he had our betel nuts in hand. And yes, they had been procured and paid for.

The tab came to 35,000 rupiah, about $2, so I obviously agreed to reimburse him even though he’d given us no clue this transaction was even occurring and we’d already had our betel nut experience. I’m certainly not going to grind a guy who was just trying to be helpful, despite his poor communication skills, over $2.

When I shared this saga with Nef, she smacked her hand on the table and said, “And that’s exactly how I got two donkeys in Greece.”