We Took a Drug Called Stardust—It Hatched Something Inside Us
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What was Stardust and why was it feared in the 1980s?
Stardust wasn't something you took on a Friday night to kill a few hours with a cheap high. This was the thing that Nancy Reagan used to get up on that podium and harp to people about. No, hold on. You're too young to remember her. Do you remember those DARE programs from when you were younger? The cop would stand in your classroom and drone on about how bad drugs are and how easy they were to get. This was the kind of thing those programs were trying to scare you away from, even if they didn't know this particular stuff existed. Now, Stardust was around back in the 80s, believe me. But it wasn't the kind of thing every dealer had sitting in his jacket pocket. Most people had never even heard of it, and the ones who had usually knew better than to say much.
You had to know the right people, or the wrong people, depending on how you want to look at it. Burned out musicians, rich kids chasing something stronger than acid, border town weirdos, occult types. That was the sort of crowd it moved through. Every now and then, you'd hear some story about a guy getting caught with a coffee can full of the stuff hidden under his floorboards, or somebody disappearing after taking too much of it. But those stories never made the papers. They just got passed around like warnings. Oh, I'm not sure where it came from. Hell, I don't think anyone knows who invented it. It wasn't like LSD, where everyone knew the name of the guy who came up with it. I heard someone say that it was cooked up by Santeria cultists on a ranch down in Matamoros.
Allegedly, they'd smuggle it across the border inside hollowed-out religious candles and little plaster statues of saints. One guy told me they found a whole truckload of Virgin Mary's once, every single one packed full of orange tablets. Another story was that the feds raided a pizzeria owned by the cartel in Florida, and they found one guy with his head ripped clean off and crates of stardust piled up in the kitchen. A buddy of mine, he's dead now, heart attack. He told me he heard it came from some Vietnam vet living out past Houston. A guy who cooked it up, trying to shut off the nightmares he brought back from the war. Story goes, he took so much of his own supply that they had to keep him locked up in a padded room at the local nuthouse.
Ah, the point is that Stardust was out there back then, if you knew where to look. It wasn't common, not really, but it had a way of turning up in the wrong rooms with the wrong people. And this was before anyone really understood the side effects of it. So whatever attention it got didn't start until, say, about 89 or 1990, which meant that... Did I ever take it? Well, of course I took it. You ask me what the strongest thing I've ever done is and you expect me to go into this history lesson without saying I tried it? Granted, I only took it once when I lived in Los Angeles, but that was more than enough for me. This wasn't like taking a hit from a bong, where you just lay out on the couch all day feeling like a ton of bricks.
Stardust was intense. And this is coming from the guy who spent half a winter eating shrooms in a cabin. What was it like? Well, the kids back then called it body tripping. There were other names for it too, dream surfing and star walking, but body tripping was perhaps the most accurate way to describe it. They were people who would take a hit of stardust and they'd spend their high trying to write down the things that they saw, things that they felt and heard and touched. They'd write all of it down afterward and pass the pages around like they'd discovered some great truth. Half of it was nonsense, but they treated it like scripture. Some of them wrote about spending eons wandering a desert on their bellies like slugs, living as a giant jelly blob in the bones of a huge corpse, or living out 100 years as a pharaoh with a crocodile head and the body of a hippo in ancient Egypt.
If I hadn't taken it myself, even just that one time, I would have written all of it off as drugged-up nonsense from people who wanted their bad trip to mean something.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What was Stardust and why was it feared in the 1980s?
0:03–6:57
2
Who used and trafficked Stardust and where did rumors say it originated?
6:57–15:06
3
How did the narrator first encounter Stardust and what happened during the initial trip?
15:06–17:48
4
What did users call the Stardust experience and what vivid visions did it cause?
17:48–27:22
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Scary Horror Stories by Dr. NoSleep
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