"We took the acid at 6 p.m. - the awards started at 6:30 p.m.": the inside story of Loaded's wild debut

"No, you got it. It's your turn."

"Fuck you, I'm telling you to have."

A line in the Loaded desktop is so rare that I put down the article I'm editing and walk around my desktop, which is covered in bottles of vodka from a photo shoot, and walks through my room.

On the wall is a large Scarface poster. Alongside is a clipping of a newspaper article highlighting "the 10 traits of a social psychopath". Someone put a red check mark next to each entry and stuck it on my door.

At the bottom of the couch is a pile of brand new outerwear nines that our fashion department swagman Reece joked about. Across from my desk, the four men in the art department are all facing computer screens, laying out pages and calling up photographs. Their area has two broken fans hanging from the desk, there are piles of our latest issue with Frank Skinner on the cover, and bottles of freshly used poppers are strewn on the floor.

A meeting table is covered with over 40 boxes of breakfast cereals from our recent Breakfast Cereal World Cup.

Elsewhere in a hidden corner, someone empties a bag of cocaine wraps, opens each one, and scrapes some of the white powder into a larger wrap. He puts the new, smaller, neatly folded envelopes back in the bag and the larger siphoned overstuff envelope back in his wallet. low volume chat where people actually work. It's the magazine's engine room, the reason it comes out on time every month.

On the floor of the office, a portable television with a video player is playing a soon to be released song called Wannabe by a new band called Spice Girls. The record company wants us to go to Japan with the band, which they think is "very busy".

The source of the high voices is the writers' area, where three staff members row to see whose turn it is to buy unlicensed champagne just 100 yards away.

I watch in disbelief and think that one day I will look back on this chaos, this second childhood, and wonder if it all really happened.

Outside, two cars are waiting to take us five to Heathrow to fly to New York, for no other reason I now have a company credit card and as soon as it arrived we decided to make a travel story there. Within 12 hours of this fight, we'll be in a Manhattan hotel room drinking vodka shots. The signature on the credit card is already mostly erased due to the amount of assorted cocaine powder it came into contact with. These include baby laxatives, speed, and almost certainly bath cleaners.

I'm 28 and have created my ideal job as the editor of a magazine that exploded into public life. Nobody tells us what we can or can't do, pretty much anything we want is fine, but who knows how long it might last?

It's been five months since Charge launched and for me there are 31 more to go. A thousand nights of mayhem await.

You know you're becoming success-jaded when you eat acid sheets before a Park Lane awards night. In the two years since Loaded's launch, we had become one of the most talked about cultural phenomena of the decade. We had been in an exercise in childish behavior for over 700 days, and things were going well. Almost too well. So, at the third edition grand prix, I thought that, despite the popularity of the magazine, I probably wouldn't dishonor the stage again - I just didn't see how we could continue to win every year. Anticipating impending rejection, I decided to change our agenda for the night and encouraged the staff present to take a load of acid blotter.

The A4 acid sheet was a gift from a guy who needed a reference to explain his unexplained income. I had written a letter saying that he was a marketing consultant and that he was paid in cash. We took the acid at 6 p.m. and the reception was supposed to start at 6:30 p.m. At 7 p.m., we were still wandering around the office when the phone rang. On the other end of the line, a reporter from the Express wanted a quote about me being Editor of the Year again.

I explained that they must have been wrong because the awards hadn't taken place yet. She said the ceremony had already started and it was assumed that all attendees would already be at the Grosvenor. Therefore, the organizers had sent the results to the media. I felt my mouth go dry.

I looked over my desk at the acid sheet. I put the phone down. "Shit!" I explained to...