3-MeO-PCP (3 separate reports)

CW: depression
(This one has been published by Erowid!)
OH nO PCP!!!! How scary, how crazy!!!! Assassin of youth, potion of madness, condiment of evil!

Whelp. 3-MeO-PCP is PCP's friendlier cousin. PCP has earned itself one hell of a reputation, and I'll make a post about that reputation and the stigma surrounding that substance eventually. 3-MeO-PCP as the name implies is PCP with a Methoxy group on the 3 position of the phenyl ring. Chemically, it is in the same group as Ketamine, MXE, MXM, PCE, Deschlorketamine, N-ethyl-norketamine, and many more (the arylcyclohexamines). This groups can be divided into PCM, PCE, PCP, and PCMo families (see my post about taxonomy). 3-MeO-PCP falls into the PCP group, which consists of cycklohexane ring wtih a phenyl ring and piperidine group sticking out of the same spot (the name is derived from this I blieve, Phenyl-Cyclohexane-Piperidine. Ketamine belongs to the PCM group, which has an methylamino group in place of the piperidine. MXE is in the PCE group, which has an N-ethyl group at that same site. All of these drugs are NMDA receptor antagonists, meaning they have dissociative effects. They do this by blocking and inhibiting the action of the NMDA receptor, essentially preventing certain brain signals from transmitting, resulting in anesthesia, amnesia, hallucinations, ataxia, delusions, and all variety of other fun effects.

Here is an amalagamation of my explorations of 3-MeO-PCP. When I first tried it, I found it to be a bit lacking, it felt like just being drunk honestly. This was 10 mg oral. However, subsequent experiences truly opened the floodgates to this fascinating, exciting, and unique chemical. It is very setting dependent, it can really really enhance some experiences. It's a good dissociative for public use (But for the love of god, try it in a safe place first to know how you react to different doses, it is EXTREMELY dose sensitive), as you are not completely annihilated and it really does make the world into a more fascinating place. Be careful with pushing doses. If you go too far, you find yourself trapped in overwhelming mania, thoughts exploding rapidly and pushing you towards psychosis. Also for the love of god do not binge on it. This is a fast lane to psychosis. After being on it long enough, you really really lose touch with reality and your mind begins to make stuff up with vigorous energy, stuff that you will subscribe to completely. In my opinion, to get the most out of it, smoke a lot with it. This can potentially open you up to the hole, it is a very unique experience unlike any dissociative hole. Smoking will potentiate the more interesting dissociative effects of it without jacking up the manic aspect.
I would recommend this only to the most responsible psychonauts. It is extremely potent and truly not forgiving if you get careless. There are a great deal of reports of using this substance at high/sustained doses leading to psychotic breaks/stints in a psych ward. If you are smart and careful with it however, it is immensely rewarding and utterly fascinating. I hope it won't give me Olney's Lesions lol.

Anyways, here is the first experience with it that I decided was worth reporting, I saw a noise show by myself while donked out. I smoked a lot with it and it really took me somewhere else. This was easily one of the most rewarding live music experienecs I've ever had. I should go to shows incredibly fucked up mroe often.

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Dose: 10 mg

ROA: oral

T0:00-Took 10 mg in a capsule. Was seeing a noise show by myself.

T0:30-Arrive at the venue. Can really feel it start to kick in as I get off the subway, it only builds more and more as I approach the door and am let in. All goes smoothly. Someone is playing when I come in so I can hide in the dark and sneak into a corner. I slump against the wall and close my eyes and let the dissociative warmth swallow me.

T0:50-Their set ends. I wait in line for the bathroom for a while (right next to nate young from wolf eyes!!!). In the bathroom I really get a grasp of how fucked up I am, as is typical when I’m tripping in a bathroom. Everything feels like fuzzy static, the entire world is lo-fi. step outside to smoke some weed. The outdoors are absurd, all the buildings look far away and everything feels like some strange fantasy. It feels like im watching the world from the bottom of a metal bucket. It seems like everything is through a fish eye lens and is glowing at the edges. I smoke and manage to make my way back to the venue, it feels like im just standing still and the world is moving around me until I am there.

T1:30-The next set begins. I am right well dissed to space now. This one is an industrial noise act. It’s a dude at a DJ booth with an image of himself projected on the screen behind him, the effect making it recede into infinity, it is oversaturated and washed out. The noise eats me alive. I close my eyes for most of this set and just stand there feeling the tangle of sound waves as they batter me. I get my first ever experience with CEV’s while on this substance, It is monolithic angular objects with spiky toothy auras in an infinite space of spiky waves. They are generally all very angular and sharp, no soft edges or corners anywhere to be seen. They are all in warm dull colors like burgundy and dark grey orange. As I sail through this space I can feel my body become nothing, I honestly have no idea how I was able to remain standing. It feels like my body is just being disintegrated into these spiky waves by the walls of noise.

T2:10-The set ends. I go outside to smoke more. It is similarly disorienting, and everything is even more warped seeming now, I don’t try to make sense of this world I just try to navigate it as safely and functionally as possible. I don’t want to go back into the venue, where the lights are up, I decide to just sit on the ground in dark little place outside and curl into a ball and just drift away. CEV’s aren’t too prominent now, just an overwhelming disorienting feeling of dissociation.

T2:30-The next set begins. This one is so confusing. It is as much performance art as it is a sort of noise/spoken word act. Everyone is dressed up in strange ragged costumes. A small set was built on stage. People dressed as gnarled trees are dancing in the audience. This was all real not even me hallucinating but it was fascinating nonetheless. I feel like I have descended into some circle of madness the human mind wasn’t meant to tap into, and it feels great, it feels like I’m on a rocking boat going down the inky river styx.

T3:10-This set ends. I feel slightly more coherent and less dissed. No good. I see someone I actually know here, a chance meeting. Whoa. We smoke together, I get myself back into the dis zone and need to be walked back. Being social is a real fucking struggle. I really hope I didn’t say anything rude or abrasive, I was so completely out of touch with social conventions and how to interact with others. I break off to go hide alone in the venue when we get back.

T3:40-The headliner set begins. It’s Wolf Eyes. I stand directly in front of the speakers. The next 40 minutes are unspeakable bliss as I get swallowed by sound. I don’t even notice how loud it is, I just feel soundwaves battering me, literally feel them as they shake my bones and ripple my clothes. The noise the noise the noise is so huge. I don’t open my eyes most of the set, I am just in a sea of noise, in a sea of soundwaves with angular crests and troughs. Everything is a maroon darkness, my body is cut to pieces and cast into eternity, my mind is tripping and stumbling through the void and there is no world no worries absolutely nothing beyond this endless abyss of grating sound. I have never had a more rewarding live music experience than this.

T4:20 (Ha), their set ends. I retreat to a corner and linger there while the venue empties. I go to the merch table. I feel so good, so confident. I get a bunch of stuff without really thinking, I show the members of that sort of performance group my locust costume which fits their aesthetic kinda well I guess. I normally wouldn’t do something like that, but 3-MeO-PCP fills me with a manic arrogance and confidence. I decide to walk home. I don’t even remember walking home. I felt like it would be a short walk, and although it was about two miles it did feel like a short walk. I honestly didn’t notice how far I went. I was manic and honestly probably looked like just another of the insane people who go around the streets around here at night in my erratic movements and wild eyes. I was confidently flirting with someone the whole way home. This was unlike me I think, this was just such haughtiness, the one thing that scares me about this drug is this personality shift that it levies on me. I came home and was glowing and just relaxed in my room the rest of the night.

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I have a bad habit of hittin dissociatives when I get really depressed. I mean it makes sense, to just sever all connections to the world and self. Plus some have been shown to have clinical use as antidepressants. But that really doesn't justify what is textbook drug abuse. This was my first time in the "hole", I really got to see the potential of this substance.

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Dose: ~12 mg 

ROA: Intranasal

T0:00-Was feeling very depressed that night. Did 3-MeO-PCP the night before. Felt stressed out and stricken with some hardcore shame and self-loathing that more or less arose from nowhere. Crushed up and insufflated the chemical.

T0:10-While coming up decide to turn the almost instant manic energy into a frantic scribbling of my favorite poem/spoken word piece (I have a very special plan for this world by Thomas Ligotti, read by David Tibet of Current 93). I end up with three pages saturated with illegible scribbling, it looks like the sorta creepy shit pasted on the wall of a ‘crazy’ character in a movie. I feel like this absurd surreal and absolutely bleak madness is the threshold of a deep abyss which I am about to plunge into.

T0:40-Have been coming up for a while now. Feeling numb and warm, the usual. Want to take it further though, I feel almost disappointed in how shallow I am in the trip. Decide to smoke a bowl out of my DMT pipe. I’m not sure if the DMT residue had any effect on this or was responsible in any way, there honestly probably wasn’t too much in the pipe. I also took 2 hits from the gravity bong.

T1:00-This is it. I did it, I did it right. I am absolutely blasted away, this isn’t the mania I was warned about when pushing the limits with this drug though. This is something else. First thing I notice is in the body- almost total anesthesia, my body just completely faded. This is cool, this is good. I am having that feeling of “I could move if I really tried but I just don’t want to, I have no reason to”, so I don’t move, at all. Breathing is becoming heavy and deliberate. This feels like the verge of any dissociative hole. Here it comes! I decide to put on the audio version of the aforementioned poem to guide me into the dark.

T1:10-I am in the hole. Just completely sunk. I close my eyes and suddenly I am transported. This feels more energetic and manic then other dissociative holes. Ketamine is like a great void. MXE is a colorful adventure where I drift through scapes. DXM is weird as fuckall and filled with amnesia and fragments of memories. MXM was coherent memories, and MXP was being vibrated into incoherent waves. But this, this feels like the aether around me is in perpetual and frantic motion. It feels like the boundaries of the hole are in perpetual flux, constantly self-transforming and moving. If I were to give it a characteristic color, it would be dull warm colors. Dull oranges, rust, maroons, browns, crimsons, mahogany. My surroundings felt toothy and sharp, and accented with smaller concentric shapes within. On all sides of me were spinning gears, toothy conveyors, twitching and morphing monoliths with angular borders. Not a single soft edge or corner was in sight, it was all very sharp and angular. It was like being in a jungle of shapes, some huge, some small, but all were in frantic motion. It felt like I was not drifting through this space, rather sitting completely still and having it move around me. This space was mindless yet warm. It was not the cold sterility of ketamine, but also not the warm adventurousness of MXE. It was certainly sterile, but it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t that dissociative feeling of having consumed some chemical ice. The motion and energy of the surroundings seemed to give off a sterile warmth, like a toaster oven or the coils of a space heater or the heat from a car engine.

T1:40-This was a relatively short hole. After about half an hour I am completely unable to return to it. It is at this moment that some strange cosmic coincidence struck. My friend (also the only other person I know who is so into 3-MeO-PCP) messages me. He said he has just managed to hole on the substance for the first time. We strike up conversation and compare notes. Really strange that we just completely uncoordinatedly did this at the same time. I hope he wasn’t driven to it by a fit of depression. I forget his circumstances, if I recall correctly he achieved it by stacking doses with some weed potentiation. We both had similar duration, and the visual aspect was of a similar nature for both of us-toothy and angular. Very very interesting. I am feeling so stoked, I haven’t read much about holing on this substance on the internet. I feel like I have broken down a barrier, explored a new frontier. I am so hype and so weirdly proud of myself. I decide to follow up with a personal project-Sorting a sample of insect specimens collected in a trap that I received from a museum where I used to work. This is a blast, I feel so happy pursuing something I love, and then there is the social and arrogant aspect of it, that I am doing something unique that will make me look interesting and appealing. All I want to do is appear unique, to receive validation to counter the emptiness and self-loathing so deeply rooted in my mind.

T2:40-A friend contacts me. She is a bit drunk and in a very very bad place mentally. She needs a physical presence. I fear I will be too fucked up to properly provide any sort of support or kindness but whatever. She comes over and I find myself lacking a voice. As in I can only speak very quietly and meekly. I feel so shy and afraid. I feel like I am failing to be a good friend and good support, and its just pushing me further down into a hole of meekness and weakness. After smoking some more and talking for a while I get my voice and mania back. I feel warm and confident. I hope I was able to help and provide positive energy and positive spirit.

T5:00-Fall asleep. Was still feeling dissociated when I went to bed. Woke up feeling nothing out of the ordinary the next morning.

CONCLUSION: Well interesting discovery. I’m not sure if its easy to hole on 3-MeO-PCP by itself. It seems like you need some sort of potentiator, maybe a smidgen of psychedelics. A lot of weed seemed to really do the trick though. From what I’ve heard pushing doses with 3-MeO-PCP doesn’t put you in a hole but overloads you with mania and racing thoughts that can push one into a scary dissociative psychosis. So I would assume potentiators are the key here, and that is certainly a much safer way to experiment with it it seems. In this case though, can the hole truly be considered a 3-MeO-PCP hole? With my most absurd weed highs (multiple edibles, smoking really relaly dank weed after a long t break, etc) there was certainly a hole-like experience with visuals (visuals that seemed to feature angular shapes and gears most of all, oddly enough). So perhaps you can’t truly and purely hole on 3-MeO-PCP, but this was a combination weed/3-MeO-PCP hole with each drug amplifying the effects and visual aspects of one another. Easier just to call it the 3-Hole or something.

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This was another go at the hole. The therapeutic / introspective potential of this drug that was revealed by this trip is really exciting.

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Dose: 10 mg

ROA: Intranasal

T0:00-Finished finals for the day. Wanted to play in the 3-Hole again to unwind after so much stress.

T0:30-Feeling pretty dissociated already. Haven’t touched this stuff for like 2 weeks. Everything feels distant and there is a distinct appreciation for music, kinda like a lower dose of DXM. Pretty interesting. I know exactly how to navigate this, I wait until I think I’m at the peak.

T0:50-Peaking now. Here it comes. I Hit the gravity bong 3 times. Here we go. I sit back and wait for it to hit. There is no rush or sudden comeup, it slowly slowly creeps up on me. I am able to coherently relax in bed for a bit.

T1:00-The hole is opening up. I lie under my covers and close my eyes. I am being sucked in. I can feel my body fade to nothing. I am eventually 100% anesthetized, it feels like my body has folded up on itself until its become nothing. The analogy I can make is a pretty specific reference to a manga… If you’ve read/watched Jojo’s bizarre adventure part 3: stardust crusaders, there is that character towards the end named Vanilla Ice who is capable of folding up to disappear from our dimension. He does this by having the demonic creature that accompanies him eat him. It then eats itself until it is nothing but a jaw, which then also blips out of existence. That’s how I felt. That is exactly how I felt. (see the end of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXsxc2G7iQ) (Sorry for the weird reference but I was in the midst of reading the series at the time). It was now that I was cast into the dream world. I was literally revisiting my old and recent dreams, watching them like movies. I could feel the same feelings I felt during them, and they were attached by free association. It was like exploring the structure of my subconscious through virtual reality. I would experience one dream, and then seeing an object, location, or having a feeling from that dream would immediately bring up a chain of associations that would lead to another past dream. This chain continued indefinitely. It was fascinating to explore, and it was so so strange to feel something so familiar that I had forgotten about. I was truly traversing my unconscious. I have no idea when I had these dreams, most did feel fairly recent, but these were certainly not random inventions, upon being exposed to them it triggered the distinct memories I had about them. After a bit I managed to pull myself out of it, just to see if I could.

T1:40-I talk to a friend a bunch online. He’s on MXE, and I’m holed up on this. It’s hard for me to maintain/understand conversation. I’m really really heavily dissociated. I decide to bid him a brief farewell and explore the hole again.

T2:00-Back in the hole. Now there is this feeling of an immense centipede or serpent skeleton. This is me, this is what I am now. I have no body, I am this swimming segmented being, twisting and turning through the aether. I have a vision of a landscape, rolling angular hills marked with grids, with a great red sky. It seems like this is a sort of “dream nexus”, similar to that I felt on DXM. I slither between the hills, and each grid mark is the entrance to another dream. I do not see the associations between them anymore, and unlike DXM these are not just hallucinated versions of my reality, but actual dreams I have had. I am like the librarian of this vast dream library, completely alone in its infinite scape to peruse these memories as I like. I can literally tap into whichever one I want. Well, I’m not sure what each one is until I enter it, but once I’m in, the chain of associations continues. Very fascinating.

T2:30-I awake again. I am down enough to not fall into the hole anymore, even if I try. I decide to give my heart and mind a rest and not smoke more, as this would probably bring me back to that state in some degree. I am elated at this discovery of dream exploration.

T6:00-Still feeling a bit faint. I go to bed now.

Conclusion: I am not sure what it is with NMDA antagonists and dreams. Do dreams have something to do with the NMDA receptor? DXM brings about similar experiences, although it seems to warp and bend the dreams a bit. This was very clear and literal exploration of pure unadultered dreams. This could be a truly useful tool, if I have a profound dream. It would allow me to revisit and explore it. I am excited by the implications of this and how I can explore it in the future.