2F-DCK (Oral)

 Age: 25

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 200 mg oral in gel cap

Setting: My house

 

T0:00- Dose taken.

 

T0:22- Onset, feeling a tad dizzy and numb in my extremities, a bit of tingling down my nerves.

 

T0:28- I’ve been trying to respond to some reddit comment about structure/activity relations and hypothetical molecules that would fulfill certain receptor affinities. It’s like a puzzle, and I am frankly not informed enough on the subject to create anything meaningful but its fun to play with. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly difficult to type and concentrate.

 

T0:30- It’s hitting more and more, I feel breathless, I feel like my mind is floating to the top of the room, trying to contain it is like trying to hold a piece of Styrofoam on the bottom of a pool. I am at once rising and sinking, being steadily submerged in heavy grey water. The sensation crawls to my toes. There are flashes of visuals on my computer screen, pastel symmetrical arrays of little iridescent bubbles. My tongue and teeth are numb.

 

T0:36- This is coming on surprisingly fast- the visuals rise and pulse, almost synesthetic, seething and dancing to the steady breaths of the house around me. I am sailing on big cold grey-blue waves, undulating like great breaths of the ocean. My limbs become more and more disjoint, feeling as though they are in places they really are not, as though they have taken up sizes and shapes and consistencies that don’t belong to them. I find myself losing my train of thought a lot. I am still steadily sinking deeper and deeper, everything is flowing around me and I am empty and lightheaded.

 

T0:45- My partner is downstairs taking a nap on the couch. I am upstairs, and though I know I am sharing this house with a human presence I feel so isolated, like I am the only person in the whole world, like no world exists outside of what I can see. I am perpetually sinking.

 

T1:02- It’s hard to walk, I am dangerously clumsy and everything seems to be shaking and rocking more. I don’t feel massively dissociated or incapacitated though, not the sort of deep hole of dissociation like I’ve just been dropped into a void, the type that 2F-DCK imparts when insufflated. There is no rush or acuteness to it, it’s simply there, matter of fact and quietly working in the background. It’s noteworthy that I am still incredibly uncoordinated even though I don’t feel it. Sitting down I imagine I can walk perfectly fine. Yet when I try to put it into practice I come close to tripping and falling down the stairs in just a few steps. I must be very careful.  It is not the usual flash flood I have come to expect from this chemical, rather it is the water steadily rising around me.

I am dizzy and my body feels stuck in one particular direction, like I am being oriented by a magnet. My fingertips are entirely numb at this point.

With my eyes closed there are vivid images of discrete contained spaces, little cells and rooms, tight and shrunken around me. There are lots of vivid and discernible photorealistic insect images, perhaps after images left behind after a workday of identifying insects under a microscope for hours. Great detailed magnified visuals of tiny little beetles creep and flow across the confined landscape of little tunnels and hallways.

I am so used to the simple cause and effect of snorting this drug, feeling a brief and acute discomfort from the mounds of powder, and having a brief and acute experience. It is an added layer of dissociation to have this feeling imparted by a single painless oral dose.

 

T1:10- I relocate to the bedroom so I can lie down and sprawl out on the bed while listening to music.

My fingers are sponges, every letter I type feels like they are being pressed in several inches. Open eyed visuals present as patterns of spots, drifting in perfect vertical synchronicity with gentle steady trails of tracers behind them, against a backdrop of concentric melting warbling textures. I close my eyes- more images of insects. The sensation with my eyes closed meanwhile is phenomenal- my body just melts away, turns to a puddle of melted ice cream, melted ice cream cannot feel, it has no sense of proprioception, no solid body to hold in relation to itself or the space around it, and that is me. It is so disorienting to lose any sense of where my body is relative to itself, to anything. I still feel as though I have a body, but it is an odd an alien thing that occupies a different state of matter.

I see basic interlocking polygons with warm colored lines, their faces occupied by dark voids that bend and shape around nuclei of swirling chaos in the vast distance. Everything is ultimately symmetrical across a larger field. No more vivid images of bugs, just abstraction now. I am content to be swept away into this vast abstraction, I am content to not exist beyond this darkened space, both impossibly vast and intimately concise. It feels like bubbles are rising and passing through me, juggling my consciousness on their soupy gooey buoyancy.

 

T1:24- This is odd- while it came on gradually and steadily, it seems to have just quickly left. While listening to music and trying to sink into the closed eyed visuals, I notice that I just suddenly am not able to anymore. The physical dissociation and anesthesia has also faded entirely. Open eyed visuals are barely a step beyond my baseline HPPD. I stand up and my movement isn’t clumsy at all. I would expect an oral dose to be more drawn out and have a longer duration than an intranasal one, but that does not appear to be the case. I feel like I am close to baseline- the only sign I have done a drug is a persistent cognitive dissociation, a sense of feeling out of myself and detached from the world, reminiscent of feeling very fatigued but without the discomfort of physical sedation. I am content to just exist, I am lucid and heavy and neutral and walking down the stairs, it turns out still just a tiny bit uncoordinated.

 

T1:30- I come down and find my partner is awake now. We decide to have a second dinner as our earlier meal was pretty light. I just eat a big salad with tons of veggies and homemade vinaigrette. I talk to them about how weird this experience was and how I already seem to be out of it. Indeed my appetite seems fairly normal now, as opposed to how many dissociatives can make food seem like an alien concept. My sense of taste is normal. I find it is somewhat difficult for me to converse- I am having a hard time articulating my words when speaking them out loud, as though there is some kind of strange obstacle impeding communication between my brain and mouth. My short-term memory is also still affected, and I find myself sometimes losing track of what my partner is even saying. Its not the empty blank dumb feeling that I sometimes get from dissociatives, it is just a subtly and neutrally shifted baseline.

I notice as time passes that it feels as if the experience is slowly on the rise again. I close my eyes and find the visuals have returned. I narrate them aloud to my partner as we sit at the table, covering my eyes with my hand to block out ambient light. I see beetles again, images of them in photoreality, appearing as they do under a scope, those images flipped and reflected radially as though they are facets of a kaleidoscope. I see their faces up close, I see them crawling, various click beetles, leaf beetles, bark boring weevils, lady beetles and ground beetles. I am also greeted by flowing rivers of color in darkness, glyphs and swirling patterns. Another sojourn yields a great inverted glowing red wireframe pyramid, spinning around in the black nucleus of a dark, spiraling mountain range.

 

T2:00- We finished our pseudo-dinner and I have now become enraptured in playing with their cat, awkwardly running about the house with her favorite toy as she chases after me. While I love her cat and playing with her, there was an ulterior motive here- the drug had come back in force by this point, a great wave welling through the glassy gelatinous depths of an endless amethyst ocean, pushing me steadily into the stratosphere. I found myself increasingly unable to hold conversation, my short-term memory failing me at every turn. I keep getting distracted, wrapped up in the sensations returning to my body, or rather draining from it, and the gentle but markedly burgeoning numbness in my extremities, my limbs and bones turning to jelly. It feels like I am hovering just a bit above where I really am.

I wasn’t even sure how to get this across to my partner, words in general were failing me more and more. I decided I could make a graceful exit by engaging with the sweet and adorable cat, a fun nonverbal activity that could innocuously capture my full attention and interaction for a bit. She needed the exercise anyway.

 

T2:34- My partner settles into the living room as I play with the cat for longer. As I engage in this task, my faculties already seem to be returning. A second wave of this drug had welled up, though of lesser intensity and duration than the first. The best way to monitor the retreat of the trip is through gauging the physical effects, which were indeed receding. Feeling, balance, coordination, and stability returned to my body. Mental effects meanwhile, lingered on through the waves, though they too gradually descended in intensity. I can hold conversation again, I feel jovial and slightly manic. I am reading about a bunch on the internet and giddily sharing information with my partner. I begin to notice my inflection and behavior and realize I must be coming across as cocky, arrogant, overconfident. I feel like a jerk but I also don’t feel like I care too much, it’s hard to care too much about anything in this state. It feels nice to just let things pass. Visual effects also seem as though they have been on a constant and steady downturn since the peak, not vacillating in waves like the physical dissociation.

I feel like I keep making awkward gaffes, I am hyper aware of my own actions and speech, I need to distract myself and stop myself. I feel dumbfounded, like I have been smacked in the face.

 

T3:26- It’s been going up and down in waves for a while now. I’ve just been playing my current (and old) favorite game, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. It’s a nice way to pass the time, especially as a low-commitment nonverbal task to keep me going as a third wave rose up and receded. This wave passed after about 20 minutes.  

 

T3:42- After another 30 minutes, a fourth wave bubbles up but quickly fizzles out in about 15 minutes, segueing to a long, steady, and constant comedown. Typical of non-manic arylcyclohexylamine comedowns (Ketamine, for example), this end of the experience is fairly boring and irritating in how it is mildly incapacitating with 0 worthwhile returns. Just a wasteful inhibition of my mind, a waste of time, a residual dissociative burnout. I feel dumb and tired, but there is still a bit of stimulation that tickles through me ensuring I can’t sleep. I mostly just hang out with my partner now, both of us on our respective devices quietly sharing space. It’s a comfortable domestic and intimate existence. I smoke a bit of cannabis but at this point it seems like it only gets me stoned instead of stirring the dust of the dissociative remnants. I do notice the open-eyed visuals briefly become brighter and more prominent before fading down the drain with the rest of the experience.

 

T5:26- I am back to my baseline. My partner has gone to bed and I am awake alone now. I play videogames and smoke more for about an hour before I too go to bed. I fall asleep quickly without issue.

 

Conclusion: It’s amazing just how much changing the ROA can change a drug. This frankly felt like a totally different substance than when it is dosed intranasally. Firstly, there was absolutely zero rush of any sort with this ROA, it was a steady and certain immersion into the experience. While 2F-DCK has less of a rush than ketamine, an intranasal dose is like a headfirst dive into an icy lake relative to the overall sensation with the onset of an oral dose. It was reminiscent of the diarylethylamines (Ephenidine, Diphenidine etc.) in that regard in fact. The comeup was swift but smooth and gradual. The peak was highly visual, as 2F-DCK often is for me, though there was a glut of photorealistic closed eyed visuals that was certainly unique. Perhaps most interesting however was the duration- the experience came in waves, with seemingly 4 separate peaks and an interstitial near-sobriety between them. Each wave was less intense with a shorter duration than the last. The overall nature of 2F-DCK in being smooth, fairly gentle, visual, cold and blue, and overall neutral and mentally incapacitating was retained. The potency seemed to be about the same as an intranasal dose, just with less of that aforementioned rush. It is worth nothing that I am not sure if the wave effect is something that is consistently reported or if perhaps that was a pharmacokinetic aberration that presented from the ROA.