Age: 26
Weight: 130 lbs
Dosage:
40 mg intranasal
Setting:
My house
Preface:
The
next 3 paragraphs are heavy pharm/chem jargon, skip to the bottom of the
preface for a summary of this new dissociative, skip to the end of the preface
for my full report.
3,4-MD-PCP
is yet another new arylcyclohexylamine. While most new ones have been following
a fairly predictable pattern for design, 3,4-MD-PCP brings something new to the
table. The 3,4-MD denotes a methylenedioxy group attached to the 3 and 4
positions of a phenyl ring. Chem savvy drug users may instantly recognize this
as the distinctive substitution on the methamphetamine base that forms MDMA. It
can also be seen in other stimulants like MDPV and Methylone. In this case, the
methylenedioxygroup is seen attached to the phenyl ring in PCP.
So
in seeing this, one may think- “Wow! So is this compound a combination of PCP
and MDMA?”. That is not how drugs work though. The effects of MDMA are due to
the interplay of the 3,4-MD substitution with the amphetamine base. Lacking
that amphetamine base, a 3,4-MD group will not generate the empathogenic
effects MDMA is so known for. It is simply a coincidence that a 3,4-MD group
retains some sort of psychoactive activity on both the PCP and Methamphetamine
base. Rather, this molecule stands alone as a unique and fascinating
dissociative drug, vastly different from both PCP and MDMA.
It
is worth noting that 3,4-MD-PCPr is the most selective NMDA antagonist known.
(The source for this is Dr. Jason Wallach’s dissertation) This means it would
hypothetically offer about as pure of a dissociative experience as possible, as
most other dissociatives hit a variety of other receptors, giving them
peripheral stimulant effects. 3,4-MD-PCPr pretty much only hits the NMDA and
DAT receptor (most other dissociatives hit serotonin and norepinephrine
receptors in some way too)- there is perhaps something very interesting to be
explored there- is this selectivity a result of the 3,4-MD substitution? Only
further studies and more data can tell us.
Anyways,
all the jargon aside, what is this compound like? It is a unique dissociative,
I find it hard to really grasp the words to summarize it. Perhaps what
characterized it the most was how many forms it could take, depending on dose
or set or setting. It is an amorphous compound that molds itself to all sorts
of situations. I could throw a million descriptors in the air and all of them
would be true to some degree: warm, social, manic, stimulating, insightful,
introspective, heavy, visual, colorful, disorienting, confusing, lucid, dizzy,
dancey, grounded, precise, whimsical, futuristic, the list goes on! It is a
truly exciting compound that has been fascinating to research. At times it felt
sentient, like I was engaging in a complex interplay with some other being or
some creature, curious and alive and fully interactive. It is my colorful
dissociative little pet.
I
ran several trials with this compound at doses ranging from 5 mg up to 50 mg. I
tried it in different settings, like an outdoor rave, or the grocery store, or
most times, just alone in my house. Each time felt quite distinct, but
ultimately some commonalities began to develop between them. Most of all is a
sense of being transferred to an enhanced other self, it is an odd sort of
transitive mania where it feels like my consciousness and body have shifted to
some other superior form, or perhaps reality has shifted around me. It feels
like I am piloting my body as a mech, with impossibly precise handling and
motor control. I found my ideal dose to be around 30-40 mg. 50 mg was
overwhelming and lasted for a very long time. Lower doses are sociable and fun
for dancing. Most of my trials were intranasal, though it is active orally and
sublingually with about the same potency, just a longer duration. The duration
is medium-long, dependent on dosage. A 50 mg dose lasted long into the night
and I was still feeling it the next morning. A dose around 30 mg lasted for
about 5-6 hours. The powder is unpleasant to snort- not extremely caustic but
foul tasting and very powdery, coating the sinuses. The following report is for
a 40 mg intranasal dose. I apologize for it being vague, contradictory, and
abstract at points. This is a compound that really defies coherent description,
even for me.
T0:00- Dose taken intranasally. Powder is
light and fluffy and slightly stings and irritates but above all else, is
pretty foul tasting. Snorting it is unpleasant, after chuffing down one line I
have to wait a minute to finish the other. It is a sizable pile of powder.
T0:17- Onset, feeling a little bit dizzy and
lightheaded. I am watching King of the Hill with my partner and playing
Minecraft. The show slowly becomes harder and harder to make sense of. I’m
having a lot of fun building my little castle though. I smoke a bit of cannabis as I come up.
T0:30- My head feels so heavy and floppy, my
fingertips are numb, it is like my brain is immensely heavy and floating in the
middle of my skull, not touching anything, just drawing in its surroundings
with a sundering gravitational force. A powerful numbing sensation fades in
from the front of my head. It feels like the room is moving, rocking on a
gentle sea. My mind is adrift but grounded like a balloon anchored to the
earth, tossing about in the breeze.
I feel like my consciousness has shifted
slightly to the side of my body. I still try and follow the TV show but it
makes little sense at this point. The events on the screen seem too disjointed
and nonsensical to be of interest to me. I feel like I am emphasizing the wrong
details of it and ignoring the parts that are actually important to
understanding it. I doubt I could hold a conversation well right now and don’t
bother.
T1:00- Effects are still building, washing
over me, that same sensation as laying in the ocean and having its waves buffet
my head. Visuals begin to build in my periphery, tangled circuitry like dense
networks of roots and mycelium twisting and turning at right angles,
translucent and gelatinous. My entire field of vision is taken by an intense
flashing, the world flickering in great violet pulses. The experience feels
psychedelic, in the limber flow of thoughts, in my hyperfocus, in the
anticipation building at the sight of iridescent visuals creeping in. It is
being etched into my mind with a fiery bright laser. I am so dizzy, each moment
I feel an odd contradiction building where I feel further from my body, receded
into empty space- yet immaculately and completely in control of it. I get up
and move around and don’t feel particularly uncoordinated, rather like I am
compensating for momentum and moving my muscles with an impossible precision.
This is a confusing sensation because these limbs don’t quite feel like they
belong to me. I would liken it to a sensation of piloting my own body as if it
were a mech suit, my consciousness a little homunculus of myself perched in my
skull cavity, pulling levers and joysticks to make my muscles move. I feel dry
like I have been desiccated under a heat lamp. The character of the comeup is
that of a slowly sinking dissociation, smooth and steady and constant, not
rushing or pulling or gushing forth like a churning river.
T1:30- Time for me to practice my standard
for characterizing dissociatives- turning all the lights off, lying down in the
total dark and listening to music through headphones. My selection this time
around is a perennial favorite, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Garden of Delete”. It
is a familiar and exciting and interesting album that always provides a
fascinating substrate for dynamic synesthesia.
My notes resume some 30 minutes later (I
didn’t finish the album I got too restless just lying there). This speaks to
the character of the experience of course- as much fun as it is to just lie
around, there is a compulsion to do something, to occupy my thoughts and
actions with something more stimulating to all of my senses. I don’t want to
just aimlessly be in the dark. Furthermore, there wasn’t much of a hole to
speak of, there was no sense of all-encompassing dissociation, no sense of my
body fading entirely. No sense of being altered and twisted in impossible ways
or feeling like I am levitating or feeling as though there are odd pressures
being exerted on me, as other dissociative holes tend to offer. I am quite
aware that my body is there, lying still on the couch, and though it is still distinctly numb and
dissociated, there is still that sense that my consciousness has shrunk or
shifted or changed its form to no longer match me physically.
Despite this, it was still a deeply immersive
experience, replete with amorphous synesthetic visuals, great monolithic things
lurking in the distance. They weren’t particularly vivid or active, swirling
and blurring and at times faint and indistinct, but something was going on. The
realms are soft, silken, smooth and flowing like winds through a meadow or
banks of fog gently enveloping a rolling landscape. They are smooth and shaded
like a computer render.
The sense of immersion came primarily,
however, from a sense of presence, like the drug was a playmate, wrapping
around me, clutching me, lurking in the wings to pounce and strike. It has
motion, desire, intention, all the trappings of a living breathing thing and
yet it is nothing more than the cascade through my nerves of some white powder
up my nose. I am sunken in its world as it flits and floats around me, curious
and inquisitive, glowing in the night. I am taken with its wonder, swept up in
its light and motion, possessed by its mind. How fascinating!
I stand up and return to the world, able to
reintegrate easily. Standing and walking proves no issue. I feel imbued with a
glowing energy, I feel like I have powered up and entered some ascendant form.
Everywhere I turn my eyes seems like a perfectly composed movie shot. I stand
tall and proud as energy flickers off of my muscles as they shift and move with
impossible precision. Perhaps this is a form of mania.
T2:00- This experience is so full of contradictions
and challenging descriptions. At once, lying still, I am lucid, I am able to
think clearly, to interact with the world around me, yet at the same time, I
feel so remarkably far from myself, distant and weird, I have been transformed
into some glistening crystalline other.
I am now just laying about, eyes open, lights
still off, music playing through my busted laptop speakers, browsing the
internet. I bask in its glow, not fully paying attention to the screen, just
thinking and meditating. Visuals stream and creep in the dark, melting and
shifting with a steady motion like a curtain of water running down a wall. This
drug seems to have little character of its own, rather it will imprint on my
current conditions and emotions. It is alive, sentient, and fully amorphous. I
am fixated on sex, sexuality, the nature of lust and desire, not in the sense
of arousal but in the sense of it being a subject to ponder. This is probably
imprinting on my immediate memory from earlier in the night where there was a vivid
and intense encounter with multiple people. I take in my own body, my own form,
I wonder how others experience desire, I wonder how others would experience
desire towards me specifically, I think about how I personally experience
desire. This compound offers so much to think about, but it remains relatively
subtle, it gently suggests these thoughts, it doesn’t force them through in
some manic rush (though as mentioned in the last timestamp, there is certainly
an above-baseline degree of mania to the experience- quite pleasant!)
T2:41- I go upstairs and hang out with my
partner while they get ready for bed. The peak seems to be descending by now.
At this point I feel talkative and social and I am messaging people on my phone
just for idle chitchat. I am acutely aware of my body at this point, despite
the storm of dissociative numbness and dizziness. I am aware of all the little
aches and pains that are constant nowadays at the ripe old age of 26. My
muscles in particular feel incredibly tense. I get on the floor and stretch and
contort myself to my hearts content, pulling every muscle to be supple and
limber. I am not a very flexible person, I can’t even touch my toes, but I do
the best I can and I feel great afterwards, with even more control of my body and
limbs. It feels so empowering, I feel yet even more superhuman and ascendant,
to continue the metaphor of piloting a mech I feel like I have undergone a full
maintenance, all my parts oiled and cleaned and replaced to be fresh and fully,
effortlessly mobile. I have nothing to do with this energy, with this sense of
fulfillment, but that is okay, I am content to merely exist. I am blissful and
languid and listless. I go back downstairs to be alone in the dark.
T3:30- Tossing about among the curtains of
the world; I am lucid, mobile, functional. I don’t feel like I could descend
into a hole or pseudo-hole at this point no matter how hard I may try. I am
still feeling sociable and eager to interact with others and I have my bearings
about me well enough to do so competently. I feel a compulsion to talk to my
grandmother who lives on the other side of the planet. I feel sad, that this is
my direct ancestor but I know next to nothing about her. I only see her once
every few years and we usually only exchange small talk. She is in pain,
lonely, bored, and depressed. It feels so odd to be so detached from someone
within my direct bloodline. I am taken by the sadness of this, of the great
cultural divide in my upbringing, in how I must create a false version of myself
to peacefully coexist with an entire half of my family that lives in a deeply
Conservative Islamic culture. I feel pangs of empathy, vividly imagining her
passing the days just watching TV in her apartment, quiet and dim, widowed and
alone. It nearly brings tears to my eyes. The amorphous nature of this compound
reveals itself yet again, a prismatic fox bounding and twisting and nuzzling
among my emotions, pulling into the depths of my heart, tugging at the great
insurmountable sadnesses that permeate this world, larger than us and beyond
our control. It is a but a misfortune of geography after all, that we cannot be
closer, see each other more, entwine our lives as family should.
Once my mind catches onto a subject, the
compound does too, eagerly enveloping each thought with crystalline vines that
quickly grow into dense tendrils slither upwards to the sky, firing off as a
dazzling display of fireworks in my neurons. This is a compound of presence,
but that presence is little but a hollow vessel, ready to take in every passing
thought and experience, envelop it, amplify it, imbue it with vibrant color and
a great swirling energy, crystallize it and construct it as something new in my
mind. It is an imitator, a mimic, it will replicate whatever it touches, and
within this is a boundless world.
T4:00- A distinct stimulated psychedelic
comedown has set in, a state I often find in the comedown of certain
dissociatives where my thoughts flow like a bursting dam, where my curiosity
drives me to ravenously consume as much text as I possibly can. This state
presents with many drugs for me actually, most characteristically psychedelics
but also cannabis, and as stated before, many different dissociatives. It is a
distinct type of cognitive enhancement that seems common across all those
classes where my pliable brain just demands more, more information, an endless
trail of investigation towards a trivial tangent, a vicious desire to just
know. It is always a pleasant surprise when I enter this familiar state. The subjects
of my ravenous readings for the night are the history of Miami and the history
of skyscrapers. Reading and reading and reading like a nerd. There are
intermittent pleasant conversations with others as I do this, this is a
compound that offers a great deal in the realms of sociability.
T5:00- I have passed through the veil of an
altered lucidity to a state closer to baseline. There is a lingering sense of a
heavy dissociation in the back of my head and a bit in my limbs, but it is a
warm buzzing afterglow smoldering itself out. There is a lingering gentle
stimulation like a neon sign in a vacant room. I am still getting visuals in
the dark, distinct images of forms and patterns swirling and flowing in my
periphery.
T6:00- Back to baseline by now.
Conclusion: It is tough to really
characterize 3,4-MD-PCP, each of my trial with it offered something different.
As far as commonalities go, I would say it is smooth, insightful, a bit manic,
colorful, warm, euphoric, and sociable. It is a dizzy and functional
dissociative, towing a line between being great for getting up and doing stuff
while also being great for just lying in the dark. Perhaps its most remarkable
feature is that it is so difficult to generalize- it is a truly amorphous
compound that bent and molded itself around my brain, collecting and amplifying
thoughts and emotions, its nature changing as my set and setting changed. It
has promise of a true jack of all trades dissociative, versatile and enjoyable
in a wide variety of settings, depending on dosage. Lower doses were fantastic
for dancing and socializing, medium doses are great for being around close
friends or playing video games, higher doses can be disorienting and
incapacitating but can make it nice to just meditate and listen to music. There
is a lot of potential here! Dosage seems to correlate with duration, with
higher doses having a significantly longer peak and comedown. Any dose offers a
pleasant afterglow even after the other effects have faded.
The physical dissociation is present but not
overwhelmingly heavy or incapacitating. At times I felt immaculately in control
of my muscles and my body, almost superhuman. It is great for dancing. The
sense of dissociation is one of steady immersion, there is no rush or
stimulating push in my nerves, though I would say this drug is quite
stimulating relative to dissociatives like ketamine or DCK, though it is a
neutral, background stimulation, no force to it at all. The headspace is
meditative and contemplative like a psychedelic, and can turn into a tranquil
stillness when occupied with over activities. There is a warm euphoria
throughout. Visual effects are present but not particularly remarkable, the
same drifting patterns and textures that other dissociatives seem to offer.
With my eyes closed, the visual space in the darkness was vague and
nondescript, as if the drug was telling me to stop lying around and enjoy the
world around me. This drug has a sense of interactivity and immersion, as
though it is a presence that will bend to the thoughts and emotions of the
user, twisting and twirling around them and shifting to fit whatever the mood
and atmosphere may be. It is truly a fascinating dissociative, even if it may
not be to the liking of all people or fill the roles they desire, it can perhaps
be molded to whatever function a person may need, and ultimately it is an
extremely interesting novelty to explore!