3-Me-PCPy

 Age: 26

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 20 mg intranasal

Setting: On the train, walking around the city, at my house

 

Preface: 3-Me-PCPy is an exciting development in the world of Arylcyclohexylamines! Once again I’ll give a brief chemistry/pharmacology primer to contextualize this drug, if that’s not of interest, just skip to the body of the report. And per usual, there is an overall summary of the compound at the end.

PCPy is a close cousin to PCP- the second “P” in “PCP” denotes a piperidine group, where the essential nitrogen in the compound is part of a hexagonal 6-atom ring structure. PCPy is very close to that, with the nitrogen in a pentagonal 5 member ring, forming what’s called a pyrrolidine group. Both PCP and PCPy and most of their analogues have similar qualities like high potency and stimulating effects.

PCPy was first only seen as a street drug, made by enterprising basement chemists to try and circumvent laws around manufacturing PCP. Very little information exists on the subjective effects of PCPy itself. 3-MeO-PCPy cropped up on the market briefly around MXE’s heyday, but even then it was an obscurity and very little data trickled out before it too faded into oblivion. 3-Me-PCPy represents an exciting return to a base compound with a lot of potential!

Personal correspondence with Dr. Jason Wallach and poring through some of his publications brought about some hints as to what effects this compound may have- It was shown to be a triple reuptake inhibitor, meaning it leads to a buildup of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine (Perhaps the most famous triple reuptake inhibitor is cocaine). This generally can display stimulating effects but it also has interesting implications with regards to antidepressant effects. Much more formal research is needed in this area with this particular compound! A few other scattered reports suggested high potency and subjective stimulating effects. I managed to obtain a sample of this and had to see for myself.

The short of it is that this is a stimulating potent dissociative with a short duration. The headspace is shallow but it is euphoric and social and prone to redosing. It is not so much a trip as it is a casual high, though a unique and wonderful one at that. Again, at the end of the report is a more detailed summary of this compound and its effects at different doses/overall character, along with other properties pertinent to the batch going around.

 

T0:00- I am waiting alone at a train station in my home town, eating some dinner. I had just dropped my car off to a family mechanic for state inspection so I had to take the train back home to the city. It’s a lovely summer afternoon, the sun is getting low in the sky casting everything in a peach-golden light. The trees arc overhead and shimmer in a pastel suburban breeze. My train isn’t coming for another half hour.

I pour out a pre-measured capsule onto my hand and snort it down in one go.  It burns a lot, bringing tears to my eyes. There is a bitter stinging petroleum flavor typical of ACH’s. This is near unbearable for a minute or two but the pain subsides to a dull numbness.

 

T0:05- Already feeling a bit dissociated, just a tad lightheaded and spacy, my extremities feel just a little number. Great dark thunderheads tower and loom and rumble in the distance, timidly lit by the fire of setting sun. Where I am it is balmy and nice, it feels like my feet are floating off the ground. With the onset it seems what appetite I had before has completely dissipated. I wrap up the rest of my dinner and pack it away.

 

T0:10- My teeth are numb and buzzy, like I can feel them invisibly vibrating in the gaps in my gums. This is a dissociation that sets into my bones, a high frequency vibration that shakes me into a dull half-anesthesia. I am dizzy now, my head is spinning like I’ve had too much alcohol. I am taken aback by the speed and intensity with which this drug comes crashing in, it has an exhilarating rush. All I can do is sit on my bench and gaze down the tracks into the distance, my dazed attention lapsing into my own skull.

 

T0:15- Bearing down harder and harder like that thunderstorm in the distance. My field of vision is flashing, I feel waves of anesthesia pulse through me, I am stimulated and short of breath, there is a sense or rising and inflating in my skull and everything looks blurry except for what’s right before me. It is like extreme tunnel vision, the walls of these hallucinated vitreous tunnels illuminated by flowing pulses of understated light. My sense of depth perspective has all but collapsed, distant buildings and trees telescoping to the forefront of my vision. I am glad I am alone here right now, in the looming dusk.

 

T0:25- I get up and pace around a bit just to get a measure of how exactly this dissociation is manifesting. There is a surprising degree of physical dissociation, my limbs feel heavy, well lubricated with excess momentum. My proprioception is led slightly astray. It is like every part of my body is moving easier and more than it should, more than I am used to. I feel clumsy, dizzy, uncoordinated, but I can still walk straight and be steady on my feet. Perhaps to an outside observer my posture is weird and my walk a tad off-kilter but I feel like I could outwardly project relative sobriety. My extremities are buzzing and numb. This is similar to any of the manic, lucid dissociatives out there, PCP or 3-MeO-PCP or 3-Me-PCP or 3-MeO-PCE, though a bit heavier and less precise.

The mental dissociation rules first and foremost, it is like a big weight has landed in my skull, a pile of bricks that leaves me dazed and listless, confused and baffled by the mere presence of my surroundings. Visually, everything is flashing and blurry. There is a stimulation coursing through my core, conflagrating out from my pounding heart, rippling down my muscles, flashing my anesthetized phantom limbs with vibrating electricity. As content as I am to just sit still I feel obligated to be up and in motion. Moving feels fantastic in fact. This drug would be excellent for dancing or some other physically demanding social activity.

The drip is hitting and it is unpleasant. It stings and irritates on the way down the back of my throat. Whatever appetite I had left is certainly gone now.

Beyond the flashing and depth perception there isn’t much in the way of open eyed visuals- not much patterning or color, just strange alterations to perspective, blurring and tunnel vision. I sit and close my eyes to take stock of that space- I am greeted with great pulsing radial images, great turning floral wheels, mostly black but adorned in auras of maroon and yellow ochre. They are hardly perceptible, not vivid by any means, but they turn in tune with a general sense of perpetual rotational motion that carries the dissociation of this experience like the turbulence of an undulating sea.

 

T0:30- Everything wobbles and waves, my entire field of vision is gently vibrating. Warm electricity crackles into my fingers and toes and extremities. It is mostly dark now, visuals begin to dance in the sky, radiant and rotational with neon fringes. There is a blast of light glinting off the tracks in the distance, a rumble and a shriek of a great machine, the train is approaching. I stand up and take a second to collect myself before boarding and being immersed in the world of the living. This feels like an elaborate fantasy or a half-formed memory from some lagging dream. I don a mask, give a nod to the conductor and climb aboard, the world taken by vibrations from this rumbling machine of light and the odor of brake fluids. I find a secluded seat towards the back, windows eventually facing the city skyline, and settle in, content to be totally unnoticed. It is lucid and functional, but at the same time quite heavy and off-base.

I then notice someone sitting right in front of me, another old friend from elementary school who I have previously lived with and shared a number of psychedelic experiences with. We haven’t seen each other in a good long time, he is commuting home from his job. We chat briefly, the world falling away from this singular focus of my attention. Talking and interacting flows smoothly but it also disjointed and uncomfortable- I am not quite sure how to conduct myself in a public space full of strangers, I feel like I would be very content to talk to a person in relative privacy. In a previous experience, I had dosed this drug prior to attending a party of good friends and acquaintances, and it proved delightfully social, making me articulate, commanding attention and brimming with confidence. That sensation seems to be quite contextual. He gets off at his stop in the suburbs and I am again alone on the train. I plug in my headphones and listen to Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Garden of Delete”.

 

 

T0:45- I don’t like that I have to sit still for this entire train ride, that I can’t get up and pace around. My whole body is getting creeping crawling pulses of numbness, I feel like ball lighting, bouncing off the walls with pent up energy. I just want to run and jump and exercise my muscles, but I have to settle for fidgeting in place to not make a scene. I am explosive and tense and existing faster than the world around me, even on this train as it barrels down into the night city, glints of light drifting past.

 

T1:00- I arrive at my stop and make my way off the train. It feels so nice to stand up and move again. I am tense and my gait feels awkward and stiff, but there’s a spring in my step, extra energy and extra momentum propelling me forward with a steely determination.

I have stepped out onto a major commercial corridor, a recent development in this city’s downtown to try and mimic Time’s Square. Massive screens blast sterile white light from advertisements onto the street, reflecting in blue on the asphalt and black granite and filth that coats everything. Concentric fountains of visuals seep from the lights, cascading down in steady ripples, ghostly and subtle but certain. It is dizzying and disorienting and I suddenly feel very small, beaten back by the fires of neon until I am left cowering like a roach in the gutter, small and inconspicuous. I duck behind a pillar and pull out my one hitter, taking a few puffs of cannabis to lighten up the walk home. With things pleasantly smoothed out and an aura of smoke around me and the filth of my work clothes I set out and pace between the shadows in the grime, obscured from the glistening gods overhead.

 

T1:10- I walked hurriedly home through the night city, it’s a warm Friday night and of course people are out and about enjoying the weather. I have little interest in stopping and smelling the roses, I would like to just be back in my house. Nevertheless I do occasionally have to stop and wait for traffic, tie my shoe, respond to a message, etc. When I stop it feels like the experience bears down on me like a big gooey tidal wave of static. There are drifting visuals on the buildings and on the sky, like there is shadowy black water flowing down every surface. The whole world feels like its slowly drifting and cascading, and my sense of body is trickling into the concrete and flowing into the gutter. In contrast to this, a glowing energy is rising through me, flaring into the atmosphere in an electric corona crackle in fluorescent white light. I am buzzing, drifting, dizzy and disoriented, but there is a stable energy springing through my limbs, ensuring I remain locked into my path.

 

T1:20- I get home and am again thrown for a disorienting loop by the change of setting. From the warm swirling night rippling with energy, to the quiet dim light of the house with still, cool, conditioned air. I interact briefly with my partner and do a few chores before taking a shower. The space is warm and meditative, the sensation of hot water cascading off my body is heavenly stimulation, steaming off of me as electricity courses through my veins. The clatter of water on the tub echoes and reverberates into a cacophony that pummels its way through my skull, pulling me into a trance. My sense of body, my anchoring to our world swirled down the drain to mingle with my languid long hairs, I am left in a daze where I am replaced by a simulacrum of solidified light, a Theseus’ ship that felt naturally at my command, a body rinsed away from the buzzing of electric nerves.

I usually take scalding hot showers, but I already felt warm, walking all the way home in the balmy night, and the drug felt like it had me warmer too. I turned the water down and savored a gentle cold deluge, the chills shocking me back into reality a bit and pulling me back into my body. I feel fairly lucid when I step out and dry off and dress myself, the most noticeable effect being excess momentum in my movements and a numbness across my skin.

 

T1:50- I talk to my partner a bit but can’t really find much to say. I am in a bit of a daze. A lower dose taken previously had me unable to stop running my mouth. It seems there is a sweet spot for socializing. I go downstairs where its colder and plop down nice and clean on the couch. I am buzzing with dissociation and stimulation, but my body feels comfy and not overwrought. It feels nice to stretch out, listen to music, talk to some people online. There is a daze and a dumbness that washes over me, it doesn’t feel like the cognitive enhancement imbued by substances like 3-MeO-PCP or 3-MeO-PCE, I am just empty and fast and dissociated. I would describe the overall headspace of this drug as “shallow”, there really was no tendency towards curiosity, flow of thought, processing, introspection, or pattern formation. It is quiet and neutral, but it burns bright and hot. I am comfortable and satisfied with the state I’m in, if a little restless.

I am past the peak but there is still a visual drifting on the white of the walls, a messy wash of colors blending together to form a contrasting visual mud. With my eyes closed it is a similar slow, steady, radial motion.

 

T2:00- The sensation of stimulation has overtaken the sensation of dissociation. All that remains is a sensation of floatiness and weightlessness, a sensation of being ethereal, of defying gravity from the energy in my veins. I am alert and talkative now, more articulate and coherent than before. I am enjoying just lying here, taking in sensations. I am idly playing Minecraft and listening to music, it seems like a perfectly mindless way to wile away a delightfully mindless experience. I am beyond a daze, beyond dumbness, now I am taken by a stimmy afterglow, a neutral sense of euphoria. I really want to redose, it seems gone too soon, but for the sake of this report I restrain myself.

 

T3:00- Playing good ol’ Chivalry Medieval Warfare now, definitely on the downward slope. My partner comes down and interacts for a bit. I feel a bit dazed and the physical stimulation is dying down, while a distinct mental stimulation and clarity remains.

 

T4:00- Back to baseline almost entirely now save for some residual numbness in my fingertips.

 

T4:30- Entirely down.

 

Conclusion: If I had to describe 3-Me-PCPy as anything I would call it dissociative cocaine. And this isn’t just because it supposedly shares a portion of its pharmacology with cocaine. It is short, fast, fun, stimulating, euphoric, hedonistic, reinforcing, and low-commitment. It stands apart from most of the other dissociatives for lacking in depth or introspective ability- the dissociation is there but not in any meaningful way that has one pondering their role in existence. It seems to conveniently obscure such thoughts, or not allow room for them in the first place, just smacking a user up with the physical and mental sensation of dissociation. It is perfectly crafted for casual low-commitment use.

This isn’t to say this is a bad thing, there are different drugs for different purposes. I see this one as serving the purpose of an excellent party drug. A lower dose in a social setting was delightful, I was articulate, disinhibited and confident, as though I had mixed cocaine and alcohol (though 3-Me-PCPy has the added benefit of not having the toxic metabolite, Cocaethylene).
One quality I would like to emphasize about this drug is that it could prove quite troublesome to people prone to binging or compulsive use. The short duration and the pleasant rush of the comeup lend to "chasing the high", redosing again and again. Even in many situations where I only planned on dosing once I found myself reneging on that and redosing anyway. For this report I wanted to capture the experience of a single dose but I really had to hold myself back from dosing again when I got home. In previous weeks I found myself using it multiple days in a row, something I almost never do with dissociatives. It feels light and purely recreational but people should be wary of overuse, as the dissociative mania that builds with repeated doses could easily devolve into the territory of stimulated psychosis. While I don't use dissociatives daily, the relative functionality and short duration of this seem dangerous in being a slippery slope into that territory.

The general qualities of the drug are such:

Dosage information carries the caveat that I have a slight tolerance to dissociatives and that I tend to opt for more intense experiences. I would consider 20 mg to be an upper cap on dosage. I ventured beyond that but there seems to be diminishing returns, with the experience asymptotically leveling out at the top. There was little discernible difference between 20 and 30 mg beyond a greater sense of physical dissociation. 20 mg felt like the fully fleshed effects of this compound. A 10 mg dose was delightfully social and warm and hypomanic, and redosing 5-10 mg bumps spaced hours after an initial dose made for a fun night spent with others.

It is quite caustic to snort, burning intensely for a short time and seeming to cause some sort of tissue damage that can lead to nosebleeds the next day. Sublingual dosing was the same potency, though this too left a sore spot on the mucus membrane. Oral dosage was a bit less potent, but with a much longer comeup and less of a rush. No other routes of administration have been attempted yet.

It hits fast depending on route of administration- Onset for an intranasal dose is within 5 minutes, followed by a 15–30-minute comeup, about an hour peak, and a steady comedown for 2-4 hours. Duration did not seem to increase with a higher dose.

Visual effects are light, often consisting of subtle drifting or radial forms. There is a sense of constant motion, whether it be textures perpetually flowing like an ancient creek or the dizzying steady rotation that took hold when I closed my eyes. Auditory effects had a nice synesthesia with tingling physical sensations. It was mildly physically dissociating, not impairing movement enough to interfere with walking around in public, though I definitely felt a good distance off-base. There were sensations of creeping dissociation, crackling down my nerves like arcs of electricity. This substance is distinctly stimulating, though not overwhelmingly so. The stimulation exists in greater proportion to the other effects relative to drugs like 3-MeO-PCP or 3-MeO-PCE though I would still distinctly classify this as a stimulating dissociative rather than vice versa. The stimulation adds a lot of motion and momentum to the experience-it pairs well with physical activity like dancing or just going for a walk.

For those seeking a comparison to familiar substances, it bears the most similarity to 3-Me-PCP and PCP, a moot comparison because those drugs are fairly uncommon. It shares a quality of shallow, hedonistic, stimulating dissociation. Perhaps the next closest thing would be 3-MeO-PCP, though that substance is longer lasting, less stimulating, less physically dissociating, more introspective, more visual, and more psychedelic. They seem worlds apart, though when compared to a more sedating dissociative like ketamine, they can clearly be classified together. As for the triple reuptake inhibitor activity? I cannot say this is a sensation I can discretely pick out from a drug, though perhaps the self-reinforcing dosage behavior and compulsion to redose this drug is because of that property.

Overall, this is a light, fun dissociative that is best for casual use, a fantastic and low-commitment party drug that shines in social settings. Nevertheless, it should be approached with caution and the utmost responsibility, I can imagine it would be very easy to make mistakes with something so potent and seemingly forgiving.

1cP-AL-LAD

 Age: 26

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 300 µg sublingual

Setting: A woodsy park in my hometown, my friend’s apartment

 

Preface: 1cP-AL-LAD is another entry in the saga of developing new lysergamides. Variations on the lysergamide structure can be split into 3 categories, based on attaching things to the 3 Nitrogen atoms present in the basic lysergamide backbone. The first two are nitrogen substitutions in the “upper part” of the molecule. There’s the amine substitution, a diethylamide in LSD, modified in compounds like MiPLA or LSZ. There’s the N6 substitution, a simple methyl group in LSD, modified in compounds such as ETH-LAD or AL-LAD. Modifying the structure at these places yields compounds that are pretty unique from each other in terms of effects and potency. The variation that has exploded in popularity in recent times, however, is 1-substitutions, adding things to the 1-position nitrogen on the bottom of the molecule in the included indole structure (the same base of the tryptamine molecule). In LSD, this spot is just left blank with a hydrogen. There is a great deal of evidence however, that adding certain things to this spot creates a prodrug to whatever the rest of the molecule is. So if you have an LSD molecule with something attached to the 1-position, your body will clip off that 1-position bit and turn it into regular LSD. This is an invaluable discovery, as the modified compound is technically legal in most jurisdictions (though this loophole is now being closed in several countries), as it only turns into the desired scheduled compound once the body has metabolized it. This has led to a cornucopia of 1-substituted LSD compounds that are supposedly all prodrugs to LSD, such as 1P-LSD, 1B-LSD, 1-cP-LSD, ALD-52, etc. The reasoning behind this is obvious- it is functionally just LSD.

As a brief aside, I have personally found the 1-substituted compounds to be unique in their subjective effects, both from LSD and from each other- while it has been demonstrated that they are indeed metabolized into LSD, I am of the belief that they are also psychoactive in their own right and they aren’t fully metabolized, leading to some unmetabolized material crossing the BBB, yielding a unique experience for each compound. Others however disagree with this- the subjectivity of psychedelic experiences makes it hard to generalize about each compound and possible differences may just be coincidence guided by the set and setting. There are reliable claims that they could not be distinguished via double blinded testing, there are also seemingly reliable claims that each compound is consistently distinct. Further research is needed.

Anyways, it seems curiosity pushed synthesizers to develop 1-substuted variations of other lysergamides with Amine or N6 variations. In this vein we’ve seen compounds like 1P-ETH-LAD or 1cP-MiPLA. AL-LAD is a N6 modified version of LSD that has proven quite popular, and the 1cP modification of LSD has proven to be quite popular too. So naturally they would be combined into one compound. One would expect this to be similar to AL-LAD, based on pharmacology. I found it to be a delightfully unique and intensely visual and lucid compound, something wonderful. A full report follows. There is a summary at the end.

 

T0:00- Dose taken as two tabs. I am at the apartment of one of my closest friends in my hometown. I am with one of my other closest friends too. The three of us have been inseparable since we were in elementary school, we went to college together, lived together, and have shared many many hallucinogenic experiences with each other. In fact they both feature in many of my previous reports. This is the first time we have all been able to hang out together since the beginning of COVID-19 lockdowns, we are all vaccinated and finally had a day line up when none of us had to work. One of them is taking LSZ, while the other is taking 2C-B-FLY.

 

T0:37- Just hanging out and playing Super Smash Bros. Melee like we always do. I feel the first notes, a bit of stimulation and discomfort.

 

T1:04- It deepens and develops into little visual flurries, I get up to drink some water and it feels like the whole experience is closing in on me, little bright spots flit and float around the edges of my field of vision like flies or minute iridescent fairies. It is all glowing and glistening, textures begin to develop on surfaces and seep into my periphery. I am typing notes onto my phone when I notice the plain white background of the notes app has taken on the texture of a stucco wall, the mottled forms drifting and transforming to become reminiscent of spiral clouds reminiscent of Mesoamerican stone reliefs or classical Chinese paintings. They seem to be cast shadows, illuminated by an iridescent light.

 

T1:20- This is now visually extremely intense as a sense of nausea and discomfort builds in me. I feel somewhat sweaty. Patterns are just pouring into my field of vision, radiating off of everything and taking space wherever they desire. Fronds, swirling spirals, herringbone patterns, all flush with shadowed relief and iridescent colors. I look outside and the world recedes from me into a mosaic of fractals. Both of my friends end up throwing up on their comeup. I manage to keep it down. I remark that it feels like we’re getting too old for this. I turned 26 recently and my one friend is turning 27 tomorrow. I am looking through a physical copy of Berserk, possibly my favorite piece of media I have ever consumed. I am truly heartbroken about the recent death of mangaka Kentaro Miura. Berserk is an incredibly gruesome thing to witness, the true definition of “grimdark”. From piles of emaciated plague-ridden corpses, maddened naked cultists tearing soldiers limb from limb with their bare hands and teeth, the protagonist Guts receiving grievous injuries from a band of deformed torturers who are in turn messily dismembered, a sickened man who dies buried under a pile of carcasses. Deep fractal textures develop in the blank spaces, the words seem to float off of the page, images and characters seem to float at different depths like a pop-up book. Despite the gruesome imagery it is fascinating to behold and I am grateful to witness it. We are waiting for my friend’s girlfriend to give us a ride to a park where we want to hang out.

 

T1:30- My friend’s girlfriend is driving us to the park. She is talking about her life as an EMT. Her voice seems disembodied, floating through the car like a wisp of smoke. The sunlight is overwhelming and I can feel its energy glisten down to bleach the earth, its rays travelling in sine waves and steps. There are rainbow tracers behind every car that passes, turning the roads into constant undulating technicolor ribbons. I am grateful to not be driving. The sense of motion is more apparent than it ever is when I am in a car- humanity was simply not meant to move this fast, it feels vulnerable.

This feels like a clown car, one sober responsible person driving 3 tripping weirdos around. The world is flashing in different colors outside, tree branches split into fractals at their edges, replicating like fern fronds with bioluminescent tips. The world appears as such a profoundly strange place from our private vantage point, I am almost dreading the vulnerability of stepping out into public.

 

T1:40- We arrive at the park, thank our chauffeur and disembark. The park is an old rail line that has been revamped into a walking trail, the great steel railroad pylons left intact standing over everything. The sky is vast and blue with patchy cumulus clouds above us, the midsummer foliage incurs into its margins, all of it twisting upwards to dizzying heights. I feel small beneath the enormity of the world we have stepped into. I am taken by an eerie quiet, a deafening silence replacing the ambient noise of the car, the radio, conversation. It was like the great blue silence of diving into a pool, as if there was just so much space for sound to go that it was diluted in the vast summer air. Our destination is a trail into the woods that bends into obscurity off of the paved path. It’s a gorgeous day so there are a good number of other people out, exercising and enjoying the weather. There were spots of showers that have cleared up now, leaving everything still wet and glistening in the full sun. My pace is hurried and nervous- there is a distinct paranoia that I am acting odd, walking odd, appearing strange to people who certainly don’t care less how I’m behaving. At the same time I am taken and bewildered with my surroundings- concentric rainbow auras in the gossamer grass like thermal images, great swirling shining forms in the sky above, the abundance of trees and flowers singing and dancing with fireworks of color running in pulses up their length and exploding from their vertices. Every tree, every bush, every stone and wall and giant metal tower seem perfectly placed, perfectly constructed, every direction I look is a vista that appears to have been carefully composed by one of the great masters. Nevertheless, I keep my hurried pace, too nervous to stare in one direction for too long, my friends following behind me, a tense silence tethering us together.

 

T2:00- Nearly imperceptibly a grassy path curves away from the main trail, cutting a shallow and subtle gap through towering stands of mugwort. Soon the forest envelops us, leaves arcing overhead pouring deep green shadows on the rocky muddy ground. The sun peeks through the canopy in tiny beams glimmering with flitting gnats and drifts of midsummer pollen. This place is more overgrown than I remember, I can’t see far ahead of me through the thick tangle of undergrowth, and the intense visuals don’t make the scene any less confusing. Leaves multiply and mirror themselves, fringed with pulsing rainbow ripples. Japanese Knotweed obscures my vision and my path and brush me with their velvety leaves, tingling my skin on contact.

Our destination is a old stone conduit tunnel that carries a creek through the woods to a nearby river. It is a place where I would hang out in my teenage years, where I would sneak off and smoke weed and take psychedelics, it was a waystation for a path to a nearby abandoned factory (now demolished and turned to a condo) that we would senselessly vandalize as teenage boys are want to do. It is a hot and punishingly humid day in the depths of the summer, but the mouth of that tunnel is always pleasantly chilled by the flowing water, natural air conditioning. It is framed in piles of rubble overgrown with gnarled roots and persistent undergrowth. At last, the structure emerges from the forest, the usual paths to the cave have decayed to muddy slopes and fallen logs, it is a challenging climb but we make it. My friend pauses at a fallen tree- it is swarming with writhing masses of millipedes, a disturbing vision for him as he is overwhelmed with visuals from his dose of 2C-B-FLY. I stop to observe it too, it is indeed a writhing mass, the visuals of my trip definitely making it appear as though there are more millipedes than there really are.

 I stop to breathe, take in the scenery, lie on the ground and stare up at the sky. Great radial fractals hover above and work their way into the fractalizing edge of the foliage as they trace the clouds, it is a glorious day and I feel euphoria well up inside of me. I am in the right place, the right time, with the right people on the right drug. I soak my hat in the stream, take in the cool breeze and lie on the chilled damp concrete, embedding myself with the moss and the millipedes.

Minutes pass slowly, I have been smoking weed from my one hitter. We are mostly quiet but occasionally break the muffled ambient noise to chat or observe things. We all sink into our separate experiences. My friend on LSZ is not feeling much. I close my eyes and great fractal snowflakes, shimmering in gold, grow and spin and intersect and tesselate against a deep blue backdrop, infinitely zooming.

I propose we go deeper into the tunnel, into the cool darkness, where the stream is swallowed by a great concrete drain and directed through the conduit. We hug the wall as we walk deeper inside, everything wet and cool to the touch. The visuals explode in the darkness, it is quite disorienting. It is difficult to tell where the ground is, where the walls are, where the flowing stream is, everything becomes a sensory jumble. Everything is synesthetic to the echoing sounds of flowing water, great visual ripples bouncing off of every wall and flattening my field of vision into one vivid explosion of fractalized twisting and swirling color. Echoing calls and responses to my friends help keep me grounded, as does occasionally flashing my extremely bright tacticool flashlight. The brief illuminations are replete with pulses of mute colors, concentric vibrations on the vibrant sprays of graffiti, glistening with moisture. As we go deeper the graffiti fades, the walls turn blank, and the water grows faster and deeper. We eventually reach the end, a tall grotto with shreds of sunlight peeking in from the drains at the top. Here the water gathers in pools punched through the concrete, murky and mysterious. We laugh and joke and loiter in the damp dark, voices echoing into the space above, the sounds forming into amorphous shapes, phantom amoebas that twist and turn and interlock in the void.

We see a flash of movement, quite startling. There is a brief fearful pause- a giant rabid sewer rat? A raccoon? We shine our lights on the movement and it stops- it’s a chipmunk, damp and timid. We laugh at it, joke that it was probably the least threatening animal we could’ve seen. It is oddly unafraid of us though, pacing back and forth, sniffling its little nose. It’s a bit unnerving that it isn’t fleeing from us, perhaps we have it cornered- It becomes braver, even approaching us, then charging at us, feinting and making bluff attacks. It whips towards my friend and does a little backflip- perhaps this creature is more threatening than we give it credit for, we beat a quick retreat. It is a beast that has successfully defended its cave, we escape with our tails between our legs. I guess that’s what we get for making fun of it.

 

T2:30- We are back at the mouth of the cave, chatting about life and work, laughing and joking, having a good time. The drug has me in good humor, I find myself laughing to tears often, speaking is articulate and thoughts flow and form well. This is a very euphoric experience. We talk about how much this landscape has change since we were here last, how many new trees have fallen, how the stone walls have collapsed more and more, how much of the hillside and rubble has been smothered by small landslides. I can feel the weight of the earth around this tunnel, eternally bearing down, gaining momentum with each passing rainstorm that soaks weight into the soil. I feel like I can feel the breath of the great stone planet beneath us, feel time as it does, passing as a gradual, inescapable, unbreakable and implacable force, where gravity and mass are the judgment hammers of an ancient god formed of accreted stone and dust on an unstoppable march to swallow and smother and decay all the mortal things us puny humans have placed on its surface. It is a frightening and beautiful sensation.

 

T3:00- I wander off into the tunnel again, I want to experience the dark, the sensory deprivation. Everything is overwhelmed by the sound of the gurgling water, once again it becomes synesthetic and its vibrations and forms swallow the walls. The ambient noises begin to vacillate and vibrate, whooping and phasing like a siren, echoing on itself and smothering itself with its own interference waves. It doesn’t entirely register as odd to me that I am hearing what sounds like an ambulance siren under the earth.

The visuals dance in turn, yet again I lose any visual points of reference and though my two feet are on the ground, it feels as though I am floating adrift in a great void. I lose sense of up and down, left and right, north and south, I am aware there is a dim light from the mouth of the tunnel behind me but in front of me is nothing but black. Soon my entire visual space becomes overwhelmed with tessellated interlocking fractal forms, twisting together in unison at their borders in stepped and infinitely intricate ways, great spirals and astral forms adorned with gradient chevrons filling in their space twist and spin and dance, dazzling me, buzzing and vibrating in my skull and rattling my teeth. Electric sensations ripple up and down my body as I immerse myself in the experience. I return to the mouth of the tunnel when I feel there is nothing more to be gained by this- in fact it is worth nothing that the novelty wore off somewhat quickly, I kept my head and didn’t find myself sinking deep into thought loops or flowing freeform thought patterns. In fact, I would describe this experience as being overall fairly shallow in the cognitive department. A lot of visuals and nice articulate mental stimulation that made for great socializing but not too much more than that. I am back with my friends looking out onto the landscape, occasionally chatting but mostly just sitting and silently appreciating the scenery.

 

T3:15- We’ve had enough of just sitting here, we decide to disembark and walk to our next destination, deeper in the woods. There is a lonely forgotten footpath that tunnels under a freight line leading to a vast highway underpass, always bathed in golden sunlight, its arches soaring into the sky adorned around their limbs with palisades of bright graffiti. Once upon a time we could follow this path further into desolation and abandonment at the edge of society but no longer, development is slowly creeping in.

As we follow the little path down the freight tracks, I notice how overgrown it is, how it seems the hills above the crumbling retaining walls seem to be sliding more and more, there is once again a sense of being swallowed by the earth. I am dazed and stimulated, filthy and sweaty, radiating energy. We come to the tunnel under the tracks, stalactites of rust and calcite menace overhead as we walk along the only part of the gravel that has not been cut away by a rainwater gulley. I look at the decaying structure around me and begin to wonder when it was built, who built it, for whose lives this structure played a significant role through its construction, and how it has been forgotten to fall into disrepair. Someone had to design it precisely, sketch it, and so many more had to take part in realizing that design. So much work and resources for what was now an overgrown and disintegrated footpath, known only to the few who ventured into this little patch of woods. Would they know that all of their effort would one day be for naught? At least we were here, appreciating it. All is silent save for the distant rumble of cars and trucks on the highway overhead. We break out into the sunbaked cathedral and walk along the train tracks, picking at scraps of metal and railroad spikes among the railroad ballast.

I become occupied with throwing things at one of the highway pylons, trying to perfect my aim. First railroad spikes, which tear up my hand and leave me bleeding, which I proceed to wrap in a filthy bandana, then I go on to fist sized rocks. My friends stand there and watch me aimlessly chuck stones at a wall. At base level this feels good it feels like a worthwhile exertion of my strength. However, I begin to feel silly, pitiful, immature- Is this something a 26-year-old should be doing? Should a 26-year-old not be spending their day off running around with their friends taking research chemicals? What should a 26-year-old be doing? Probably not this. My two friends have taken on adult lives with adult responsibilities while I skate by on maximized indolence and sloth, a mix of privilege and dumb luck, dedicated to extract as much aimless pleasure as possible. Should that have been stamped out of me by now? I was truly unsure, and it was unnerving. It feels silly to fret about getting old, I am by any objective measure quite young, but the thought of aging out of things I once loved shakes me to my core- that will only happen more as time goes on. I am in loose fitting clothes that barely cover my skin to beat the heat a little;  I am intensely aware of the size and shape of my body and the movement of my muscles.

We walked further down the highway, admiring and talking about the graffiti that adorns every surface within reach, reminiscing about being here in the past and how it’s changed over time. The passage of time is tangible, a river of glimmering scales floating past in an eddy current. I find a computer modem hanging from the overpass and look for a stick to hit it with. I am awkwardly alone in this endeavor. When we lived together we reveled in smashing things we found with various blunt objects. We find a turtle on the ground and I pick it up. I feel like I am embarrassing myself. We decide to call it a day and retreat back indoors, awaiting our ride. I would say I am riding the tail end of the peak at this point.

 

T4:00- We sit on a grassy hill overlooking the trail while we wait for my friend’s girlfriend to come pick us up again. I am definitely coming down now, I feel less uncomfortable about being exposed and out in public, the air is beautiful and idyllic in the late afternoon sun. Everything is aglow in golden light. We sit and chat in the grass, surrounded by bugs, talking about our grown-up lives, the trials and tribulations of attempting to be independent adults, something I feel I have been spared from in my lackadaisical and fortunate hedonism. My friend comments I should teach a class in how to look scary to old people. I notice that in terms of appearance, I definitely stand out from them. Oh well.

Eventually our ride arrives and we stop at a convenience store/deli for sandwiches on the way home. Psychedelics of course always suppress my appetite to some degree, but all the walking and throwing stuff around has left me pretty hungry. As teenagers we used to always loiter in the parking lot here- and without fail another cluster of teens keeps the tradition alive. It is an another odd moment that seems to be truly timeless, where a space exists both in the present and in some distant memory, just as much of the day has. Today has been a steady trip through my teenage life that has hammered home the fact that no matter how hard I try to cling to my youth I will be continually growing away from it. Interacting with the store clerk and being around strangers indoors doesn’t feel too out of place, a sure sign that I am past the peak.  

 

T5:20- We get back to the house, our host graciously lays down towels for me to sit on as I am sweaty and filthy with mud and creek water. She changes the bandage on my hand from slicing myself badly with a knife that morning, and I clean out the other wounds I sustained throughout the day. It is odd to transition to a world of sweat and filth to a clean adult apartment. I remember how even in my early 20s I would just enter my house in this state and flop down on any furniture.

I am eating dinner and we are all just relaxing and hanging around, playing video games and smoking weed. My appetite isn’t as sharp as I thought, and I can’t finish my entire sandwich. I descend further from my trip, the visuals have died to be nothing but a barely discernible drifting and some flashes of color, with my eyes closed, I just see a great swallowing violet void. All that rings through my nerves is a steady stimulation and the glowing coals of a drug burning itself out.

 

T6:30- We have been sitting around not really doing much but smoking weed and intermittently playing super smash bros. melee. There are long silences where we just look at our phones. It is getting darker outside. My friend who lives here has been troubleshooting a new keyboard. He has a vast collection of comics and hands me one to browse, “Silver Surfer: Black”, it is stunning to behold and intensely psychedelic, though at this point my trip has receded enough that the already intricate visuals of the comic aren’t amplified through the visuals of my psychedelic experience. Most interesting to me in the moment is the rendering of faces and facial expressions. The cannabis does little to the experience, it doesn’t breathe fire and life into the visual space like it often does, it instills a greater sense of dissociation and derealization but this is fleeting.

 

T7:30- The sun has fully set now. We decide to walk with my friend’s girlfriend to pick up food from a restaurant. It is a delightfully balmy night, the temperature and still air so perfectly neutral it is as though they cannot be felt at all. Various crowds of people are out and about enjoying the weather, gardens of fireflies hover over the grass. As the sober one, it feels again like she is escorting a circus through the town. While I felt like I was coming down, interacting with a sober person makes me realize I am still quite off-base, in how her words clatter and echo in my head, in how I pore over every detail in the conversation often to the loss of my listening ability, in how I am still in a strange derealized daze. While it was beautiful and I appreciated the walk it feels so comfortable to return to the apartment. The night is quiet and heavy.

 

T8:00- After aimlessly drifting around for a while we finally all settle in to play Melee together like we have been doing since we were 8 years old. We quickly abandon playing seriously to just mess around, pause and take in the detail in the backgrounds of each stage, it is amazing how engaging and novel and fun a 20-year-old party game can be. It seems like every time we play we still discover something new. The trip lends itself to taking in information, to engaging with this experience at my own playful pace, a sense of childlike wonder is restored in everything.

 

T9:15- Before the night could go on with our renewed energy I have to leave to catch the last train back into the city. Shame. My one friend who took LSZ is back to baseline by now and I am mostly there too. He gives me a short ride to the train station, we talk about feeling off, about feeling like we are too old for this, that in the long year since we last saw each other we’ve grown up too much. There’s really nothing we can do about it but make the most of the time we can. Once again it feels truly silly to fret about getting old at the ripe young age of 26, but none of us are getting any younger. Already it feels like we’ve aged out of so much that is permissible, it feels like so many more expectations are levied on us, and those will only grow as the years pass. It seems this was weighing on all of our minds.

 

T10:00- Walk home from the train station, about 20 minutes through the heart of a major city on a Saturday night in the summer, ascending back from a year of lockdown. Throngs of people are out enjoying the night, bouncing between bars and clubs and visiting friends for house parties. Everything is alive and vibrant, I walk hyperfocused on music in my head, there is still a certain mental stimulation that keeps me locked into certain thought patterns.

 

T10:30- I arrive home and shower off. By the time I am settled back in I feel like I am back to baseline.

 

Conclusion: 1cP-AL-LAD gets a thumbs up from me, it’s a vivid visual experience, at once lucid but also surprisingly insightful and cognitive when thoughts are properly stimulated. The setting of this trip lent itself to pondering nostalgia, memory, aging and time a lot. I think it is simply coincidence of setting that my experience with AL-LAD had similar themes, but nevertheless both drugs provide a stable, effective, an active platform for browsing such topics in one’s mind. I would argue from my personal experiences that the 1cP substitution lends itself to greater visuals in proportion to other psychedelic effects, or at least I have consistently observed this in 1cP-LSD and 1cP-AL-LAD now. Whether this applies universally is still unknown, it is certainly a prodrug for AL-LAD but it feels like something else was there. Others will disagree on the grounds of subjectivity, and that 1-substituted lysergamides are total prodrugs of their base compound. Further veritable research is needed in this area. Nonetheless, I find 1cP-AL-LAD a worthwhile and exciting compound worth exploring by any fan of lysergamides. The deeply sensory lucidity of it was reminiscent of other compounds, like 2C-B, but it was more drawn out and less stimulating. The character of the visuals was a deep swirling patterning, replate with lots of spirals and spinning forms with detailed fractals at their edges. This presented both with eyes open and closed. The sky and dense foliage were particularly beautiful to lay eyes upon, they would mirror and form into snowflakes and drifting patterns in deep relief, adorned with iridescent colors. The visuals were truly rainbow, with no one color having dominance, save for perhaps a vivid teal and a bright magenta. Auditory effects presented as phasing and a hallucinated doppler effect. Bodyload was neutral and expected, typical for any lysergamide. Duration was also like other lysergamides. I would describe it as just a bit less potent than LSD and the same potency as AL-LAD.