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.