FXE

Age: 26

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 170 mg intranasal

Setting: My house

 

It is worth considering that the 170 mg dose I took here would be considered quite a heavy dose; my personal preference with dissociatives is for higher doses and more exploratory experiences. I would urge people exploring this compound for the first time to aim much lower.

FXE has a rocky history- The first time it came onto the scene it was offered as “FXE + 8% stimulant”. This was a very perplexing formulation- why not offer it as a pure product? The vendor would later reveal that the FXE had difficultly crystallizing and needed some sort of seed crystal to form on. Why they used another psychoactive compound and not something inert is beyond me. The stimulant used was A-D2PV, an interesting compound that actually technically belongs to the diarylethylamine class, its structure resembling Diphenidine. The presence of a beta-ketone however turns it into a cathinone-like stimulant. Most who have bioassayed A-D2PV do not have high praise for it.

Thus this batch of mixed FXE and A-D2PV was unleashed on the world, presenting as large brown rocks (The color almost certainly came from A-D2PV, we actually made a batch in the lab and the freebase indeed has a deep amber color). A-D2PV, bearing the pyrollidine group, smelled like acrid semen, similar to the pyrovalerone family of stimulants, and indeed this impure batch did too. I did run one trial with this batch, at ~80 mg, and the odor and flavor and presence of the stimulant made itself known. It was unpleasant to me. I had to find a way to separate the two compounds. I made some feeble attempts with washing with 99% isopropyl alcohol with middling success, but put the project on backburner.

But then- lo and behold- someone else stepped up to the plate and began offering “pure” FXE. I do not know if it was a new synthesis or just someone cleaning the other batch on a large scale, but I jumped at the opportunity. This time around, the crystals were clear and vitreous, beautiful to behold. I confirmed their identity on GC and MS and proceeded with my experiments. My GC/MS results for the first batch can be found here, and the purified batch can be found here.

FXE is otherwise known as 3-F-2'-Oxo-PCE, and represents the first time we see a 3-substituted halogen paired with a 2’-oxo group on the cyclohexane. We have seen other 3-halogenated arylcyclohexylaines like 3-F-PCP and 3-Cl-PCP that were certainly active. FXE is an exciting development in that same vein, and opens the door to a whole load of possibilities – I think 3-Cl-2’-Oxo-PCE would show a lot of promise! Pairing the halogen with an unsubstituted cyclohexane (eg; 3-F-PCE, 3-Cl-PCE) could also yield very interesting compounds. As a general rule, when a halogen is added to an arylcyclohexylamine in any position you see a steep drop in potency, and FXE is no exception.

FXE is fantastic material. Bright, stimulating, comfortable, with a remarkable degree of cognitive enhancement, bordering on being psychedelic. It is short, fast, heavy, and bursting with energy. I tested it at doses starting at 40 mg and working upwards. I found 80-100 mg to be a sweet spot functional sociable dose. The total duration of this compound ranges from 3-5 hours depending on dose, with a rapid onset and a short peak, with a pleasant afterglow. This is better enumerated in the conclusion.

 

T0:00- Big rock crushed into fine powder. Not unpleasant to snort, fairly painless with no distinct flavor or odor beyond  a tinge of petroleum bitterness.

 

T0:03- Rapid onset, extremities already feel numb.

 

T0:10- The dizziness and dissociation builds. The numbness climbs up my body to the crown of my skull. The air around me feels heavy and wavy. It is like I can feel the impact of the untold x-illions of atoms of gas bouncing off of my skin, this air I see just a block of wiggling particles. I am surprised at how quickly this is taking hold, I already feel like I am well into the dissociative experience. I am uncoordinated and clumsy, my proprioception has already left the building and I am left to figure out how to manage the momentum of my limbs on my own.

I begin to see visuals, faint and indistinct but there are certain flashing symmetrical bands of patterns on surfaces around me, mirroring themselves and drifting about laterally in faint yellows and orangs and reds. I see patterns flashing on the walls, hexagons, like organic molecules, perhaps an artifact of seeing molecular diagrams all day before this.

 

T0:15- My fingers feel like gummies, flopping about my keyboard littering my notes with typos. My head feels like it is going to just flop over and droop onto the floor. This is great fun, I feel jovial and in good spirits. There are striped bands of deep blues and hearty reds spinning and streaming faintly across my vision, tracing the surfaces around me. Textures on the walls begin to flow, like water running down a window, glitchy static in pink and turquoise. Concentric forms appear in my vision and ripple and bubble with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Typing is getting harder, I feel pleasant and content. There is music playing, the vocals are practically dripping with overwrought emotion, as though I can hear the singer’s vocal cords tugging directly at their heart, a lovely bit of enhancement.

 

T0:20- Really peaking now, I am truly immersed in the thick of it. The waves have crashed over my head and I don’t have even a moment to catch my breath. I am completely absorbed by it, enveloped in its twisting throes. I am lucid, I can think quite clearly “wow I am very dissociated”. It is remarkable how lucid I am despite the intensity of this. A fascinating compound. I feel like I am on a rocking boat- moving at all presents an enormous challenge. I am immersed in faint cascades of pink and bright green.

It feels like there is a great whirlpool next to me, a gravity well sucking me in, my physical form and consciousness swirling around this maelstrom, being dragged into some great glowing depth. I feel its pull, I feel like my nerves are being magnetized in one direction and it is wonderful. I am fully conscious and fully aware of this sensation and the novelty fills me with giddiness. It is odd because dissociatives usually have this “gravity well” effect centered on the user- in this case the great dark swallowing pit was some unknowable spherical mass about six feet to my right. It drags me, twists me, I surrender my body and my physical form to the sensation of being twisted around and spun slowly and slowly. I am pelted like a hailstorm with little nuggets of numbing static. My fingers have gone from uncontrollably gummy to uncontrollably stiff, typing is always a challenge.

My face is turned to a smile, there is a genuine inherent euphoria here and I love it, I love the sensation of being swirled around and losing myself, I love this sensation of gentle energy working its way up my nerves, I love the flashes of visuals and the whole world of dissociatives that we know and that we are yet to know. I am in a great pool gazing at the stars.

Visuals are timid, escaping distinction and definition, they are geometric and hexagonal, constantly flashing and constantly drifting, spilling leaking and splashing but always flowing downwards, like watching the water against a fish tank being rocked back and forth, in slick polychrome static drizzles. There are waves and pulses and auras around discreet objects. I vape a bit of cannabis.

 

T0:30- I decide to immerse myself. I plug in my headphones, close my eyes and lie down on my couch. I surrender myself to the compound. I queue up Burial’s seminal LP “Untrue”. The internal hole space of this compound is vast, it is dark, it is punctuated with streamers of light and trails of color. Everything is spinning, I feel as though I am navigating this realm still bound to my couch. I am not just myself, I am myself and whatever my body is touching, bound to this platform as it traverses the realm. It is an odd sort of distinction of where my physical form ends with respect to all other physical forms around me. There is a sense of motion, of flying, of spinning, great geometric forms in the deep violet sky deconstruct and reconstruct above me, it is a vast deep yawning beauty, a lush depth, velvet and pearlescent. It does not appear to be synesthetic, it just exists on its own, heavy and solid.
While strapped into this ride under this great inky dome, I still think, I think articulately, like my inner voice can speak uninhibited. I am thinking and thinking. Thinking about my life, my work, my relationships and love, it feels like viewing my life from the sky at night, from the eyes of a black vulture whose feathers swallow the moonlight. It is such a lovely vacation, this world of the night, where I can think and play freely. There is so much fun and excitement in being free in this realm. I think and think and fantasize and imagine, I imagine myself achieving great things, receiving great praise and recognition, discovering things that bring benefit to the masses. It’s all so self-indulgent. This is the opposite of ego death. But I love it. I just want to think and imagine what will make me feel best, I want to take refuge in potential futures I can hope to inhabit, I want to be good and beautiful and loved, appreciated and respected. The drug tells me that yes, you can get it, this is what it is like, you can imagine it and I shall provide for you. What a pleasure to have my idle fantasies crystallize before my eyes! But it is phantoms, it is illusions, there is not a moment where deep down I don’t know this. I am tasting this forbidden fruit while solidly rooted into my own ground, such satisfaction will always be mere fantasy. I am too lucid, there is nothing silencing the cynical little voice in my brain that reminds me that I am just a guest in this compound’s palace of luster and shimmer. I can still rationalize that I am ultimately the same bum on the couch who shrugged off all other potential social contact on this night to snort white crystals alone in the dark.

 

T0:40- I arise from this hole and gather myself. There is such a sense of heaviness that I automatically expected I would arise on the floor, having sunken through the couch. It was exciting and exhilarating, I hadn’t grown bored. I just wanted to see what else was going on. I am still so lucid, I can still hear myself think so loudly. I can even get up and move if I need to, with great difficulty. I am drawn to introspection and reflection, everything seems to come back to that and I wonder if there is therapeutic value in that. This is a very ego-driven substance. I am still in the dark but I open up my laptop. Despite being so dissociated I am still able to read and understand text.

 

T1:00- The next phase of this compound is a steady burn, a sterile light-blue glow, a seething burn of energy and joy and above all else, curiosity. I am in a daze under a great violet sun. I want to go on my laptop, read about the world around me, I feel ravenous to take in information and to be filled with all the energy that information carries. It is almost psychedelic, in how my thoughts and associations flow so freely into one another, in how perfectly they form and combine. This is like a cold plastic psychedelic. I feel locked in place, like an action figure in its packaging, and I am okay with that. The world is so big and wide and I want to learn and experience as much of it as possible from within my plasticine confines. Level streams of energy run over my face and my lungs like strips of silk.

 

T1:15- Beginning my descent, much of the physical dissociation is receding now. I am mostly just feeling a sense of buzzing numbness in my head and my gums. There is a still a great deal of remarkably lucid cognitive stimulation.

 

T1:40- My curiosity is insatiable- every nugget of information I stumble upon becomes a deep rabbit hole of reading and taking in as much information as possible, even the most mundane little things on the internet, the most one-off mentions of anything I scroll by on social media attract immense fascination. Some of the subjects of interest are the Vietnam and Indo-China war, particularly the biography of Võ Nguyên Giáp, Cave paintings, an incident in Brazil where a woman killed an armed robber named Elivelton Neves Moreira outside of a school, solvent welding of PVC pipes, the war in Ukraine, the show ‘Wheeler Dealers’, counterfeit pharmaceutical ketamine and the global illicit ketamine trade, the “Zonian” people of the Panama Canal, Jerusalem’s old city. All of it is for a moment intensely fascinating to me, something worth pursuing until my brain wears itself out. I hardly notice most other aspects of the experience fade away as I am so deeply engaged in reading and thinking. It feels as though my brain is forming associations and conclusions easier than normal.

 

T2:30- It feels like something is clanging around and reverberating in my skull, a conscious active dissociation, still faint, the lingering vestiges of the experience. I decide to pass the time by playing the game Yume Nikki, a quiet and slow and cryptic game where I explore the vast eerie reaches of the main character’s dreams.

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T3:30- After playing for about an hour, I go back to ravenously reading things online. My thoughts are still active and I there is a buzzing sense of stimulation in my head, with a bit of lingering lightheadedness and dizziness, the only remaining and clearly discernible aspects of the experience.

 

T5:00- Fully back to baseline.

 

Conclusion: FXE is a lot of fun, having tried it in its purified form, it is quickly earning a place among the pantheon of my favorite dissociatives. It is euphoric, creative, fairly visual, and quite psychedelic offering a great deal of stimulating cognitive enhancement. It fills me with a ravenous curiosity and a compulsion to read and draw connections between the information I gather. At lower doses, from 70-120 mg, it is a fantastic social substance; I found myself articulate and motivated to write and talk to people. The physical dissociation grows heavier as the dose increases, as do visuals and the overall sensation of detachment and exploration. It is fairly forgiving with dosage, seeming as though there is no real steep increase in effects past a certain threshold. I did not attempt doses higher than 170 mg, though I would expect that higher doses would just see a heavier physical dissociation and a slightly longer duration. At all doses, a sense of cognitive lucidity was maintained, allowing for concise articulation and processing of the experience. This is perhaps quite valuable for introspection and meditation. The onset is very rapid for a dissociative, and the overall experience is fairly brief, which may lend it to redosing, which I have done without there being much issue with effects compounding. While cognitively stimulating, with a certain push behind thought processes, it is not manic in the sense of the other lucid dissociatives like 3-MeO-PCP or 3-MeO-PCE. I have only tried intranasal, I do not know about its potency or efficacy through other routes of administration lie oral, rectal, or intramuscular. I have found it combines well with other dissociatives, both the functional manic stimulating ones and the heavier more sedating ones, adding more heft and visual flair to those experiences. This is a substance that I am eager to explore further, and I am glad that it is now available separate from A-D2PV.