DOC

I dedicate this report to the memory of Ann Shulgin. For those of us who seek to document the wide wonderful world of psychedelics, you are a giant upon whose shoulders we stand, and we all owe you our eternal gratitude. 


This is a long one. It was a long experience. It's not particularly exciting, I don't expect anyone to read all of it, but I'll share it here for documentation purposes. 

Age: 26

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 5.4 mg oral in gel cap

Setting: My house

 

DOC needs little introduction, it is not a novel compound by any measure and within certain communities hardly an obscure one. It’s a psychedelic amphetamine, they last forever and are very potent.

On a more personal note, it took me a very long time to find what was already a renowned and attainable compound. I am always curious about SAR and curious about comparing the psychedelic amphetamines to their 2C-x counterparts. 2C-C is one of my favorite psychedelics of all time. I was excited to try its amphetamine cousin. Difficulty in executing this trip mainly just came about from circumstance- I needed an extended amount of time alone in my own home, something difficult to do when I live with my partner and work full time. After I obtained my sample I waited about a year and a half until the stars finally aligned- a warm late spring day, the house to myself for an extended period of time, no responsibilities and the whole long weekend ahead of me. It was finally time. I did not want to take this opportunity lightly so I opted for a fairly high dose. I used an analytical balance to precisely weigh out precisely 5.4 mg. This was placed in a gel cap. I ingested it shortly after waking on the morning of the experience on an empty stomach.

DOC is a challenging and mighty drug. This is demonstrated in the body of the text. It is not something to be taken lightly and perhaps lower doses are more merciful, but I reckon it should only be in the hands of those well versed in the world of psychedelics.

 

T0:00- Dose taken

 

T0:30- Onset, feeling a tad stimulated and jittery, my muscles are very tense. My fiancé leaves for the day, I am alone from here on out.

 

T0:45- DOx compounds, owing to their long duration, are expected to have a long comeup. I am surprised to find myself already entering the experience with speed and ferocity. Muscle cramps and tension grow, like my body is being bound to itself. A great painful nausea has set in and smolders in my abdomen. I take a shower. There is a buzzing feeling in the back of my skull. Light visuals begin to present, faint plays of color and pattern.

 

T1:00- I am tripping pretty damn hard. The nausea overtakes me in the shower and I throw up several times. My stomach is empty and there is nothing to come out but water. It feels like great tight fingers are gripping around my torso. I am so stimulated and nauseous and uncomfortable.  I am in misery. My mind is bright and sprouted with electric flowers. Pastel traceries trickle as slow-motion lightning strikes down my nerves the way the water traces the contours of my skin, iridescent like oil slicks. This is what I asked for is it not? Water and fire and electricity all at once, all tearing through me. I think about the week preceding this, a middling work week of doing chemistry to varying degrees of success. I think about my capabilities and limitations. I think about this being the weekend, I shouldn’t think about work. I feel like overwrought madness, I feel like a skeleton of blue vibration, detached from all of it, cleaned and invigorated.

I turn off the water, I step out. Visuals are great ripples through my field of vision, flashing like reflecting dancing sunlight, spots of bright color, shimmers of glitter, auras around objects. Everything is cast in a gentle blue and teal. I am giddy and jovial, I am having fun, I am also suffering a great deal. I cannot help but feel wonder and joy. It feels like someone has stabbed me in the gut.

 

T1:20- I get dressed in light breezy clothes and roll around. I am hot and sweaty and very uncomfortable. I realize that I didn’t begin to peak early, that that was just the beginning, that this is a heavy dose, that is still growing. Ever growing. I am maybe past the point of discomfort; I would say I am just in pain now. Ouch. Sounds begin to bend and warp, a sure signal that I am indeed in the deep deep throes of it. Flanges and trickles and twinkles, blips and blops. Visuals are relatively subdued but only grow more intense by the second, concentric patterns waving and rippling and pulsing. I am on my bed now, curled up, clutching my abdomen. I do not yet know that this will be my tomb, my altar, for the next indefinite hours. My digestive system is imploding. There is incredible weight to this, like I am facing a final boss.

 

T1:40- The power! The heft! It is like a great sword has been impaled through my skull, crystalline and pulsing with energy, webbing and radiating through my rigid form, I am locked in a trance. I cannot move, my muscles are pulled to their most violent tension; my brain projects from my skull, a ray of patterns freeing my ego from the shattered husk of my physical form. I want to be free, I want to be a ribbon caught in the wind, dancing among the clouds and reflecting the sun, but I am bound, by metal cord to this agonizing body, this tearing crackling thing that contorts under the pressure of its own form, oh poor pitiful sack of bones!

The whole of reality begins to expand and contract, like a great accordion, I am twisted in some strange form face down eyes open to only see the fabric of my bed before me, but I can sense it in every way. In the sounds, in the weight of the air around me, in the passage of time, growing, shrinking, repeating, hefting, breathing. I am at its mercy, I am not me, just one spot in this great image that stretches and bulges and pulls and closes and shrinks. It is like floating on waves in the middle of the ocean, the sun beating down, no land anywhere in sight. It is out of my hands, it is out of my control, I am just here. What can I possibly do? My physical body just lies still, rigid, tense.

It keeps growing. This mighty king of the mountains of a drug.

 

T2:00- I am reduced to a shambling ghost, a faint form hanging around the room, doing nothing. As a body I might as well be dead. As a consciousness I cannot leave that poor pained thing behind, all I can do is linger around it, comfort it as one would try to rekindle a dying fire smothered in its own ash.

I don’t know if I feel hot or cold. I don’t know if I want to lie down or stand up or throw up or if I’m hungry or thirsty or anything. Everything seems to be on alert, every alarm that can be ringing inside of me is. I am facing all of it, in such incredible force. I am something new, alone, the body and its memories are something faint and distant and frayed. I just want to be out. I want to be a spirit liberated.

If I was of another mind or a more spiritual person, I would say there is a sense of presence to this, something coming in and influencing me and my experience. But there is nothing, I am alone, physically and metaphysically, it is a great cold void, a frozen yawning mouth. All there is is me, an internality, bound to this wretched body. There is something in that body, something original and primal, something that hearkens back to the oldest divisions of cells, replications of DNA, I am stuck to this being, suffering as it is, beautiful in its complexity, beautiful in the ways it can suffer. There is an energy in my physicality, there is an essence in my body that is separate from the essence of my mind, they cannot talk, they cannot see each other, but they can intertwine, interact, synthesize into something blossoming glowing and wonderful. I wish my stomach wouldn’t hurt so much.

 

T2:30- My nervous system is inundated with electricity, I am energy in space. This is pure, all-consuming psychedelic power. My body and my mind have come to a peace and can do little more than lie still on my bed, intersecting at their base most impulses, their deepest instincts and faintest vestiges all enjoined. The great electric wind has blown everything else away and left this simplicity, a corpse and its life, laid out like specimens on an autopsy table.

Great seas of visuals drift above me, like lying in a meadow watching great cumulous clouds drift across a deep blue sky. Great radial patterns like snowflakes, drifting and breathing completely free from me; these aren’t my perceptions, these just live here. Flowing traceries, stripes and pulses and breaths of patterns, running and streaming and drifting in all sorts of shades of blue, accented with flashes of neon pink. All of the ambient noises around me reverberate and bounce and resound, growing higher in frequency as they go, trailing off into a spiraling interlocking oblivion.

 

T3:00- The wind picks up outside, carrying the shadow of an afternoon thunderstorm on its back. The thunder shakes the weight of the sky, the great blue comes down in drifts and flits of cleansing rain, soaking the warm earth, blossoming with the love of the sun. I lie still and listen to the clatter of the rain drops on the window, the wind as the beats its bass notes into the heavy glass, the thunder rolls over me yet again and again.

I think of my pain and I think of the incredible pains and tortures people have faced throughout history. Flaying, burning, breaking, 1000 cuts, drawn and quartered, impaled, eviscerated, vivisected, crushed exploded exsanguinated separated slit annihilated massacred and shattered. There is just so much you can do wrong to a body, all of it is horrible. I am blessed to not face that, it is absurd that I induce so much pain on purpose. I could have simply avoided this. But it’s not so bad, all things considered.

 

T3:30- My sweet orange cat comes into the room and cuddles up on me. I am enraptured with petting him, scratching him, letting him walk about me and sniff at me. What an angel I love him so much. All I can do physically is still lie here and writhe. The same visuals still flow down the walls, glaring in intensity. The rain has stopped, the world is saturated in light and sun again, it’s so beautiful outside but I have no intention of going out or doing anything. It is clear that all my body can do right now is lie here and writhe. Any other motion, pushing it to any other extreme, just makes it worse. I must be in my default state. My T pose of laying down.

 

T4:00- Talk to some of my dearest friends in a group chat, the same friends mentioned in many of my reports with whom I have shared so many wonderful experiences with research chemicals. It’s lovely funny witty banter, we have such a nice rapport and love each other so much. Despite being still well within the thick of the peak I am still articulate, able to understand their words and say my own. It feels like the overall intensity of the experience has leveled out, a steady heavy plateau scoured by a roiling derecho. I am cautious to feel this seeming stop to the steady acceleration of the experience thusfar. This equilibrium feels so fragile, like it could shatter and the experience could fall deeper at the slightest disturbance.

Everything is still deeply uncomfortable. It feels like there is a serpent in my stomach. I have a bit of a headache probably from muscle tension and bad posture. Visuals still bubble and swirl, difficult to characterize beyond noting their sheer intensity. My perceptions and swirled and warped and seen through a dizzying sky blue glass, in stepped concentric forms. It’s all vague, but overwhelming too.

 

T5:00- I muse about how funny it is to me that I waited a year and a half for conditions to be right for me to ingest this drug, and now that the opportunity has finally presented itself, I am just subject to monolithic physical suffering.

Someone on twitter quotes a passage from DOC’s entry in PiHKAL:

 

‘One must learn to keep one’s sense of humor. The immortal humorist Wavy Gravy once said, “If you can’t laugh at life, it just isn’t funny anymore.”’

 

Yes, Wavy Gravy, so true. Clutching at myself, trying to keep my vomit down, writhing in pain,

What else is there to do but laugh?

I decide to read the rest of the entry- now that I have a little bit of experience with synthesizing drugs, the chemistry section is no longer a formidable impenetrable wall of text. I recognize the reagents, the techniques, the purpose of each step of the process. Shulgin went about chemistry like an artisan, every move intentional and purposeful, an artist executing his craft. Shulgin’s descriptions of rote monotone chemical procedure is littered with sparks of wonder and love for what he does. I’m drawn to certain excerpts like:

“The clear solution was quickly filtered to give a clear, pale amber mother liquor, which soon started depositing lustrous white crystals.”

 

Chemistry was a craft, and I had already in a few short months grown lazy and complacent, treating it as a chore, as the tedium of work. Surely work would be more boring if I took no pride in it and viewed it as something dreary I only did out of obligation. It is something that is more exciting if I see it as something beautiful and miraculous and humbling and powerful. It is magic, it is a craft and an art and a science requiring an immense amount of learning, and I was only at the beginning of this journey, a mere apprentice with the golden opportunity to learn from experienced masters of this craft. I smoke a bit of cannabis to settle my stomach and ease the bodyload.

I aimlessly browse social media. I snoop on a lot of right-wing libertarian circles adjacent to the knife collecting hobby or firearms. Across those and my more familiar left wing spaces is astonishing agreement over a shocking recent event- the massacre of children at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, which had happened just 4 days prior to this experience. In that short time, the narrative of shock and horror had given way to an infuriating deepening scrutiny over the police response, or lack thereof. I think about the meanings of courage and cowardice, fundamental values and antithetical concepts in our world, how breaking the basic codes of courage and cowardice could bring about a social rejection worse than death. But perhaps nothing of consequence would happen, they would just quietly return to their lives and the world would forget- as of this writing that appears to be what is happening, pending even worse news.
I am back to thinking about chemistry, about living out a life as a professional chemist, different from anything I’ve ever intended. I only have about 3 months of experience under my belt. It is probably unwise to think further into the future until I have built up much more experience. I read about lab safety, particularly the case of Sheri Sangji, the research assistant at UCLA who died from severe burns suffered from a spill involving the extremely pyrophoric (combusts when exposed to air) chemical t-butyllithium.

Such continues this portion of the peak- a lot of thinking and contemplating, turning ideas and events over in my mind like studying an interesting little stone with my hands. It’s lovely, stimulating and delightful and brings interest to the otherwise dull task of lying on my bed wincing in pain.

 

T8:00 – The experience rages on. I am slowly coming off the peak now, at last at 8 hours. I determine this in being even more lucid and able to read and talk to others. I have been doing little but lying around listening to music and browsing the internet for the last few hours. The bodyload has subsided mercifully, to the point where I can comfortably get up and walk around. I no longer feel paralyzed by this beast of a substance. I briefly stepped into my backyard, soaked by the earlier rain, and breathed in the moist and humid air. The ambient sounds of my neighborhood echoed around me, reverberating and repeating into a fractal infinity- sirens, dirtbikes, children playing, dogs barking, planes overhead, all the richly textured soundscape of the city. The sun was getting low in the sky, its golden light diffuse in the steady cloud cover above. I smoked a bit of weed and breathed in the humid air, the visuals retreating like earthworms from the sun as the drug slowly steamed off of my hyperthermal body. I still felt a bit uncomfortable though and opted for the continuing dull familiarity of the soft surfaces inside of my house. I decide I want to watch a movie, to further pass the time into the comedown. Especially now that I don’t feel as though it would be overwhelming.

 

T8:23- I decide to watch “A Scanner Darkly”, Richard Linklater’s rotoscope animated adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. I’ve never read the book. It’s a film dripping with anxiety, paranoia, disorientation; It is like stumbling around after staring directly into a bright fluorescent lamp, it gives off an odor of stale smoke and gasoline, it is cynical and grim and relentless. Some scenes remind me of my former life in my early 20s, lounging around a horrendously messy house with my best friends and roommates at odd hours, doing strange drugs and having baffling whacked out conversations. We were kinder to each other, substantially less paranoid, but just about the same degree off-kilter from reality, as a collective unit. The movie is replete with twitches and swirling hallucinatory ticks that make it hard to determine what is coming from my perception and what is built-in. I enjoy it a great deal though. A dystopia peering through a screen to another dystopia.

 

T10:20- Movie’s done. I am 10 hours into this experience. How do I feel? I am tripping.  I am not peaking but I am definitely tripping. It is 10 at night, the sun is fully down. I ate a little capsule at 11 this morning and I am still feeling the consequences- Wavy Gravy was right, it is pretty funny. It will always be pretty funny.

I need to do something different, I need to go for a walk; I can get up and move around, the world tilts and twists and cracks around me, but I have a mission. WAL-MART! I am going to walk the path along the roaring highway to the nearby Walmart on the sallow waterfront, buy myself some instant stuff to make for dinner, head home. I live in the heart of a major dense city, but I also live within walking distance of a wasteland of big box stores, occupying what used to be shipyards, IV lines linked directly to the major highways and arterials of the city. A flatland of undulating asphalt seas, titanic boxes crowned with A/C units, veiled in white fluorescent mist of the beams glaring over their vast parking lots. It felt like a different dimension.

I strike out from my house, a light jacket, a spot of makeup; it is disorienting to step outside, it is an achievement from having my writhing grub of a form glued to a bed all day. The sky is vast above me, the shadows hide my wild eyes, there are electric twitches at my temples and a neverending sense of energy and unease. Visuals play at my periphery but I don’t give them much mind. I feel like I am taking an expedition into an alien world, doused in gloom and glow and dark and blue and wet; something from the dim gelatinous side of the universe. Fireworks piece the sky in the distance. Rain struggles down in a barely discernible mist. The lights are reflecting off the wet asphalt, dazzling and distracting me as I hurry along. I pass under one of the greatest North-South highway arterials in the region, there is a big box truck abandoned there, covered in graffiti. I am paranoid and looking over my shoulder, there is a spring in my step, the DOC sticks energy into my veins, blue and fluorescent, sputtering at my fingertips, splashing into the May night drizzle. I weave into a park along the waterfront, abandoned piers and docks crumbling and overgrown and stinking of oily city river mud. Wood and slimy concrete and the spray of coca-cola colored water under the misty stars; there are occasional settlements here, ranging from tents to established properties built from pallets and scrap wood and metal, all caked in that sweet river mud. I brought DIY self-extinguishing isopropyl powered heaters here once in the winter, to a settlement on one of the piers that had been named “Tortuga”. Now it had been swept, fenced off, the people pushed out so the same nothing could continue undisturbed, a pristine abandoned property, for no one. Signs to that affect were thoroughly vandalized, encouraging people to dissolve into the pinelands across the river, the thralls of shadowy forests where one could truly disappear if they had decided to abandon our decadent sinking ship. Shadows stood tall around me as I stalked the trails, checking my shoulders, keeping quiet, trying not to disturb anyone. It was dark, not the pitch black of a new moon but the darkness of the shadows, of great bright lights all around, glowering brighter than we are meant to glower, beaming and burning through the landscape, shooting pillars into the misty sky, but ultimately dying in the heavy rain soaked boughs of the trees, crashing on the rocks of the buildings they were to defend, casting into the night: shadows, inky, infinite, dark, darker than it was ever meant to be. I could slither and dodge amongst these, invisible in my black clothes, comfortable to feel the way an insect must feel visiting one of the aircraft warning lights on top of a towering steel suspension bridge.

I make it to the back of my mighty Walmart, a few people with shopping carts caravan supplies back to their camps along the trail. I slink out of the shadows into artificial daylight, a sterile white glow as a mocking simulacrum of the sun. The space is immense, cool, quiet. For the first time in this experience I am in close contact with other people, they are odd beings that flit in and out of my life, I can perceive them as little more than passing cars, drifting lights that filter around me. I cannot engage, it makes no sense to me. I am on an expedition plumbing this virtual reality. I grab a cart and browse the groceries. Families flow around me on all sides, their carts laden with essentials, children running around and hanging off, like nomadic caravans filtering through the industrial remnants of the world. Saturday night is the only time that many of these families can manage to stock up on what they need to live. This is the most affordable place to get it. Its all in one place, one trip. We are all indentured to this great box. I find pouches of instant rice and beans- 90 seconds in a microwave and you have a passable meal, dense enough to feel full, and most of it is usable proteins and carbohydrates. Yes I will eat the nutrient pouch.

I wander around in a daze, pushing my cart, various night people flitting around me like birds. I stop at the magazine aisle- survivalist magazines tell me what to do in the event of a fire in a high rise, how to prepare for supply chain disruptions, how to defend your house in a city where everyone could be an enemy. They could be friends too! But the magazine doesn’t mention that.

So much flows around me. So much flows into me, so much flows directly materially into my hands, as metals paints plastics all of it is in motion, in waste, production and fire and toxins and the vast cloud of terror we are inflicting on our world, the pilings of money, the arterial flow from the rivers to the roads to the tracks writhing and bending across our landscape, the trees butchered to railroad ties, steel conquering grass, grass conquering gravel, the tepid rains outside slowly rusting away the great steel beams placed in the jetties outside, built a hundred years ago to feed the waterborne trade of goods into this dense chunk of human population. And here we still are, me getting my lazy nutrition pouches, this hub of resources on the waterfront, (The water is just a formality! Trucks do the job better), the constant flow of things from places we can never imagine, coming to places that are unimaginable to the people who extract our resources. The constant ebb and flow and pulse of this great beating body; how fragile it could be, how it could so easily be disrupted; that one truck under the highway earlier; it could just go up in flames, one broken window, one road flare, that’s all it takes to have smoke and heat shutter one of the most important arteries of this nation. This whole depository of the worlds’ production, this final resting place of so many of our beautiful planet’s resources, it felt so undignified, it stank, I felt sick, I wanted to be the one who slunk out, no phone in my pocket, staying close to the curb to avoid the cameras, dead of the night, smoke and fire; to put my hand around the throat of this whole craven mess! But we needed it. I needed it, I was spending my money (or government benefits) here after all. Such antisocial misanthropic thrashings served nothing but my own privileged catharsis. We were stuck here, for better or worse.

I waited in line with tired families in soft clothes. So many different languages danced around me. My interactions with the cashier were not noteworthy. I had enough wherewithal to manage that and appear outwardly sober. I gave some of my groceries to a panhandler outside and set off for home, this time electing to walk along the busy high-speed roadway.

T12:00- It’s drizzling a bit out, it is humid and muggy. I rolled a joint before I left but I cannot find it in any of my pockets. It would be such a simple pleasure right now, stir up the remaining dust in this experience and give me something exciting. But it seems it fell out or I lost it. There is little left to the trip now, just a steady tail. I am definitely not sober, but there is little left to which I would ascribe a hallucinatory quality. It is just a smooth stimulation, a warm associative cognition and an understated euphoria, with the same subtle discomfort and tension in my muscles. A convoy of dirtbikes rolls by blasting Mexican hip hop, shuddering my whole world with sound waves. It punctuates the reverberating background noise of cars tearing across the wet asphalt. My bags are heavy and I have to stop and sit several times. Despite the stimulation I am still the same frail body with the same weak stamina.

 

T12:30- I reach home, I am extremely sweaty. I find my joint on the table by the door. Oops. I step into the backyard and smoke it. The visuals breathe with a renewed light, but it’s a dying whimper and the experience soon passes into merely being stoned form the cannabis. I tear off my sweaty clothes and immediately jump in the shower. The shower is a soothing sensation. I keep the water barely lukewarm, my body feels uncomfortably warm at baseline already.

 

T13:30- The nausea has subsided enough to eat a meal. I just whip up one of the instant rice and beans that I collected while out foraging. It goes down simply. There is still a lingering sensation in my mind though the experience has largely left my body.

 

T15:00- I have just been lounging around playing videogames and talking to my friends. Talking to people is still articulate and stimulating. There are still hints of psychedelia in how my words translate between my mind and my fingers- more cohesive, more concise, more elegant. Beyond that, it is hard to discern the drug is still there.

 

T18:00- Fully back to baseline. It is very late at night now. I stay up a few more hours and then go to sleep.

 

Conclusion: There is little I can say about DOC that hasn’t been said already. I unfortunately do not have much time in my life anymore to dedicate to long experiences such as this and must take advantage of such opportunities when they come. I am grateful that I got to experience this, grateful for the humor and grateful for the intensity and testing the limits of my endurance. DOC for me at this dose was immense, intense and domineering. The comeup alone stood tall over many of my psychedelic experiences, paralyzing me with raw psychedelic energy. The bodyload was colossal, oftentimes there was little I could do but lay there and writhe, my abdomen cramping and roiling with nausea and my muscles twitching and tense. Much of the experience was simply spent lying on my bed. There wasn’t much else I could do. I was in no condition to be outside or up and walking around. The headspace was fascinating and beautiful and cryptic and enigmatic and profound and stimulating, it is something beautiful and worthwhile. Visuals and auditory effects are present and vibrant yet manage to fade into the background of the overall intensity of the experience. The experience plateaus for a solid 5 hour or so peak after a long dizzying comeup, before a steady stimulating comedown for many many hours. This is not a drug to be taken lightly and it should only be explored by those who have already run a diverse gauntlet of hallucinogenic experiences.

5+ mg is a hefty dose that I would not recommend, even for a seasoned explorer of psychedelics. Perhaps there is a gentler character that reveals itself at lower doses though I am not in a hurry to determine that.