TMA-2

 Age: 26

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 45 mg oral in gel cap

Setting: My house

Preface: TMA-2 is a psychedelic amphetamine closely related to mescaline. TMA-2 is just one of a series of the compounds known as the TMAs- short for TriMethoxy Amphetamine. As the name suggests, these are amphetamines with 3-methoxy groups. Those familiar with mescaline will know it by another name: 3,4,5-Trimethoxyphenethylamine. That is, it is a phenethylamine bearing 3 methoxy groups, at the 3, 4, and 5 positions. The lead compound of the TMA series, TMA, is a direct amphetamine analogue of mescaline, with methoxy groups at the 3, 4, and 5 positions. TMA-2 is similar, but has those groups at the 2, 4, and 5 positions. There is a whole range of other iterations of the TMA molecule, mixing and matching the position of the 3 methoxy groups, and most appear to be active with varying degrees of potency. TMA-2 is the one that has seen the widest availability on the research chemical market. This is outlined in Alexander Shulgin’s seminal PiHKAL (Though he did not invent the TMA series nor was he the first to synthesize TMA, he was the first to provide an in-depth exploration of their subjective effects in humans)

As is typical for psychedelic phenethylamines, the amphetamine analogues are orders of magnitude more potent than their plain phenethylamine counterparts- in fact, in some cases, the phenethylamine version appears to be totally inactive! TMA-2 is an example of this, where for 2,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, just threshold effects were possibly noted at upwards of 300 mg.

As is also typical of psychedelic amphetamines, the TMA series are for the most part quite long lasting, with an intense bodyload. I found this to certainly be true of TMA-2. While most have noted that it is not a particularly visual substance, I found it to actually be quite vivid. The bodyload was substantial if not outright painful for me, to the point that I am not likely to revisit it, a shame because it is such a bright, fun, jovial and mentally stimulating compound, perfect for socializing with dear friends. The sample was teste via GC/MS to confirm its identity.

 

T0:00- Dose taken. It is morning. Several of my friends, the same classic comrades in many of my explorations will be visiting today. We will all be consuming drugs together. I take mine before they arrive, as I expect a long comeup. I am just home with my fiancé, getting ready and tidying the house.

 

T0:15- The day hasn’t begun yet and there is already that distinct anxious nausea- did I miscalculate the timing? Oops. I am shaking a bit.

 

T0:30- This has plowed through me like a train. The drug burns through my nerves, well before I was prepared for it. This premature comeup is rattling all of the shutters and shaking the walls like a tumbling gale.

 

T1:00- This is remarkably uncomfortable. I feel like I am about to throw up. My mucous has become thick, my nose is running. It is like I have been whipped with a bout of the flu, but with color, energy, electricity. I cannot sit still.

2 of my friends arrive. One of them, J, is extensively experienced, often mentioned in other reports, here for another adventure. The other, E, is a dear friend and one of my old roommates who has witnessed me in all variety of states. His only experience with psychedelics is with psilocybin mushrooms. He intends to try LSD.

To my experienced friend I grant a dose of 4-HO-MALT. To my other friend, I intended to give LSD- though it turns out I did not have any readily available. So I gave him a 1-substituted lysergamide, specifically 1-cP-LSD. 1cP-LSD, like the other 1-substituted lysergamides, are metabolized to LSD fairly consistently, which I explain to him in tedious detail. I am agitated and nervous while I do this task. I am further into a psychedelic experience than I would prefer at this time.

 

T1:15- My nerves are being shaken about as though they are in the clutches of a hyperactive child. The terrible gripping nausea boils over and I have to go throw up, shortly after greeting my friends. I hope it doesn’t affect their perceptions.

I feel immediately better. Still reeling from such intense stimulus, I really begin to notice visual effects begin to set in. Tracers follow my vision and any movement I can see. Patterns run down the wall, glistening rivulets dancing and shimmering about. Little particles rush across my vision and bounce around my peripheries, leaving trails of afterimages in their wake. It is all bright and minute.

I feel jovial and upbeat despite the bodily effects. I couldn’t feel bad if I wanted to, at least mentally and emotionally.

 

T1:30- My stomach hurts so much again and feels so terrible but I’m having fun so I don’t care. I am overheated and sweaty and my nose is still running, I just feel like a mess all over. I am laughing and joking with my friends, conversation flows easily and feels comfortable and natural, clever quips come easily from all of us. My friends are well into riding their respective comeups now.

 

T1:40- Any relief from the nausea was temporary- it wells up again, forcing me to lie still, clutching my abdomen. I am having so much fun, this would be such an ecstatic revelatory experience of unbridled joy were it not for the incredible discomfort. Perhaps I am not meant to experience such euphoria, it must always be tempered through some other avenue. Visuals are violet, yellow, pink, and green, vibrant and saturated, playing in concentric swirling forms on the walls like the luscious sky of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. The boundaries of the forms are etched deep and defined in high relief, they are inescapable and unavoidable. The visuals are not however, particularly intricate and complex for all their vivid presence, there are no fractals, no ornate forms like bone sutures, no impossibly complex patterns, and there is no particular organic quality. They are neutral and still, existing unpretentiously and harmoniously with my regular perceptions, with about as much life as the clouds passing in the sky above.

I am watching my friends play ‘Cuphead’. This game looks so challenging, especially in this state. It is a fun medium to interact with, to laugh and joke about.

 

T2:00- One of my other best friends, C, arrives. He knocks on the door like he’s playing a drum solo (He is in a band), it resounds through the garden of the house, it is disorienting and exhilarating, I give him a dose of Isopropylphenidine that I had had custom synthesized. In addition, I give my fiancé what I believed to be a small dose of 3-MeO-PCE. All of us are on some substance now. The new energy of his entrance and his interactions with all the current denizens is like opening the windows and letting fresh air and sunlight run rampant through the room, everything suddenly feels more spacious and full of light. We sit around and play video games and doodle and listen to Charli XCX. I keep trying to sink into the experience but the environment around me is more engaging. I would rather experience the world with my eyes open. I am glad I am not alone for this. My body is warm and I am shaking a lot.

 

T3:45- We go out into the backyard. The tree in the backyard is a vivid emerald green, glistening white clouds crawl across a deep blue sky. The sun is out in full force. It is not late enough in the season to be terribly hot and the mosquitos haven’t begun to spawn yet. A gentle breeze rests in the air. I can see the depths and the reach of the sky, I can see the motion of the great air masses carrying the clouds about, it is all so vast above me and I feel so small like a little insect in a garden, it’s a wonderful comfortable euphoria that contrasts with the persistent physical discomfort.
All of us are now hanging out reveling in our respective experiences. E, who took 1cP-LSD seems to be undergoing the most intense experience out of all of us, getting tripped up in loops and misunderstanding things. The rest of us are fairly lucid for the time being. We read over one of my fiancé’s ‘Physique Pictorial’ magazines, which came as a free gift wit a Tom of Finland T-shirt.  For those unaware, ‘Physique Pictorial’ was a famous ‘Beefcake Magazine’, where images of scantily clad men were collected and published under the guise of them being fitness models, when in reality it was a means for the gay community to connect and interact when it was largely still underground in the 1950s. All of us were fairly secure in our respective varied sexualities, so there was a bit of good natured chiding and joking as we flipped through and ogled the magazine. Against my knowledge, this set into motion a paranoid chain of events.

E begins to seem nervous and agitated. He wants a change of setting, he feels uncomfortable, something is wrong but he can’t quite communicate what it is. He repeatedly keeps dismissing his thoughts as “you guys have all experienced this anyway” and refuses to elaborate. I go for a walk around the block with him- perhaps a change of setting might help.

 

T4:00- It’s just the two of us now, we are both very tall. Sounds reverberate and flow around me, bouncing and trailing. There are families and children walking around outside enjoying the day, we just talk to each other, we both seem freaked out by the world around us. We pet a cat, we stroll and avoid others, there is some churning imbalance that we cannot identify yet. I want to feel like a sage and a mentor, I am getting too caught up in my own ego. The world leans into me, submits to my consciousness as I navigate it, the flowers bow to my emotions; I am honestly taken aback by how intense this is for me. I needed to shed my own tensions it seems. Patterns drift and form in the sky, interlocking spiral forms, growing little sprouts that form ever more spirals. There is an iridescent shifting sheen to the clouds and to everything really, prismatic films dancing around my vision. The great sphere above seems to pulse into me, press down on me from the heavens, concentric circles of air masses and lights bearing down on my exact location, like I am dragging the weight of all the worlds’ essences with me as I walk. after a quick circle of the block, we both decide this is too strange and go back home.

 

T4:30- Everyone is still lounging in the backyard. It is a warm languid day. The whole collection of people has coalesced again in their various states. J and C aren’t really feeling much of anything. My Fiancé is a little too hyped up and manic from a dose of 3-MeO-PCE. E is in throes of an ever growing psychedelic storm, and I am having my own intense psychedelic experience.
We linger around the backyard, moving in and out of the house at our leisure, each trying to find our place and the state in which we want to be. E retreats into just listening to music on his headphones and ignoring us now. I am just trying to keep a hold on this nausea that comes in waves and waves and waves.

 

T5:00- E says he needs to be alone. I offer him a soft place upstairs where he can be separated from the rest of us. The oblique afternoon light is starting to lazy its way into the windows. My fiancé makes him a mug of tea. I ask if I can sit down with him and talk because he seems so distressed. At last in confidence, as best as he can confess in sharp disjointed interjections, he reveals to me that he believes this entire experience was an elaborate scheme to use drugs to turn him into a homosexual. Every angle of this is baffling- He doesn’t even have a problem with being homosexual! Perhaps it was the classic delusion of your peers all conspiring against you, to all sorts of nefarious ends, in this case I guess, indoctrinating him into the gay agenda. We are all the agents of the gay agenda, who have created this elaborate set piece, this perfectly engineered experience, to clutch him from his autonomy; To the point where he even believed we had painted our bathroom pink to “convert” him! (our bathroom has always been pink). Once that seed was planted, that all of us fairies were here to indoctrinate him into the “lifestyle”, it was over. Every counterargument I offered, ever reassuring or rational chain of thought he offered-I was met with pushback, with “well that’s just what you want me to be hearing, its all part of your plan! I’m on to you!”

And this, in all my years of built-up ego, of being a prominent and competent navigator of the psychedelic realm, was distressing to me too. I was failing. I never failed at this, I wasn’t supposed to fail at this, It is my responsibility not to fail at this. I fancied myself some sort of sage and some sort of guide but I was subject to the same chaos that pervades any psychedelic experience. My inflated ego had come to roost and the failing of my hubris was humiliating. It was spiraling out of control. I was no longer a confidante, I was now a suspect in the conspiracy, not to be trusted at all, had to totally disengage. I felt at a loss of what to do. I gave him the drug, it was my responsibility to guide him along. Should I have had him embrace this dysphoria? Would that have caused worse consequences? I wanted to push back but to be gentle, but such paranoia could be so hard to challenge. But here I was, taking up the mentor role our of sheer hubris and arrogance from my experiences, failing. I just wanted him to be ok. I just wanted this to be a useful experience to him. I didn’t want to fail him. I knew being overbearing would just make it worse. I was really truly at a loss, and I was terrified, anxious. I had poisoned my friend yet again. I have been so humbled, and not even by my own drug, which at this point was a simmering smoldering discomfort, I was distracted from the body load by all else going on.

My fiancé is in the predicament that they need to go somewhere, but may not be able to bike since they are now pretty dissed. I talk to them about what’s happening, but I am scared of talking out loud, for fear of making E more paranoid. We communicate by typing out notes and looking at them. J and C are not really feeling much from their respective experiences. Everything feels tense and panicked. To me at least. I feel frazzled, as the host, I feel responsible for everyone having a good time. I feel duty bound to address every problem, yet again my ego interjecting, assuming that I alone can solve things that others can navigate themselves, or perhaps didn’t even need help with.

 

5:30- My fiancé is about to leave. When they step into the backyard, our cat gets out. He is prone to dashing outside and is extremely difficult to wrangle once out. I am the only one who can chase him down and catch him right now. The stress feels like it’s about to crack me, but I cannot give up. I hop the wall into the neighbor’s yard, scruff him, and bring him home. I am so grateful that he did not climb the tree or make this into a more drawn out process that would involve the neighbors. It seems like my physical capacities and coordination aren’t impaired at all. I bring him in and breathe a sigh of relief. I call an uber for my fiancé to address that. E is sitting alone drinking tea upstairs, listening to music and watching me chase the cat through the window, we are content to leave him alone and he seems content to be alone. J and C are having a nice time just hanging out and playing video games, even if neither is tripping too hard. I offer C a dose of 3-Me-PCP as consolation for not feeling much, and he seems content with that. Things feel like they are leveling out. I don’t need to be so wound up.

 

T6:00- It’s just us left now. We try to play a game of Mario Party, it glitches out so we give up. C is enjoying his 3-Me-PCE. E is mostly keeping to himself and listening to music now. I feel like he would probably be better off without me bothering him. He seems high strung and paranoid. I feel uneasily at peace. I kind of want to be alone.

 

T7:00- Everyone left at once of their own accord. E still seemed perturbed and I hoped he would get home okay and be okay by himself. I hope he doesn’t hurt himself when he is alone, I hope he is able to manage the paranoid thoughts in a safe and unintrusive way. I am just worrying and worrying, but the underlying current of the experience is still pleasant and positive. It feels nice to be alone now, I feel like I can let out a sigh of relief. The experience is still quite intense, deep visuals still stir on every surface, concentric forms in emerald and aquamarine, luminous like an aurora reflected on a still icy pond. There is still a rushing stimulating, there is still nausea and tension in my muscles. I am wired like my spine is crackling with electricity. I try to make some instant rice and beans but I have no appetite. I choke them down with great difficulty. I am just lounging around my house reading things on the computer, following whatever details catch my fancy.

 

T8:00- I am coming off of the peak now at last, it seems the effects are receding- the visuals, the bodyload, it all starts to fade.

 

T11:00- Mostly down. Feeling a stimulated, focused afterglow. I walk to the house where my fiancé is staying-we are going out with my parents for father’s day tomorrow and it would be easiest to pick us up in one place. The walk through the city at midnight is exciting as always, interesting characters streaming about. I feel strung out and wound up and paranoid, there is a tense spring to my step. And despite that, there is still that underlying pleasant buzz. Visuals are little more than brief flashes and color and texture as my eyes dart about.

 

T13:00- I feel nearly back to baseline, or so I think. I take 2 mg of Fluclotizolam to fall asleep. There is a pleasant buzz as I eat some late night snack before drowsiness overtakes me.

 

Epilogue: I felt a joyous warm sentimentality the whole next day. The weather was beautiful and I had a lovely time exploring a sculpture garden with my parents and my fiancé. It is etched into my memory as a beautiful and deeply sentimental experience- I enjoyed being around my parents now, I saw them as friends and was at peace with a lot of the conflict that once tainted all of our interactions. Every little moment of that day formed as a detailed memory, one that warms my heart to think back to it. I am not sure if it is some lingering after effect of the drawn out TMA-2 experience that etched these memories so dearly into me. But the entire experience was colored by a sunny optimistic undercurrent, and perhaps that persisted beyond all of the other effects.

 

Conclusion: TMA-2 is a challenging but rewarding experience, worthwhile for those willing to suffer the massive lingering bodyload and the overwrought, nonstop stimulation. It is an exhausting and intense experience, but it is redeemed by the joyous essence that pervades the experience and lasts well beyond it. It felt nearly impossible to feel truly bad while on this substance, even as my setting deteriorated. Everything was taken in stride, with genuine humor and absurdity- all I can do is laugh after all. It was visually intense, something I found remarkable as most reports on this compound claim it is hardly visual. Visuals mostly manifested as sharply defined concentric forms, cast in cool colors and punctuated by drifting shocks of electric warmth. The headspace was burnt out like it was overloaded with arcing lightning, I felt worn and paranoid, but also jovial and optimistic. It was an odd sort of contrast that further exhausted me in any attempt to make sense of or reconcile it. The bodyload was punishing, making me vomit early on. An intense nausea and abdominal pain came in miserable queasy waves throughout the peak of the experience, not relenting until several hours in. My muscles were tense and shaky, I was sweaty and hot and my nose kept running. This is not a compound to be taken lightly, it is serious and intense and a heavy commitment for a whole weekend. I do not regret taking this compound at all, though I am unlikely to revisit it.