Stagnation time. It’s been a long time since I’ve complained this much in a year in review.
[This was written many months ago, in March of 2024. I am only deciding to share it right now]
*CW: Addiction, self harm, suicide*
*this post is not a cry for help. Its a frank assessment of my circumstances in the vein of the same posts I made every other year. There is nothing anyone can do for me. I haven’t been doing well, but it’s my own battle. Advice and suggestions are not welcome. But also as I currently am posting this I am completely sober and in wonderful circumstances, looking back at a dark time from the outside*
It probably stands out that in the course of 2023, I have not contributed a single trip report. Not for lack of trying anything new, though novel experiences have also declined drastically.
It’s not like I was doing less drugs- in fact, I was doing more than I ever had before in my life. I am thrashing around in a field of psychological polydrug addiction, a daily affair striking from multiple sides that began to spiral into absolute preeminence this year. Daily use is of course a given. The worst culprit is dissociatives- I am badly addicted to dissociatives. My tolerance to them has skyrocketed. In fact this is the reason why there are so few new reports or novel experiences- Every night I am urgently chasing that familiar comfortable reliable relieving dissociative high, using drugs that I know will do what I want, leaving little room for novelty and experimentation; in a sense, the experimentation was always to find things that I could revisit with regularity, and perhaps I have achieved that. There is little motivation to do more.
The only times I abstain from dissociatives is when I have my spouse physically hide them from me, and even then, I could sneak doses in from other sources sometimes; sometimes something would be forgotten in a drawer; at my worse I would even squirrel away a dose or two to be taken when I was alone; the collection is growing so large that hiding them is becoming more and more challenging.
When I am abstaining from them I am filling in the gaps with everything else possible, an onslaught of depressants, mostly various pharmaceuticals (I don’t combine any of these don’t worry)- Mostly pregabalin and carisoprodol and 1,4-BDO, a whole bestiary of various pharma benzos; and less frequently such delights as codeine, Hydromorphone, gabapentin, cocaine. Prominently absent is the dominant drugs of my younger days- the psychedelics; but more on that later. And of course, cannabis, nonstop, though it does little for me anymore and mostly serves as a idle comfort habit, an appetite stimulant, and a potentiator of dissociatives. The only days I have been sober in the last year have been when I am traveling with family.
The nature of how drugs affect me has changed entirely too. These substances are nearly unrecognizable to how I experienced them years ago, all of them a well worn path colored both by steady neurological wear and tear and repetitive psychological conditioning and familiarity. First and foremost, I rarely ever take psychedelics anymore. In the last year I used psychedelics a grand total of 7 times (For several years they were more or less a weekly habit). I recently posted a thread on Twitter about this, but the taxing bodyload has simply become too great for the experience to feel worth it anymore. I have always struggled with psychedelic bodyload (mainly in the form of severe GI distress as all-consuming pain and nausea and purging; muscle aches and tremors and tension and chills), but it has absolutely gotten progressively worse as I have gotten older. There was a point for a long time where it still felt worth it, where the pros outweighed the cons, but I feel like I have now passed that threshold, that the experiences have little to offer me beyond intense physical suffering. This has not gotten better, I have tried so many different methods and medications to ameliorate it, I have tried changing my diet etc; I promise whatever suggestion is offered I have already tried. I think this is just my body aging out of being able to do this, my nerves worn thin through almost a decade of concentrated and frequent use of various psychedelics rcs. The bundles of neurons bearing 5-HT2A receptors on my guts carved out, strung up to dry. Psychedelics defined a decade of my life but their time seems to be passing. I doubt I will visit them beyond my annual bicycle day experience. I don’t feel like there are any lessons to be gained from them at this point that justify the suffering. The visuals I once delighted in have turned dull and subtle and vague, no matter the substance. Perhaps there is still something to be learned from very powerful experiences but I am doubtful my body would make it out intact.
Benzos are rarely anything enjoyable these days, which is frankly truly a blessing. Their own suite of negative side effects keeps me on my best behavior, it keeps me from dosing frequently, and this has probably saved me from a lifetime of battling the worst physical addiction known to man. What was once a fun and casual experience has turned to a multi day trial punctuated by a few hours of euphoria immediately upon dosing. Repeated phases of frequent use and breaks has developed a debilitating kindling where I am left hungover for a day or even days after fairly normal recreational doses of once fun and familiar compounds I could use causally. For those days I am so fatigued I can’t make it through a day without sleeping multiple times. I am in a state of irrational deep depression, my mood is pinned to the sea floor, every input is cast and tainted with an inescapable dreariness that defies reason or cognition. And I am left in a state of amnesia for days after, even stronger than the amnesia during the fun peak of the experience - this proves to be extremely inconvenient for a job that requires my constant attention and knowledge, for meaningful social interactions or simply for trying to live joyous or pleasant experiences; the color of life fades to nothing. As much as I miss the warm fuzzy nights barred out playing videogames or the hedonistic rage of a pure present euphoria not bound to the strictures of memory or the anxieties of the future, it is objectively for the best that this cannot continue. I will cherish the non-memories forever.
Dissociatives have come to the defining forefront of my life, and those experiences too have become dulled and reshaped through constant unrelenting use. My poisons of desire are mainly FXE, DMXE, ketamine, 3-MeO-PCP, 3-MeO-PCE, 3-MeO-PCiPr, 2F-DCK, 3,4-MD-PCiPr, and a whole plethora of others with lesser frequency. I do these just about every night.
Once upon a time I got my kicks just doing a single dose of a single compound but that is too dull for me now. Each session sees a mixing and matching of drugs with several redoses of certain ones; typically playing on their varying durations; a base layer of something or a combination of things longer lasting and functional is applied, then layered with punctuated saturated moments of higher doses or small bumps of the shorter acting ones. Like drinking a beer and taking a shot. My tolerance has shot up and I find myself in a troubling place where it is hard to have a “hole” experience. I am troubled by knowing that this is likely forever, as dissociative tolerance never really fades. That these experiences I love so much will only grow duller and less fulfilling, yet I am still compelled to pursue them every day, a little bit of the magic chipping away each time. I don’t know how this will end. This magic is frankly, what I mostly lived for. Perhaps I will eventually be so bored and understimulated that I just stop trying. I hate this tolerance, I hate that I no longer feel like I can accurately report doses of novel substances to others, I hate that I’ve dulled the instrument I used to collect so much data in the past. But there’s no going back is there; I did this to myself. Persistent use of dissociatives, my preference mostly being towards stimulating ones, has exacerbated the sleep issues I already had, as has the frequent use and rekindling of benzos. It is very challenging for me to sleep anymore without some cocktail of drugs, and my addiction to dissociatives has a symbiosis with Zolpidem as my absolute fail safe sedative. I am prescribed hydroxyzine and trazodone for sleep, the trazodone I am fully dependent on, only abstaining when I plan to use psychedelics. Sleep is usually also aided by melatonin, doxylamine, and carisoprodol.
I have begun to notice that the following cumulative negative effects have become observably worse:
-short term memory loss; issues with word recall
-odd gaps in registration of long term memories
-persistent nausea
-frequent urination
-bladder aches
-fatigue
-persistent anxiety and insomnia
Some of this may be connected to contracting COVID-19 twice within the last year.
There’s a lot I could whine about.
My mental health has correspondingly been abysmal, worst it’s been in years, everything consumed by that bleak sort of nihilism - not the liberating kind but the kind that smothers the color from the daylight. Suicidal ideation and bouts of self harm have reared their ugly heads as delusional BPD episodes grow more frequent and intense. Blackouts and bouts of drug induced psychosis and catatonic panic; “incidents” as termed between me and my spouse have become dispiritingly regular occurrences. Each week is a whiplash of wild mood swings, languid depression and bouts of frenzied mania, one day after another. It's hard to really know what to feel. Does this make the drug use worse? Or is the drug use fueling this instability? It’s a chicken/egg sorta thing.
A lot of misfortune befell this year, certainly a factor in everything. I lost a dear friend to a drug overdose, they were a lifelong fighter, the most free and liberated person I have ever met and one of the toughest, one who inspired so much hope in me, for whom I held so much respect. Their loss felt like a true loss for the whole world. Rest In Peace Koda. As mentioned before I contracted COVID-19 twice, after avoiding it for 3 years. I don’t know what effect this has had on my overall state of being, it’s so difficult to determine. I was whipped by an irrationally heartbreaking rejection, from the same person twice! I ran into deeply stressful financial and legal hiccups. My country has committed itself fully to the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, and all I can do is watch helplessly. This course of events has by proxy strained my relationship with one of my closest friends. All of the memories from this year are dulled and blurry. I’ve found myself more often at odds with my spouse, I’ve found my temper shorter, myself less and less patient, and I’m terrified I am going to do or say something I will regret and won’t be able to recover from.
There’s been good things too- Beautiful times spent with dear friends, sometimes fueled by drugs, sometimes not. Times in nature, under the glorious sun among the trees and insects. I took a few wonderful trips with my spouse or my friends and saw such beautiful things and had such beautiful experiences. Seizing every chance to be outside in the summer heat in the everlasting pursuit of insect life. I met new lovers and rekindled old ones. I got really into painting warhammer 40k and dub music and they have both served as a comfortable grounding meditative routine. I began seeing a therapist, for better or worse. Many of these things feel, relative to the bad, trivial, but I am grateful for what respite I have gotten.
My time at a certain well known pharmacology lab has come to an end with the expiration of my contract. I’ve ended on good terms and will hopefully continue to collaborate with this lab in some capacity. I am deeply grateful for the time I spent there, for the people I met and the experiences I had. My colleagues were some of the most brilliant people I have ever met and it was an honor to work alongside them, to actually be included and respected among such giants. Their contributions have been and will be immense! Shoutout especially to the undergrads whom I mentored- I might not know much but I’m glad I could impart what experience and knowledge I had! You will be giants in this field. Despite the fun times, the joking and socializing, the feeling of being a part of something revolutionary in a burgeoning field, just how damn cool it was to get paid to make drugs, I think I am ready to end this chapter of my life and move on to other things. Through experience, I learned that chemistry just isn’t for me. I miss being outside, I miss the sun beating down my skin, the rain soaking through my clothes, I miss fighting through underbrush and stomping through mud and driving on dirt roads. I miss working with animals and being immersed in biodiversity, in being able to stop to look at a cool bug or a snake or a turtle while on the clock. I miss being forced to watch the sunrise on a misty morning, of the smell of sap heated by the summer sun, of coming home dirty and sweaty and torn up by thorns and insect bites, not smelling of sulfur and ether and rotten cheese, feeling like I am truly a part of this beautiful natural world as it has always existed. I miss spending my time inside sifting through and organizing vast libraries of specimens, of encountering Earth’s wondrous diversity firsthand in physical form. I would like to go back into Entomology or maybe marine invertebrate Zoology. But most of all, I miss feeling competent.
My work in chemistry was saturated with imposter syndrome- but it truly genuinely felt valid, not a delusion in the least. I don’t fundamentally understand chemistry. I am forced to confront this when extremely basic gaps in my knowledge come to a head. Just humiliating beginner level stuff that I can’t seem to wrap my head around. I don't understand stereochemsitry. If you named common reactions I couldn't tell you which reagents would be used and what the desired outcome would be. For fucks sake, I couldn't even really tell you what an sn1, sn2, and elimination reaction really are, what their utility is or how you would achieve them. That's not imposter syndrome, that is genuinely and objectively not understanding the fundamentals of the field. My lack of foundation was more noticeable every day, it was unsustainable and would have reached some sort of breaking point had my contract not expired.
I still did accomplish a lot. I am proud of what I accomplished. I synthesized ~90 completely novel compounds. By the end of my term I was completely independent, devising my own methods and optimizations and troubleshooting my own problems. Despite my massive shortcomings in the field, I made it work for the time I was doing it, I produced an end result, my compounds were ultra pure, USP grade for analysis. A dear old friend was able to do various binding and affinity assays - the feeling of collecting data on compounds that I made for the first time ever is incomparable.
Some compounds were submitted for patents- the majority of my work (I have complicated feelings about this but I have to be pragmatic about how this work can happen). They will likely be slated for publication some day too. Until anything is published I sadly cannot go into much detail about them, though there’s a lot I would like to say! The last series was a project completely my own- I decided what compounds I would make, I determined their structures based on what I knew about SAR, I went ahead and synthesized them, most of them made for the first time ever. This series consists of arylcyclohexylamines, made through a novel route that was devised and optimized by my colleagues and I. I am very excited to talk about these more, which I hope to do in the near future- likely in late summer pending some other work. This will hopefully be a publication with me as one of the primary authors.
Nevertheless, I am hoping that my time ending there will help improve my life in ways that I cannot disclose. All I will say is that certain aspects of the job served to the detriment of my sobriety. Being away from drugs in my day to day life will hopefully help me to recover somewhat.
Recovery :’) imagine. If I’m being honest, I don’t want to recover. At all. I enjoy doing drugs, I still enjoy doing drugs, when I’m not on them I think about them all the time. Despite being detrimental to my mental and physical health, despite all of the “incidents”, despite how much it is interfering with me living a worthwhile productive life, despite how it is eroding my relationships, despite it being completely unsustainable and setting myself up for a disastrous future- I still love them. One could call that addiction. I still have, every now and then, experiences that are wonderful and beautiful and profound, ones that rekindle the fire of my life. Ones that genuinely feel beneficial and productive to my life. Or even ones that just provide a steady and familiar comfort, or that seem to keep the deepest depths of despair at bay to some degree, for some time. My use has always been excessive but there was a time I considered it moderate before I fell into using every day- something like using dissociatives once or twice a week, which I know seems, once again, ludicrously excessive to most. But I maintained this frequency for several years without much issue. My desire is to go back to something like that, where they are a feature of my life, a treat reserved for sparing occasions, not a habit that overshadows and colors everything. But I know too that this is intensely idealistic - that I have already tasted the sweetness of using every day and now I can never go back- at first I began finding excuses to use every night even though I didn’t plan to before- “oh I’m feeling a little sad; oh work was stressful; oh I’m seeing x person; oh I’m engaging with x media” and I imagine it would be near impossible to work myself out of that mindset. Or even if I do find moderation, it would be exceedingly difficult to avoid going down that path and falling into a daily habit again. Now that I know how it can be, now that I know what I can get away with, I fear there is no going back. The only options are continue the way it is or total abstinence. Both seem bleak.
I think I would rather die than give this up. The world seems like a place I am simply maladapted for. It's hard to imagine getting older again, it's hard to exist with any kind of long term in mind. In my mind I am just enjoying what moments I have left. Everyone else is dying.
I have become avoidant of all of my friends, I only want time alone, I only want time alone to do drugs. I rarely see anyone, I offer little to anyone, to the people that offer so much to me, I rarely have the energy to see anyone. I don't know why anyone cares to maintain a relationship with me that I am not able to maintain myself. Maybe if they forget about me less people will be hurt should anything happen. I don't want to be around anyone much anymore.
No one can break my will to do what I want. I will just lie more, I will learn how to be even more quiet. What is to be done with this? At least I get what I want.
The drugs are what I think about. They are what I care about. Much else falls to the wayside. But I tell myself that it makes delectable what is left. I will not allow myself to be treated. I refuse it, I will fight it, I will complain but god help me will I be motivated to do anything about it.
"Freedom is beautiful and terrible its nothing soft and sweet... It's watching people die because they got back in it, and knowing that I don't have any say in it."
This next year will bring about a several months sabbatical from my normal life where I will be traveling through Southeast Asia and Oceania. I will likely not have access to any drugs during this time, and no real exposure to them. A part of me is hoping, perhaps in vain, that this is going to be my miracle cure, that time away will allow for my brain to reset, for the cravings to fade, but only time will tell if that is how things will play out. I could very well return home and immediately just go back to square one. Or perhaps the change of perspective will break that habit, shake that desire- maybe I will stop altogether, or maybe I will shift back into that pie-in-the-sky fantasy of using in moderation. I recognize that like much of the rest of my life, i entrust these results to twists of fate, inscrutable games of neural function, rather than any amount of effort on my part. I don’t want to change. I just want things to change around me.
Anyways, I did write a little bit about drugs;
I personally corroborated reports that what was being sold as FXE (3-F-2’-oxo-PCE) was really 2F-3’-oxo-PCE.
I summarized the result of a colleagues doctoral dissertation analyzing structure activity relationships of diarylethylamines.
I did an AMA on Reddit while very manic on pregabalin and 3-MeO-PCiPr while sick with COVID. I don’t think it went very well or represented me well, because I answered everything in a state of arrogant mania. I wish I could redo it with a clearer head.
Ok that’s it really.
Now then, I suppose I can try to offer my usual ranking of drugs that I have tried this year, even in the absence of any reports. There are some things I cannot really speak on for the time being. But I will attempt to discuss those that I can.
1. 3-MeO-PCiPr - This is my bread and butter. I love this compound so much. It’s like a smoother gentler 3-MeO-PCE, perfect for casual use, perfect for exploring the world, but still insightful at higher doses. Deeply pleasant and euphoric.
Dose: 20-30 mg IN
Duration: ~6-8 hours total
2. 3,4-MD-PCiPr- Another stimulating dissociative, this one has a powerful psychedelic edge, it is deeply euphoric, excellent for socializing and dancing when taken in the right context. It is only ranked lower because it is not as forgiving as 3-MeO-PCiPr and can be prone to runaway paranoia. Dose: 20-30 mg IN Duration: ~8 hours total
5. 4-HO-MsBT- A fairly standard tryptamine psychedelic with a short duration. I didn’t find it as euphoric or insightful as 4-HO-DsBT, but it’s still worthwhile. I wish I could experience it without being taxed by the bodyload.
