DMT: Flick your Bic

Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - 4:30-6:00PM

Substance/Dosage:

DMT - 35 mg., 35 mg.

Weight at time of experience: 184 lbs.

Setting: home

Companions: solo

Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - 7:30 PM-11:00PM

Substance/Dosage:

DMT - 40 mg., 35 mg.

Weight at time of experience: 184 lbs.

Setting: home

Companions: AC

In the first week of May, I changed my technique for vaporizing DMT with my oil burner. After my near disaster using a torch a few weeks ago, I got to looking for a new route of administration. The part of me that has a deep lust for gadgets was thinking maybe I needed to buy an electronic vape rig of some kind. I’d found enthusiastic internet support for some pretty cool-looking devices like the Yocan Evolve [note: I’ve since ordered one] and the X Max Starry v. 3 and I’d love to give these a whirl in the future. I’m just not willing to drop $100 right now on a new device that I haven’t tried. Then I came across a forum post from someone suggesting the “softer heat” of a standard Bic disposable lighter for use with oil burners. Their suggestion was to set the blue part of the flame to the bulb and evenly distribute the heat. The common sense of this was immediately apparent. If the object is to gently melt the crystal and vaporize it, why would I need the aggressive spitting flame of a butane torch? Maybe the reason for a torch will become apparent to me sometime later when I’ve tried more routes of administration.

On Tuesday, as silly as I knew it was, I double checked the art on my wall to make sure it wasn’t falling down. I didn’t want a repeat of my last train wreck. I did my little rituals to drive out any bad juju. I weighed out my dose and got to work melting it in my piece. I was taking a little too much caution to not burn the spice but, this being my first go round using a regular lighter, I didn’t want to make a mistake. The mistake happened in the other direction. I didn’t realize how weak my first hit was until I was halfway through it. I backed the lighter off the bulb during the next hit to increase the temperature. The second hit was big and I had trouble getting a proper third. I leaned back and closed my eyes, feeling a twinge of disappointment as I did so. In the darkness a purple, feminine entity appeared before me and lovingly fussed over me. She seemed more concerned about me not getting an efficient dose than I was. “It’s ok it’s ok it’s ok you’ll get it the next time it’s ok it’s ok,” she chattered in telepathy as she ran her spectral hands in a stuttering caress over my face and shoulders. I giggled a little at this alien mothering and enjoyed the funny body sensations. I felt a welcoming love run through me and knew that I didn’t need to be afraid to return to the DMT space. I also knew that I’d definitely get the launch right on the next round.

A small, dried puddle of spice remained in the bulb of my oil burner and I dropped another 35 mg. dose on top of it. My first hit was a long, slow, milky one. It got me excited. I pulled a second lung-filler and a solid third even though the wheels on the lighter were burning my thumb. When I leaned back, the room came apart in shiny, warping segments. I was catapulted around a mirrored tunnel, swinging forward and back. A square section of the walls of this tunnel opened up and a joker type entity stuck his head out ad yelled, “You don’t fuck with ME!” Another section opened up and the entity stuck his head out again and said, “I will DESTROY you!” It was almost like this entity heard me thinking that I didn’t have anything to be afraid of and showed up to prove me wrong! I remained overwhelmed by the spastic metal fantastics until the point at which I remembered I have eyes. When I opened them and saw my living room I burst into hysterical laughter that didn’t stop for a solid 5 minutes. Eventually my mind came to rest. I rose from the couch and peacefully went about my evening.

—

My new friend, AC, came over to try DMT for his first time. We met as simultaneous first-time attendees of the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society. His wild-eyed account of his first psychedelic experience, a 7 gram dose of mushrooms in silent darkness, wowed the room. We’ve been friendly since then. I won’t be telling the stories of his trips here.

We took turns trip sitting. I smoked first. I started too early with my first pull and the first hit was a little bit weak. I held it and took another that was good and milky. As the rush-up started I went to grab the other lighter that wasn’t hot only to find it wasn’t there. I had no time to get a different one so I burned my thumb on the wheel to get my third hit. The room started developing glowing cracks in the walls. A colossal, humanoid entity walked up next to my apartment building and said [telepathically, of course], “I’ll take that!” In one sweeping motion, he then picked up my my entire living room in his arms and took it away.

I laid my head down on a pillow and slid into a side-scrolling swirl of liquid fractal geometry. I watched undulating, rolling waves of impossible, molten, white, metal-plastic liquid flow past me. The ever-folding substance had a uniformly transforming pattern covering it. There was a hint that there were mechanical gears embedded in this soup. Despite the lack of any imagery suggesting this, something felt very sexual about the energy in the space. It was as if, by being there, I was making love to the realm. I felt welcome and loved and part of the flow. As the vision faded I smiled and giggled and felt peaceful.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go a second time but after watching AC go twice I decided I totally had to. I loaded up a little less than I did the first time since three was some unvaporized residue left in the bulb. The hits came strong and clean. As the bells started ringing in my head during my third hit, my cat jumped up from her perch, ran over to the couch, and started meowing loudly at me. Talking about it later, AC thought it was because the cat was worried about me. I knew better. It was dinner time and I was late. It took a lot to hold that hit in and not laugh at my mouthy cat while the world was disintegrating.

I was immediately launched into the center of the patterned, high-definition, smoky swirl. The colors of the swirl were the colors of my cat. Orange and yellow and black and white and pink. It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. Incomprehensibly beautiful. I was stunned and awed. The feeling that came over me was like I was inside the tipping point of an orgasm. It was like riding a wave of epic, boundless sexual tension tension with little slips off that sent me into bursts of hysterical laughter. Nothing else existed. Time was irrelevant. Language could never suffice to explain it and all the “wows” and “holy shits” that followed only drove that point home.

1P-LSD: It's not LSD

Date: Saturday, May 25, 2019

Substances/Dosages/Times:

1P-LSD - 200 ug - 2:15 PM

Cannabis - 2 tokes from a one-hitter - 3:45 PM

Weight at time of experience: 185 lbs.

Setting: out and about in Brooklyn

Companions: solo

I recently purchased some 1P-LSD through a clear web online vendor and received it in the mail without incident. I was kind of tickled by this alone, having only ever previously purchased drugs in hand-to-hand transactions. More than that, I was excited to try what I’d been reading in a lot of anecdotal reports as a quasi-legal functional analog of LSD.

At 2:15 PM on Saturday, May 25, 2019, I shook off the last of my pre-flight jitters and put two 100 ug blotter tabs of 1P-LSD under my tongue. I started a new document in my phone where I would take the notes on my experience that make up this report. It was a gorgeous, 72 degree day in Brooklyn, NY. I felt very optimistic for the experience. I put my headphones on and cued up the new album by Earth, “Full Upon Her Burning Lips.” I walked to the grocery store where I bought a liter of water and a bag of mandarins. I put them in my knapsack and headed off to Prospect Park to be around trees and to people watch.

At 2:44 PM I noted that I was feeling very activated and that my feet felt sweaty on my walk. I’d forgotten it was Memorial Day weekend and when I entered the park I was surprised to find a grandiose display of military might going on there courtesy of the US Marines. There were tanks, anti-aircraft guns, helicopters, and many other devices of war on display. There was a marching band gearing up to play. And soldiers, hundreds of beefy, hyper-masculine boys in uniform swaggering around with big shit-eating grins on their faces. I have an intense distaste for authority figures so walking through this during my come-up irritated me. I quickly made my way to a less fascist area of the park.

At 3:00 PM I noted that “the park just breathed.” I took a seat on a bench. I was feeling some body load coming on in the form of queasiness and dizziness. I was a little nervous but I felt relatively safe. The park was full of people and I knew if I were to have any intense physical emergency that it wouldn’t go unnoticed. I had to pee. I checked google maps and the nearest public restroom was a half mile away. I started walking.

Over the next hour the body load gradually built in intensity. My hands were sweating and I had the beginnings of a headache. My throat was tightening, which made me a little nervous. I felt a rushing speediness and a patchy feeling of distraction coming over me. The visuals also started to rev up. The walkway was breathing. The bark on the trees was starting to move. I was debating on wether to smoke some pot or not which I immediately acknowledged was silly. With the exception of my DMT experiences, I’ve never tripped on anything WITHOUT smoking pot. I love the way cannabis potentiates psychedelics and heightens the visual effects. I put on the new Flying Lotus album, “Flamagra.”

At 3:54 I was starting to peak. I noted that this 1P-LSD felt dirtier than most of my experiences with LSD...“so much crawly so much wonky-ness.” I took a couple of tokes from my one-hitter and it kicked the visuals into a much higher gear. The visuals had a sort of rushed, jerky, abortive quality to them. I took a seat on a park bench in front of a wide open field of people picnicking. I stared at the tree line watching the branches wave in the breeze. As I watched, I could see patterns and little scenes starting to form in them but they would fade before fully expressing themselves. There was something lazy or half-assed feeling about the visuals, like they just didn’t have the energy or couldn’t be bothered. I thought that was really weird.

I also noted around this time that there was a certain lack of spiritual and intellectual depth to the experience when compared to LSD. My experience with LSD usually brings on a feeling of awe or divinity or “otherworldliness.”. This feeling was mostly absent and pretty much remained absent for the duration. I remember thinking at one point that I felt like I was in an imitation of an LSD trip; like if someone explained the LSD experience to an animator and the animator made a Saturday morning cartoon of it.

At 4:47 I made the note “there’s a strange darkness!” I found myself looking at people and feeling myself living their lives and knowing that we’re all the same. But it wasn’t like a happy oneness. There was a strong pathos to this feeling. Like a wrenching feeling like I wanted to go up to people and grab them by the collar and cry, “I UNDERSTAND you, man!” It felt almost desperate. I have no real experience with drugs that people call enactogens or empathogens but I imagined that this feeling couldn’t be far off from that.

I’d been texting with a friend and I decided to go visit her at the farmer’s market she works at in a different neighborhood. I put on “Mars Audiac Quintet” by Stereolab and got to walking. The breezy tunes pushed me giddily along through the clear-skied Spring afternoon. As I found my way out of the park and onto the sidewalks of Park Slope, I looked into the faces of everyone I passed and couldn’t help but smile. People looked extraordinarily beautiful. I felt their energies coming into me and in a way I felt like I’d lived their lives in these fleeting moments.

At 5:07 I made a note on the feeling of dilated time. It had only been about 3 hours since I dropped my tabs but it felt like much longer. I also noted that the body load felt really hard on my knees. The visuals had a frantic quality and hard edges were forming and melting all around me. The music sounded really good and I felt like it was both grounding me and sustaining my energy.

I got on the G train to go to Greenpoint around 5:30. I was a little nervous getting on the subway but once I was seated I took a moment to get aware with my body and assess my situation. I determined that I was completely smashed on drugs but was not really distressed in any significant way. I was also kind of hot and sweaty and had some slight regret about wearing a long sleeve t-shirt. During this train ride I started to feel a real emptiness around this experience and how very singular that was to me compared to all my other recent psychedelic experiences. Possibly worth noting is that I was listening to the second album by the band Beak> and the music is pretty dark and sinister. My mind kept making comparisons and analogies. I had this thought that 1P-LSD feels like LSD if T.J. Maxx made LSD.

I got off the train and started slogging around Greenpoint looking for the farmers market. I used to live in this neighborhood and, when I did, I drank excessively. Something about that seemed to be informing my trip and I thought to myself this is a very drunk feeling trip; weaving, weird and brazen. I had this thought that, if tripping on LSD felt like making ethereal love to a golden goddess, 1P-LSD felt like having a wasted, sloppy makeout session with the golden goddess’s slutty, buck-toothed cousin who was born with a tail.

By the time I made it to the farmer’s market it had already closed and all the vendors had packed up and left. I was a little disappointed but I was also tired. I went into a bar to use their bathroom and then found my way to a little park near the train station where I texted my friend to tell her I was embarrassed for not making it to the market in time. I sat down and drank some much needed water. I put on the album “TNT” by Tortoise and settled into its fluid grooves. People were playing with their dogs in the enclosed dog run and it felt good to watch them. My mind invented their stories and felt like I could see movies of their entire lives playing in my head. I ate about five small mandarins. They tasted good but I found myself more interested in watching the pile of peels stacking up than eating the fruit. I also wished the mandarins were nectarines. I also wished the 1P-LSD was LSD, or rather that it felt more like my last LSD experience which was very clean.

By 7:30 I was back on the G train headed back to my neighborhood. The heightened colors and open-eye visuals were still very bright and strong. The body load was becoming exhausting. I felt achy in all my joints and my skin crawled with prickly, tingly feelings that were more like neuropathy than pleasure. I felt really grimy in that druggy way where it seems like poison is coming out of your pores but, to be fair to the drug, I had been walking around in the midday sun for hours. I might have just been a little dehydrated. In that moment I was feeling like the rest of the experience wasn’t worth the body feelings, mainly because the psycho-spiritual component felt so lacking. Many of the reports I’d read of 1P-LSD effects have mentioned a quick come up, shorter duration, and quick comedown but I had a strong feeling that this trip was far from over.

I made it back to my neighborhood and decided to get a pizza and go home to watch a movie. I ran into a friend outside the pizzeria and I told him about my trip even though I could see he was really drunk and would probably forget even seeing me (which, in fact, he did…a few days later I told him the whole story a second time). I took my pizza home and settled in on the couch. Over the next two hours I ate the whole pizza. Yes, excessive. Also, delicious. I watched “Mouchette” by Robert Bresson, which I’d never seen before. It’s a very sad movie and admittedly a strange choice while tripping but it was terrific. I cried.

My final note I took during this trip was at 10:00 PM: “Shit is still slopping its way along. Sloppy visuals. Wish it would end already. Body load is annoying. Reminds me of high school and bad acid.”

I can’t remember when I went to bed but I know that I did not fall asleep until well after 4:00 AM. With all that time on my hands, stimulated and sickly-feeling and alone, I made the mistake of going on Reddit and prematurely talking trash about this experience on the LSD and 1P-LSD subreddits. This incurred the wrath of a bunch of teenagers who’ve never taken real LSD, amateur science nerds, and a bunch of Redditors who clearly have a stake in the RC trade. Pretty much everyone told me I wasn’t having the experience I was having or that somehow the effects of the drug I took had more to do with my mind than the drug itself, as if I couldn’t possibly understand the nuances of a psychedelic experience. It was really stupid. I ended up deleting my threads and my comments on them because I was embarrassed for even trying to have a normal dialogue on Reddit. It never goes well.. Why do I do this to myself?

The following day, I felt no ill effects or hangover symptoms. I can’t say I felt much of an afterglow either. I just felt like I didn’t get enough sleep before going in for a 12 shift at work because I hadn’t.

I may have been premature in telling Reddit forums that 1P-LSD is “kind of shit.” In retrospect, it really wasn’t a bad experience. Maybe just a little disappointing. I still stand by my statement that 1P-LSD did not feel exactly like LSD. Two weeks later, it’s hard for me to explain the difference. 1P-LSD did all the things I would expect LSD to do as far as seeing trails and breathing surfaces and melting edges. It had the body load that I’ve experienced with some LSD. But, in this experience, it lacked that sense of wonder and divinity that I consider the really beautiful part of the classic tryptamine psychedelics.

While I originally told people I wouldn’t take 1P-LSD again, now I’m not so sure. I still have 8 hits of it left. Maybe I’ll give it another go at some point. You know…for science!

(I've submitted this report to Erowid.org for review and possible inclusion in their 1P-LSD experience vault.)