DOSE:

1 tablet

oral

2C-B

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

5.6 st

I'd sampled 2C-B a number of times previously, though not for some time. It had been around 8 years, in fact, since my last psychedelic experience - though since then I had used a variety of recreational substances on an occasionaly basis.

The setting was to be a small music festival known for its friendly, open-minded atmosphere, which I had attended a number of times before. My friends, partner and I got talking about the desire to try a psychedelic at a festival, something me and my partner had not done before. In fact, my partner had never tried a psychedelic substance before (assuming the exclusion of MDMA), and was intrigued.

As I had sampled and enjoyed 2C-B before, at various doses, I suggested this might be a good option. One friend was able to find a source of pills and said he had been offered either 17mg or 24mg doses.

***

My previous experiences with this substance had been extremely dose-dependent. My first experience - with 17mg orally - was an enjoyable, giggly trip with a positive push and a noticeably unusual bodily sensation. But there was limited visual activity (maybe a slight intensification of colour, some light breathing of objects when stared at), and my thought patterns remained largely 'sober'.

The next time I procured weighed capsules with a higher dosage - 25mg - which I had been told were likely to be more 'truly psychedelic.' My first experience at this dosage was of surprising intensity. The familiar body high was quickly joined by shifting colours which saturated and desaturated. Intense tracers accompanied all movement and objects melted, contorted and took on strange, alien forms. It became incredibly difficult to concentrate or follow a train of thought. I took this dose again once more and found the experience to be similarly intense and confusing - with fountains of colour overlaid over my entire field of vision, and the world looking as though it were being sketched in front of my eyes.

A middle ground, I decided, is what I needed. A further experiment at 21mg - outdoors in a park on a beautiful summer's day - remains among my favourite experiences, with a hugely positive push and a feeling of natural beauty, but enough of a 'sober' experience to operate in public. A second try at 21mg was less memorable but still fun, mildly visual and entertaining.

Based on these experiences, I suggested that 24mg may be a little too intense for a festival and, while 17mg may be too mild, we decided to err on the side of caution.

***

The festival rolled around and a couple of days passed. The group had all used MDMA the previous night but still felt that an evening exploring 2C-B would be a good idea. All five of us took one tablet at around 7PM - just as the heat of the day was beginning to pass, but a couple of hours before the sun was due to set.

The group comprised several experienced recreational drug users. C was perhaps the most adventurous, having experimented with a range of psychedelics including various 2C-x chemicals. A and P, a couple, enjoy fairly regular use of MDMA and LSD but tend to stick with those two choices. E, my partner, is a regular cannabis user who also uses MDMA and cocaine on occasion, but had no experience of any psychedelics prior to this day. At this time 2C-B and LSA (in the form of capsuled containing ground morning glory seeds) were the only two psychedelics I had tried.

C and I had commented to the others that 2C-B can be unpredictable in its onset time - anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes - so suggested we sit around talking and taking our minds off what we had taken. I was surprised, therefore, when after around 20 minutes I noticed a slight tracer effect as I moved my hand. 'Okay,' I commented. 'That's interesting.' I was fairly sure this wasn't placebo. 'I think I'm getting a hint of something too,' said P.

Thinking the chemical would take some time to reveal itself, A had decided immediately after dosing to take a small nap. Realising that the effects may kick in sooner than expected, P tried to wake her, but she mumbled that she would get up soon. Within minutes, for everyone in the group, the effects were kicking in. E began to comment that she felt as though the world was 'vibrating' and that she was 'unsure' whether she was enjoying the sensation - I reassured her that it can be a little overwhelming coming up on psychedelics but that she would feel it calm down.

For me, the creases on the fabric tents around us began to stand out; when I looked at them for a few seconds they would begin to swirl and morph, speeding up the longer I looked at them. The familiar body high began to take hold - a sort of strange sense of energy and tension which I know others enjoy, but which is my least favourite aspect of 2C-B.

At this point, A woke up in a state of confusion. P reminded her that we had all taken 2C-B and that she was probably coming up; after a minute or two she was calmer. She stated that she had assumed her experience with LSD would make 2C-B feel less intense by comparison, but that as soon as she woke up the experience was extremely visual and confusing.

We sat around the campsite. The visuals were becoming increasingly pronounced: significant morphing, breathing, undulating of natural patterns. Colours became intensely vibrant. Fast movement left freeze-frame tracers behind. I began to wonder if this was really a 17mg dose and C assured me that this is definitely what he had been told. He seemed surprised, because his experience was 'coming and going in waves' whereas everybody else was, by this stage, consistently and significantly tripping.

Then the giggles began. Firstly due to clumsiness. It became apparent that despite everyone in the group being a smoker, nobody was able to roll a cigarette. Every attempt to coordinate our hands ended in failure, which we all found hilarious. E, who was now enjoying her experience a lot more, decided she needed to visit the toilet; when she returned, she had (for reasons that are still not clear to me months later) managed to acquire an unnecessarily large quantity of toilet paper. We were, by now, literally rolling on the floor laughing - and the more we laughed, the harder it became to stop.

I became aware that I was 'on the edge' of a full-on psychedelic mindset, and began to consider this. I felt compelled to analyse simple concepts more deeply and in a new light, but it was difficult to find the words to explain my trains of thought. The others laughed. 'You're overthinking things,' someone said. I knew they were right, which only served to make me burst out laughing once again at the ridiculousness of it all.

Throughout this phase of the trip, visuals became more intense but shifted in form: the breathing stopped, and was overtaken by a fascinating 'painterly' style - as if everything were being painted in bold colours, the paint running and melting slightly. The whole world began to slowly sway back and forth; objects melted if stared at for long enough. Trees looked incredible, like something out of a video game, their leaves taking the form of shimmering, cascading pixels.

Surrounded by sociable festivalgoers, we were clearly not sober. P came up with the idea of telling anyone who asked that we had taken LSD, to avoid having to provide drawn-out descriptions of 2C-B to those who didn't know who it was. This led to P at one point forgetting that it wasn't, in fact, LSD that we had taken. He and A compared notes. 'It's actually a lot like acid,' they mused, 'but maybe with a more grounded headspace. With LSD you can really lose it. But the visuals on this are amazing. You'd have to take a lot of acid to trip this hard visually.'

Darkness began to fall and it became cold. I decided I needed to change into some long trousers and put on a jacket. I realised that I had not moved from where I was for the past two hours, and doing so - surrounded by tents and guyropes - was a challenge. I made my way back to my tent and went inside, but I found that completing this simple task was extraordinarily mentally taxing. I was having to break down the task of 'get changed' into tiny, bite-sized pieces of information that my brain could handle. 'Unbutton your shorts. Okay, now pull them down. Wriggle your legs out of them. Good, now find the trousers. Where are the trousers?'

I called E for help, which everyone found hilarious.

Being in a dark tent wasn't pleasant, though. With such little light, it was incredibly difficult to see much of anything, and sketchy patterns were overlaying my field of vision. I felt odd. It was cold and, in that moment, I wasn't having fun any more. I didn't like feeling so useless, like I couldn't manage a simple task. I decided to lie down for a few minutes and push myself into a more positive mental state.

Upon closing my eyes, an extraordinary kalaidoscope show of colours manifested - yellows, greens and reds, geometric, swirling into one another. I lost myself staring at it for a couple of minutes before opening my eyes again. I felt much better. E had managed to find my trousers ('though it was difficult,' she would tell me later. 'The bits of grass on the ground were jumping everywhere like grasshoppers') and I got changed and re-joined the group.

A sense of alien beauty became apparent. From the stage near our campsite, electronic music played. I lay on the grass and looked up at the sky, imagining an electronic red grid overlaying the night. With each beat, a pulse of glowing energy shot from the corners of my vision and fizzed around the grid, like a sparkler on rails. It felt mystical but grounded: very much something in the realm of science, not spirituality. I felt extremely happy - not in the pushy way one does on something like MDMA, but in a very genuine, pure sense. It was my favourite moment of the journey.

Over the next 30 minutes, we all began to come down. We checked the time and realised it had been a little over four hours since we ingested the 2C-B. I spent a little while psyching myself up to visit the bathroom, which I had not done since earlier in the day - as I did so, the theme music from 2001: A Space Odessy played over the speakers, and we laughed to ourselves that I was about to go on the most epic toilet journey anyone has ever experienced. Some visual elements remained - a sort of sketchy, grainy look to the world - but, almost as quickly as it came on, the effect was depleting.

We all commented on how tired we felt - not physically, but mentally. We tried to go to a stage and dance to the music, but none of us were really feeling it. So we went to the tea tent to get a hot drink. It turned out everyone else had taken their hallucinagens about two hours later and had decided to congregate in this area of the festival. Including the staff at the tent. We had to remind them - as they stared blankly into the distance - how to make a cup of tea. (It is that kind of festival.)

Afterward we found a campfire and sat around it with some other festivalgoers. Someone played a guitar. We had some conversations with those around us, but none of us were really feeling up for a party. By around 1AM we decided it was time to call it a night, and thus our journey was over.

***

'I want to do that again,' E told me when we awoke, feeling surprisingly fresh, the next day. 'That was fantastic. Exactly what I was hoping for out of my first psychedelic experience.'

'It was amazing,' A and P agreed. 'I actually think I preferred it to LSD,' A added. 'The duration is just right. Knowing I'd be back to baseline in a few hours if anything went wrong made the whole experience more comfortable.'

'I think those were definitely stronger than 17mg,' I said. 'My guess? Somewhere between 21 and 23.'

C wasn't sure. 'It really did come and go for me,' he said. 'Sometimes it was quite intense... but more often than not it was ebbing between 'mild' and 'just above threshold'. I've had that with 2C-B before, though. Everyone else is away with the fairies, and I feel quite sober.'

We left the festival with the sense that we had shared a new experience which, in a weird way, had brought us closer together. And there were few, if any, hangover effects: we all felt tired, but that was the result of four days living in a field and dancing to music, rather than the drug.

It frustrates me that I don't know for sure how much we took, though - because whatever it was felt like a perfect dose for me. Not too intense for the most part, but very much true and full psychedelia, it's an experience I'd like to relive.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 107267
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Mar 20, 2020	Views: 825
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2C-B (52) : General (1), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)