DOSE:	1 hit	oral	NBOMe Series	(blotter / tab)
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

This is the reasonably tragic tail of how a single bad trip has left me with lasting anxiety and trauma when using psychedelics. While I encourage (or at least, don’t discourage) the use of psychedelics to explore consciousness and for fun, the moral of the story is: ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TAKING BEFOREHAND.

I received a dose of a single tab of what I was told at the time was LSD from a friend, D, who had ordered it online. He claims he’d tested it, I’m retrospect I’m not sure he had. I put the blotter in my mouth, and was instantly struck by a bitter taste that coated my tongue. I found this unusual, and after about ten minutes grew uncomfortable with the bitter numbness, so I spit the tab out. However, this was long enough for me to absorb the drug.

I was on the way to my friend A’s house when I’d eaten the paper. When I arrived, I told him I’d taken LSD, and he happily clapped his hands and informed me we’d have a wonderful day. We smoked a bowl with his girlfriend, then made our way to another friend’s house on foot.

It was as we were walking by a park, about an hour after the initial ingestion, that I noticed that the green lawns we were walking by had taken on a more high definition sheen. The leaves also stood out, and everything generally appears more pronounced. This was roughly normal for my psychedelic come ups. We enjoyed our walk, laughing and joking, and arrived at my friend J’s house. J invited us to smoke out of his new bong, and I enjoyed watching the pronounced edge of the smoke fill the bong—at least at first. However, as time drew on, I began to grow nervous. I was experiencing a distinct sensation of descent, which I had never experienced on psychedelics before. My visuals also began to progress beyond the sharpness I had initially experienced, with the carpet slowly swirling around my legs and the walls beginning to breathe. I retreated to another room to listen to music, but in there the carpet continued to move around me and the fine wood furniture that filled the room, which I believe was a study, appeared to lean over me and extend towards me. The computer screen for the desktop computer gave a distinct sense of observation, so I turned it around, then sat cross legged in the center of the room and put in my headphones to listen to music.

The music, which was my psychedelic EDM playlist, normally put me in a good, enjoyable mood, but as I sat in the darkened study the song I was listening to made me think of diamonds and blood rain and severely heightened the feeling of descent and impending doom. I took my headphones out, but the silence of the room felt smothering, so I continued listening to the blood music until A came to check in on me. I was agitated, but calm at this point, so we decided it was best to return to his house.

The walk back felt interminable. This was about three hours into the event, and I was tripping hard. The descent feeling had resolved, but as we walked back through the afternoon sun the houses rippled, and I felt as though we were being followed. We made a stop by the grocery store, where I picked up a can of tea to drink. When I drank it, I felt as though something became stuck in my throat. This would be important later.

We returned to A’s apartment and his girlfriend met us there. By this point, the borders of objects were shedding small fractal particles and noises were amplified. I was keenly aware of my heartbeat in away I had not experienced before in my life. My legs were also tensing up. I sat down and watched a nature show as the other two occupants of the house made dinner. The tense, shaky feeling spread to my arms over the next couple of hours, and the fractals, which I was hoping would subside, only grew worse, beginning to make my vision confused.

At this point, the feeling if something caught in my throat was unbearable, so I coughed. When I coughed, it felt as though something shifted in my throat. I freaked out, and did not cough again, resulting in a feeling of strangulation. The shift was worse, though, so I didn’t try to clear my throat. My arms began tensing up in earnest, though, and my feeling of panic grew. I told my friend I thought I was having a seizure. I curled up in a ball on the floor and put a pencil in my mouth. The shaking grew worse, and he brought a blanket to cover me. He began frantically researching what I had taken. At this point, time is a little disjointed. I called D and told him to go f—- himself for giving me fake acid at some point, and I remember A and his girlfriend sitting my me, concerned. After a while the shaking subsided, and I gathered my wits about me enough to say I would like to sleep. A and his girlfriend agreed, and retreated to their room, leaving me on the couch. The fractals began to subside slowly, but I had become aware of my breathing, and just as I was about to fall asleep it would feel like my breathing would stop. I remained awake, manually breathing, until sleep snuck up on me and I fell blissfully unconscious.

This experience completely changed my bodily awareness. Any psychoactive drug, including cannabis, made me acutely aware of my own body, and even in moments of complete sobriety I am uncomfortably aware of my own heartbeat. I also credit this experience with giving me an autoimmune thyroid disorder. Whether or not this is true is another matter. This was a life changing experience, but tragically so. I have not been able to get the same enjoyment out of psychedelics since then, and have essentially stopped using them. Overall, the lesson is: know your drugs, and don’t take the bitter acid.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 116900
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Dec 22, 2022	Views: 519
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NBOMe Series (539), Cannabis (1) : Combinations (3), Difficult Experiences (5), Post Trip Problems (8), What Was in That? (26), Small Group (2-9) (17)