DOSE:

25 mg

oral

4-AcO-DET

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I've generally been pretty good in the past about new substances at Burning Man. Good being that I have always had a sitter, have taken a moderate to low dose, and have been able to make it to the porta potties on my own. Well, unless I was looking for an excuse to get a strapping young lad to carry me somewhere.

This year, I was not so bright. I didn't really schedule out my activities well, wound up having to rearrange substances several times, and for some reason, listened when a hard-headed friend told me that the 4-Acetoxy-DET I had was from a 'notoriously weak batch'. Fortunately, I had a limited amount and was not able to double my dose as my initial knee jerk reaction told me to.

I had already stayed out late playing a few times earlier in the week, so my body was already a little run down, which may have contributed to the experience.

My partner and I ingested 45 and 25mg respectively, and laid down in our dome not really expecting to feel anything, but hoping to work up the energy to wander around that night. About 15 to 20 minutes after swallowing (on an empty stomach), my partner started getting aural signals. I still wasn't convinced that I would feel anything, so he dismissed it, and went to the bathroom. While he was gone, the music surrounding me took on a really dark tone, but instead of frightening me, it made me giggle – I was just really excited I might actually get high. I just laid back and opened my eyes wide and enjoyed the weird things sound was doing around me.

When my boy returned, we both agreed that we were pretty rapidly getting pretty high. The bouncing sound in the dome bothered him, and we thought that, since our climb was going pretty fast and pretty steep, maybe we should go tell our friend that had warned us of the inactivity earlier.

Exiting the dome, depth perception was completely warped. My auditory hallucinations became so intense, I was convinced that people were shouting things at me. It was a little unsettling, and I started to wonder how long this would go on, just as the distortion of my perspective filled in with strobing patterns.

During my peak, the audio and visual noise was so distracting, that I couldn't focus on anything but the beacon we were headed towards. Unable to find our friends, we stumbled into a chill space and found other people we knew to sit out the heaviest part of it with. My partner seemed to handle his end of it remarkably well, while I just laid on the ground as they all sat around me talking, going over their experiences with the substance. All the people around me were folks I trusted, there was no ill will or anything, but something about conversation started making me really uncomfortable.

A very close friend showed up in a group and saw that I was pretty uneasy with whatever was going on. She managed to talk to me about it and figured I would be best off back at camp. She and her entourage led us back, and now, conversation was becoming unbearable. It wasn't that it was difficult to speak, but something about my trip made social cues and peoples insecurities glaringly apparent. It actually made my stomach ache when people would say things I knew made someone else uncomfortable, or pursued a line of conversation too far. In this crowd, where I knew less people, my friend took the lead and asked them to keep quiet around me.

By the time we reached camp, I was really starting to enjoy my visuals, and had figured out that I could only be around certain people if they were going to speak. My partner was feeling far more adventurous than I was, and took off to explore on his own, while I hid out in the dome with my friend.

With just the two of us, conversation was easy, and I was comfortable enough to slip in and out of a daze, getting lost in my hallucinations. At this point, I started having really vivid, dripping liquid metal imagery all around us, and found it was more comfortable to let my mind go wild with less stimulation than more. All of the busy lights and noise outside became intrusive easily, and when too much, would still bring me physical discomfort.

I peed a LOT. My friend is fortunately very patient and led me back and forth to the porta potties (since I had absolutely no sense of direction), and made sure I kept drinking water with the rate it was dehydrating me at. Luckily, I really didn't have any sort of physical side effects unless I was overstimulated with light or sound.

Once I had plateaued a bit, we experimented with how much conversation I could take, and with who. The social aspects of this drug are what fascinate me the most. I tend to have a similar reaction on most psychedelics, where I'm extremely aware of social interactions, but never to this extent before. It was like holding my friends up under a microscope and magnifying all their strengths and weaknesses. I didn't really judge people for them, but when weaknesses were particularly apparent, it would actually hurt. On the flipside, the people who could just maintain a nice conversation with me and be normal earned big time superhero points.

I eventually reached a point where I was self sufficient, and my partner returned. We talked about our evening for a bit, and then went to sleep around 4:30 (about 6.5 hours after I swallowed the chemical). When I woke up a few hours later, I still had a vague twinkle of my visuals left. I'm fairly certain I wasn't dehydrated at that point, but still felt pretty good physically, and took a nice nap later in the day. Although I still had some visuals after I woke up, once I had my coffee and and a nap, it was like I hadn't done anything the night before. Very little hangover, despite not getting much sleep.


On the whole, I really enjoyed this experience. It gave me a lot to think about, both during and after the trip, and for me had very little body load. In the future, I think I would prefer to take it in a small group of trusted people, in a less intense environment. Burning Man has a tendency to give me sensory overload when sober, and 4 Acetoxy DET struck me a little bit like 2ct7 in that it generates enough of its own noise to not need that sort of supplement.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 17288
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 5, 2002	Views: 21,500
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4-AcO-DET (188) : First Times (2), Difficult Experiences (5), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)