DOSE:

10 mg

oral

2C-I

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

First, a summary: great time, minor psychedelia, MDMA-like effects (or so I assume, never having tried MDMA), tremendous social-skills improvement. However, it's 85 hours after injestion as I write this and I still don't feel like I've really come down. Which (apart from my good mood, and frustration at being unable to concentrate properly or relax -- I've slept 8 hours in the past four days and my eyes are glassy) is concerning.

I got home from work (making pitas for college kids) around 3 a.m. My housemate (henceforth P) and his girlfriend, it was revealed, had taken 2CI about an hour before. I was tired, bored, and in the mood to get impulsively fucked up on something, and dimly aware that that wasn't the best state to be in when using psychadelics; nevertheless, I decided to take some myself.

P opened a 20 mg capsule and divided the powder into 2 fairly-equal piles (on top of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which seemed appropriate); one, he poured into a water-filled teacup for me. I joked that I'd drink it when the zen nature of the situation impelled me to, but the zen nature was taking its time (stupid zen nature. hmph.); I smoked a cigarette to cut through the nervousness and went to the living room, where I felt more comfortable, and drank it.

Within 40 minutes I felt a smoth wave of . . . something. I was more alert and conversation was eaiser; a bit like the low (15 mcg?) doses of LSD I've tried only calmer and clearer (and feeling less like my mind was being pushed in a random direction). I talked with another friend of mine about his old trips ('so I was popping mushrooms all morning, just to get through work. . .') and intellectual things I can't remember. I do remember badly wanting physical human contact, and seriously contemplating asking him for a platonic hug before deciding that was absurd.

By 4:45 P and his girlfriend were shagging and we decided to visit some other friends downtown; we stopped at a tiny diner on the way there. Conversation was great; I was much less inhibited than usual ('damn you!' in a british accent out to car window to the closed pizza place we'd been heading for) and more empathetic and inclined to say things. By the end of my hot dog I had borrowed a pen from the waitress and was excitedly explaining the difficulty of distinguishing between a generalized tautology and a proper ontology, using the ketchup and mustard dispensers as props. (I thought my altered state was obvious, but at one point he said 'Oh, I forgot you took that shit. How's it going?')

Most of the way downtown, I got out of the minivan to walk the last 5 minutes through the empty pre-dawn streets. The sky was amazingly dark-bright blue and the white blossoms on the trees were beautiful.

My downtown friend's housemate, D, is (like most of the people mentioned thus far) a friend from middle school; but we'd drifted apart. Backstory: at age 14 I was a fairly well-adjusted kid. By a couple years later, through some quirk of neurochemestry or psychology, I was a panic-striken suicidal mess, failing my classes, unable to interact with anyone on even a fairly basic level, and convinced against all available evidence that my respiratory system wasn't working properly. I managed for the most part to keep my problems from anyone else, and didn't get much help at the time. I've been recovering (therapy, yeah) for the past several years and living a fairly normal life for the past couple.

D, from painful personal experience, is hypersensitive to personality changes, drug-induced or otherwise. By the time I got there I was (in retrospect) peaking, and had to fight off the urge to hug him, or tell him what a cool guy I thought he was and how I wished we could have stayed better friends, or something; I made normal (if much-more-excited-than-usual) conversation and actually connected with him; we joked about his cell-phone's corny sounds and other epherema and I wondered vaguely about what he was thinking about and his self-image. Mostly-normal social interaction, the kind of thing I hadn't done (with anyone) for a really, really long time, since 1997 or so. I could look at people directly when I talked to them and genuinely felt all the inflections I gave my speech; I realized I'd been mostly faking it for I don't know how long.

We left; it was around 7:30. I got dropped off at home 20 min later and was by myself (P otherwise engaged, still). I really needed someone to hang out with, so I looked for the housecat. What I wrote the next day:

I was expecting this to be another depressed ending. 'I just wanted to pet the cat, damnit, and it ran away from me,' and insert several paragraphs exposition above about housemate's traumatized ex-shelter cat and its crashing into walls running away from me. But I did manage to pet, in fact, the cat. Fatty. I still can't help thinking of him as 'the cat'.

After making friends with Fatty, feeling great, I sat in the living room and wrote this:

No cool patterns but things are warm -- colors a lot richer. My hand [arrow to the side of the page, pointing at it] The kind of splendid oil-paint excess of of a 18th century sea painting. Golden, fading to blue with the shadow from the lamp, a scarlet sunrise.

I noticed how nice the letters looked on the page -- cleanlined, more than usual, and wrote this:

Is this what's going to happen? Have an experience that can be written about and then not be motivated to write anything meaningful? 'Yeah, empathogen. Connected, there.' Is this the ultimate dichotomy: pretty, intellectually empty empathy/page design vs. ugly, tortured philosophical insight?

I messed around for a couple more hours (tried mastrubating, which was only fractionally more enjoyable than usual and significantly more difficult), then spent most of the afternoon and evening in bed, trying unsuccessfully to sleep, finding shapes in the patterned wall-plaster. At 2 a.m. I was supposed to start driving with some friends (aforementioned and otherwise) to a pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C. (10 hours each way) but in no condition to do so; I wasn't as hyperkinetic as before but still, to be blunt, fucked up. D and another kid alternated driving my car while I kept trying to sleep; at this point I'd been awake 36 hours. I managed to get 2 hours or so through southern pennsylvania and woke up to the kind of blank, slightly fuzzy feeling that apparently often follows MDMA nights -- but I was still smiling from the sheer 'wow I feel good' every time I closed my eyes and conversing easily.

(Empathy is really fucking amazing. It's striking how I never realized it was gone until it came back these past couple few days. Sitting in a room with a friend is almost like having two sets of eyes. Reading and watching movies are infinitely better -- empathy is necessary to feel like you're there, to get into the story and not just be sitting in your living room, looking at moving colors on a screen.)

The rally was fun. T, D, and I successfully pursuaded the others not to smoke marijuana in the national mall (the fuck??) and I got 6 or 7 hours of sleep in the hotel that night. In the morning I still wasn't back to normal, but rested enough to drive.

I was also more and more worried, contemplating the possibility that I was a genetic freak who lacked the enzymes to break down 2CI and wondering what its continued presence, and accompanying serotinin (?), would do to me. 70 hours is the equivalent of 10 MDMA doses; would I have dementia within a week, consigned to e-tardation?

When I got home (newly rebonded, to some extent, with D) I called P in as much of a panic as my neurochemestry would allow and asked for the number of his brother, biochemestry graduate student and general pyschadelic guru, who reassured me: it was a small possibility, he conceded (and this is heavily paraphrased, so any scientific mistakes are likely mine), that I couldn't break down the 2CI, but more likely, it had triggered a neurochemical cascade that was self-perpetuating even after the initial trigger was gone -- I had more neurotransmitters (active ones, at least) and was 'operating at a higher level' (I took that part with a grain of salt). As long as I felt fine, he said, things were probably alright. But 'it's temporary -- everything's temporary.'

I told him I felt great, if a bit spaced out, and headed to a co-op I'd lived in during the summer, where, freer of the fear that what I was feeling was slowly damaging me, I had more conversation in 2 hours than in my entire couple months living there. I played the piano there as well (I usually do) but this time it was great -- I was able to connect with the emotions the chords and notes carried much more than usual and made, consequentially, much, much better music. Then I came back and finished writing this.

I don't know what's going to happen. If I'm permanently injured, or permanently helped, I'll submit an update. These are extremely powerful, relatively untested chemicals, not to be trifled with. For better or worse, temporarily or permanently, they alter the mechanics of your brain, your self. It'll be amazing if this helps me, but suck tremendously if it does the opposite. Thanks for your time.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 33160
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 6, 2008	Views: 4,838
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2C-I (172) : HPPD / Lasting Visuals (40), Multi-Day Experience (13), Glowing Experiences (4), Alone (16)