DOSE: T+ 0:00	20 mg	oral	2C-I	(capsule)
T+ 2:50	20 mg	oral	2C-I	(powder / crystals)
T+ 4:50	repeated	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

On one of the last days of this past spring semester, as a celebration of the onset of summer vacation, my friends and I decided it would be fun to trip on acid. However, our acid contact had gone out of town for the day, so I went to find some mushrooms instead. I went to my local fungus dealer (call him Dealer), but his magic caps were greivously overpriced. 'I do have these 2C-I pills, though,' he says.

I'd heard of 2C-I before this, I'd been told that it was basically distilled mushrooms. Yeah. It's not.

Anyway, I bought 5 20mg capsules. I later found out that only three people (A, B, and myself) were planning to trip that day, so I decided to save the other two capsules for another occasion.

The three of us popped one 20mg capsule each at 7:00pm, having been told that the trip would come on in about an hour and then last five hours or so. We'd come back to reality at one or two in the morning. That seemed reasonable. We walked back to my dorm room and chilled there for about an hour and a half. We wondered why it wasn't starting yet. We talked for a while about random crap, a little antsy and wondering why it wasn't working. Maybe one pill wasn't enough.

T+2:50
We'd given up on the drug at this point, and B had gone to spend some time with his girlfriend. A and I decided that the 2C-I was probably crappy and that we should eat the remaining two capsules. We popped them open and ate the powder with our fingers. It tasted like ground-up orange peels.

'This is vitamin-C,' said A, 'Your guy gave us vitamin-C.'

'Wow...' I was actually thinking along the same lines. I wouldn't have expected this particular dealer to gyp me, but I was very disappointed at this point. I called Dealer's cell phone. Straight to voicemail. 'Yeah... um... how long is this stuff supposed to take? 'Cuz I've been sitting here for like three hours and it hasn't kicked in at all. Call me back.'

T+3:00
We totally give up on the drug at this point. There's a NORMAL (alcohol) party coming up tonight, maybe we'll just go to that. I decide to drive A back to his dorm. As we're walking to my car, everything seems a bit surreal, dreamlike. Walking moves me forward but I don't notice the actual action of walking. The world just kinda comes toward me.

‘Um... A, I think I'm actually feeling something.'

'Dude, you're tripping on vitamin-C. It's all in your head, man.'

'Well...' I smile. There's a definite hint of euphoria coming on. 'If I am, then I like it. Either I'm tripping on these capsules, or I'm losing my mind. Either way, it's very cool.'

A sighs. 'Alright man, enjoy your placebo effect.'

'Maybe I will.' I smile. This is niiiice. I do actually believe at this point that it's a placebo effect (stuuuupid).

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
I drive A down to his quad. It's not a bad drive, but I feel like it takes forever. I notice my other friend's (C's) SUV in front of me on the way there. C happens to be a very experienced acid tripper and actually has a mild case of HPPD. I call him up... I tell him I'm driving behind him and that he should meet me down by A's quad. I remember that he'd wanted to go to that drinking party, so I figure I'll go in his car. I drop A off and C parks next to my car.

'This feeling is getting stronger,' I say to A. 'I really think it's the drug.' A looks condescending and disappointed. He never believes me.

'It's not working, man, get over it.'

'Whatever dude, whatever.'

'Enjoy being tricked by your own--'
'--yeah alright bye.'

I walk back to C's car.


'When are we heading over to beerfest?' I ask.

'In an hour or so. Let's go back to your room and start pregaming.' He looks over at A. 'What was that about?'

'Aaah... well, we took some 2C-I about three and a half hours ago and he's not feeling it, and I THINK I'm starting to feel it. But it may have been vitamin-C.' C looks into my eyes (I guess he was looking at my pupils) and laughs knowingly.

'Yeah, you're not going to the party, trust me. You're tripping.'

'I don't know, it might have been vitamin-C, it tasted like--'
'--trust me, you're tripping. Just follow me.'

I get back into my car and follow his car back to my quad. The trip takes forever. I'm pretty sure he's right, this is definitely NOT normal. We go back to my room and I just sit down and relax while my friend starts drinking. I break out some my weed stash because C's friend (D) wants to smoke, but I don't start smoking yet because I want to feel the 2C-I on its own, to see what it really does.

T+3:50
I'm relaxing in my favorite chair. D is rolling a blunt, C is drinking a beer, and I'm spacing out, staring at the carpet. I'm staring at the veins in the carpet. I think to myself, 'I never realized that the carpet had veins before...' They pulse rhythmically with a beautiful, pure white light. Very interesting. I wonder why I never noticed this before.

'Hey... guys... is the carpet pulsingating?'

'What?' D looks up from his blunt wrapping.

'Does the carpet look like it's pulsingating, to you?' C starts to laugh.

'(Author)... do you think that the carpet is pulsing? Or do you think that it could POSSIBLY have something to do with the drugs you ate after lunch?'

'I'm pretty sure that was vitamin-C.'

'Huh?' D looks confused. C answers.

'(Author) has never so much as tripped on anything in his life and he eats a fucking research chemical...'

'I tripped on the Salvia...'

'That stuff is weak, man...'

'No it's not, you just don't understand it.'

'Yeah, OK.'

'Well anyway this is nowhere NEAR as intense as the Salvia.' It wasn't.

'Just wait 'till you peak, man.'

By this point in the conversation, not only is the carpet pulsating with light, but the light from the hallway overhead lamp is being drawn, in streams, in my direction. The woodgrain on the door at the end of the hall is pulsing too, it's popping out of the door and then receding back into it. The room is also changing colors slightly between reds and greens, as if someone was changing the color of the ambient lights. At this point I understand that I'm actually tripping and that it's DEFINITELY not vitamin-C.

'OK, yeah I will... but I'm telling you, I can see where this trip is going and it's not even close to the intensity of the Salvia trip.'
'Just wait and see, man, just wait and see.'

I realize at this point that A and B still think the capsules were fake. I pull out my phone. C advises me against calling anyone while I'm tripping, but I tell him that I need to do this. I call A and tell him that the drug is DEFINITELY working. At this point (T+3.75), A still isn't feeling it yet. He still thinks it's a placebo effect when I tell him. He won't believe me. I call R, a mutual friend of ours, and tell her to keep an eye on A and make sure he doesn't hurt himself, because he doesn't realize that he's got 40mg of a very potent hallucinogen in his system.

'Forty miligrams?' C has been listening to me while I'm on the phone. 'I thought you said they were 20mg capsules.'

'Yeah... well we thought they weren't working so we ate another one.' C laughs.

'Rookie mistake. If you don't feel the effects, double the dosage.' He laughs again.

I try to call B, but his phone is off. I get worried and decide to go looking for him in my building. I stand up and the floor is swirling in little whirlpools, and bubbling like molten steel. When I start to walk, the carpet undulates under my feet in flowing waves. C tells me to stay put, but I tell him I just need to find B.

'Trust me, B knows he's tripping.'

'I don't think he does.'

B had only taken one 20mg capsule. I didn't know if it had hit him yet. I go across the hall and find B playing Street Fighter, his favorite pastime. He's yelling stuff like:

'Whoa... look at Ryu's face, son... it's morphing... do you not SEE that?!?... I never noticed that the background of this level swirls around... that's so FLY son...'

Everyone else in the room was looking at him a bit oddly. They were smoking a blunt of haze but were definitely not at his level.

'B,' I say, 'the 2C-I is definitely working. Concentrate on something and you'll get really cool visuals.' I had just realized this myself.

'Yeah I know, son... this is really COOL son...'

Other people in that room were not very tripper-friendly. They were starting to get annoyed at B and me for being all hyper and excited.

'Let's get this trip back together,' I said. 'Come in the other room and let's look at the walls.'

'Maybe in a few minutes, this video game is so FLY right now son...'

I go back in the other room.

'Yeah he knows. He's playing Street Fighter.' C looks horrified.

'WHAT? Video games is like the worst possible waste of a trip, dude. Get him in here. This is where the trip is.'

My phone rings. It's R.

'Hey, (Author)... I think we're going to walk up to your quad now.'

'Awesome! Is A feeling it yet?'

'Yeah. We're gonna come up there, alright?'

'Yeah, great, come over.'

'K, cool. Bye.'

I go over to get B. He's pacing around his room, ranting about how cool the visuals are and how weird his perception of reality is.

Someone brings a gram of reaaaally good skunk weed and a really trippy-looking glass pipe, so I stay in that room to smoke a little. Now, I've got a really really high tolerance to THC, but the few hits I take get me very... SOMETHING. I don't really get STONED off of it, but it really accelerates my trip. The skunk-smell of it is delicious to me, and the smell alone is worth staying in the room for as long as possible. It's intoxicating and delightful.

My friends in that room usually like to toke up with the lights OFF, and so the lights are off. B and I, however, are annoyed at the lack of visuals in this environment. 'Turn the lights back on,' we implore, but the consensus in the room is for darkness. So B and I go back to my room, where C and D are still drinking. A and R arrive soon after. A comes through the front door and gives me a hug.

'Props, man, this stuff is incredible.' I wonder why his clothes are soaking wet when he gives me the hug.

'Wow, how hard is it raining right now?' I ask. 'This stuff is so crazy... I had no idea it was even raining at all.'

'It's not raining,' laughs R. 'A has been sweating balls for the past half hour.'

'Ewwwwwwwwwww.' I smell myself. 'Awwwww maaaan...'

Meanwhile, B and I were both cold. Apparently different people react differently to the 2C-I. Either way, I'm EXTREMELY happy to have the whole trip back together... like everything is right with the world.

T+4:50

This phase of the trip is (looking back), the most pleasant, enlightening and fun of the night. C and D have decided to go to the party, but A, B, R and I just feel like chilling and tripping out in my suite.

R is the only one not tripping, and she's really regretting it now. Every so often during the unbroken conversation at this point, I turn to her and say, 'See, this is what I felt like when you and A were tripping on the acid and I was just stoned.' (That had happened about a week before, see my experience report on Salvia divinorum). I pack a few vaporizer-hits of cannabis and pass the tube around for everyone to partake. I make sure that she gets the most, so that she doesn't feel like the only sober one in the room.

Anyway, during this unknown span of time (probably about two hours), A and I are engrossed in some of the most honest and philosophical conversation we've ever had. Nonstop. We often finish each other's sentences and only stop to take a breath when the other is speaking. B is listening intently, but he seems to be on a bit of a different wavelength, I never fully understand what he's talking about. He'd only taken 20mg, after all. R just sits there the whole time, trying to comprehend what A and I are talking about. The visuals continue for A, B, and me throughout this entire conversation, and they are strongest when I look at B, who is a dark figure against a white wall.

One major topic of conversation at this point is my developing belief that this 2C-I trip will last forever, and that we'll never come out of it. This is fueled by my understanding of C's HPPD, which he describes as 'always tripping.'

A notes that 'It's a chemical imbalance in our brains. It will work itself out in a few hours and we'll be back to normal.' I, however, argue that the philosophical ideas and cosmic understandings that we are now perceiving will ALLOW us to ALWAYS perceive the world as we do at this point. The 2C-I may leave us, but the understanding will remain (I was wrong about this). Even the visuals will remain, since they are REAL and OBSERVABLE patterns that are simply not NOTICED without the aid of psychedelics (I was wrong on this point as well, the visuals are hallucinations and are not actually hidden patterns). Now that we've seen them, we know what to look for when we're sober, and we can pick out these cool visual effects whenever we want to (wrong).

Anyway, that was a really cool phase of the trip. At around 2:30am, R was getting antsy and wanted to go to sleep (she had a final exam the next day), so we walked to the late-night food court. The walk was very cool, I felt like everything around me was a beautiful, surrealist painting. A small group of people walking toward us on the sidewalk were a dynamic part of the painting, growing in dimension with each step forward. When our group passed their group, it felt like we had 'entered' the painting.

I ate some mashed potatoes at the deli. I hadn't been able to eat prior to that, as my stomach was very tight. The consistency of the mashed potatoes was really cool in my mouth, moreso than the taste. I felt good after eating, but I felt less 'trippy.' A, who hadn't eaten anything, was still tripping balls.

A bunch more boring stuff happened after that, I was cold and uncomfortable outdoors so we went back to my room after dropping R off at her dorm. The outdoors did give me a feeling of 'walking the earth with a truer perception than that of my ancestors,' though, which was really cool.

My trip ended at about 4:30am. A came back to reality at about 7:00am or so. I assume I came back to reality earlier than he did because (a) my onset was an hour before his, and (b) I ate food and he didn't. I don't know how long B's trip lasted because he went to sleep when the rest of us left. So the shortest trip for the 40mg dose was about 6.5 hours, the longest was about 8 hours.

It had been a beautiful trip. I may have been TOO honest at times, I said things that I kinda regretted saying, but it was beautiful not to be encumbered by the chains of socially-acceptable politeness, and I don't regret that at all. It was like thoughts just flowed from my brain to my mouth without the usual intermediate processing.

One of the major insights I gained on this trip is an understanding of what it's like to be insane in a society where insanity is not acceptable... I feel now that insane people probably have perceptions of reality that are not inherently 'worse' than our own, though we (as 'sane' people) may not be able to understand them. I used to be a very strong empirical objectivist, but I'm now more inclined to see 'reality' as thing relative to each observer. The Universe does exist objectively and would continue to do so without our experience of it, but each person's REALITY is different (and each is just as valid as any other), based on his own personal perspective. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. I understand that a star is a huge burning ball of gas. My ancestors understood it as a tiny hole in a celestial sphere. Both of us live with our own realities, and both of us are correct inside of our own minds, which is where all of experience exists anyway.

It's exactly as B said during the trip: 'It's all perception, that's all it is.'

It was fun and exciting and I never had a negative thought that could lead to a bad trip. Even the idea that we'd 'be this way for ever' was exciting and fun to me (though, back in this reality, I'd really rather not do that). It's also great for philosophizing.

I did have a slight headache for a couple of days afterward, I don't know if it was related to the 2C-I.

An additional note: some other people I know took the same exact 2C-I capsules a few days later WHILE DRUNK... they all threw up. I don't know how the rest of their trips were.

Smoking cannabis on 2C-I, it has a relaxing effect and it gets rid of the queasiness associated with the trip. It also seems to accelerate the trip.

I told my friend C that even at the peak, the 2C-I is nowhere near as intense as the ego-death from Salvia (though the 2C-I is way more enjoyable). He now has more of a respect for Salvinorin A.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 53320
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 18, 2006	Views: 6,190
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
2C-I (172) : First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)