There's every other drug that's achieved street drug status on there. Figured I'd have to learn chemistry and synth it myself. You are definitely more knowledgeable on the subject than I am. I'd love to go to school and study Organic Chemistry. Did you study it in school or are you all self taught? I know that there have been a number of great chemists who were self taught without school.
I would argue that PCP is kind of a vestigial drug at this point, it got so optics-fucked by being a "black drug", like crack vs. cocaine, or PCP vs. ketamine, the nearest analog that rich white people used is fine and acceptable but if a poor person or black person uses it, all of a sudden it's evil and makes you permanently crazy according to any old normie on the street. In school I got a degree in InfoSec, essentially studying propaganda and the interfaces of society and technology, and the ways that it presents a ton of issues to which we have virtually zero solutions. My background with all of that is weird, I started coding at 8, was deep into hacking by about 13-14, and it spiraled into a degree/career that has me now feeling like a fucking luddite. The attention economy makes me feel like the Unabomber, I guess I'm more along the lines of the "technooptimists" a la Aaron Swartz (RIP) in that technology should remain as anonymous and distributed as possible, but at the same time, the more it develops the more distance I believe is necessary to live a good life. Part of my adoration of BL is the fact that it's still an old school message board that doesn't want to connect your personal identity to others in a way that could provide meaningful advertising revenue. Sorry for the rant about this, every day that passes I just think more and more about how much technooptimism is a thing of the past that seems so distant now.
Clandestine chemistry was around me for as long as I can recall, specifically the production of amphetamines, then cannabis concentrates, then GHB. PCP that's produced in America is almost exclusively from the DMV/Philly area, and SoCal, both of these places produce some SUPER heinously polluted products that cannot hold a fucking candle to well made arylcyclohexylamines, I'm talking sub-20% purity in almost every sample analyzed, alongside things like PCA and elemental bromine contaminating samples to the point where I would personally avoid street PCP, just out of self-preservation. It's not tough to make if you're an actual chemist, but if you're making it how these gang affiliated cooks make it, in plastic trash bins with pool cleaner and shit, you're just not going to get a good product. Somehow the shit I went to school for and the things I'm good at have zero overlap, I'm just a nerdy autodidact. Attempts at diacetylating morphine when I was a high schooler were unproductive, but I was capable of making neat fireworks and I ended up focusing more on fragrance chem until I was about 21, LSD reoriented me towards psychedelic chem.
Man, that is so fucking awesome, pardon my french. Chemistry such as that really isn't suited to the city life. It's great that you're on your way to making this dream of yours happen. The dream of many of us here on BL, really. Having the possibility and ability to obtain those rarities through sweat, tears and good ole American hard work is really special. I can only imagine how good it must feel to work towards something and obtain it through you're own ability. The 4C compounds I find very interesting. It's a shame they haven't popped up. 2C-T-2 is by far my favorite psychedelic. I only tried it twice in fairly low doses and that was enough for it to earn its spot as my favorite psychedelic of all-time. That one is the best of the magical half dozen in my experience. Would also be interesting to see how TMT and TeMPEA are in comparison to Mescaline. So many things to explore, so little time. Chemistry is such a cool science. It seems like anything is possible with enough knowledge and hard work. It's ammazing to think that for all of the known drugs and psychoactive substances, that we may have only scratched the surface.
I appreciate the sentiments here, I'm always working on nerdy projects wherever I am, and whatever state I'm in. 4C-X's likely haven't been on the market much because they are just not economically right for production, they require higher doses to produce less effects than 2C-X's or DOx's, so why would they be produced if the motive is profit? The only people I've known who produce 4C-X's are silicon valley tech people who were trying to "optimize [their] workflow", but the concept of utilizing psychedelics to improve shareholder value as opposed to more meaningful things in life seems goofy as hell to me. 2C-T's in general seem neat, the only 2,4,5-Trisubstituted phenethylamines I've used so far are DOB, DOM, DOC, and 2C-B, then a few 25X-NBXX's. A group of chemists I've corresponded with have sampled TMT, 4-AcO-TMT, 5-MeO-TMT, and TeMPEA, and they found only 4-AcO-TMT to be worthwhile, but a couple noted unique effects from TMT orally in high doses while others reported it as completely inert.
Chemistry is one of the sciences that I feel got fucked over by the American education system terribly, because much like language learning or computer programming, people view it as exceptionally difficult when it's, in fact, simpler than I could reasonably articulate. Chemistry is also vital to common activities like cooking, yet people act like they're two separate things, when really cooking is just a sort of abstraction of chemistry that we're acclimated to being around. One of my biggest motivations with it is just to do my best with emulating Shulgin's mission of finding the best therapeutic psychedelics for psychotherapeutic applications.
I only really keep up with the USA RC scene, and I don't do a great job of that because I only know of one vendor. I try to keep an eye on things going on in Canada and China as it's still possible to get things though. It's also interesting to see what China is putting out. Saw the nitazenes become available about a month or so before it hit the USA. Was sad knowing that it was going to kill tons of people but nothing that I could do to stop it. But yeah, the RC scene in the states has been pretty dry for a while. I don't know if there are many vendors left.
RCs in the US are so fascinating to me because we have this pseudo-RC market of "gas station drugs", we used to find 2C-B and 5-MeO-DiPT in smoke shops and gas stations, now we're finding 4-HO-MET in gummies and tianeptine analogs in liquid shots, it's pretty wild. I think that the drug war originating in the US is why we have this kind of hush-hush culture surrounding RCs, whereas places like Canada and the Netherlands never had to be so quiet about drugs in the first place. Just my hunch on the matter.
Sounds like you have a bit of a psychoactive garden going on which is one of my dreams. I'm living in an apartment so its not possible for me, but to you intend to expand it?
I'm aiming at probably 600-1,000 square feet of greenhouse space, working with ~18 pepper plants in 200 square feet of space right now but I'll be trying to fit a couple hundred cacti in there too. The Lophophora plants are in my bedroom currently, but since I'm living in Florida now things like kratom and coca will grow super well. Living in an apartment you could still certainly cultivate columnar cacti, psilocybin containing fungi, HBWR, Banisteriopsis caapi, etc. if you wanted to, hell I was running a 28 plant cannabis grow out of a 7'x11' bedroom at one point. If you ever have any questions about this, don't hesitate to ask!
Ambien is kind of interesting. It's extremely hit or miss for me. 9 times out of 10 I don't feel much. It's also a shitty hypnotic for me personally. I've taken up to 50mg and couldn't get to sleep. It can be kinda cozy too and the short duration is nice. I've only been able to get that strange sort of delerious, sort of psychedelic, sort of benzo like experience once and that was pretty interesting. I've never experienced anything like that before. I need to try my amanita some time. I picked a few caps and I should have enough for a dose. I'll probably try smaller doses as I'm more interested in it's hypnotic properties as a sleep aid.
Most people seem to have a super hit or miss experience with Ambien like you mentioned here, but both Ambien as well as Lorazepam are consistently profoundly hallucinogenic for me, and I have no idea what causes that difference between people. I'm suspecting it's an enzymatic quirk but I have no idea. My current experience with Amanitas stems from a single batch, ~2/3-3/4 of a pound that one of my best friends shipped my way, and tbh I don't think it's Amanita muscaria. I think it's either pantherina or regalis, because a full smoked dose of this is like 5-10 milligrams of mushroom matter, not even just the cap, but any of the mushroom. If it was muscaria, it'd be potent to the point of being record setting, leading me to suspect it's one of the varieties more potent than muscaria. This shit feels like smoking Ambien, but way better and with less of a burn on the throat.
Yeah, I know that stimulant use is huge with trans-folk (trans-women in particular) and the queer community as a whole. I now know that a huge reason for my meth use is that it allowed me to explore my sexuality without some of the fear and anxiety that I had built up through my childhood/teen years over the fact that I might be gay. Also helped me feel more comfortable about my gender expression without as much fear about what other people may think. Going to have a nice psychedelic endeavor when I can with the intent to process and hopefully get control over some anxiety about the trans experience and my gender expression in the future. Still gotta tell dad and grandma and the extended family which is a source of anxiety. Anyways, I'm getting off track a bit.
A friend of mine who's ~32 and I always talk about how wild it is that we feel such a generational gap between the two of us with me being 26. It's super shocking how he and others around his age had this internalized fear of being perceived as queer, but I nor really any of my peers ever did. I came out at 15 and the only thing that changed is that my homies realized that since I'm into dudes, they can send me a fit pic and ask "Hey, does this look good? If not what should I change". He took until he was about 30 or so to come out, we're both bi, he's cis and I'm uh, idk, cis-ish? Agender? Idk, AMAB but I've never felt pulled either way. I dress masc, have a bigass beard, long hair, often do my nails, my straight friends tell me that they can't tell me apart from most metalheads but people around me a lot could often tell I was gender non-conforming in subtle ways. My mom said she knew I was queer just from my shoe choices, which I find hilarious. I'm grateful that I've had a 220 lb male body virtually my whole life (hit puberty at 8), because when trouble occurs I'm the stocky mfer who just slings a hoodie over someone's face from behind and pulls them down into a horrible (for them) grappling situation. If I woke up tomorrow in a female body I wouldn't give a fuck outside of just being annoyed I need to carry a gun more often than I need to right now.
The friend who's ~32 always talks about how growing up so many things about masculinity were pushed on him, the scorekeeping of how many women he's fucked, a bunch of weird macho shit, it's so funny the mind games that people can work themselves into surrounding gender expression when in reality it's completely arbitrary, and it's genuinely nothing but a personal choice of expression. I think gen Z made it out pretty well as far as not being constrained by this, at least for people I know and have run into consistently between Maine and Florida. I think I have a single friend who's straight straight, like a hard 0 on the Kinsey scale, the closest any others get is "Yeah I'm not into [insert either masculinity or feminity], so I just sleep with people based on gender expression regardless of biological sex", and that seems to be the norm. The aforementioned Gen X friend also became more comfortable with his queerness as a result of methamphetamine use, and I've found meth can bring out queerness pretty hard, but for me it was ayahuasca and then years later NEP that did it personally. What drugs outside of methamphetamine do you find useful for this? Which psychs/empathogens/dissos especially? I'm fascinated in the intersection of pharmaceutically assisted psychotherapy and trying to deprogram hetero/cisnormativity, colonialist biases, etc.
