By MCAT you mean methacathinone, from the late 90s/ early 00s? I also tried it and found it less focused stimulation than amphetamines but also more spacey. Like a kinda doped up MDMA esque stimulation but easy to zone out. Nowhere as pleasurable. Definitely rushy but not as much and just kind of... different.
If so I'd be interested in hearing more on your experiences with it (by pm if you prefer). I've never met anyone else that's tried it.
Although it could be mellow and spacey it could also make you flip out and act violently almost without realizing...
Years later I tried khat and felt the similarities.
Sorry for the much delayed response - Yes methacathinone/MCAT. I'd read about it on erowid and actually planned to attempt to make some at the end of high school/beginning of college - picked up most of the stuff to do so before eventually coming to realization that this was a profoundly stupid idea to do given that I'd most likely have had to find a way to use the stove at my parents' house to do so.
About a year later (01 or early 02) some showed up on the scene and made the rounds. I'd agree with how you described it - kind of anxious, kind of rushy, kind of spacey, and much less satisfying than any stimulant I'd tried up to that point.
I've found that in general the few times I've tried cathinones, something about the experience has contained a hint of that feeling - the lack of being truly satisfying. 3-MMC was super euphoric, far more refined than MCAT, and much more pleasant in every way, and yet still, it just sort of made me crave a non-specific "more" (sex, drugs, chatting etc.). I still have a couple of grams of it in my box that I may or may not ever get around to using. We'll see.
Regarding MCAT - I definitely had a point of comparison between MCAT and other stimulants at the time and found that coke made me social at first and then increasingly anxious and spacey as the night went on. Meth made me feel more and more focused as time went on, often in a way that becomes difficult as hours turns into a day or two of use. MCAT made me feel really awake and alert, but on edge and at the same time not super present. I could be in a room and feel like I wanted something but didn't know what, and have a hard time staying present on any one thing or person. I did have one friend who really liked it - he was someone who seemed to have no issues being completely reckless with certain drugs (would eat a couple of MDMA pills on a Tuesday night while hanging with people who weren't on drugs, or hitting a can of keyboard dust remover while driving - he actually totalled his car doing either nitrous or duster after being up at a music festiival for a few days) - he really liked MCAT and would get this kind of intense but vacant look in his eyes when doing it. He'd kind of lose the thread while on it too - like misunderstanding what people were saying but reacting really intensely in a way that didn't make a lot of sense. There was definitely an emotional heightening to it that was almost like the parts of coke I don't like mixed with the comedown from meth ... cracked out but high at the same time.
I remember it came around for a couple of months that year and people were kind of into it at first but as it made the roudns it seemed to ultimately cause way more issues than our circle was used to dealing with, and eventually faded away. I do seem to remember that there were a few people like my friend above, who really took to the stuff. I am a therapist by training and have always been someone who thinks a lot about how other people around me act. I sometimes view people as a certain 'type' in my mind (not necessarily good or bad, just like categories of ceratin personalities and patterns of behavior). The 'type' of people who seemed to like it were dudes who I definitely partied with but who always made me a little less comfortable to use anything with either 1:1 or for a longer period of time. The kind of friends that you might trip with if there's a big group. MCAT really seemed to bring out some of the qualities in others that I didn't like, and almost certainly made me feel geeked out/self-conscious/fiendish in a way that I couldn't really relax with.
Never tried Khat, not sure if I would. Yours might be the only personal account of it I've encountered.
So yeah, that's the overall impression MCAT left me with - something that was anxious, fiendish, spacey, euphoric but with a very hard edge that bordered on uncomfortable, scattered, hypervigilant, and deeply unsatisfying.
Other than the couple of friends I mentioend above, and a few others who were also part of the same crew, you're absolutely the only other person I've ever crossed with experience using it.
I would not be shocked if we even used stuff that came from the same origin point given how niche it is and the timing of it.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
