Help! Need help remembering THE MOST OBSCURE DRUG YOU NEVER HEARD OF

[iom]

These dreams I've been having are crazy intense and vivid. I believe it has to do with the current condition of my HPA-axis, glucocorticoid receptors, and so on. Weed usually mostly stops me from dreaming, but it doesn't touch this shit.

Unfortunately most of my recent dreams have been very dark and dystopian. One was like being in a Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies scenario where I had to act violently against otherwise innocent people to protect myself and ultimate assert dominance. In another, I was working for Palantir which had become the singular global super-corporation. Employees were all required to attend "court" after work, where attendees were brutally and publicly judged in a spectacle in front of a huge screen with a first rate sound system presenting intensely psychedeilc AI-slop impregnated with fascist symbols and scientological (as in the church) themes. The movie soundtrack still haunts me. In yet another dream, I was traveling with my wife through an airport when I was kidnapped, forcibly drugged, and interrogated before being left half-dressed and mostly amnesic on a very hot evening somewhere in Tel Aviv. All of these dreams developed in vivid and sometimes gory detail. I've never dreamed anything like this so consistently.

So I'm very very glad I've been able to have a happy dream, finally. In my dream, you hadn't taken it with me, but you had a full contact high and were having a good time. I was also very happy that I had more than enough to share. From my memory of the dream, it was a lot like 2C-I but much less stimulating, smoother, and more uplifting. If I ever do get to take it, my expectations are going to be very much primed.

Edit: One more thing. You had two cats, one of which I got along with very well. He was like ginger-brown with longish fur and full-throated purr.

 

[Bagseed]

Don't get me wrong. The Nichols lab for example has put out a lot of novel and highly potent stuff, but were any of his drugs actually better for humans than the drugs from the Shulgin era, or the classics? I mean I know the (D)Flys and 2C-X-NBXX have their fans, but are any of these really better drugs than what came before?

Well I think the point of that research wasn't to make and distribute better drugs but to study the receptors affected by those drugs?

 

[cycloprop]

Are

Okay, so I don't know if anyone here remembers this but me. I remember this because I used to have dreams about trying to do this. But I just had a really long dream. I keep having this recurring series of dreams where I'm like states away because I've been states away lately.

I have this dream where I got into a fight and I couldn't walk. Im in a wheelchair limping or basically dragging myself around, and I keep losing all these things. I kept going back to sleep because the dream was distressing but I kept returning as I felt like I needed to dig deeper. I end up in a Louisiana hospital right and my first girlfriend comes and visits me and lays with me, and then I get up to use the restroom and the reason I'm in the hospital in my dream is because I kept thinking I had like brain cancer or a tumor because I'm so forgetful in the dream that I keep leaving all my stuff everywhere. Well, I just had a flashback to remembering that there's an ultra rare class of psychedelics that I can't remember the name of dude. And it's not amt, it's not 2cb fly, it's not a phenethylamine, it's not a tryptamine, it's not a lysergemide, but I know it exists. Because I was like obsessed with finding it at one point.

I've dreamt of taking said psychedelic multiple times in the past but somehow forgot it exists even with my eidetic memory (blaming meth and hard drug use)

Does anyone else know about what I'm talking about?

The dream pointed towards the glowing material on some obscure card game as having something to do with this it's beyond rare I remember the street name of said drugs before I remember the actual molecular name and class...

Were you thinking of Efavirenz? It's an antimalarial drug with psychedelic properties and isn't a tryptamine, phenethylamine, or lysergamide.

 

[iom]

Well I think the point of that research wasn't to make and distribute better drugs but to study the receptors affected by those drugs?

I do agree. I also appreciate much of the work that is being done by Dr. Nichols and others, and I wish there was a lot more of it going on. Nichols in particular I have to credit for taking a serious look outside the brain, which IMO is practically prerequisite for being able to properly understand what is going on inside the brain. His work could lead to development of many non-psychedelic drugs that are nevertheless medically useful. It's also fair to argue that by better understanding the receptor, we should be able to design better psychedelic drugs more efficiently.

However, I think the knowledge required to design better psychedelic drugs using molecular models is much more vast than is readily appreciated. Simplified abstractions like (drug X is an agonist at receptor Y) easily fool us into thinking that things actually work that simply. They really don't, and our biggest problem is that we don't know what we don't know. Because of this, it is essential for good science to work hard to avoid being blinded by these simplified abstractions. All psychedelics of a certain bind to 5-HT2a as part of their action, but it must be understood that the result of said binding is very much multi-dimensional, taking into account both "biased agonism" at the molecular level, all the way up to the fact that receptors are distributed all across the body in which a variety of different biases and co-factors may be present, and the aggregate consequence of activating those receptors will depend on not mere pharmacokinetics but more generally the transport characteristics of the drug in the body. I also highly suspect (but have not seen any formal study of this) that receptors on a common membrane exert time-dependent effects. That is, the action will depend not just on how many receptors are occupied but also on how rapidly they became occupied. Serotonin is used for signaling after all. Signals may carry rich information in the time domain, and biology is pretty damn "smart".

Consider also that almost every known "good" psychedelic (where I'm leaning hard into assuming at least rough consensus as to which psychedelics are actually good, even though everyone has their preferences) has substantial activity at additional receptors types. Consider the "classics" (DMT, 5-Meo-DMT, 4-XX-DMT, LSD, and mescaline). Include perhaps different N-substitutions of the aforementioned tryptamines and also include Shulgin's "magical half-dozen" phenethylamines (adding DOM, 2C-B, 2C-E, 2C-T-2, and 2C-T-7). I believe essentially all of these bind substantially at either 5-HT1a, 5-HT2b, or both. Most of these (including among the tryptamines) additionally bind substantially to one or more adrenergic receptors. I'm going to guess that these additional receptor interactions are essential for many of the different qualities which we appreciate from these psychedelics. Therefore, to design better psychedelics using molecular modeling, I think we need not only a much much more thorough understanding of the 5-HT2a receptor but also these various "off-target" receptors, and we need a deep understanding of how simultaneous activation of these different receptors (across multiple dimensions of possible activity per receptor) work in aggregate. The implication is that the required knowledge is even more absurdly large and complex.

Perhaps molecular modeling can be useful for screening, to avoid wasting time synthesizing compounds that won't work at all. Maybe. Once upon a time, molecular modeling of this kind didn't work all that well and was oversold, and while I'm sure there have been improvements, I suspect that it is still very much oversold. There are unforeseen complexities. Receptor binding does not occur in a vacuum but in an complex environment of co-factors on either side of the membrane, for example ions like H+, K+, Ca+, proteins, mRNA, or even lipids within the membrane itself. One might mistakenly discard a quality compound on the basis of a model with a blind spot. Similar mistakes are possible with animal models. My understanding is that most psychedelics are actually a lot more toxic to lab animals than to people. A lot of good drug candidates are potentially lost because they were discarded after animal screening.

In my opinion, Shulgin's approach is not really obsolete at all, and most of the new tech really is overrated for the purpose of doing what Shulgin did so well, which was inventing novel psychedelics for humans. I also know from his writings and even personal interactions with him that he was very passionate about his approach to doing science and advocated strongly for it.

 

[Featherfall]

Are

Were you thinking of Efavirenz? It's an antimalarial drug with psychedelic properties and isn't a tryptamine, phenethylamine, or lysergamide.

theres also that one hiv medication they smoke with heroin in south africa for some reason

 

[cycloprop]

theres also that one hiv medication they smoke with heroin in south africa for some reason

Pardon my mistake earlier, that and efavirenz are the same thing. I guess I just remembered it being a malaria medicine even though it was exclusively for HIV.

 

[Esperighanto]

Pardon my mistake earlier, that and efavirenz are the same thing. I guess I just remembered it being a malaria medicine even though it was exclusively for HIV.

Mefloquine is a very scary antimalarial that can be months long (sometimes lifelong) psychosis inducing, similar to Benadryl.

 

[fuckabout89]

I do agree. I also appreciate much of the work that is being done by Dr. Nichols and others, and I wish there was a lot more of it going on. Nichols in particular I have to credit for taking a serious look outside the brain, which IMO is practically prerequisite for being able to properly understand what is going on inside the brain. His work could lead to development of many non-psychedelic drugs that are nevertheless medically useful. It's also fair to argue that by better understanding the receptor, we should be able to design better psychedelic drugs more efficiently.

However, I think the knowledge required to design better psychedelic drugs using molecular models is much more vast than is readily appreciated. Simplified abstractions like (drug X is an agonist at receptor Y) easily fool us into thinking that things actually work that simply. They really don't, and our biggest problem is that we don't know what we don't know. Because of this, it is essential for good science to work hard to avoid being blinded by these simplified abstractions. All psychedelics of a certain bind to 5-HT2a as part of their action, but it must be understood that the result of said binding is very much multi-dimensional, taking into account both "biased agonism" at the molecular level, all the way up to the fact that receptors are distributed all across the body in which a variety of different biases and co-factors may be present, and the aggregate consequence of activating those receptors will depend on not mere pharmacokinetics but more generally the transport characteristics of the drug in the body. I also highly suspect (but have not seen any formal study of this) that receptors on a common membrane exert time-dependent effects. That is, the action will depend not just on how many receptors are occupied but also on how rapidly they became occupied. Serotonin is used for signaling after all. Signals may carry rich information in the time domain, and biology is pretty damn "smart".

Consider also that almost every known "good" psychedelic (where I'm leaning hard into assuming at least rough consensus as to which psychedelics are actually good, even though everyone has their preferences) has substantial activity at additional receptors types. Consider the "classics" (DMT, 5-Meo-DMT, 4-XX-DMT, LSD, and mescaline). Include perhaps different N-substitutions of the aforementioned tryptamines and also include Shulgin's "magical half-dozen" phenethylamines (adding DOM, 2C-B, 2C-E, 2C-T-2, and 2C-T-7). I believe essentially all of these bind substantially at either 5-HT1a, 5-HT2b, or both. Most of these (including among the tryptamines) additionally bind substantially to one or more adrenergic receptors. I'm going to guess that these additional receptor interactions are essential for many of the different qualities which we appreciate from these psychedelics. Therefore, to design better psychedelics using molecular modeling, I think we need not only a much much more thorough understanding of the 5-HT2a receptor but also these various "off-target" receptors, and we need a deep understanding of how simultaneous activation of these different receptors (across multiple dimensions of possible activity per receptor) work in aggregate. The implication is that the required knowledge is even more absurdly large and complex.

Perhaps molecular modeling can be useful for screening, to avoid wasting time synthesizing compounds that won't work at all. Maybe. Once upon a time, molecular modeling of this kind didn't work all that well and was oversold, and while I'm sure there have been improvements, I suspect that it is still very much oversold. There are unforeseen complexities. Receptor binding does not occur in a vacuum but in an complex environment of co-factors on either side of the membrane, for example ions like H+, K+, Ca+, proteins, mRNA, or even lipids within the membrane itself. One might mistakenly discard a quality compound on the basis of a model with a blind spot. Similar mistakes are possible with animal models. My understanding is that most psychedelics are actually a lot more toxic to lab animals than to people. A lot of good drug candidates are potentially lost because they were discarded after animal screening.

In my opinion, Shulgin's approach is not really obsolete at all, and most of the new tech really is overrated for the purpose of doing what Shulgin did so well, which was inventing novel psychedelics for humans. I also know from his writings and even personal interactions with him that he was very passionate about his approach to doing science and advocated strongly for it.

Too bad we dont have a more variety of neurotransmitters lol.

 

[Esperighanto]

Too bad we dont have a more variety of neurotransmitters lol.

I bet there are a handful we've yet to meaningfully recognize or understand, there are possibly another few cannabinoid receptors (GPR55, GPR119 and GPR18) I was reading about recently. Ligands of the first one cause an upmodulation of 5HT2a receptors too which is interesting, but I'd say we may understand these well in a decade or two, I'm not quite sure.

 

[fuckabout89]

I bet there are a handful we've yet to meaningfully recognize or understand, there are possibly another few cannabinoid receptors (GPR55, GPR119 and GPR18) I was reading about recently. Ligands of the first one cause an upmodulation of 5HT2a receptors too which is interesting, but I'd say we may understand these well in a decade or two, I'm not quite sure.

Its very interesting that the thing in our head is one of the least understood things in the universe.

 

[cycloprop]

Mefloquine is a very scary antimalarial that can be months long (sometimes lifelong) psychosis inducing, similar to Benadryl.

Yes! that's probably where the confusion was from. I was definitely thinking of Efavirenz though, because Mefloquine isn't a psychedelic. Regardless, it's still a fascinating drug.

 

[777iLLucidDreamer777]

....

Yeah I'm at a loss too especially as there really are only 3 classes and you named them. Are you SURE it's not in one of those classes...

How could a drug be so incredibly rare that we've never heard of it, but yet it has a street name?????? And how are we supposed to know based off of a description of a dream you had?
You're really not giving us much anything to go on.

All i can think of is:

Salvinorin A (Kappa opioid antagonist)
Dissassociatives like Ketamine, methoxetamine, phencyclidine? Ephenidine? Nitrous Oxide? xenon???? (NMDA antagonists)
Harmine? Harmaline? Tetrahydroharmaline???? (beta-carbolines)
Lophophorine (isoquinoline)
U4euh/4-methylaminorex?
25C-NBOH???????
Grayanotoxins?
ψ-DOM-FLY?
Mesembrine?
2C-I-2-Hemifly?
Ibogaine?
Tabernanthalog?
Ortho-DOT?
DMMDMA?
DOTFM-NDEPA?
25D-NM-NDEAOP?
Voacangine????
O-ethoxymethylsalvinorin B; 2-EMSB; "symmetry"????
Datura? Scopalamine??? Jimson weed? Brugmansia
Hallucinogenic fish???????
Cryogenine?
Psuedoindoxyl Mitragynine???
Akkuamine?
Dextromethorphan?
Benzo Fury?
aminobenzofurans?
LPH-5?
BNAP?
Luvesilocin

--- I could go on and on and on listing random weird obscure compounds, but I'd rather not as there's 10,000's of random psychoactive compounds... Without more info, it's about the best I can do. Sorry.

If there is a psychedelic I've never heard of.... I'd love to hear more.
Draw me a chemical structure and I can tell you what it is and if it's real.

Are you sure you didn't just dream it????????? I've definitely dreamed of getting high and of non-existent molecules...

I appreciate you all.. i am pretty sure at this point it was all a dream, but goddamn what drugs i didn't know i now do i think this thread has definitely blown my mind although i was going off falsely placed intuition

 

[777iLLucidDreamer777]

What was the street name if you can remember?

That's the worst part I've dreamt of it multiple times but i think its a class of drugs my brain made up in the dream world i remembered in a later dream on april 14th. I just remember the first dream i would take it and it would come on so hard I'd black out and not even remember tripping, weird celestial events like on shrooms, that sort of thing. Second dream i was in the hospital for cancer again (been diagnosed before) and they gave me a drug in my IV that sent me to a geometric plane and i eventually returned but they were somehow related to the drug in the dream from like a fucking year ago lol

 

[777iLLucidDreamer777]

Are

Were you thinking of Efavirenz? It's an antimalarial drug with psychedelic properties and isn't a tryptamine, phenethylamine, or lysergamide.

Maybe. I heard someone saw mxPCP without knowing what it was once, I'll look into it. Thank you sir

That's the worst part I've dreamt of it multiple times but i think its a class of drugs my brain made up in the dream world i remembered in a later dream on april 14th. I just remember the first dream i would take it and it would come on so hard I'd black out and not even remember tripping, weird celestial events like on shrooms, that sort of thing. Second dream i was in the hospital for cancer again (been diagnosed before) and they gave me a drug in my IV that sent me to a geometric plane and i eventually returned but they were somehow related to the drug in the dream from like a fucking year ago lol