The last time I took 2C-E was the day they announced the COVID pandemic. Talk about stressful trips.
Damn dude, when covid happened a local plug who I translated for during acquisitions from suppliers (he was only an anglophone but we were in South Florida) threw me an absolutely absurd amount of shit that he was going to sell at festivals that year, but since they were all canceled I all of a sudden just had literal grocery bags of counterfeit benzo bars, meth addies, pharma grade Ritalin, etc.
I was routinely eating monstrous doses of edibles, and was over a gram deep into my day when the Covid shut down the state I was in. I'm unsure if I've spoken about it here on BL, but I was talking to a former boss of mine (super kickass woman I'll refer to as CBH here), and I got called up to configure a conference room with a really uniquely high-quality set of conference calling gear, as the university presidents of every state university in the state were assembling there in 30 minutes for an emergency meeting. I encountered that former employer CBH there, and she told me to warn my friends and family to leave the state immediately as some serious shit was going down. Talk an ominous thing to hear from an exceptionally serious, straight-laced person while over a gram of THC (orally) deep into the day hahaha. I had just purchased a two-layer Yamaha Electone organ from a thrift store though so I just spent months inside shredding on that thing.
This is a really good question. I suppose it has to do with how many times I've used a substance and how deeply I've gone with it.
For example, I had smoked DMT 30x before I finally had a true breakthrough (was no longer didgital, had no body, I was a color/shape/texture) but up until that point I had considered myself very familiar with DMT. At this point though, I've probably had 1000x DMT trips, with several breakthroughs so.... I think I've got more to learn but I've got a pretty good idea of the substance at this point.
In regards to your 2nd part of the question, it definitely varies by substance and this is mainly due to duration. DMT being extremely short, I can use every night with very few negative consequences. 2C-E on the other hand, I'd probably end up in an asylum or something if I took it every night. So yeah, shorter acting substances are easier to take more frequently and become familiar with imo. Rarity of the substance can also factor in. I've had 150mg of 4-HO-MIPT for 5 years minus a couple doses out of it. I'm sure if I had obtained grams early on, I would have taken the substance more and be more familiar with it.
Another thing, certain substances that I am very familiar with, I tend to notice the effects MUCH quicker, even if they are just somatic sensations that my body knows it's about to trip. For example, every single time I take LSD, in approximately 5 minutes, i start getting very subtle alerts ie the hairs on back of my neck start to stand up. When I took a thumbprint of AL-LAD (something I'd only taken a handful of times) I did not get those same alerts.
2C-B, I had a good stash when I was young, but then it disappeared for a good 10 years for me. When I finally got some new material, I took 15mg, and in 10 minutes, I knew it was B and a huge shit eating grin appeared on my face.
So there is also something to be said about the body having familiarity with a substance even if you're not conscious of it.
I definitely see can see your stance of how a shorter duration on a drug could facilitate less time investment needed to develop familiarity with it, but is it the experience, or the integration and reflection of it's long term cognitive impacts that really matters when cultivating this familiarity? I'm totally unsure and am now asking it as a direct question, just trying to articulate how this question has evolved in my mind over time, if that makes sense. I recently was gifted 20 grams of memantine and for some reason it's twice as potent as the last batch I had. I took 45mg expecting it to me ~4/10 intensity, and it feels more like a 90mg dose of my old batch and that 90mg feeling I'm still dealing with since yesterday is maybe an 8/10 degree of dissociative intoxication. I've tried to balance it out with other shit but have only been able to do so much, so my apologies about grammar/typing. I feel like tolerance also plays a role in how quickly you can get to know a substance, LSD induces a tolerance where even taking it weekly for a couple months, you'll then need to give it a couple weeks of abstinence to fully reset your tolerance, whereas 2C-B, allylescaline, DPT, harmalas, salvia and DMT don't form a tolerance at all, so I imagine familiarity could be developed quicker with those.
I'm working on two book-length projects right now, one is aimed at guiding psychoactive experiences, and the other has the working title of "Tactful Relationships With Drugs", aimed at normal people who use drugs and want to do so in an informed and intentional, controlled, targeted manner. Long before I even had an account on BL, I always noticed your username and associated it with a deep well of experiences in the realm of psychedelia, and I've been following your posts on here for a long time, so I really appreciate the information/perspective you've shared here. The concept of "getting to know a drug" is something I'm really trying to explore, experiment with, and write about in both of these writing projects.
I've used 2C-P at very mild doses two times and really liked it. I think I've tried 2mg and 4mg (I used volumetric dosing). It's very long lasting as you know, so it's a big commitment. 2C-P was the first psychedelic I've ever been able to sleep on which really surprised me - normally psychedelics make me wired and sleeping impossible, but on 2C-P I just had the nap feeling was able to easily sleep right in the middle of the trip for about 45mins. On something like acid or a 4-sub tryptamine, even at a tiny dose, I really can't sleep, so this is something novel to me.
I really like the alkylated 2C set: 2C-D, 2C-E, 2C-P. I see them as very much akin in flavour, with 2C-E seeming like the pinnacle of that terrain in terms of character. Of course as we know the duration scales as you add carbons so 2C-D < 2C-E < 2C-P duration wise. I haven't pushed the dosage with 2C-P just because of how long it lasts, so I'm not sure how it compares (personally) to 2C-E in terms of potency, but I get the feeling that 2C-P is more potent at the lower end, but that it might tap out earlier (earlier saturation). This early saturation idea is basically a gut feeling, and probably a digest of stuff I've read over the years on trip reports etc, not fact at all, so I hope no one counts on it when they are measuring out their own 2C-P.
It may be that 2C-P is the real pinnacle if you take the dosage up, I'm not really sure.
I'm curious about 2C-iP as well, and a lot of Trachsel's creations.
I love that 2C-P is well within the potency range to fit on blotter, I'm shocked that hasn't been a thing yet.
So, once I accidentally took some DOPr, basically I had just eaten mushrooms and spilled a little DOPr while putting it away. I thought "Hey a few mg can't hurt/wont do much. Boy was I wrong. But like you said, it was very smooth, and I was surprisingly able to sleep on it tho I took a small amount of clonepin at end of trip. I had a DOB trip that I attempted to mute/abort with benzos and the DOB definitely outlasted the benzos.
I've done the old "shit, I spilled some and I don't want to waste it so I guess I'll lick it up" thing too many times. 25E-NBOH, 25B-NBOMe, LSD (that one was ~37.5mg I consumed, long 4 days), etizolam, phenazolam, THC-P-O acetate, MDMB-4en-PINACA, MDMB-5F-PINACA (aka 5F-ADB) and potent ethanolic solutions of 3-MeO-PCP and 3-HO-PCP are all things I've done that with. One time the etizolam crystals just puffed into my open mouth, that shit was nutty.
Is it abnormal for people to be able to sleep on psychs? Many of my friends and I love acid dreams, ayahuasca naps are very popular, mushroom naps are too. As far as DOB goes, a 5.25mg dose had me hit some benzos to downmodulate it as my blood pressure and heart rate was super concerning, but DOC I pushed up towards 8-10mg (maybe 12? I'd have to dig up old notes) and it was totally serene and gentle on my body in a way that DOB didn't only avoid, but acted as a polar opposite to. DOB is fucking brutal dude, I can't exceed 4.5mg of it, and my fiance can't exceed ~2mg of it without us getting absolutely punished by that shit. DOB has still granted me some profoundly transformative experiences, but it's just a taxing one on the old meatsuit, if that makes sense. Klonopin can help, but my longest DOB experience was 104 total hours (didn't sleep, didn't eat). It was turning down 45-50 hours after the initial 4.5mg dose, and then I smoked almost 9mg of MDMB-4en-PINACA in the form of 45 tabs of 200mcg-per-tab blotter, which I would fold up into a bowl and smoke like it was weed over a series of twisted copper screens to keep it from falling through the neck of the bowl. Nothing could turn it down really, but I just rode it out because I know that DOx's are for some reason virtually nonresponsive to antipsychotics, benzos, anything one would turn to as a tripkiller. I wonder how buspirone would effect it though, 5HT1a positive allosteric modulation tends to have a downstream effect of downmodulating 5HT2a activity, so it may be worth testing.
The afterglow of 2C-E is the best part imo.
I'm so glad to hear someone else say that sometimes a psychedelic's most useful period is the afterglow, I very much feel like that as it pertains to LSD. I also found 3C-P to strongly resemble a ~14 hour version of the LSD afterglow, but with the most intense pro-sexual effects I've ever felt, and some more phenethylamine-y visuals than I'd see from LSD.
Twas a good vacation. Everyone should drive a stick shift through the countryside of Ireland at least once in life.
The Irish word bóithrín has no direct English translation but it refers to what was once typically a walking path for livestock, and nowadays it seems to typically be for those rural dirt roads that are allegedly 2-way but only have enough space for a single car in any practical context. There's an enormous amount of words that help to expand perspective (through the lens of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at least) which I did not expect to encounter in another Indo-European language, it seems like Irish is quite a bit in its own league though as far as IE descended languages go.
Depending on how I feel this weekend, I might finally try a full trip for my anniversary with my partner---maybe with some 2C-B being that always feels most gentle on my body as well as my mind. We'll see. I'm hoping that my condition continues to stabilize over the summer, and that between that and getting a bad tooth out, I hope to stop the terrible nerve pain from triggering. I want to continue exploring the 2C-P very badly.
I tend to trip whenever I'm distressed or in pain (I really just trip every time my tolerance goes back down) but after some recent surgeries I would use LSD within a few days out, regardless of the iodine melting a 3x5 inch patch of skin on my back off (could see muscle fibers' definition, it was rough) and an incision from my sternum to my pelvis as well as a separate incision for a drain. I still took a large dose of LSD (I would estimate it to be ~450-500ug in total) and watched a series of interviews, took notes about ways I want to develop personally and participate more in civil services, quite a nice time. I could see though how that state could be a bad time to trip. I also really adore tripping while watching horror movies or researching genuinely horrific and macabre shit, so maybe I'm just a freak in that way hahaha. I've got this section in a book I'm working on (working title is "Tactful Relationships With Drugs") about how unique I find the intersection of hallucinogens and horror films as a tool for exploring the nature of catharsis and continuing to live with a smile on your face in a world so deadset on turning it into a frown.
To explore this class of product, I plan to grow some cacti after the summer and to got some 2C-B so at least I could tell that I tried at least one of the 2C-X!
Thanks too all of you for your contributions, this part of science is really something!
Growing cacti is a fantastic hobby, I'm glad you're picking it up! If you get into Lophophoras at any point, don't sleep on diffusa, fricii alberto-vojtechii or koehresii as they all contribute a fascinating ensemble effect to williamsii/other phenethylamines, but are also fascinatingly unique and high quality stimulants when taken on their own imo. I hope you also find the opportunity to contribute experiential and cultivation reports to help, community driven citizen science is something that we all (collectively, as humans) should be hopping on more and more. If you're interested in it, let me know and I'll try to figure out how to get a thread up for people running experiments so we can try to do some genuine data collection.
Sorry again if this post is a mess of typos, run-on sentences, atrocious grammar, etc., I am unintentionally balls deep in a memantine trip (is a disso experience called a trip? Idrk) and it makes articulation exceptionally challenging in this dose range.