Yesterday I tried ETH-LAD for the first time. It was really special and it blew me away!
Set & Setting
My mindset was okay, but I had been drinking a bit too much the week before, work involves a lot of deadlines and had an issue with my routines and a lot of tiredness, so I was not 100% sure if I was up to it, to trip at all this weekend. On the other hand, it had been a little while (compared to normally – I trip quite often) and I could use the rejuvenating ‘reset’.
I got up a little later than I had intended and hurried a little bit to eat some breakfast before dropping the dose and do some final tidying up during the onset. Tripping in (or at least departing from) a clean and tidy apartment as my home base has become pretty important to me. I think you are so much more sensitive during a trip that it is important to make decent preparations on factors that influence your state of mind quite a bit. To make sure not too big physical things are bothering you and the atmosphere where you are is healthy and positive. The point is: in my experience it makes a surprisingly big difference!
Coming up
I chose 150 µg ETH-LAD acquired from a trusted Dutch vendor as my dose after a few final comparisons. I had already zero’d in on that dose, but somehow what I read – it seems to be up to 50% more potent than LSD from some comparisons – did not concern me too much, even though I was a little unsure about my mindset. The reason is probably that I have had a number of trips on LSD that fell a bit short of my expectations. Some had been strong enough but others on the weak side. Rarely full-on intense and exciting. So I lowered my guard.
Cut off 1½ blotter making 150 µg total and put it under my tongue. Tidying up ended taking very little time, I left some projects that are under construction be. After about 30 minutes I started like I was coming up, it was just a general and vague but familiar lysergamide feeling. In the second 30 minutes the development was slow which lead me to think that it was going to be easygoing, I was wrong!
I decided to put on a movie, telling myself that it would be to enjoy myself during the further development so that I could do more active things and go outside later. It was bad weather but there was promise of it clearing up now and then.
The movie I chose was “Lion”. Now, I think sometimes it can be a real waste of a trip, but definitely not always!! It turned out to make for quite an adventure! During the first part of the movie I started coming up much more and I could feel the ETH-LAD very well.
It felt more fierce than LSD but still friendly, I became much more emotionally sensitive and watched awesome visuals blossom, though mostly on the walls and all around. Most of the time I found them quite Lo-fi while for comparison LSZ was laser sharp for me. However I don’t really believe that a psychedelic will produce the same sort of effects every time, even if it has ‘tendencies’. LSD can produce both very sharp and fuzzy effects for me, though usually quite sharp.
It was a very good sort of lo-fi this time with ETH-LAD, which I don’t find so natural! (Sometimes it can just be blaah, unintelligible). I have had very euphoric soft pastel rainbow vision before on acid and actually have wished I could experience that again… this was very similar: it felt mature and looked intricate, but also quite ‘neutral’ which can be a wonderful thing for psychedelics like 2C-E or mescaline as well. Entactogenic and second-nature.
(The lo-fi visuals sometimes made it impossible to make out what was on my screen though, very blurry!) It's hard to explain how it could be so pleasant but it was just majestic in it's soupiness!
The true trip and flip
I was watching ribbons of light and energy twist and whirl and there was a continuity of this from what I saw with eyes closed and with eyes open.
Maybe I paused the movie a few times, but actually was still following the plot alright and got sucked right into the captivating story.
At some point shit really hit the fan though: I was starting to get tense from certain scenes, from the powerful acting, the tensions building up between characters and from a handicapped guy freaking out completely more than once (which was actually really disturbing to me and caught me off guard so much that I had very minor flashbacks to it much later when I tried to sleep, also a few more things about the movie+trip). Then there was a scene with the main character browsing the internet and the world, but I began hallucinating things that looked like beautiful corals, freaky flashes of him being unable to forget his mother’s face, and magical fireworks. A sort of portal seemed to open with a wormhole! I have experienced this before but it was more immersive and intense somehow.
I started out thinking that it was done amazingly – not the really trippy stuff but him having a sort of flashback that was somehow synthesized with footage from where he was from, that part looked realistic for a movie and later on I got confused repeatedly about whether it was part of the movie or not or whether I had hallucinated it all. It seemed genious to me that he couldn't forget and how it was supposedly done. Most of that was a hallucination, lol!
At one moment the confusion, the tension and the scenes with people freaking out made me lose it so I paused the movie and felt my heart racing very fast. What was disturbing was I began cycling between the decision to later even finish watching it or not, quite fast, and every time I realized how much I was freaking out, it got me and my heart up even more. I wondered whether it could potentially be fatal if one was unable to get out of such a loop.
It seemed best to speak out loud just randomly one of both decisions to at least break the loop, which worked. Then I went to lay down for a bit in my bedroom to calm down after taking a small dose of etizolam – I believe it was under 1 mg (volumetrically measured though not too exactly), I do not take it lightly to drop a benzo during a trip, but I really felt like I had to calm down asap and could use at least a small hand.
I automatically assumed some yogic postures and meditated for a little while, also without thinking much about it.
Extremely quickly I began experiencing a very altered state of consciousness, that was like crystalline… harmonizing, pulsing, buzzing. I am not a stranger to mystical experiences, especially from meditating on psychedelics. But it was so quickly after being extremely worked up and afraid for my life!
Yet soon enough I was past a point of no return and realized: once you are having an experience like that, there is nothing more to it. It’s there. Being in that state for a while I felt an immense power, that was washing over me. Healing but also ‘blanking me out’.
I assumed other postures and felt centered, but also still a bit scared from before. I had a crystal clear realization that was so simple: ‘make the best of it’. Immediately I felt myself align entirely to that idea, to turn all my energy into positivity.
Coming out of the experience, I was still having bouts of wishy-washy confusion which I pretty much only know from almost any fairly active dose of mushrooms or psilocin, or LSD but at quite high doses only. One moment I could be thinking ‘holy shitt!!!!’ and the next I would be hopping around like a child. My cognition was getting obliterated though, more on that later, but the vibe got more and more playful and cheerful over time, the etizolam might have played a part, especially with the cognition, but I think it was not the main reason I managed better – the key to that already happened before the etizolam started working.
Altered thinking and the attempt of analysis of (within) confusion and dementia
The next phase consisted of me trying to make notes and diagrams that got very chaotic because I was forgetting what I was doing or losing my train of thought the entire time. I was convinced I was able to think in alternative ways though, that at the same time I understood very well technically but trying to bring it into this reality via models proved to be extremely difficult.
A few themes were the one-directionality of my mind exploring possibilities and getting ‘lost’, basically the difference between divergent and convergent thinking to the extreme. I also thought that since I was getting back to the same core ideas, even though I was losing my train of thought all the time it would amount to a sort of word-cloud that could serve as a condensed way of providing all the ingredients as long as I would draw the algorithmic relations one at a time like a flow-chart.
It involved – no surprise there – chaos and confusion, the cost-effect efficiency of explaining something if you can’t finish your sentences, ineffability, whether it matters that something is futile or ineffable. Temporal manipulation of ideas if you are not thinking linear at all anymore. And basically that it’s all “One Direction’s fault”, senility, and that a lot of this was ridiculous in a way that reminded me overwhelmingly of Rick & Morty humor, including the philosophy about mortality and metaphysics (cosmic nihilism humor etc)
I really felt like I was getting a bit old during this trip, at times like I had aged 20 years which is something that has been on my mind a bit now that I am in my 30s and things are starting to 'deteriorate'... I didn't realize quite as much that it was the ETH-LAD that wrecked me, or even the etizolam which I thought I didn't really feel so much apart from having calmed down... maybe also the boozing took it's toll.
You might think that it’s terribly frustrating to try and theorize something when you are unable to think normally, but I had a wonderful time and laughed my ass off trying. It was so elating that I felt a fulfillment of experiencing something very special again, which had been a while.
The rest of the day was spent goofing around. I completely forgot that I had baked a pizza and just forgot about it in the oven (after turning that off though). Ironically it was fine, just too salty…
Here are the notes - lol I'm glad they were so 'helpful' for writing this report 8) wtf is with the "whether", i was getting pretty hung up on that:
I'd give it probably a 9-/10 despite my freak-out, I do not blame the way this drug works for that, just my hybris. I want to do this again sometime!
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_ethlad
substancecode_lysergamides
explevel_firsttime
exptype_positive
exptype_glowing
exptype_difficult
roacode_sublingual
Set & Setting
My mindset was okay, but I had been drinking a bit too much the week before, work involves a lot of deadlines and had an issue with my routines and a lot of tiredness, so I was not 100% sure if I was up to it, to trip at all this weekend. On the other hand, it had been a little while (compared to normally – I trip quite often) and I could use the rejuvenating ‘reset’.
I got up a little later than I had intended and hurried a little bit to eat some breakfast before dropping the dose and do some final tidying up during the onset. Tripping in (or at least departing from) a clean and tidy apartment as my home base has become pretty important to me. I think you are so much more sensitive during a trip that it is important to make decent preparations on factors that influence your state of mind quite a bit. To make sure not too big physical things are bothering you and the atmosphere where you are is healthy and positive. The point is: in my experience it makes a surprisingly big difference!
Coming up
I chose 150 µg ETH-LAD acquired from a trusted Dutch vendor as my dose after a few final comparisons. I had already zero’d in on that dose, but somehow what I read – it seems to be up to 50% more potent than LSD from some comparisons – did not concern me too much, even though I was a little unsure about my mindset. The reason is probably that I have had a number of trips on LSD that fell a bit short of my expectations. Some had been strong enough but others on the weak side. Rarely full-on intense and exciting. So I lowered my guard.
Cut off 1½ blotter making 150 µg total and put it under my tongue. Tidying up ended taking very little time, I left some projects that are under construction be. After about 30 minutes I started like I was coming up, it was just a general and vague but familiar lysergamide feeling. In the second 30 minutes the development was slow which lead me to think that it was going to be easygoing, I was wrong!
I decided to put on a movie, telling myself that it would be to enjoy myself during the further development so that I could do more active things and go outside later. It was bad weather but there was promise of it clearing up now and then.
The movie I chose was “Lion”. Now, I think sometimes it can be a real waste of a trip, but definitely not always!! It turned out to make for quite an adventure! During the first part of the movie I started coming up much more and I could feel the ETH-LAD very well.
It felt more fierce than LSD but still friendly, I became much more emotionally sensitive and watched awesome visuals blossom, though mostly on the walls and all around. Most of the time I found them quite Lo-fi while for comparison LSZ was laser sharp for me. However I don’t really believe that a psychedelic will produce the same sort of effects every time, even if it has ‘tendencies’. LSD can produce both very sharp and fuzzy effects for me, though usually quite sharp.
It was a very good sort of lo-fi this time with ETH-LAD, which I don’t find so natural! (Sometimes it can just be blaah, unintelligible). I have had very euphoric soft pastel rainbow vision before on acid and actually have wished I could experience that again… this was very similar: it felt mature and looked intricate, but also quite ‘neutral’ which can be a wonderful thing for psychedelics like 2C-E or mescaline as well. Entactogenic and second-nature.
(The lo-fi visuals sometimes made it impossible to make out what was on my screen though, very blurry!) It's hard to explain how it could be so pleasant but it was just majestic in it's soupiness!
The true trip and flip
I was watching ribbons of light and energy twist and whirl and there was a continuity of this from what I saw with eyes closed and with eyes open.
Maybe I paused the movie a few times, but actually was still following the plot alright and got sucked right into the captivating story.
At some point shit really hit the fan though: I was starting to get tense from certain scenes, from the powerful acting, the tensions building up between characters and from a handicapped guy freaking out completely more than once (which was actually really disturbing to me and caught me off guard so much that I had very minor flashbacks to it much later when I tried to sleep, also a few more things about the movie+trip). Then there was a scene with the main character browsing the internet and the world, but I began hallucinating things that looked like beautiful corals, freaky flashes of him being unable to forget his mother’s face, and magical fireworks. A sort of portal seemed to open with a wormhole! I have experienced this before but it was more immersive and intense somehow.
I started out thinking that it was done amazingly – not the really trippy stuff but him having a sort of flashback that was somehow synthesized with footage from where he was from, that part looked realistic for a movie and later on I got confused repeatedly about whether it was part of the movie or not or whether I had hallucinated it all. It seemed genious to me that he couldn't forget and how it was supposedly done. Most of that was a hallucination, lol!
At one moment the confusion, the tension and the scenes with people freaking out made me lose it so I paused the movie and felt my heart racing very fast. What was disturbing was I began cycling between the decision to later even finish watching it or not, quite fast, and every time I realized how much I was freaking out, it got me and my heart up even more. I wondered whether it could potentially be fatal if one was unable to get out of such a loop.
It seemed best to speak out loud just randomly one of both decisions to at least break the loop, which worked. Then I went to lay down for a bit in my bedroom to calm down after taking a small dose of etizolam – I believe it was under 1 mg (volumetrically measured though not too exactly), I do not take it lightly to drop a benzo during a trip, but I really felt like I had to calm down asap and could use at least a small hand.
I automatically assumed some yogic postures and meditated for a little while, also without thinking much about it.
Extremely quickly I began experiencing a very altered state of consciousness, that was like crystalline… harmonizing, pulsing, buzzing. I am not a stranger to mystical experiences, especially from meditating on psychedelics. But it was so quickly after being extremely worked up and afraid for my life!
Yet soon enough I was past a point of no return and realized: once you are having an experience like that, there is nothing more to it. It’s there. Being in that state for a while I felt an immense power, that was washing over me. Healing but also ‘blanking me out’.
I assumed other postures and felt centered, but also still a bit scared from before. I had a crystal clear realization that was so simple: ‘make the best of it’. Immediately I felt myself align entirely to that idea, to turn all my energy into positivity.
Coming out of the experience, I was still having bouts of wishy-washy confusion which I pretty much only know from almost any fairly active dose of mushrooms or psilocin, or LSD but at quite high doses only. One moment I could be thinking ‘holy shitt!!!!’ and the next I would be hopping around like a child. My cognition was getting obliterated though, more on that later, but the vibe got more and more playful and cheerful over time, the etizolam might have played a part, especially with the cognition, but I think it was not the main reason I managed better – the key to that already happened before the etizolam started working.
Altered thinking and the attempt of analysis of (within) confusion and dementia
The next phase consisted of me trying to make notes and diagrams that got very chaotic because I was forgetting what I was doing or losing my train of thought the entire time. I was convinced I was able to think in alternative ways though, that at the same time I understood very well technically but trying to bring it into this reality via models proved to be extremely difficult.
A few themes were the one-directionality of my mind exploring possibilities and getting ‘lost’, basically the difference between divergent and convergent thinking to the extreme. I also thought that since I was getting back to the same core ideas, even though I was losing my train of thought all the time it would amount to a sort of word-cloud that could serve as a condensed way of providing all the ingredients as long as I would draw the algorithmic relations one at a time like a flow-chart.
It involved – no surprise there – chaos and confusion, the cost-effect efficiency of explaining something if you can’t finish your sentences, ineffability, whether it matters that something is futile or ineffable. Temporal manipulation of ideas if you are not thinking linear at all anymore. And basically that it’s all “One Direction’s fault”, senility, and that a lot of this was ridiculous in a way that reminded me overwhelmingly of Rick & Morty humor, including the philosophy about mortality and metaphysics (cosmic nihilism humor etc)
I really felt like I was getting a bit old during this trip, at times like I had aged 20 years which is something that has been on my mind a bit now that I am in my 30s and things are starting to 'deteriorate'... I didn't realize quite as much that it was the ETH-LAD that wrecked me, or even the etizolam which I thought I didn't really feel so much apart from having calmed down... maybe also the boozing took it's toll.
You might think that it’s terribly frustrating to try and theorize something when you are unable to think normally, but I had a wonderful time and laughed my ass off trying. It was so elating that I felt a fulfillment of experiencing something very special again, which had been a while.
The rest of the day was spent goofing around. I completely forgot that I had baked a pizza and just forgot about it in the oven (after turning that off though). Ironically it was fine, just too salty…
Here are the notes - lol I'm glad they were so 'helpful' for writing this report 8) wtf is with the "whether", i was getting pretty hung up on that:
NSFW:
I'd give it probably a 9-/10 despite my freak-out, I do not blame the way this drug works for that, just my hybris. I want to do this again sometime!
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_ethlad
substancecode_lysergamides
explevel_firsttime
exptype_positive
exptype_glowing
exptype_difficult
roacode_sublingual
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I love ETH-LAD, from my one trial. I found it easier to handle mentally than LSD although the come-up was more intense. Of course as you said, every trip is different, it's hard to judge a substance from one trip.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
The fact that it does require such a high dose is a bit of a downer particularly for that reason. I wouldn't mind it if it was cheap and plentiful in a perfect world though, it certainly doesn't detract from the trip in any way.
It may be a little scratchy, but you can tell there's an organization to it... maybe not intentionally, but significantly more than just random. It's easy to see the whole thing as a picture if you so choose.