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Experienced possible glutamate cascade

Timothy Leary

Bluelighter
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
61
I had massed 50 mg of DPT, and was planning to titrate via insufflation. I held off on my little pile of DPT to do some more reading. After a bit of reading I decided to mass out 20 mg more and keep it separate just in case I couldn't stand the burn.

I got through about 10 mg of the 50 mg pile before running around looking for cough drops to ease the pain, it was not unbearable, just very unpleasant. After the first few minutes of lozenge sucking things got a bit trippy and I got a respectable amount of visual distortion, you would diffidently notice it if you didn't know you'd been drugged, but it was pretty mild. So knowing that the molecule is very weak when taken orally compared to insufflation I just ate the other 60 mg I had measured, so 70 total, which is what erowid lists as threshold for oral consumption.

It got scary, very, VERY scary. All went fine until t + 3:30, I had come down a bit at t:+1:00 probably from the insufflated DPT wearing off. At about T+ 1:30 I started getting more effects, and they got more and more intense, after 3 hours I started to think I took a bit much, the visuals were very intense; but I anticipated coming down soon. But at T+ 3:30 I started getting a bit scared, I started to notice a bit of anxiety, but more frightening was the fact that I was having occasional moments of the very edges of the bar on the top of a light blue Firefox window having intrusions of what I thought was orange. I then started noticing every so often the black parts of my laptop would have sections of white near the corners. It got worse from there.

I started getting scared, I was going to get a serotonin antagonist, but couldn't remember if LSD and psychedelics were 5HT-2A agonists or antagonists, I would have NEVER forgotten that. Thank god I couldn't get to to the risperidone before more happened, as you will see later. I started getting delerious and got some more "true" hallucinations, not patterns but like seeing things as people for just a split second in what was really just a pile of pillows. after a while I started to get really scared and couldn't really follow a conversation at all, not because I knew no language, I just didn't recall what was said a minute ago. I got more and more delerious, I don't even remember some of it. I started having delusions I could stop it by figuring out some truth, I started to vasulate on thoughts about seeds being the start of everything, and ideas of self and stuff, it was not normal psychedelic stuff, it was what I would imagine atropine poisoning to be like. The visuals were unsettlingly cartoon-like, a bit like a cannabanoid, they were not typical of serotonin hallucinogens. More colour inversion came, but I really don't remember about 30 minutes of it. I was told I seemed like a seriously mentally impaired individual.

This state lasted roughly two hours and then wore down on its own as I gained composure again. I was still a bit "off" though. I came to the conclusion it was probably a glutamate cascade given the colour inversion. I took 60 mg of dextromethorphan to antagonize the glutamate receptors and within 15 minutes I felt completely like my old self. The next day I slept heavily and administered low doses of DXM constantly to give my glutamate system time to rest from the excitotoxicity.

I was in this state for a short period and then used an NMDA antagonist to counter the cascade, however glutamate is of course an excitotoxin. I am concerned as to the level of damage this has done, if any. I am expecialy concerned about the location of the action of the DPT, being in the higher functioning centers like the locus coeruleus and the prefrontal cortex, however glutamate cascades tend to move around being that the system is wired in everywhere and distributes through different nerve pathways. I have not noticed any problems with memory or executive funtioning. The glutamate system is the most plastic of the brain and I anticipate if there was any nerve death damage it was either repaired by the cells mechanisms given the short period of damage, (2 hours may sound like a lot but the intensity of status epilepticus makes the glutamate activity I experienced look like a K hole) or the system will work around any seriously damaged neurons.

I am wondering if the extra 20 mg I weighed may have actualy been a 50/50 mixture of 2C-E/2C-I, as I had a bag of that around, it would explain some of the increased length. Quite frankly though I have my doubts about the identity of bag of "DPT" I ordered. 10 mg initial insufflated should probably have not been quite as pronounced as it was, nor should this dose have been that long acting, or induced glutamate cascade. (even with some 2C-X's) I think ultimately this equates to "the bad childhood fever" and the delirium associated with high fevers, and I know people who have been in that delirium in fevers for like 6-12 hours. I do not anticipate damage, however I would like some input on your thoughts or experiences.

Interestingly enough the only long term thing that I have noticed is that I am much more amiable now (not that I wasn't before, I am very peaceful, its just I have two particular people who really get on my nerves) and I am generally more patient, I thought about this independently but passed it off as placebo, however I gave it more thought after two people noticed the change. I have also observed that I am not quite as chronically depressed. These are positive changes, but it is concerning as it means something changed. Of course this could all be from me being glad to not have died. :)

PS- I am disposing of my DPT, I advise you to be very careful if you have any on hand and have not had any experience with your particular batch. Either way one should tread lightly.
 
Although it doesn't sound like what you took was DPT given the doses, your experience doesn't sound an atypical psychedelic experience.. I'm puzzled as to why you found the colour distortions early on as so frightening.

This:
I started getting delerious and got some more "true" hallucinations, not patterns but like seeing things as people for just a split second in what was really just a pile of pillows. after a while I started to get really scared and couldn't really follow a conversation at all, not because I knew no language, I just didn't recall what was said a minute ago. I got more and more delerious, I don't even remember some of it. I started having delusions I could stop it by figuring out some truth, I started to vasulate on thoughts about seeds being the start of everything, and ideas of self and stuff, it was not normal psychedelic stuff, it was what I would imagine atropine poisoning to be like. The visuals were unsettlingly cartoon-like, a bit like a cannabanoid, they were not typical of serotonin hallucinogens. More colour inversion came, but I really don't remember about 30 minutes of it. I was told I seemed like a seriously mentally impaired individual.

TBH sounds just like tripping, albeit quite strongly. I wouldn't say flashes of seeing groups of objects as people counts as a "true hallucination".

As for the glutamate excitotoxicity, I'm thoroughly confused. It seems highly unlikely that's what happened, and I'm not sure why you came to that conclusion, when the far more likely one is that you were experiencing the normal effects of a psychedelic.
 
There is so much wrong with the original post, is this a work of fiction?

Are you an aspiring writer Tim?

There's being wrong, then there is being wrong when your own well being hangs in the balance.

If anything taking an NMDA antagonist on top of a 'potent and overwhelming' psychedelic (be it an phenethylamine or tryptamine), would only potentiate the negative effects.

If you had Risperidone, why didn't you just take that? Psychedelics are agonists, Risperidone is an antagonist. Problem solved lessened.

And why throw out an unknown substance? Send it to one of the helpful lab rats who peruse this website so that this does not happen to other people. If there's some DPT going around that's actually a phenethylamine, you're acting counter to harm reduction in destroying your sample.
 
Leary, you seem to be jumping to conclusions based on our rather poor knowledge of psychedelic psychopharmacology. We barely know how these things work in the brain, let alone knowing what acute symptoms and types of hallucinations might accompany a "glutamate cascade." Frankly, it sounds like medical technobabble on Star Trek.

I mean, that might be a theoretical process for excitotoxicity, but none of this stuff is precise science yet. It sounds like you were just having an overly intense psychedelic experience. Intense experiences change us. That doesn't mean there has been some kind of psychophysical damage to your brain.
 
My post was rather poorly written and jumped to a lot of conclusions. I was worked up at the time it was written.

But honestly, I may not have described it as well as I could have but I do not think this was an effect from the 5HT-2A receptor. Take a look at these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_seizure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_receptor#Clinical_significance
(check the excitotoxicity heading)

I had actually found a description of the colour inversion a few days ago but I cant find the page at the moment, I will post it when I find it again. The colour inversion was almost like looking at the negative of a photograph but not the entire visual field. I remember parts of being in an absolute delerium I was attempting to use my laptop touch pad but realized that my finger was on the far corner of the keyboard, about 4 inches away from the touch pad. I do not remember a good part of it, I remember after my pupils were huge, the biggest Ive ever seen, and I could shine a flashlight in them and they would not contract at all. I was in a stupor and didn't understand anything at all, not as in I didn't understand why war or suffering occurred, I just didn't get anything, it was like being an animal.

The subjective effects were completely different than any kind of classical hallucinogen, much more like what I hear about datura. All I have to say is that I firmly believe that this was something else.

But yes, my original post was conceptually flawed, I tend to get overly worked up.
 
This sounds like a typical panic attack. People tend to dismiss panic attacks as the root cause of an extremely distressing episode because the symptoms seem too severe to be merely imagined or anxiety. However a true clinical panic attack as you likely experienced can cause temporary amnesia, severe disorientation, frightening or distorted hallucinations. A sense of dissociation, or disconnect from reality similiar to the negative effects of the dissociative class of drugs (like datura). During a panic attack stress hormones are released to levels which would not normally occur within your body. These hormones do a number of things including redirecting blood flow in the brain, causing you to have much more emotional and much less rational thought processes. These hormones also serve to heighten the senses, and significantly lower the threshold stimuli required to cause sensation. Because of this, the effects of a psychedelic become significantly amplified giving the classic second come-up you described. You also mentioned chronic depression which makes you significantly more likely to have a panic attack even without the addition of an anxiety inducing drug.
Long story short pofacedhoe is right: you had a bad trip- it happens
 
This sounds like a typical panic attack. People tend to dismiss panic attacks as the root cause of an extremely distressing episode because the symptoms seem too severe to be merely imagined or anxiety. However a true clinical panic attack as you likely experienced can cause temporary amnesia, severe disorientation, frightening or distorted hallucinations. A sense of dissociation, or disconnect from reality similiar to the negative effects of the dissociative class of drugs (like datura). During a panic attack stress hormones are released to levels which would not normally occur within your body. These hormones do a number of things including redirecting blood flow in the brain, causing you to have much more emotional and much less rational thought processes. These hormones also serve to heighten the senses, and significantly lower the threshold stimuli required to cause sensation. Because of this, the effects of a psychedelic become significantly amplified giving the classic second come-up you described. You also mentioned chronic depression which makes you significantly more likely to have a panic attack even without the addition of an anxiety inducing drug.
Long story short pofacedhoe is right: you had a bad trip- it happens

having had panic attacks on trips i can safely say they are the most face melting horror you can imagine (you feel like your brain is burning), you feel a sense of dirty that is beyond describable and has put me off trying 4aco-dmt again for maybe ever.

once on mushrooms i just experienced a strong sense of eletric shocks- like the brain zaps you get after using too much mdma but about a million times worse. it was brutal and had a terrible effect on mood afterwards. it was physically painfull- horrid.

also dxm releases serotonin- whereas psychedelics block the action of serotonin so maybe thats why you felt better after dxm
 
You appear to be misusing some terms here...in short, a gross oversimplification

me or the op?

my explanation is ridiculously simple but i have never experienced the kind of panic attacks and bad trips from amt (strong serotonin releasing agent) that i have from 4aco-dmt and mushrooms (or from purely dopaminergic drugs such as mdpv). also ssri's can be prescribed for panic attacks, and heavy use of mdma can lead to pnaic attacks in the weeks afterwards among other things.

i think serotonin is heavily involves in panic attacks

as far as i was aware psychedlics do block the action of serotonin at the 5ht2a recepetor and that this is what triggers the psychelic experience (through other more complex mechanisms)
 
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having had panic attacks on trips i can safely say they are the most face melting horror you can imagine (you feel like your brain is burning), you feel a sense of dirty that is beyond describable and has put me off trying 4aco-dmt again for maybe ever.

once on mushrooms i just experienced a strong sense of eletric shocks- like the brain zaps you get after using too much mdma but about a million times worse. it was brutal and had a terrible effect on mood afterwards. it was physically painfull- horrid.

also dxm releases serotonin- whereas psychedelics block the action of serotonin so maybe thats why you felt better after dxm

I thought psychedelics mimic seratonin at the 5-HT2a and 5-HT2c receptors not block it.
 
I thought psychedelics mimic seratonin at the 5-HT2a and 5-HT2c receptors not block it.

yes they are like serotonin but while they are in action they block serotonin as well as binding to the receptor and having an effect that isn't the one serotonin would have caused. maybe i'm wrong but i remember reading something like this on erowid. surely thats why lsd (which has effect long after it has finished binding to the 5ht2a receptor) potentiates mdma so much, and why mushrooms and many 5ht2a agonists can cause such intense anxiety on the come up
 
me or the op?

my explanation is ridiculously simple but i have never experienced the kind of panic attacks and bad trips from amt (strong serotonin releasing agent) that i have from 4aco-dmt and mushrooms (or from purely dopaminergic drugs such as mdpv). also ssri's can be prescribed for panic attacks, and heavy use of mdma can lead to pnaic attacks in the weeks afterwards among other things.

i think serotonin is heavily involves in panic attacks

as far as i was aware psychedlics do block the action of serotonin at the 5ht2a recepetor and that this is what triggers the psychelic experience (through other more complex mechanisms)

No not at all, I was referring to the poster. He seems confused....not sure how he arrived at these notions:

10 mg initial insufflated should probably have not been quite as pronounced as it was, nor should this dose have been that long acting, or induced glutamate cascade. (

I wonder what a long-acting/induced glutamate cascade feels like................is it not as refreshing as it sounds?

Point is, I think his sample was contaminated with Aminoprefuos-entheogenusindolicas (or possible some residual extract from the highly potent Intoleras Psychotomimetrica vine).........
 
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