@JackARoe Has been imploring me to start a blog about some of my trip reports that involve certain combinations/doses of psychedelics, and I'm currently scripting a website to host them on. In the meantime though, I wrote up my initial run-in with pharmahuasca for the site and I figured I'd post it here as well:
Some initial details of the experience:
Ayahuasca had become one of my best friends around this time, a period of my life I somewhat erroneously refer to as the "ayahuasca winter". It's erroneous because it lasted 8 months, much longer than winter, yet I was taking ayahuasca daily barring days that I knew I had to drive. Those days I'd usually take it after I got home from whatever I had to do. My job was less than a mile's walk away, and I was living in a rather dense city that's only 2 square miles, so a skateboard can get me from any place to another pretty quickly. The brew had become my primary tool for enhancing meditation and processing trauma from the past that I knew was holding me back. A life spent hacking and programming led very gracefully into feeling like ayahuasca was some sort of decompiler I could use to crack the software of my own cognition, to get it to work how I wanted to, and goddamn was it successful at that task.
I predominantly brewed with Diplopterys cabrerana, Psychotria viridis, and Banisteriopsis caapi, typically adding purified tetrahydroharmine in to bring a more clearheaded element to the trip. Weekly I was using LSD, and sometimes I'd switch it up and use mushrooms twice in a week instead of LSD once in a week (acid's tolerance is longer than psilocin's). Once I had begun extracting DMT to vaporize, I realized I could just eat it alongside extracted and purified harmala alkaloids, so I wanted to give that a shot. Ayahuasca already had this quite mysterious feeling to it, it felt like if the twilight zone contained both god itself and was also found inside of a couple Amazonian plants. The comeup was always like being whisked away into some sort of afterlife's retrospective of the present, the tactile feelings were amazingly similar to psilocin or vaporized DMT with enhanced sensory awareness and a capacity to exert dramatically more physical force than I normally could. This made ayahuasca a great workout drug. Between sets of bodyweight exercises, I'd typically do a dab and meditate while on ayahuasca, and I expected pharmahuasca to be a similar experience. It was not.
Recent experiences with vaporizing DMT had been mind blowing and profound, as vaporized DMT so consistently is. The worst part was simply that it was so brief, and so intense, I wanted to slow it down to process it more a bit like ayahuasca. The logical middle ground was, of course, pharmahuasca. Recently my cannabis use when on the move had switched from using an electric nectar collector to smoke THCA diamonds in public to the use of THC-O cartridges, which offered a more clear-headed, though delayed high. I decided to visit a park in the city that I'd never been to before, Harbor View Park. This location is a grassy park on top of a hill, overseeing a somewhat ancient industrial shipping district, a drawbridge, and it's watched over by a looming row of Victorian era homes that cast an ominous, though somehwat protective vibe upon the park. The other people here were unsuspecting of my imminent tomfoolery, as was I. I thought it would be a tame experience, but I had grossly overcalculated the necessary doses of both harmaline as well as DMT. The harmaline was consumed as an infusion into tea I brewed out of banisteriopsis caapi, 300mg of harmaline and 100mg of tetrahydroharmine was added in addition to whatever was already in the tea. Drinking this before hastily skating ~20 minutes to the park led to no nausea on the come-up, but the feeling as if I was being slowly pulled upwards as if a UFO's tractor beam was unsuccessfully trying to levitate me off of the ground, and off of my skateboard's grip tape. The ride to the park was marred by an accidental overacceleration down a hill, leading to a powerslide that ovalled most of the wheels on my skateboard, leaving me unable to skate home later. This will be highly relevant soon. Upon getting to the park, I sat down and began meditating, but after meditating for another 15-20 minutes, I realized that not only had the harmaline and tetrahydroharmine fully kicked in, but I realized I'd accidentally overconsumed THC-O, taking at least 50 to 100 full rips off of the cart before I decided to put it back in my pocket as to avoid compulsively hitting it even more. I was still new to alternative cannabinoids during this phase of my life, and I had not yet learned how to treat them with proper respect.
Once the harmaline and tetrahydroharmine were truly noticeable, no more than 45 minutes after drinking the tea and heading out of my apartment, I was higher than I'd been in probably a year or two at least. The THC-O was catching up with me and I knew that there was plenty more catching up where that came from, so I figured I might as well eat the gel cap containing 125mg of N,N-DMT that I had prepared and kept in my pocket. It took no more than 15 minutes after eating this gel cap until my vision began to be overtaken by spiraling gemstones of every color whimsically dancing back and forth, pulsating outlines of every animal I could imagine were perfectly centered within my vision, I was pretty sure that the everycreature image I was seeing was god itself. My primary thought about this was "huh, neat". I decided that smoking some delta 9 might help, so I swapped carts and took a few hits, but the rapid intensification that followed administration of delta 9 led me to put the cart back in my pocket for good. As the visuals began to reach a point where I could not easily see my hands in front of my eyes, I realized that not only did I need to get home sooner rather than later, but I couldn't skate back with my senses so compromised on a board rolling on such damaged, ovalled wheels. Carrying my skateboard, I began to walk out of the park onto a brick sidewalk, and then, without warning, I began vomiting with an intensity and violence that only ayahuasca has ever made me do. It was like performing an exorcism on myself, from my stomach to my lips, purging is an understatement but exorcism is too. I have no language to describe the guttural screams that I was releasing as I was vomiting uncontrollably, much to the horror of likely 20+ innocent bystanders, and the entire playground full of elementary school aged children across the street who were hurriedly ushered back inside by their visibly concerned adult supervisors. To this day, I consider this to be one of my greatest "societal party foul" incidents. I managed to keep walking while vomiting somehow, I don't think I ever broke stride, although at points I had vomited all over my shoes, slipped in the vomit and rolled clean over my shoulder, somehow still not breaking stride or dropping the skateboard in my hands.
The walk home was quite the treacherous ordeal. I could not see clearly enough to tell when the walk signs said to go, so I was simply walking through a very dense area on vibes alone, playing a fractal themed variant of Frogger with my own life. Sometimes at busier crosswalks, I could just follow the actions of other pedestrians, but the route back to my apartment did not involve many areas that other pedestrians were waiting at, and involved many side streets and odd turns that people typically avoided, as I lived in a relatively low income area that most people in the city avoided. Noticeably, that day, I was geeking harder than anybody else in that neighborhood (West Bayside), which truly is saying something. There were points where I was concerned to step in puddles because I couldn't tell if the reflections in them were real, or if they fell down deeper than I was tall, so I was making many odd skips, hops, and peculiar shuffles along the gnarled brick sidewalks of Portland as I found my way home. The 20-25 minutes it took me to get there became more like 45-60 on the way back, due to my state of profound inebriation. Upon returning home though, I realized that not only had I found myself in a state of psychedelia unparalleled by any other experience I'd ever had, but it should, in theory, be redosable to any extent that I want it to be. My body felt amazing, my mind was flowing between states of ecstatic bliss, unfathomable awe and excited awareness of the fact that this could last for as long as I had more harmaline and DMT to shovel down my throat.
Throughout the remainder of the day, I would eat the majority of a gram of DMT (~950-1000mg in total), as well as another two doses of harmalas, each consisting of 150mg of harmaline and 50mg of tetrahydroharmine each. All doses were delivered in gel caps, and I continued tripping roughly until the sun rose the next morning. At numerous points, I looked at myself in the mirror and I resembled Aku from Samurai Jack, if he was made out of the visual elements of a kaleidoscope, in a constant state of psychedelic metamorphosis, warping and writhing and twisting in some inarticulably perfect way. I meditated upon a variety of traumas in my life that pertained to chronic illness, an abusive ex-partner, at one point I attempted to sand the wheels of my skateboard back into a round shape but quickly gave up upon realizing how much of a fool's errand that was, simply swapping them out for another set I had on hand. Many hours were also spent programming, and cracking an old copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 to work inside of a PSX emulator, but with the levels from the past games in the franchise as well. The clarity of thought that I was experiencing was genuinely performance enhancing for computationally oriented tasks like programming and hacking, but doing a simple physical task like changing the wheels on my skateboard took easily 4-5 times as long as it normally would, due to the distracting visuals and proclivity towards tactile overstimulation from the high doses of DMT and harmaline. I continued tripping until I saw the sun rising the next day, telling me that I'd soon have to be functional enough to go to work. I'd worked just fine on a variety of psychedelics, but knew that I was far too lost in the sauce to not come off as an unhinged lunatic in this state, so numerous large swigs of liquor (it was either whiskey or gin if I recall correctly) set me rather straight, and I skated to the office on a new set of non-ovalled wheels.
In retrospect: This was the first time that I'd used pharmahuasca, and was far from the last. It was the last time I ever fiendishly ate my entire supply of DMT in one day, but it was also the most clear-headed, visually stunning, emotionally healing experience I'd had out of probably 100+ trips at this point in my life. I found it to be exceptionally useful for tasks that involved thought and creativity, and I'm sure that it would've been highly conducive to art as well. I could feel the life emanating from my houseplants, and the history of my people immigrating into the neighborhoods of the city I walked home through, where each brick was likely laid by one of their hands, felt like the roots of a family tree growing up out of the ground, wrapping around my feet and absorbing me into it, reminding me that I am just one link in the chain of the energy put forth by my ancestors. In addition to the more profound elements, I was genuinely a menace with the decompiler out and cracking software became even easier than it normally was, given it was something I already spent a fair amount of time doing. I would compare the intensity of this to 30-50 tabs of acid off the street, but with a far more clear-headed mindset and a less dopaminergic (think jaw grinding) and more tryptamine-y (think feeling every cell in your body let out a sigh of relief all at once, every moment that passes) sort of body feel, when compared to LSD. I found interacting with my roommate to be relatively normal, he could tell I was geeked to the bone but also expected such, given that it was my typical state. This initial experience was highly confounded by the extreme amount of THC-O that was consumed, probably somewhere between a third of a gram and half of a gram in total. Upon getting home I also vaporized 1-2 full grams of rosin. During this period of my life though, I was consuming 1-2 grams of rosin a day, and the THC-O was just supplementary to that, not altering my headspace much more than it would've been if I'd instead just eaten a heady edible (300-500mg) instead. THC-O however maintains a much easier to control headspace than orally administered delta 9 THC. In the future, I'd add LSD, psilocybin containing fungi, blue/red/pink/white lotus, yohimbine, ephedrine, caffeine (and other xanthines), klip dagga, alpine dagga, Alicia anisopetala, and other alternative cannabinoids into the mix with harmaline, tetrahydroharmine and DMT just to see how things went. This led me into my favorite combination of harmalas with any psychedelic of all time, LSD, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine.
Some initial details of the experience:
- Age: 23.
- Date: Late Winter/Early Spring of 2023 (usually referred to as the "melting season" in Maine).
- Weight: ~175 lbs (~80 kg). All I did in this period of my life was skate, trip, write code, hack shit and meditate.
- Experience: Using LSD, ayahuasca, and psilocybin containing mushrooms literally as often as my tolerance would allow, and consuming 1-2 grams of delta 9 rosin daily via a dab rig.
- Headspace: Calm, excited to see what pharmahuasca had to offer compared to ayahuasca, incredibly, unbelievably stoned at every moment in my day.
- Career & Lifestyle: Software engineer, goofy hippie in Portland, Maine.
Ayahuasca had become one of my best friends around this time, a period of my life I somewhat erroneously refer to as the "ayahuasca winter". It's erroneous because it lasted 8 months, much longer than winter, yet I was taking ayahuasca daily barring days that I knew I had to drive. Those days I'd usually take it after I got home from whatever I had to do. My job was less than a mile's walk away, and I was living in a rather dense city that's only 2 square miles, so a skateboard can get me from any place to another pretty quickly. The brew had become my primary tool for enhancing meditation and processing trauma from the past that I knew was holding me back. A life spent hacking and programming led very gracefully into feeling like ayahuasca was some sort of decompiler I could use to crack the software of my own cognition, to get it to work how I wanted to, and goddamn was it successful at that task.
I predominantly brewed with Diplopterys cabrerana, Psychotria viridis, and Banisteriopsis caapi, typically adding purified tetrahydroharmine in to bring a more clearheaded element to the trip. Weekly I was using LSD, and sometimes I'd switch it up and use mushrooms twice in a week instead of LSD once in a week (acid's tolerance is longer than psilocin's). Once I had begun extracting DMT to vaporize, I realized I could just eat it alongside extracted and purified harmala alkaloids, so I wanted to give that a shot. Ayahuasca already had this quite mysterious feeling to it, it felt like if the twilight zone contained both god itself and was also found inside of a couple Amazonian plants. The comeup was always like being whisked away into some sort of afterlife's retrospective of the present, the tactile feelings were amazingly similar to psilocin or vaporized DMT with enhanced sensory awareness and a capacity to exert dramatically more physical force than I normally could. This made ayahuasca a great workout drug. Between sets of bodyweight exercises, I'd typically do a dab and meditate while on ayahuasca, and I expected pharmahuasca to be a similar experience. It was not.
Recent experiences with vaporizing DMT had been mind blowing and profound, as vaporized DMT so consistently is. The worst part was simply that it was so brief, and so intense, I wanted to slow it down to process it more a bit like ayahuasca. The logical middle ground was, of course, pharmahuasca. Recently my cannabis use when on the move had switched from using an electric nectar collector to smoke THCA diamonds in public to the use of THC-O cartridges, which offered a more clear-headed, though delayed high. I decided to visit a park in the city that I'd never been to before, Harbor View Park. This location is a grassy park on top of a hill, overseeing a somewhat ancient industrial shipping district, a drawbridge, and it's watched over by a looming row of Victorian era homes that cast an ominous, though somehwat protective vibe upon the park. The other people here were unsuspecting of my imminent tomfoolery, as was I. I thought it would be a tame experience, but I had grossly overcalculated the necessary doses of both harmaline as well as DMT. The harmaline was consumed as an infusion into tea I brewed out of banisteriopsis caapi, 300mg of harmaline and 100mg of tetrahydroharmine was added in addition to whatever was already in the tea. Drinking this before hastily skating ~20 minutes to the park led to no nausea on the come-up, but the feeling as if I was being slowly pulled upwards as if a UFO's tractor beam was unsuccessfully trying to levitate me off of the ground, and off of my skateboard's grip tape. The ride to the park was marred by an accidental overacceleration down a hill, leading to a powerslide that ovalled most of the wheels on my skateboard, leaving me unable to skate home later. This will be highly relevant soon. Upon getting to the park, I sat down and began meditating, but after meditating for another 15-20 minutes, I realized that not only had the harmaline and tetrahydroharmine fully kicked in, but I realized I'd accidentally overconsumed THC-O, taking at least 50 to 100 full rips off of the cart before I decided to put it back in my pocket as to avoid compulsively hitting it even more. I was still new to alternative cannabinoids during this phase of my life, and I had not yet learned how to treat them with proper respect.
Once the harmaline and tetrahydroharmine were truly noticeable, no more than 45 minutes after drinking the tea and heading out of my apartment, I was higher than I'd been in probably a year or two at least. The THC-O was catching up with me and I knew that there was plenty more catching up where that came from, so I figured I might as well eat the gel cap containing 125mg of N,N-DMT that I had prepared and kept in my pocket. It took no more than 15 minutes after eating this gel cap until my vision began to be overtaken by spiraling gemstones of every color whimsically dancing back and forth, pulsating outlines of every animal I could imagine were perfectly centered within my vision, I was pretty sure that the everycreature image I was seeing was god itself. My primary thought about this was "huh, neat". I decided that smoking some delta 9 might help, so I swapped carts and took a few hits, but the rapid intensification that followed administration of delta 9 led me to put the cart back in my pocket for good. As the visuals began to reach a point where I could not easily see my hands in front of my eyes, I realized that not only did I need to get home sooner rather than later, but I couldn't skate back with my senses so compromised on a board rolling on such damaged, ovalled wheels. Carrying my skateboard, I began to walk out of the park onto a brick sidewalk, and then, without warning, I began vomiting with an intensity and violence that only ayahuasca has ever made me do. It was like performing an exorcism on myself, from my stomach to my lips, purging is an understatement but exorcism is too. I have no language to describe the guttural screams that I was releasing as I was vomiting uncontrollably, much to the horror of likely 20+ innocent bystanders, and the entire playground full of elementary school aged children across the street who were hurriedly ushered back inside by their visibly concerned adult supervisors. To this day, I consider this to be one of my greatest "societal party foul" incidents. I managed to keep walking while vomiting somehow, I don't think I ever broke stride, although at points I had vomited all over my shoes, slipped in the vomit and rolled clean over my shoulder, somehow still not breaking stride or dropping the skateboard in my hands.
The walk home was quite the treacherous ordeal. I could not see clearly enough to tell when the walk signs said to go, so I was simply walking through a very dense area on vibes alone, playing a fractal themed variant of Frogger with my own life. Sometimes at busier crosswalks, I could just follow the actions of other pedestrians, but the route back to my apartment did not involve many areas that other pedestrians were waiting at, and involved many side streets and odd turns that people typically avoided, as I lived in a relatively low income area that most people in the city avoided. Noticeably, that day, I was geeking harder than anybody else in that neighborhood (West Bayside), which truly is saying something. There were points where I was concerned to step in puddles because I couldn't tell if the reflections in them were real, or if they fell down deeper than I was tall, so I was making many odd skips, hops, and peculiar shuffles along the gnarled brick sidewalks of Portland as I found my way home. The 20-25 minutes it took me to get there became more like 45-60 on the way back, due to my state of profound inebriation. Upon returning home though, I realized that not only had I found myself in a state of psychedelia unparalleled by any other experience I'd ever had, but it should, in theory, be redosable to any extent that I want it to be. My body felt amazing, my mind was flowing between states of ecstatic bliss, unfathomable awe and excited awareness of the fact that this could last for as long as I had more harmaline and DMT to shovel down my throat.
Throughout the remainder of the day, I would eat the majority of a gram of DMT (~950-1000mg in total), as well as another two doses of harmalas, each consisting of 150mg of harmaline and 50mg of tetrahydroharmine each. All doses were delivered in gel caps, and I continued tripping roughly until the sun rose the next morning. At numerous points, I looked at myself in the mirror and I resembled Aku from Samurai Jack, if he was made out of the visual elements of a kaleidoscope, in a constant state of psychedelic metamorphosis, warping and writhing and twisting in some inarticulably perfect way. I meditated upon a variety of traumas in my life that pertained to chronic illness, an abusive ex-partner, at one point I attempted to sand the wheels of my skateboard back into a round shape but quickly gave up upon realizing how much of a fool's errand that was, simply swapping them out for another set I had on hand. Many hours were also spent programming, and cracking an old copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 to work inside of a PSX emulator, but with the levels from the past games in the franchise as well. The clarity of thought that I was experiencing was genuinely performance enhancing for computationally oriented tasks like programming and hacking, but doing a simple physical task like changing the wheels on my skateboard took easily 4-5 times as long as it normally would, due to the distracting visuals and proclivity towards tactile overstimulation from the high doses of DMT and harmaline. I continued tripping until I saw the sun rising the next day, telling me that I'd soon have to be functional enough to go to work. I'd worked just fine on a variety of psychedelics, but knew that I was far too lost in the sauce to not come off as an unhinged lunatic in this state, so numerous large swigs of liquor (it was either whiskey or gin if I recall correctly) set me rather straight, and I skated to the office on a new set of non-ovalled wheels.
In retrospect: This was the first time that I'd used pharmahuasca, and was far from the last. It was the last time I ever fiendishly ate my entire supply of DMT in one day, but it was also the most clear-headed, visually stunning, emotionally healing experience I'd had out of probably 100+ trips at this point in my life. I found it to be exceptionally useful for tasks that involved thought and creativity, and I'm sure that it would've been highly conducive to art as well. I could feel the life emanating from my houseplants, and the history of my people immigrating into the neighborhoods of the city I walked home through, where each brick was likely laid by one of their hands, felt like the roots of a family tree growing up out of the ground, wrapping around my feet and absorbing me into it, reminding me that I am just one link in the chain of the energy put forth by my ancestors. In addition to the more profound elements, I was genuinely a menace with the decompiler out and cracking software became even easier than it normally was, given it was something I already spent a fair amount of time doing. I would compare the intensity of this to 30-50 tabs of acid off the street, but with a far more clear-headed mindset and a less dopaminergic (think jaw grinding) and more tryptamine-y (think feeling every cell in your body let out a sigh of relief all at once, every moment that passes) sort of body feel, when compared to LSD. I found interacting with my roommate to be relatively normal, he could tell I was geeked to the bone but also expected such, given that it was my typical state. This initial experience was highly confounded by the extreme amount of THC-O that was consumed, probably somewhere between a third of a gram and half of a gram in total. Upon getting home I also vaporized 1-2 full grams of rosin. During this period of my life though, I was consuming 1-2 grams of rosin a day, and the THC-O was just supplementary to that, not altering my headspace much more than it would've been if I'd instead just eaten a heady edible (300-500mg) instead. THC-O however maintains a much easier to control headspace than orally administered delta 9 THC. In the future, I'd add LSD, psilocybin containing fungi, blue/red/pink/white lotus, yohimbine, ephedrine, caffeine (and other xanthines), klip dagga, alpine dagga, Alicia anisopetala, and other alternative cannabinoids into the mix with harmaline, tetrahydroharmine and DMT just to see how things went. This led me into my favorite combination of harmalas with any psychedelic of all time, LSD, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine.
