Here are the followers, right. Now put that holy 4-OH-DMT onto your banner! Classic tryptamine pathos is the only true psychedelic experience. It won't hurt you and will lead you to ultimate and final enlightenment. Everything else is outright heresy.
Cute. But, this kind of thing proves that you are not understanding where I am coming from at all. Of course a chemical construct can not be inherently evil. Hell, I have trouble believing a
living thing can be truly "evil". I have already said that 2C-I and 2C-E are interesting and beautiful substances and that I respect them as psychedelics. And even though I dislike it now, I still hesitate to pull 2C-E out of my top five due to the sheer level of interest that I have in the experience as well as the depths at which it has left its seemingly permanent mark on myself and others (not to mention a few very fond memories that I've gathered during my time spent with it). But I truly believe that it is less conducive to a stable mind / more dangerous to an unstable mind and can have a permanent or long-lasting effect on perceptions beyond that of HPPD (which has been pretty much confirmed to be a major problem with the 2C-X family) and in a way far different from and more apparent than other psychedelic substances. I admit that I was a bit of a sensationalist, I was wrong to call out the 2C family in its entirety, and I may have chosen the wrong words at certain instances, but at the end of the day it is simply my opinion based on personal experience and I never expected anybody to take it as anything more. I did not think that I would have to throw "IMO" onto the end of each one of my sentences to get that point across, but perhaps I was wrong.
I have had horrid experiences with other drugs and I would not say something like this about any of them. Like IamMe90 proposes, I would have simply moved on, perhaps after writing up a trip report to relate my experiences to others. But I have talked to multiple people in real life who have experienced the same kind of negative, long-lasting damage that 2C-E and 2C-I have dealt to me. I have also posted this same thread on another psychedelic forum (although not in the sensationalist fashion that I did here, I guess I got swept up in my feelings towards these drugs and went off on a rant) and had a rather upsetting number of people agree with the points that I brought forth. And there are obviously some people here who think that I may be on to something as well.
The 2C experience has been burned into my mind like a picture gets burned into a television set. It's like it's hovering over my normal sense of perception and altering them at times, and I don't just mean visually (although focusing on the HPPD does bring me "further" into it). These changes were there from the very first time I used 2C-E, but I never gave much attention to it because it was a new experience and I simply thought they would go away with time, plus I had not yet seen the "dark side" and found the new sensations kind of amusing. It took me a long time to come to terms with these mental scars and accept them as part of me, and during that time I have never felt closer to insanity. This is something that I know was at least strongly related to the 2Cs, because it did not start until I had used 2C-E and 2C-I and did not begin to recede until I had stopped using 2C-E / 2C-I for quite some time. Furthermore, there is a distinct, unrecognizable 2C "flavor" to the unwanted mental saturation.
I believe that there very well may be real risks to these chemicals that are not seen at first and/or not often discussed, and the point of this thread was simply to bring that to the attention of others and see what they had to say. Whether it is a matter of this particular family of drugs having a higher potential for "abuse" (due to novelty, lack of immediate tolerance, cheapness, availability, etc.) like some people here seem to think, or if there is something about the chemical actions of the drug and the inherent nature of the experience that is more likely to produce a higher incidence of psychedelic-related mental illness than other substances (which is what I think).
We all know that the 2C's have a heavy, stimulating, "speedy" effect. And we also know that temporary psychosis is heavily linked with stimulant use. Could it be the stimulant qualities combined with the psychedelic qualities and "coldness" at the depths of the 2C-E / 2C-I experience that cause them to be so harsh on some? Just throwing some thoughts around...
I am not a psychedelic elitist. "Classic" and "naturally occurring" mean absolutely nothing to me when it comes to psychedelics. Methoxetamine, 4-AcO-DMT, LSD, and aMT are my absolute favorite substances behind DMT, and none of them could be considered natural (and only one of them could be considered a classic). I try to see the experience for what it is, not from where it originates. I do not literally think that the 2C's are toxic, cold, or fake. The descriptors I used are there to try and relay my personal experience and the experiences of others the best I can using plain English. The psychedelic experience is an ineffable one, and I would expect the people here to understand that better than anybody and not take my words so literally. You know what I mean when I call the experience cold and analytical, and if you would read my posts you'd know what I mean when I say "organic".
instead of condemning the 2c's as "evil,", the OP had just given everyone a humble warning that in his opinion, the 2c-x series posed some risks.
Truly, that is all this was meant to be. I have passionate personal feelings regarding these chemicals that caused me to go a little overboard. I've been a bad, bad boy and have had my spanking.
Also, what is up with all of this unfounded projection of character? And the only people who've used the words "evil" in this thread are the ones pretending that I said it.
This is a great thread. Out of the 2C's, I've only done 2C-E and 2C-I, and only a few times each. That said, here's my take.
I am a highly analytical person. Super-rational, more than anyone else I know. I am also a pure naturalist. I don't believe in the existence of ghosts, gods, entities, spirits, or anything else like that - or at the very least, if those kinds of things DO exist somewhere, somehow, we will not ever have access to them, nor they to us. In my opinion, anyone who thinks they have connected with something which is BEYOND nature is deluding themselves. We ARE indeed nature, but nature is material, mortal, bags of simmering chemicals fighting against entropy, evolving down through the generations, until that giant fusion reactor in the daytime sky burns itself out and entropy eventually wins.
When I had my ego-loss experience on 2C-I that one time, a part of me kind of experienced (on some level) something like what the OP is talking about. Of course it wasn't really "me" experiencing it - ya dig? Something came out - a hidden aspect of "me"? Or perhaps just an aspect of human nature, or an aspect of existence itself - something that was not positive, not affirmative, not a place where all is one and all is good, but rather a total submersion into the eternally repeating fractal - a place where infinity piles upon infinity piles upon infinity, where there is no up or down, no left or right, no right or wrong, a place from which the frightened, disoriented little ego recoils in horror, then despair - and then anger. Pure, white-hot righteous anger at the gaping, bottomless, black hole at the centre of all questions, at the lack of objective frames of reference, at the absence of good and evil, at the process of natural selection, that horrible, bloody, cruel joke, at the lion who must work endlessly at becoming an ever-bigger and stronger monster to feed her cubs, at the gazelle forced to run all his life and dominate the smaller gazelles if he wants his children to survive, at the arbitrariness of love and hate, ego and id, strength and weakness, at the realization that all meanings are forever symbiotically linked, that nothing can exist without its opposite, and that existence and non-existence are both exactly equivalent and everything is permissible. Something that was not me, but rather a sinister, predatory essence began to stir, to feel, to BURN - profoundly, wildly, - and suddenly that fragile little ego was completely gone and it BECAME the bone-chilling, empty, eternally expanding void of insatiable hunger. It was a glimpse into the pure, stark naked core of things as they truly are, which is to say, as I see them - and it was suddenly, shockingly beautiful. For a guy like me, this was nothing short of AWESOME.
Now it sounds to me, Styrofoam Jones that you are not like me. And that's cool. It sounds to me that this kind of trip is not what you're looking for. That's cool too. But like many others have said, I would be careful about making blanket statements about "the true nature" of this or that family of drugs. They may have a "true nature" but it will never be experienced the same way by everyone. And of course, doing any psychedelic too often, especially one that can provide experiences like this, is probably inadvisable.
In conclusion - for the next little while I think I'll be sticking with mescaline.
This reminds me a lot of what I've heard from others, and what I've gone through myself. Is it so hard to believe that a drug may produce a reliable, loosely defined experience throughout a portion of its users, and that this experience might be something that is not easily integrated or "managed" by many? What about the Salvia Wheel? Or even broader concepts like the fractal void (commonly experienced on LSD)? There are obvious and widespread constants throughout the human-psychedelic relationship.
I've been to the kind of place that you are describing on 2C-I and 2C-E. I have had beautiful ego death before, but this experience is... there just doesn't seem to be any humanity in it. It's something that, like you said, a human mind seems to automatically and instinctually assign some kind of sinister nature to. It's a cold depth that seems to instantly cause not only you as a human being, but you as a living thing, as an existence in general, to recoil in disgust. I have had terrible, terrible, terrible times on other substances but none have had such a permanent effect on me. 2C-I and 2C-E have left their mark on me for months on end, and I can still feel the changes they've made, although they ever so slowly "fade to the background" as I come to accept that this is just how I am now. It's not just the HPPD (although my HPPD is absolutely ridiculous, to the point of patterning and at times even fractals), it's a solid mental shift.
I can see how you found that place beautiful. I did too. I really did. Until I realized it wasn't going away anytime soon. And the HPPD was a constant reminder of this. The experiences were great at the time, but at the end of the day there just wasn't anything but nonsense, a space of maddeningly empty yet extremely distracting mental saturation that does not feel appropriate or useful on any level. And yet it remains.
What makes me feel so passionately about these chemicals is that, like AlyDrops says, so many people see little to no psychedelic experience or value in them, except for at very high doses. They'll go on and on about how mild and easy on the mind they are, and they'll recommend them as the perfect drugs for beginner psychonauts. I can not count how many times I've heard something like "LOL WHAT HOW'D U MANAGE A BAD TRIP ON 2C-I?!?!?!" And then people like me and you can take 25mg or less and reach these profoundly inhumane states of mind. That, combined with all of the negative patterns that I've perceived in these drugs make them seem kind of "wrong" to me.
Furthermore, I think it's even easier to equate these substances with a somewhat "sinister" nature given the sheer trickiness of them. I've had 17mg 2C-E experiences that were significantly stronger than 22mg experiences. It seems to throw you through a loop every time, literally and figuratively. They really are interesting chemicals. I just strongly question their safety and widespread reputation as baby's first psychedelic. Personally, I'm never going back, although Mescaline remains my most wanted psychedelic and I would still love to try the rest of the 2C family.
