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Becoming a Digital Entity
DOB & Cannabis
Citation:   1101011. "Becoming a Digital Entity: An Experience with DOB & Cannabis (exp101441)". Erowid.org. Jun 26, 2021. erowid.org/exp/101441

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
2 mg oral DOB (blotter / tab)
  T+ 4:00   smoked Cannabis  
BODY WEIGHT: 70 kg
This report is not very accurate in terms of the details and time-frame of the experience since I had not planned to write a report on the experience. Furthermore, the experience was quite confusing at times and I have since forgotten the intricate details: that'll teach me to keep a trip log! The report is however very long, because I delve quite deeply into the background, set and setting, and aftermath of the experience.

***One-sentence summary:

I still don't know whether I love or hate DOB, but one thing's for sure: don't touch it if you're in an unstable mindset.

***Background and personal experience:

It is my belief that 'experienced psychonauts' write the most useful trip reports in terms of how informative or interesting the report is to the reader. I consider myself a 'newbie' psychonaut, since my personal level of experience with psychedelics is quite limited, but I have found all of my experiences to be most interesting. I've been a heavy cannabis smoker for about a year and have experienced around 10 psilocybin mushroom trips and three DOB trips (including this one). I've never felt particularly inclined to write a trip report before because I found that my experiences weren't radically different from those I've read in other reports, so my report would just be the same as all the others. This time I think my experience is worth sharing due to the relatively small number of reports on DOB and the fact that my subjective experience seems to have been slightly different from those described in other reports.

I have had recurring problems with blood clots in my legs and I am currently on anticoagulant therapy (warfarin) and part of this report is to provide information to people with similar conditions so that they can make informed decisions. I've noted painful vasoconstriction in one of my legs with previous high-dose mushroom trips which once led to minor 'thrombophlebitis' but I found that cannabis helped to prevent vasoconstriction if I smoke two or three joints during the come-up. I therefore decided to be careful with DOB, and started with a low dose (0.7 mg) for my first time, and increased the dosage to 1.5mg the second time. The first time I had no vasoconstriction but the second time presented minor discomfort which was remedied by taking a long walk around the neighbourhood.

***Set and setting:

During the 6 or so weeks prior to this experience, I had been aware of a few personal issues that I needed to deal with, but was unable to do so due to being completely drowned by my workload. Being a final-year engineering student, I am quite accustomed to a fairly large workload, but this was just something else: I literally spent all day every day for 6 weeks working in front of a computer. So these issues took a back seat for a while and a few more were added to the pile along the way. After the completion of this massive project I decided to take a break to catch up on sleep, then test the next higher dose of DOB, then get started on dealing with my issues.

I spent about 2 weeks recovering (and smoking vast quantities of cannabis) before deciding that my body was ready to tackle the DOB.

***Experience:

Times are adjusted to 0:00 at the time of administration.

[0:00] I took 2mg of DOB in blotter form as soon as I woke up at around 8AM on the day I had set aside for the experiment. I was expecting my friend Z to come over to my place at around 11AM. He had never taken DOB before and was keen to give it a go after I had told him of my previous DOB experiences. While I waited I re-read some DOB experience reports and decided that I'd try smoking some cannabis during the trip to see how it would interact with the DOB and to see if it would ease the vasoconstriction that I was expecting. I swallowed the chewed-up tabs after half an hour under the tongue.

[2:00] I started feeling the initial effects of the DOB around 1-2 hours after administration. The first effect was the same stimulation I had felt in previous experiences, but surprisingly it didn't seem to be any stronger than the lower doses. I personally find this stimulation a little bit unpleasant, but nothing I can't handle. A little later I started feeling the familiar 'mental clarity' as described by other users, but I prefer to describe it as a vast open space in my mind: In the same way a dog is free to run around in an open field, my mind was free to sprint around this vast space, just...because.

[3:00] I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth in an attempt to get rid of the metallic taste in my mouth but the toothpaste burned like hell, so I gave up. I spat the toothpaste out and looked at myself in the mirror and noticed that my pupils were finally starting to dilate. At that moment Z rang my doorbell. I turned around to leave the bathroom but as I turned something caught my attention. I looked at the bathroom wall (which is painted bright yellow) and thought: 'Why is the wall wet? Wait. No. Why is the wall melting? Oh wait, visuals!' I have never really experienced any real visuals except on one high-dose mushroom trip where people's faces were a little distorted, so this was quite a surprise to me that the visuals were so convincing! For a moment I was actually convinced that the wall was melting and that 'I should run for help before the entire house melts!' When I leaned forward to get a closer look, the 'melting' was even more convincing! I finally managed to tear myself away from the wall and open the door for Z. We sat down and talked about what he should expect with DOB before I handed a blotter to him.

[4:00] We went out to the back yard to smoke a few bong hits and I noticed a strong magnification of the DOB effects, but felt almost nothing in terms of typical cannabis effects. It was a warm, sunny day at the end of winter and the sun felt fantastic on my skin and the gentle breeze also felt amazing blowing through the hairs on my legs and arms. We sat on plastic crates in the back yard talking about personal issues and I felt a little uncomfortable, which is strange since I have known Z for a very long time and we are close friends. I attribute this discomfort to how DOB affects my emotional space. My experience with DOB is that it 'compresses' or 'filters' my emotions. I'll try to explain what I mean by that. It seems as though all of the positive emotions (happiness, excitement, hope, amusement, etc.) are all experienced as the same positive emotion, which I like to call 'good' or '1'. All negative emotions (anger, sadness, jealousy, fear, etc.) are compressed into 'bad' or '0'. It's as if my emotions are simple binary, hence the '1' and '0'. If computers or robots could be taught to feel emotions, I'm convinced that this would be the extent of their emotional capacity. This binary emotional space still has me quite stumped because when I feel '0' I have no idea what emotion I am actually feeling, and what I should do about it.

[5:00] I checked my email and found an important work-related email that I had to respond to ASAP. I immediately felt '0' and decided that I was in no condition to write a professional response, so I ran upstairs and called my housemate (who is more experienced in the academic style of emails than Z is) to help me out. When he opened his bedroom door his face was lightly covered with swirling patterns of colour which was quite exciting (surprisingly not '1'). I led him downstairs and explained my problem to him, which made me feel a little '0' again. We sent the email off containing a total of about 10 words. This event made me feel very '0' for the next few hours as I was smothered by recurring thoughts of all of my personal issues that I had put aside for the past two or three months. I decided that the amount of time I had wasted on reading about drugs and taking drugs and growing drugs, both before and after my project, had been a catalyst for my personal issues. At that point I decided that this would be the last time I take drugs, at least until my life has some form of certainty and stability to it. I voiced this concern to Z and told him that it probably wouldn't be forever: psychedelics are way too interesting. He seemed a little upset by this, probably because he felt the same way I did.

[7:00] We sat in silence for a while and smoked a few joints, which amplified the DOB again. At this point I noticed the colours. The colours! The sky was infinitely blue and the walls appeared perfectly white. The house I live in is really old and a little scruffy with broken panels and rust stains down the walls. The white was in perfect contrast with the bright blue sky, and the rust stains stood out beautifully on the white, and I noticed that everything around me looked exactly like modern art with massively saturated colours and lots of contrast. The colours... Blue. White. Dirt.

[8:00] At this point I felt that I was at the end of the plateau and beginning my descent to back to sanity. It is usually at this point that I experience the worst vasoconstriction in my problematic leg, but there was nothing! I figured that the cannabis had potentiated the psychedelic effects of the DOB and minimised most of the body load, which made me feel '1' so we decided to take the dog (and the DOB) for a walk. Walking was absolutely amazing. I have no way of describing it: it just felt extremely '1'.

[10:00] Most of the psychedelic effects had died down at this point but I still felt quite stimulated and my mindspace was still quite 'vast', very similar to the feeling during the come-up with the exception that I felt a little fatigued. We spent the rest of the evening playing video games, cleaning the house and reminiscing the experience. I believe Z was still tripping a bit when I finally went to sleep at 10PM, 14 hours after dosage. Sleep came fairly easily.

The next morning I woke up feeling refreshed, but could still feel a small amount of 'vastness' in my mental space. I lay in bed thinking about the decisions I had made the day before, and I got out of bed at around 7AM and grabbed a garbage bag from the kitchen. I went to the back yard and pulled out all 6 of my cannabis plants, 2 of which were ready for harvest, and filled the garbage bag with the potent-smelling green-and-purple plants. I put the bag into the garbage bin, sat down on my smoking-crate and burst into tears, overcome with emotions relating to my personal issues, but happy to finally have my normal emotions back.

***Aftermath:

At the time of writing it is one week after the experience and I have been feeling very depressed for the past few days. I have been wading through my issues and am happy that I have dealt with a good number of them, and that I have not used any drugs since then. I am hopeful that keeping busy with coursework and steadily working through my remaining issues will help me to get back to a normal state of mind again.

Some users have noted that DOB seems to promote the 'understanding' of complicated systems, and I have also experienced this phenomenon, though in my experience the other effects of the drug seem to make this effect difficult to notice during the trip. After this particular trip however, I have experienced this phenomenon every day to a small extent. One particular system I have been 'understanding' is this thing called the 'economy' (something I have never really been interested in before) and how the whole world and all human life seems to revolve around this seemingly silly idea. I have continuously been thinking about this and how 'unfair' it is, and it sucks. For this reason I believe that this depression is heavily catalysed by my DOB experience.

I have also noticed that the DOB appears to have a negative effect on warfarin therapy. My INR is normally maintained between 2.0 and 3.0, but whenever I have taken DOB a few days before the test my INR dips as low as 1.5, so I'd imagine that the day or two after taking DOB the INR could be as low as 1.2. I have been on warfarin for a number of years as a preventative measure against DVT so I have a fairly good understanding of how it works.

1101011

Exp Year: 2013ExpID: 101441
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Jun 26, 2021Views: 1,499
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DOB (19), Cannabis (1) : Combinations (3), Health Problems (27), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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