DOSE:	5 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. mexicana	(sclerotia)
	20 mg		Deschloroketamine
	10 mg		3-MEO-PCE
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis
	20 mg	oral	4-AcO-MET
	100 ug	oral	Flunitrazolam

BODY WEIGHT:

55 kg

I often pride myself with the work I put into the time before a trip, but just as so many other times in my life I lost track of my values and lost myself in the endless bliss that drugs can make one feel. I should have, could have seen everything that happened this night coming- yet I very obviously didn’t. I want to share this experience.

It was the first weekend after I had covid for the first time. Fever, coughing, pain and weakness. I was in a very weakened state physically as well as psychologically. Being surrounded by the death & illness theme for so long. Yet I felt very comfortable in what I was doing. As usual, we were three people. A house to ourselves for a week- life could not be more perfect, so the last thing we wanted was to be sober.

On the most perfect Sunday morning, we ingested 5g of magic truffles (Mexicana) each, no visuals but we were all very relaxed and in a funny mood. Next were about 20mg of Deschloroketamine (first time for us, we felt adventurous) and also about 10mg of 3-MeO-PCE- one of our favourites. We also smoked a shit ton of weed and the feeling was just divine. I should have left it at that. It was all so perfect. All so beautiful.

However, we all wanted more, so we decided to take 4-AcO-MET, one of our favourite psychedelics. We have all had it many times. We had two small plastic bags with the stuff in it, two different batches. Upon seeing mine, I saw the discoloration, it was much darker than the other one. I didn’t care much- so I had my friend measure out 20mg of the stuff and swallowed it in a comically large pill. (My two friends both had their own batch of the stuff, and thus I was the only one ingesting the discoloured one!)

00:15: Something was off. We sat outside at a campfire, my visuals with 4-AcO usually start after about 45 minutes, but all of a sudden I already had mild geometry going on. I was unsure what was happening, the other two didn’t experience this. So I just laid back and tried to enjoy it

00:30: Back inside the house, watching “Bee and Puppycat” on Netflix, all of a sudden I feel fear coming on, panic even. I didn’t know why. Also I had none of the usual physical feelings of the drug that I usually have (warm feeling in the chest and tingling in the arms). Slowly I got nauseous.

00:50: I excuse myself with the words “I think I’m about to have a bad trip, gonna be right back, I think I have to throw up”. The next 45 minutes I spend in the bathroom, my body wants to throw up, but nothing comes out.

I have the hardest visuals ever, everything dissolves and mirrors in itself a thousand times. Nothing I ever saw on even 50mg of 4-AcO-MET. I started to think back to the discoloration ‘did I poison myself? Am I in danger? I think repeatedly. I started to get cold. I had a shirt, sweater and thick sweatpants on. Woollen socks over normal ones. The house was well heated. I shouldn’t have been cold. This added to my panic, especially as I got so cold, that the cold turned into pain. Suddenly a static in my head, that got louder and louder.

As the static reached its peak: silence. My mind bound by an unimaginable mental heaviness. I was so afraid, yet so heavy and sedated, I could not even bring myself to feel the fear. I tried taking Flunitrazolam (The only downer I had available) to help, but it didn’t do much, and I didn’t want to add to the weird chemical mix in my body, so I left it at about 100mcg. At some point I was tired of sitting on the floor. My friends had come to me, greatly worried. I could not even tell them what was happening- I was just too heavy..

With the static reaching its peak I experienced a very terrifying form of ego-loss. As the silence came, I tried to scrape the remainders of my mind together ‘my name is. Name is. Name is?’ I started thinking. After some time, I managed to think of my full name, but it sounded alien to me. I had no attachments to it. I was in deep shock, as I was very confused and not able to think of all the things that I actually *know* about the phenomenon of ego loss. I luckily still remembered where I was and that I was under the influence of psychedelics. The concept meant nothing to me, but I’m happy I at least remembered that part- who knows how much more scared I would have been, if I forgot that.

I have all the knowledge in my head, but I couldn’t access it. I felt as if I was a stranger in my own body, trying to impersonate someone, and deeply failing. I remembered my parents, I thought of them a lot during the whole experience. They did not know what I was doing, I realised how sad and heartbroken they would be, if I died of such a thing. That is where the idea of calling an ambulance first came to be in my mind.

I moved upstairs, I was so cold I just wanted to lie down and pray for it all to end. Upon lying down I got tired, and the cold increased. I felt as if I was freezing, under three blankets, so cold, so painful. Then an overwhelming wave of being tired. My eyes fell shut, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Then visions of myself attacking people, which put me in a very uncomfortable position as I realised:

‘I might die here. Now’

‘Call an ambulance and risk having the police involved? Or die?’

My mind raced back and forth between these scenarios. Once I had these visions of violence (so to speak) I decided: ambulance. I still feel like, that on this night, I was very close to death. The panic took over my entire mind.

Unfortunately, nothing got better upon calling doctors. They were incredibly rude and angry at us for taking drugs (which I get, but, come on, someone who is already having severe panic attacks does not really need more to fear on such a night). After some back and forth they took me with them.

The worst thing was, how I couldn’t make it clear how I was feeling because I was just so damn heavy. I do want to mention: they were not only rude to me, they were rude to everyone at the ER. Which doesn’t make this whole thing better- but at least they weren’t biased?

The hospital was a nightmare. A giant fucking nightmare. I was in room 2, the woman in room 3 died, the woman in room 4 screamed for hours (and there were other really awful noises I cannot identify and dare not to write about), the woman in room 1 was old and half-deaf, she asked the nurses about what time it was every 30 minutes.

Take all this, together with constant beeping and alarms, mix with a person freaking out on drugs, hallucinating stronger than ever- stir well, let sit: That was me.

I lay in that room, in that very uncomfortable bed for almost 10 hours. My thoughts still all tangled up and confused. My mind was gone. My body weak. Since I had a shitload of research chemicals in my body, the doctors didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even have a majority of the substances in their databank. They did not know how to handle someone like me, so they just gave me a very mild sedative (later found out it was Flunitrazepam) and told me to sleep. I wished to sleep, but the screaming and the beeping inspired all kinds of things to appear when I closed my eyes. So I kept them open and waited.

At one point, a middle-aged nurse came and talked to me about why I did drugs, she explained to me things like addiction. I knew all the things she told me (I had regained parts of my drug-memory), and under normal circumstances, I’d love a good conversation on drugs, but I was in no mood. She explained to me how in her mind, drugs don’t help with trauma and getting to know yourself and others better (which is what I told her was my experience), according to her, drugs just make you numb. So numb that you don’t care about all the stuff in your life. I partially agree with her, but I think it depends greatly on the substance, the circumstances, and the person. There is no way anyone can generalize drugs in such a way. Especially since the therapeutic use is well proven.

After these painful 9 hours I was released, the hospital was a maze, it took me 15 minutes and some very, very shameful questions like “excuse me, how do I get out of here?” because apparently, I didn’t notice the big red arrow on the floor. Not my proudest hour. I also got to experience the joy of calling a taxi for the first time, and then being confused that the taxi car did not have “Taxi” written on it. Great. The driver talked to me for 20 minutes about some newly discovered type of concrete which was interesting? But I was really just tired. Still confused about everything and greatly disturbed.

I finally was back at the house with my friends, no police had come, they were concerned, I was tired. I wish that would have been the end of the story, but:

//now some after effects, in chronological Order//
// about 1 week after: //

As I had already known before, bad trips can have quite the toll on a person’s mind. And the past days, my mind has been filled with the fear of pain and death. The incoherent screams of the woman in room 4 still fill my head, whenever I hear an ambulance something in me breaks over and over again. I cannot even really define what I am so afraid of, I don’t know what exactly changed. What I do know, is that I cannot cope with it well. I usually dream about stuff that goes on in my life immediately the night after. I have not had a single dream of this night. It is concerning to me, just how much my mind might have been damaged.

Before writing this report, I put a lot of thoughts into the experience. And I realised many things.

-This whole death-theme? It had already been in my life since covid. Makes sense that I was so concerned about dying, since my mind had been taken up by that illness for weeks. Even the months before, the thought of my own death filled my head evermore. I realise now, how this was when the “bomb in my brain” finally exploded.

-The discoloration of the 4-AcO-MET? I had exactly these visuals and nausea with the lack of the usual physical properties of the 4-Aco one other time, but it was no such scaring, yet still very intense experience. Apparently this substance can just “go bad”. Maybe that’s some form of oxidation? Temperature? Moisture? I’m no chemist. But something changes, and it makes the drug a whole lot more intense and dangerous.

-The cold and weakness? Probably still remainders of the virus. I was seriously weak. 20mg of that stuff was just too much for my system- especially considering that the only other time I had this discoloured form of AcO, it was at a dose of around 10mg.

// about 3 months after //

It is still difficult to think about what has happened, I had a lot of growth to do- and there is still more to come. I realise now, that that trip showed me something I greatly needed: Fear. Over the past years and with growing experience with drugs, I had often noted how I never felt any fear. Often on trips I would ask myself “Why am I never afraid?”. I finally found the answer, I repressed everything I really feared. The only real fear I ever knew before that, was when watching horror videos on youtube. But my actual fear, the one that makes me shiver and my heart beat ever faster, is death. Not the thing that comes after life- not my soul leaving my body; but all the things before death. My fear is dying, suffering throughout the process. My fear is of dying horribly and painfully, not fast, but eternally slow.

It took a lot of reading, a lot of thinking to get to this point. I still have recurring panic attacks, but I get better and better at managing them. It will still take me a while to really deal with all this- as far as I read, bad trips can take years.

There were many times where I just wanted to give up. Feeling anxious and miserable and “off” all the time is extremely difficult, especially when there is no one you can tell. Only my closest friends (the two that were with me) know of my state. Everyone else has been quite confused why I act the way I currently do, why I stay in my room and lost my sense of humour.

Truth is, I am not yet over this experience. But it gets easier every day. I am now almost 20 days sober, and I plan to be sober for some while longer until I really know how to deal with everything, until even my subconscious mind knows that *I am safe*. I am no longer in this state, I am no longer in danger. Even if I have been pretty sickly since covid, that does not mean I will die. It does not mean I will “suffer eternally”. My mind has been catastrophizing a lot, but I put work into validating my feelings and breaking that habit.

In Hindsight, I could have known all of this. I had completely abandoned my values and pre-work that I used to put into drugs. I failed. But I am managing to go on, come back stronger than before. I will never make this mistake a second time, I will never ever be so blatantly ignorant of my own body and mind to mix drugs like this without any second thought.

To end this report, I would like to share the note I wrote in the bathroom, as the cold set in, as the static was about to reach its maximum:
“Hey mom and dad,
I am sorry should it end like this; I hope you still have fun with the cookies we made. I never wanted everything to end like this, in hindsight, I could have seen it coming.”

They will never read that note, reading it puts me in great pain. I feel like dying or almost dying on drugs is something that makes you think about lots of things. It made me think about my parents, who only know I smoke weed occasionally. How terrified I was, thinking about them finding out I had died. I made a promise to myself, to tell them about the hospital. But I don’t want to pain them. I cannot tell them about it, as long as I am still thinking of taking these substances. They will have to wait.

I urge everyone reading this to practise much, much more selfcare when taking drugs. These divine substances have so much potential, but it is easy to get lost in that heaven. I found myself in a hell designed specifically for me. Bringing out fears I was repressing all my life.

While I had to experience just this “punishment” first hand, I still would not undo it. Of course, I realise how harmful this experience was, but I try to see the good in it. I knew this bad trip would happen at some point in my life. I am grateful, that I am still among the living. I am grateful, that I had this experience. It was not nice, not pretty, not good in any way. But it helped me realise just how much more I need to value this life. It is not a toy.

Take care, fellow psychonauts, I hope to be able to re-acquire this term for myself in time.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 116918
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Jan 20, 2023	Views: 335
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4-AcO-MET (711) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Personal Preparation (45), Bad Trips (6), Combinations (3)