DOSE:

21 mg

oral

2C-I

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I (B, a 25 year old guy) had done MDMA one time, about a month before this trip, and she (G, a 23 year old girl) had done it a few times before that. I had never done a psychedelic drug, and she had done shrooms one time (and had a negative experience), but we had heard that 2C-I gave a less intense psychedelic effect than LSD, and an empathogenic effect similar to MDMA. We would soon learn this was untrue, at least for us. Our one MDMA experience had been wonderful, with both of us expressing easily how we genuinely felt for each other, while never feeling out of control.

We prepared G’s apartment for the 2C-I experience, getting out glow sticks, setting up an iTunes visualizer on the big TV screen with a predetermined playlist that we had previously used with MDMA, wet rags to chew on if we started to clench our teeth, and a pitcher of water to drink from. We also decided to record our experience on a small whiteboard, which we labeled with 30-minute increments. We carefully measured out 20mg of the white powered 2C-I in small aluminum foil tares using a 0.001g scale. We had already tested the 2C-I using a Marquis Reagent NIK kit, and found that it was very likely to be 2C-I (dark green to black reaction). The plan was to take it at 7:00pm, but we were waiting for a Peapod order, which ended up not coming until 8:30pm. We didn’t want to be tripping when the guy came in.

8:35pm – Finally it comes time to take the 2C-I. We pour it into shot glasses filled with lemonade, and down it, licking the aluminum foil to ensure not even a single microgram was wasted. We decide to work on G’s 3000 piece puzzle while we wait for it to kick in.

8:50pm – We decide the puzzle is too much work for right now, so we move to the living room to play some Farkle, a dice game similar to Yahtzee.

9:00pm – G starts feeling nauseated, but not terribly. We can’t tell if it’s just nerves, placebo effect, or if the 2C-I is really having an impact on us. I start feeling a little funny too, kind of like I’m drunk, but my thoughts are still clear. We’re about 2 rolls into Farkle and we decide it’s way too much effort for right now, so we move to the couch and try to relax together.

9:15pm – We both start feeling like something just isn’t right, but we aren’t sure yet. It felt sort of similar to the initial “falling in” sensation of MDMA, but we weren’t sure how to describe it. We would soon learn that being unsure of our feelings, and confused generally, would be one major theme of the night. At this point we try to start talking, because we remember how amazing it was to talk while we were on MDMA, but it seems nearly impossible. It felt like we had lost 50 IQ points, or had a stroke, or maybe both. I go to rub my nose and it feels like my hand isn’t even part of my body, as if it had been injected with some type of local anesthetic.

9:45pm – It becomes apparent to us that all of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are delayed. By the time we realize what we are feeling, we’ve already begun feeling the opposite. I would realize I was overheating, but before I could acknowledge it, I would be on to the next feeling. This also continued for the entire night.

10:00pm – G decides she has to go to the bathroom, but can’t decide. The confusing feelings make it almost impossible to understand what we’re feeling at any given moment. As if feeling empathy for her impending bowel movement, I suddenly can’t decide if I have to go to the bathroom, if I somehow went in my pants, or if I don’t have to go at all. I go over to the bathroom to talk to her, and she’s in there writing things on a piece of paper. She asks me to join her. She asks, “What time did glow stick take 2C-I?” and proceeds to write that on a piece of paper. We go on to laugh about the concept of our new friend “glow stick” for a while, and then about the fact that we dropped the article before “glow stick,” which seemed hilarious at the time. I draw her a picture of this anthropomorphic glow stick on the piece of paper that she wrote her sentence on, but she decides the glow stick looks conniving, and folds the piece of paper in half to hide him, saying, “I’m keeping the piece of paper, but mostly because my sentence is on it.”

I’m usually a confident guy who doesn’t get insulted by much, but for whatever reason 2C-I made me feel vulnerable and much more susceptible to criticism, so when she said that, I suddenly felt completely insulted. I thought, “This is my girlfriend, why can’t she just accept my picture because I made it for her?” In hindsight the situation should have just been funny, but on the 2C-I it wasn’t at all. Similar situations happened multiple times in the night, and were totally out of character for me.

We write “pull your shit together!” on our blackboard and continue our evening.

10:07pm – It’s unclear exactly what we were doing, but we felt like it had been eons when we decided to look at the clock, only to find that a mere 7 minutes had passed since we had last written on the blackboard. Over the next 2 hours time seemed to crawl, with each 10 minute period feeling more like 30 or 40 minutes.

Over the next 2 hours time seemed to crawl, with each 10 minute period feeling more like 30 or 40 minutes.

10:30pm – We decide to change the music to listen to something more familiar, and in doing so we end up on the desktop of G’s Macbook. She comments to me that the desktop wallpaper looks like it’s moving all over the place. I look, and say, “Quick, get back to the visualizer! The desktop is way too intense for me!” Who would have thought that a static laptop desktop image would be “too intense” for anyone?

11:00pm and beyond:

At some point we decide to move into the bedroom so we can relax on the much more comfortable bed. We take the glow sticks with us, which ended up being our entertainment for about the next 3 hours. At first I wanted to cuddle, and G complied, but we both soon became way too hot, and cuddling was uncomfortable. I usually like to pull on her hair in a massaging kind of way that she really enjoys, but I touched her hair and I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do anything with it at all. I started to dislike that my normal nature, to enjoy doing just about everything, was being overtaken by these feelings of disinterest and vulnerability.

I suddenly felt a surge of eroticism, and told G about it, hoping she would feel the same. I wanted her to want to touch my body, and I wanted to touch hers. We weren’t in sync, and I was unable to communicate to her what exactly I wanted. Nothing came of it.

At some point we realized that a large part of our experience was being dictated by the music we were listening to. When we had intense music on, we couldn’t think. When it was smooth and quiet, we could at least attempt to think. When the music was off, we would feel sober, but realized quickly we weren’t when we actually tried to walk around or to communicate.

G decides she wants to tell me a fairy tale, retold using a green glow stick and an orange glow stick as our characters. The story started off slowly, but before long she was completely immersed in her tale. She told me the story of Cinderella, complete with funny voices, and it was thoroughly entertaining.

Next she asked me to tell her a story. I start off telling the story of the Little Mermaid, the Disney version, which somehow quickly degrades into a semi-racist (though fairly tasteful) tale where the characters all talk like they’re black. We spent about 20 minutes laughing uncontrollably throughout the entire story. It comes time for my next story, which ends up being about a kid’s transgendered Aunt Bernadetta, who used to be Uncle Bernie. I have no idea how I started telling that story.

The stories ended up being the best part of the night. We spent a total of about 2 hours laughing and enjoying each others company, occasionally saying “I’m so confused,” or, “I just don’t know.” No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t figure out how we felt about anything.

The night starts to wind down and we check the clock, shocked to find that something like 3 hours have passed. We were now about 7 hours from when we took the 2C-I initially. We both started feeling a bit more sober, and were able to start talking about our trip and how we felt. I talked about how I felt vulnerable the entire time, and didn’t like that at all. I’d say my normal baseline is as if I was constantly on a bit of MDMA, and the 2C-I took that away from me. At this point I confess that there was something I had wanted to talk to her about before we started tripping, but I had forgotten until it was too late. Once we were tripping I knew it was impossible to have the conversation, so it had been bottled up somewhat inside me, almost certainly negatively influencing my experience.

We finish our conversation on a good note and try to go to bed, finding it nearly impossible. At some point I doze off, but G finds it more difficult. We wake up only a few hours later, and eat some breakfast, work on her puzzle, and eventually shower. We had to help a friend move that afternoon, and somehow we weren’t tired at all while we were helping. We crashed a little early that night, around 10pm, but considering how little sleep we’d had, it wasn’t bad at all.

Overall the experience was positive, but mostly as an interesting research project, and not something that either one of us wants to try again anytime soon. It made me appreciate my normal fun-loving nature, and feel a bit more what it’s like to be easily insulted, and not always happy. For now, I’d say we’ll stick to MDMA a couple times per year, and leave the research chemicals for the lab.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 89527
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Mar 17, 2011	Views: 19,654
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2C-I (172) : First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)