"a Giant Chinese Finger Trap Made Of Rainbows..." - Part 1

TEXT BY D. H. TICKLISH, ILLUSTRATIONS BY TARA SINN

I have spent the last year of my life on an exhausting psychedelic journey. I managed to get my hands on some of the most potent and rare hallucinogenic drugs ever made, drugs that mainly are illegal. The ones that are not illegal are only approved for analytic studies on things like mp range, GC/MS, and receptor binding affinity. If you have no idea what I’m talking about it might be better to stick with mushrooms.

But if you know a naughty chemist, you might be able to get your hands on a few of these compounds. How did I get them? For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that I pretend to be a doctor. It isn’t easy and I don’t want to risk arrest or competition by divulging anything about my methods.

These drugs are as rare as they come. They are super potent and not recreational by most people’s definition. People have died from taking these drugs for reasons nobody yet understands because there is no research being done on their toxicity. It is quite possible that I could wake up ten years from now with irreversible brain damage, or I could screw up a dose by a few milligrams and end up dead—and from what I gather, tripping to death is not a lot of fun.

It might seem odd that I would spend so much time experimenting with substances that have no guarantee of being safe or enjoyable, but to me that’s the entire point of psychedelic exploration—to dive into the unknown. Why drink alcohol every night when you can drink gamma-Butyrolactone? Why snort coke when you can eat N-ethylcathinone? The psychedelic revolution has come cloaked in drug names that are difficult to pronounce, and it’s time to wake up and smell the 4-fluoroamphetamine.

A quick note on dosage: These are the doses I take. Don’t take the same as me and then get mad when you die. All of these drugs are dose sensitive, so 1 milligram can be the difference between a good time and a permanent psychotic break.

Also, they almost always come as powdered white crystals, usually with the characteristic taste of their chemical precursor, which is called iodole and which is present in human shit. It is wise to keep track of which white crystals are which, to avoid a potentially lethal trip cocktail. In other words, if you are going anywhere near this stuff please be really, really careful.

DPT

2C-T-21

Dose: oral 140 mg, nasal 100 mg
My proposed street name: Christ There is a cult/church on the Lower East Side of New York called the Temple of the True Inner Light that has been taking this drug as the Eucharist for the last 30 years. Apparently it’s tough to join because they already have enough people willing to participate in Holy Communions where they smoke Christ’s psychedelic flesh out of a communal pipe instead of eating a flavorless wafer. Understandable. The first time I snorted DPT it terrified me so much I felt like I had just railed a line of haunted houses. Eyeballs were peeping out of everything around me and when I looked up I saw a giant Chinese finger trap made of rainbows try to suck me into the sky. Also, snorting it was so painful it made me cry. I would rather snort a handful of sand.

Dose: oral 12 mg

My proposed street name: Heat Stroke

This drug had a brief stint about five years ago as a legal ecstasy alternative, but it was taken off the market when a quadriplegic from Florida tried to lick an unknown amount out of a vial he bought online, gave himself a massive overdose, and literally fried his brains. That paralyzed man was the infamous party pooper of this entire drug scene, and it was his overdose that got most of these unknown drugs scheduled by the DEA.

I tried 2C-T-21 about a week ago. While walking around my neighborhood, I got so hot that I had to take off my shirt. My body was actually steaming. I decided to go swimming in a nearby urban river but instead threw my house keys into the water just to see what it looked like when they splashed.

4-AcO-DMT

DOC

Dose: oral 24 mg

My proposed street name: The Greatest Drug in the World (some people call it Aurora but that’ll never catch on.)

Some wayward chemists figured out a way to twist around the structure of psychedelic mushrooms to fit them into a legal loophole so they could be sold from gray-market laboratories. Thus, 4-AcO-DMT was born. The second it touches your gut it gets converted into the active ingredient of mushrooms. But one big difference is if you eat too many mushrooms you vomit, which prevents many overdoses. With 4-AcO-DMT it’s easy to accidentally swallow what would be equivalent to a trash bag of shrooms. My friend took too much in a large American city center, went nuts, and ended up strapped down in a hospital. As soon as he got out he attacked his mom for lying to him about Santa Claus as a child.

Dose: oral 3 mg

My proposed street name: DOC Feelgood

Since a scale that is accurate down to the microgram would cost more than all of these drugs combined, I measure DOC in a liquid solution. I dissolve 10 milligrams of DOC in 10 milliliters of vodka and then use a syringe to measure doses. 1ml = 1mg. Easy!

DOC is a psychedelic amphetamine that is unrivaled in potency. A lot of the acid that people think has angel dust in it is actually adulterated with DOC. The big difference between DOC and acid is that DOC lasts about 24 hours, and since it’s an amphetamine, you’re looking at 24 sweaty hours. This is the kind of drug you really want to have some Valium around for. Any food I put in my mouth tasted like polyester. By the end of the trip I ate a potted plant and the dirt it was growing in.

5-MeO-DMT

Dose: smoked 5 mg, nasal 15 mg

My proposed street name: Crystal Death

This one actually occurs in nature. A rare variety of desert toad squirts it on predators in order to render them defenseless in a psychedelicized stupor. The dose is about the size of one grain of salt and when smoked it sends the user into a death trance. It is not uncommon for people high on this stuff to pee their pants.

“Psychedelic” does not quite describe the 5-MeO-DMT experience. If there was a chemical way to shoot yourself in the face and survive, this is it. Once I gave it to a drunk guy who didn’t believe there was such a thing as psychedelic toad venom. Within moments his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor motionless. When he regained consciousness (after vomiting on me while passed out), he said he had touched God.

2C-T-7

AMT

Dose: oral 22 mg
My proposed street name: 7-Up Another psychedelic amphetamine that is totally synthetic and never gained any significant level of popularity in the United States. Around 2001 a couple of suburban teens overdosed on it and the DEA immediately put it in the same legal schedule as heroin. Last time I took 2C-T-7, the moment I began to hallucinate I decided to get on a cheap, Chinese-immigrant-run bus to a city that is five hours away from where I live. I closed myself in the bathroom and pretended I was time-traveling in a septic tank, and when we arrived at our destination the driver had to pry open the bathroom door.

Dose: oral 40 mg

My proposed street name: Jaw Clench Vomit Powder

This drug was born in Russia 50 years ago. Pharmaceutical companies marketed it as an antidepressant called Indopan. I think the problem was that it worked too well and it didn’t take long before people realized it was capable of sending them into an insane vibrating notionscape if they simply took twice the dosage.

During my first trip on AMT, I was supposed to stop briefly at a party before going to a friend’s house. I foolishly took the pill beforehand and ended up staying at the party the entire night exchanging pleasantries with strangers while watching them melt into the carpet. I was actually having the time of my life until I had to pee and realized that it was a psychological impossibility.

2C-E

DIPT

Dose: oral 17 mg

My proposed street name: C-Esspool

This one is somewhat related to mescaline but about 20 times stronger. It made me so violently nauseous that I vomited out of my nose. Later that night I collapsed on a bench and watched the trees lining the roads slowly grow genitalia—splintery leafed penises and big sappy vaginas. I sat watching this in awe with two friends while taking an occasional whippit, but after a while a passing woman suddenly started beating the shit out of her boyfriend ten feet in front of me. It was more of a downer than a thousand Chris Farley overdoses. When the cops showed up I was climbing one of the vagina trees to get a better view.

Dose: oral 70 mg

My proposed street name: Dipthong

Whenever people ask me what DIPT is like, I have trouble explaining it. It is vaguely related to mushrooms, but at the same time not really. It’s totally synthetic—a lab-made psychedelic anomaly that only affects the regions of your brain dedicated to auditory perception. DIPT gives you ultra-sensitive canine hearing and drops the pitch of all sounds down a couple of octaves. Sound waves that fall below the human range of hearing are called infrasound and are associated with earthquakes, exploding volcanoes, and screaming whales. On DIPT, I was listening to a steady infrasonic thrum being generated by a parking meter. Everything sounds like you’re underwater, in a broken transistor radio, talking to a bullfrog. I could hear people having conversations inside their apartments as I walked down the street. I also learned to translate the language birds speak. I still have the notebook I was carrying, which has about 40 pages of phonetically transcribed bird chirps that read like this: “percheap twererp cherwerp.”

DIPT is like a fun version of being schizophrenic, but I stopped taking it after a high-dose trip where I had an epiphany and figured out that fire-engine and ambulance sirens are a citywide conspiracy to give people headaches. Also (and in retrospect I should never have done this), riding a crowded city train through a not-so-great neighborhood while on this drug was comparable to listening to a thousand howler monkeys being burned alive through a stethoscope.

DMT

Dose:

smoked 50 mg

My proposed street name:

Demetri

This one is a classic but still a lot of people have never tried it. You can inject it, snort it, smoke it, or eat it—and have a totally different experience each time. Once I smoked 50 mg after taking a special type of antidepressant that makes it impossible for your body to break down the drug. I began having a vicious argument with my left hand, speaking from both sides—my hand’s point of view and my face’s. I said, “I’m sorry. I will never do drugs again,” and my hand replied, “It’s too late!” I thought I was every crazy person that had ever lived in the past, present, and future simultaneously. A lot of people report having sexual encounters with aliens while on this drug but I think before experimenting with DMT, those people experimented with being molested.