Sorry to bug you with further questions, but- did you have significant issues at the time you were using Ket like that?

There's a growing body of literature on the phenomenon I appear to have experienced. I'm not preaching shit except "be smart and safe" so I don't have an axe to grind. But I don't have many people to talk to about this stuff. My therapist who was on top of the research was the only one really interested and most of my friends and family look at me sideways like I'm delusional.

But the reason I ask is, I'm fairly sure that if what happened to me wasn't a fluke, it hinged on the mindset of change and the self awareness of the specifics of my issues. Even if I was just trying to get fucked up before my mind did the thing.

I'm guessing meth was in play in addition in most cases there

I really think it comes from PCP laced blunts. Weed can definitely put people in a psychotic state and if you mix that with a poorly measured (or completely unexpected) dose of PCP- I could see someone bugging out real bad.

But then again it's the media, right? A-PVP was probably what those flesh eating cannibal crackheads in Florida were doing a few years back. I've done that shit, I'll admit it was a very strangely demonic and sex-tastic experience rolled into one (shouts out McAffee RIP) so I could see The Fear taking hold, but not to that extent.

I bet the biggest common denominator in these drug-scare horror stories is untreated mental illness.

Out of curiousity, when you had access to good ket before the market went stupid- how often would you do a nice big megadose like that? Do you remember particularly what drove the impulse, or was it just "getting fucked up" like how I was playing with the 3-HO before I stumbled into an accidental positive upside?

No worries fam. I hope you find relief from your issues.

I'd be reserved, as you seem to be, about an online prescription for frequently-redosed dissos. It sounds like a bad idea and, low key, a grift to legally sell drugs that are otherwise restricted. I'm suspicious of the pill plan you described in your OP.

A one time very close online friend became a ket fiend and by the end of her time with the drug was fishing dirty needles out from under her bed, straightening bent sharps and re-dosing with that sort of gnarly rig. She was hooked bad, regardless of whether there's a physical addiction component to it.

btw let me know if I need to unblock my inbox if you want to discuss any of this privately. I keep that thang hidden by my browser so I won't see messages unless I know to look for them.

Having typed out my "trip report" of sorts. I want to second this.

I wouldn't recommend using anything as an ongoing crutch. That has brought me nothing but pain and burnt bridges and suffering for 15+ years. If you choose to try and experiment with ketamine treatment I can only recommend trying it as a one-off experiment, or a series of experiments over the course of a week or two.

If you are successful you won't need to keep doing it. You may find you benefit from re-doing it once a year, or once every six months, or something like that. I understand that in a professional setting this is often the approach.

But I think re-dosing, re-visiting a cathartic dissociative therapy session/s should, eventually, be unnecessary as you build a healthier life and mental space.

My semi-ignorant interpretation of this experience

So I've obviously reflected on this a lot over the last few years. I have relapsed since. Nowhere near to the degree that I was gone when I had these breakthroughs. But I relapsed for a variety of reasons and with effective support and self care I would probably still be free of drug addiction today.

I mentioned my then therapist was really into this stuff, so he was up on the literature and we spent a few sessions talking about what had happened. My addiction psychiatrist who was supposed to be managing my taper started to really get the shits with me and fired me, still leaving me in a very physically dangerous situation. Total piece of shit, she was. She was sick of me from the first time I mentioned that I struggle with nihilistic and existentialist philosophy, she straight up told me she doesn't like working with nihilists. What the fuck.

So my understanding is, during many psychedelic experiences (or perhaps all?) there is a great sort of weakening of the neural pathways that form the fundamental patterns of our thinking and our behaviours. I mean it weakens them enough that you might wake up and take 15 minutes to recognise that other conscious entities exist, that the soft hairless long one is like you and the little hairy one is fren. "Hu- man. Bean?" were the first non-gibberish words to my trip sitter after the most powerful of these experiences.

I believe that if you have a conscious desire for change, or are sufficiently sick of the behaviours or thought patterns that plague your consciousness, that these deeply hallucinogenic states have a tendency to cull that which is not useful or desirable. I think this is why I didn't wake up with an entirely different personality, you know? I have a strong ego, a fairly coherent sense of identity, these are things I value enough that the pathways regenerated during the tail of the trip and the days following.

But the dose-impulse behaviour, as a component of my addiction? That was ruining my fucking life, over and over, and I knew it, and I hated it. It withered and died during those trips. With ZERO effort from me. ZERO intention from me. Other aspects of addiction too, were weakened or deleted from my mind. Other trauma-learned behaviours and patterns of thinking were significantly weakened, I've found it much easier to learn to love and forgive myself, to do something like what the therapist would call re-parenting, but it's different in my particular mental framing.

Lasting efficacy

As I mentioned, I have relapsed since. My mental health has generally stayed pretty good, but I'm still not back to being extremely high functioning like I managed to be before my burnout. I'm getting there though.

While the drug class (dissociatives) has a low risk of addiction, I have seen friends become ketamine addicts, I have seen friends become DXM addicts. These drugs are often not good for you in the long run. When you self medicate you run the risk of learning a new destructive pattern - I can fix this with a line of ketamine, for example.

I do not crave or seek out these drugs actively and haven't used any since the bag ran out on these experiences.

With a better support framework in place (that therapist ended up being a dud and triggered a bit of a relapse in me with his own reckless words) or a well prepared routine for active self care - physical, diet and meditation type shit - I think it would be possible to land on one's feet after something like this and literally get the closest thing to a fresh start that life has to offer.

My understanding is, that even in a managed, therapeutic environment, following all the protocols and shit, the psychiatric support staff are only on hand to hit you with a big dose of diazepam if you freak out, and perhaps to help guide your thoughts in a productive direction as you drift off into the trip. Even in a therapeutic medical environment ($$$) those guys are just there as guard rails. They don't know how this stuff works much better than I do, it's your brain doing all the work.

Final thoughts

Should you fuck around and find out?

I don't know Corgi, you're a precious comrade. We love you here.

What I have described above I credit a lot to the nature of the drugs and especially that class of drug for it's particularly potent combination of ego-death-ifying psychedelic properties and ego-buffering dissociative properties. Personally, I think it's fairly safe.

But I also have to acknowledge, again, that I came to this drug with a lifetime of experience using and abusing every class of drug you can think of. I'm a polydrug addict almost by nature. I'd like to change that eventually, I think? But I'm not even sure. I don't place a value judgement on substance use, except that I don't want the people I love using and abusing certain drugs that cause serious physical and psychological harm.

Dissociatives do have their outlier horror stories, so I can't say it is free from the potential to cause psychological harm, and blacking out on anything by yourself is physically dangerous.

Tread cautiously if you choose this path.

But me?

I will fucken do it again.

Aight, so this is definitely in the realm of irresponsible anecdote sharing. But here we go. This happened to me by accident, playing with drugs. It may have saved my life, it definitely improved the quality of my life and my mental health.

Background Info:

I was in therapy after complex burnout and trying to address a serious benzo addiction. My therapist was slated to be one of the first to participate in running a Ket therapy trial. I was going to probably be on the shortlist. The trial got funding pulled last minute.

COINCIDENTALLY. A dissociative drug arrived in the mail and I started experimenting with it. I will NOT recommend you fuck around self medicating. It's led me to a lifetime of wasted time and blacked out years. However.

The Drug / my "approach"

I dosed 3-HO-PCP.

Yes. PCP. The cannibal drug for 90s street lore aka "dat shit big lurch ate his girlfriend on." Well, I certainly don't recommend fucking around with PCP while mixing other substances, but I did not have any cannibalistic compulsions, nor find myself in any dangerous situations, nor did I experience any sort of psychosis-provoking mindfuck state.
In my experience dissociative anesthetics do not lend themselves to this sort of response, I believe that particular bad rep comes from mixing with cannabis. Avoid combos. On their own, I find dissociatives to be a very gentle way to explore psychedelics, because they literally dissociate you, you're buffered, somehow. I dunno, it's hard to explain. The parts you're conscious for, feel adjacent to having a dissociative episode from panic or stress, but it's much more gentle than those psychological responses to trauma, so, it's a shitty analogy that I don't have a better one to replace.

3-HO is an analogue molecule of the classic PCP, created to work around the specific laws in the US which dictate the international drug trade as it relates to grey market manufacture and import. It's all illegal in my country, I'm sure it's illegal in yours, if it wasn't then, they update the lists, those US laws are busted and stupid. (No shit hey.)

So I experimented a little with 3-HO and it reminded me of DXM (dextromethorphan) another dissociative, with a horrible bodyload that just isn't worth abusing if you're not a bored juvenile, or can get pure powder. IMHO. I've only done a bit of Ket here and there, but these three drugs, ketamine, dextromethorphan and PCP are all dissociative anesthetics. Oh, there's another one, er, MXE? Someone might chime in I've done a bunch of that and done a bunch of stupid shit since then so I forget.

Then I experimented enough that I hit the 3-HO equivalent of a "K-Hole" - basically when you hit the truly like, "we could do surgery on this MFer and they wouldn't even notice" level of dose. A lot of ketamine users will try to avoid the hole, because it stops being a fun drug and becomes a basically un/semi-conscious pseudo-psychadelic trip. But basically it's an ego death experience. It puts you in a physically vulnerable state. I do not understand people who use ketamine as a party drug.

My mindset at the time:

I was in therapy, I was tired of fucking my life up with benzos, I was addicted to a drug that would kill me if I withdrew too fast from it, life revolved around dosing schedules, tapering, losing the plot and blacking out, running in circles. I was numbing out my emotions which made me extremely vulnerable when the time came for me to burn out. I crashed hard and was catatonic for like 6 months, no shit. I had decades of unresolved trauma. I was actively sick of my situation, knew many of my problem points, and perhaps had made some level of progress on these things.

My point here is, I was not necessarily in a great place, mentally, but I was focused to an extent on change and keenly self aware of my major problem areas. However I was NOT trying to fix myself with 3-HO-PCP, I was playing around with a new drug and enjoying myself the best way I knew how.

My setting:

I had someone in the house with me who is a reluctant but experienced trip sitter. And a young playful, emotionally connected pet.

Worth noting: I was quite experienced with the range of psychological responses to drugs, I've experienced meth psychosis, I've overdosed on things, I've tripped on acid hard enough to step out of the time-stream and walk between universes with full blown visual hallucinations, etc. I'm not a dedicated psychonaut and I maintain a lot of cautious respect for this class of experience. I'm just saying, if you don't know what you're doing, this isn't your granpappy's dope high. This isn't even a one or two tab of acid type of experience, it's closer temporary self-deletion, with periods of fascinating but fleeting lucidity, until the come-down / come-to when the trip is wearing off and the lucidity starts to stick and form a coherent chain of events.

My initial result:

This is the reason I'm telling you this stuff.

When I came back from my first dissociative ego-deaths, it was, as usual, very confusing. (It's very funny too, like, it's very very funny experiencing a complete rebirth of your being and all the layers of social construct and self construct reassembling themselves in a freshly blown mind. It's also very sad and grim. It's a range of things. You gotta be ready for that shit, push the bad off to the side for later contemplation and let the good stuff in to enjoy. Meditation can give you these skills.)

But over the course of I think 3 of these experiences, I lost my desire to use benzos completely. Whatever neural pathways connected my addiction and my need to not-be-sober to cope with not having resolved my problems, had weakened, and my head was in the right place to not want to re-strengthen them again.

I had to be very mindful to keep taking my stupid drug of addiction, but I sped my taper up, I was no longer uncomfortable from the withdrawals etc. I dropped from the equivalent of about 170-200mg of valium a day to a maintenance dose of 5-15mg more rapidly than the literature would indicate is safe or even possible without seizures. (DONT DO THIS, FELLOW BART@RDS. LOL.)

Critically, my mental health improved a lot. I did not continue seeking 3-HO after it was gone. I was happy to basically be sober. I did eventually come off the benzos completely for quite a while. I believe I still experience the ongoing benefits of these experiences.

edit: MXP == MXE / moxy

Hit his replacement immediately, we call that day 1 DLC.

Ahahahahaa.

OH! Ohhh. Well that's easy. *sideeyes my italian partner in crime*

I get it by proximity to my sister's family, but yeah, once the new generation enter the picture it's really nice to see innocent knuckleheads getting to enjoy the thing. Good on you for making the effort for the kids. Shit does bring back the nostalgia.

I bought obscure cakes that only my sister and I know the meaning of from when we were single digit aged. Shits special, even if only for the high water marks left by christmasses past. It's a good time to reflect and remember that stuff.

*all with the caveat that I recognise we were lucky to have some good formative experiences, I recognise that this is one of the toughest times for a huge number of people and I hope all our comrades on here who have to endure this time with gritted teeth make it through to the new year unscathed.