DOSE:	42 mg	oral	4-HO-EPT	(powder / crystals)
		oral	Pharms - Ibuprofen	(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

4-HO-EPT: Intense Energy, Calm Contemplation
11-27-2020
by Xorkoth

2:25pm (T+0:00) - I ingested 42mg orally at this point. It was a fine, chalky powder, like basically all of the 4-sub tryptamines are. Unlike the others, its taste is really surprising. It first hit the tongue as a sweet flavor, and then quickly turned savory, and actually tasted quite good for a moment, before it went sharply bitter and I no longer enjoyed it and washed it down with water. It was really an unusual flavor experience, but it reminded me of 4-MeO-MiPT in the savory portion of it. That drug is the only other time I have tasted savory in a tryptamine (or any other psychedelic). My girlfriend and I had just arrived at the trailhead of a really nice trail that we've been to before. To our displeasure, there are all kinds of people there, vacation tourists, loud groups of people shedding debris everywhere and soiling this beautiful environment. Those were the underlying thoughts I had, especially fed along by my girlfriend who is always quite upset at the increasing encroachment of people in the land she grew up with. Despite that, I/we have had a great day, with some good intimate time together earlier, in the middle of a much needed four day weekend.

It was at exactly 20 minutes in that I felt the first alerts. They were quite strong, really. I suddenly found myself with a slightly sour stomach feeling, and a pretty strong rushing sensation that was stimulating in nature. I had eaten some pulled pork shortly before we left in the car towards the trailhead, and I felt a slight heartburn-esque sensation. I found myself burping pork burps and in general my stomach felt unsettled, but not nauseous. It didn't bother me too much but I could not help but take a note about this as a difference between 4-HO-EPT and most other tryptamines, which do not unsettle my stomach at all.

As I walked, it came up very quickly, and I would say that by 30 minutes in, there was a well-established thing going on. My body felt somewhat tense, and the hiking was quite uphill. The stimulation I felt was not making the walking any easier, in fact it seemed to cause me to be out of breath easier. Rather than an energetic stimulation, it was an inward-focused energy. Rather than the tryptamine energy originating in the core and radiating outward from the solar plexus and fingertips, which is what I most often feel with tryptamines, it is as if the energy is originating in the center of my head and my fingertips and feet, and radiating inward to the core. This opposite flow of energy is unusual, and less comfortable than I am used to with tryptamines. It's an edgy feeling, not dissimilar to anxiety, but I do not feel any anxiety, it is just like anxiety. It is extremely evident to me that my pupils are substantially dilated, as they have that feeling of being wide open and trying to swallow all of the visual input (note that later when we got back to the car, I was able to confirm substantial mydriasis).

We walked on, still mostly uphill, and I spent a lot of time out of breath. At this time, my thoughts were quite scattered. The feeling of the 4-HO-EPT coming up and taking hold was quite intense, a more intense feeling than it seemed like it should be. My surroundings seemed unaltered, and I wasn't having any introspective or profound thoughts. My body felt clenched, and my leg muscles were tremoring slightly as I stepped in front of me, again and again, feeling as if, on the downhill steps where my quads are supporting my weight and holding me up, that if I was a little more strongly on this drug, I might lose control of my legs and fall. But I pressed on, and my legs obeyed me. I felt my heartbeat throbbing in my temples and eyes, and my visual display seemed to be wavering like a heat mirage in my peripheral, so that as I walked, my surrounding blurred. Yet, there did not seem to be any outright distortions. I got a sort of mental sense of a complex grid architecture of pulsating dots emanating from whatever I looked at. It was like I could imagine a wonderfully complex tapestry of visual distortions, but I was only seeing it in my mind's eye. It was like the sensation that you are just about to get some visuals, everything appears coiled and ready to unfurl with movement, but it doesn't. Except that this is even more intense and pregnant with potential. I got the sense that if I were to close my eyes and go inward, it might really be something special. However, in this case, such a thing was impossible. I found myself wishing I were able to lay down quietly and see what transpired, but I was locked into my prior decision to take this on a hike. I breathed in the crisp, scented air and felt the strong inward-pulling energy center me. My body was quivering with the strength of it, but my emotions felt held tight and secure in the protective center.

It was about like that previous paragraph, the process of transitioning from a scattered come-up phase into the peak of the effects. One minute I was preoccupied in the feeling's intensity, but totally unclear on what this drug was about, and the next I felt comfortably in it. There was still an element of discomfort in that body feeling; my muscles felt clenched, and I felt a decent bit of tension in my head. The energy seemed most centered in my head, right in the center, between my temples, behind my eyes. But I was content and calm, while the world outside pulsed with energy and the unfolding in my mind's eye of a tapestry of swirling dots on a grid overlaying it all. The energy of it was intense, almost searing, but I felt strengthened in my core and impervious to distress. There were a fair number of people we kept passing by, and I found that I had no feeling of social anxiety or self-consciousness. I was able to easily exchange brief greetings and pleasantries without being concerned at how I appeared or any other such psychedelic self-awareness issues.

I took notes occasionally as a few smatterings of words on my phone as I walked. It was 3:15, which was 50 minutes after taking it, still under an hour in. As we walked, my mind was quite active, thinking about various things. There was no laser-focused insight, not really any serious introspection, either. My thoughts would expand and hit tangents, based around observations I was making, or things my girlfriend said to me. I expect if I hadn't created all of that external input, and been focused on a rather intense hike, my thoughts would have turned inward and I might have been quite introspective. Since that was not to be, I explored the thoughts I had. They were many, of course, but I remember some of them. I saw a sign for the trail (Hawkbill Ridge) and that led my girlfriend and I into a silly conversation about what if we lived in a world where we had to worry about getting snatched out of the air by giant hawks? Think about how different it would be if we had a terrifying predator species that would regularly snatch people, and we had to be in prey mode. Of course, in reality, we would have just exterminated them. But before we had the technology to do so, that would have been so crazy. You lose a few friends over the years as they get grabbed and flown off and eaten.

I also found myself thinking about the chemical structure of the drug inhabiting my brain. 4-hydroxy-ethylpropyltryptamine. Meaning there are 2 nitrogens, with an ethyl attached to one, and a propyl to the other. It seems to me that it should matter which order they're in. Could there be a difference between ethylpropyltryptamine and propylethyltryptamine, or is that just a lack of understanding on my part? My guess is that it's irrelevant or it doesn't work that way, because I have never seen anyone talk about that or explore that possibility, all the way back to Shulgin, so it's more likely than not that this possible probability isn't possible after all.

At about 3:30, slightly over an hour in, I was at a pretty stable plateau, it didn't seem to be getting stronger. We reached the destination of the hike, which was a breathtaking jutting outcropping of stone, a granite cliff face, with lots of area to sit and take in the stunning view. We found an unoccupied rock overhang and sat down to drink some water and enjoy the view. I stood there, facing a great yawning gulf where the cliff dropped off far down below and the next ridge rose some distance away. We were facing down the ridge, and I saw mountain after mountain, stacked like dominoes, off into the distance, and then the great eastern continental divide ridge far off in the distance to the west. I felt the empty space and it seemed to reverberate in my body's tightly bound energy field. I felt dizzy and exhilarated, but I didn't want to get too close to the edge, due to the feeling of the abys pulling at me. The view was gorgeous, and it seemed to pulsate at me with the promise of potential energy. I took out my Nikon 3200D camera and started playing with it, taking photos, playing with some branches hanging nearby to blur the focus of the background view, and messing with the light settings.

After 15 minutes of this, we decided to leave. There were some other people there, on the next rocky hangout area. They were being really loud, their voices ricocheting off the stone and assaulting our peace. We watched as one of them threw a used napkin on the ground thoughtlessly. This made me wonder at the incredible amounts of thoughtless destruction that humans wreak on the planet. Why in all that is holy would you come to a place like this and throw trash on the ground instead of taking it with you? It would be so easy to just put that napkin in your bag and throw it away later. It's madness, and yet, so many people do it, and you end up with beautiful, precious natural wonders infested with plastic waste. Despite my solid center of emotional peace, I feel a sense of anger, or perhaps disgust, at my fellow man. My girlfriend, who is much more cynical than I am, couldn't stand it anymore, and so we decided to leave, and head back to the car. Anyway, it was getting to that time where we had to go, since it gets dark so early this time of year, and the temperature was already dropping, and we were nearly as high up as you can get east of the Mississippi.

As we headed back, we had a pretty brutal uphill section for about a third of the way. We took a quicker pace than we did on the way there. Before long I found myself very winded. It felt like it was hard to get a full breath, and my throat, nose and even lungs felt suddenly coated with a thin layer of mucous. I wonder, was that there before? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. The humming and buzzing energy field of the 4-HO-EPT still surrounded me strongly, but now I was beginning to feel the faint worry of a tension headache. The greatest impact of the force of the drug's energy was firmly seated in the center of my skull, between the temples and behind the eyes. The increased force of my blood pumping in the intense cardiovascular exercise was a constant force I could feel, throbbing my vision and leaving a slight dull ache. I felt that the drug was making this hike harder and my body was reacting with inflammation, but I don't know if that was actually true. It is certainly true, though, that this hike was harder than it usually is. I think 4-HO-EPT, despite its stimulating sort of nature, is probably not best suited for intense physical exertion.

We passed far fewer people on the way back, as it was getting later in the day, the sun slowly creeping down the sky and changing the color palette to violets and blues. At one point, we passed an older guy who we had also passed on the way there, as he was heading back. He was sitting on the side of the trail, a sad look on his face. He looked utterly defeated, despondent, rejected. We passed him and I got this impression strongly. He looked so alone, and I was pretty sure he was crushingly depressed about it. After we passed him, I started to imagine that he was considering ending his life. The logical part of my brain realized that this was not something I could know, but the emotional part of my brain was convinced I was correct. I wanted to go back and say something to him, tell him it would be okay, but I felt shy, and my girlfriend was loathe to speak to anyone, as the pandemic is going stronger than ever before. But the experience impacted me, and I kept thinking, what if that was a missed pivotal moment for that guy? What if some kind words from me could have turned his day around, and made a lasting difference? What if he was sitting there, deciding on suicide when he got home, and my connecting with him and talking to him could have caused him to change his mind, and he would ultimately recover and live the rest of his life, and my passing without saying anything missed that opportunity and instead he would kill himself later that night? It was a flight of fancy, but I considered turning around repeatedly. I felt guilty for passing by, I felt I had failed in a simple thing that would have made a tremendous difference. I couldn't tell if the drug was actually increasing my empathy to the point that I was able to glean complex insights by feel and first impression, or if I was just tripping.M/pullquote> I guess I will never know about that particular scenario, but I do feel that the drug was facilitating a keen insight into human mental states and humanity in general, regardless. In retrospect, it seems unlikely I could have gleaned such information from a brief look at the guy, but I do believe in intuition and the ability to understand things about people from nonverbal communication, and it is possible for psychedelics to increase receptiveness to these things.

As we walked, with me feeling somewhat guilty and somewhat silly for feeling guilty, the talk turned almost entirely to human nature and the problems facing the world, which is pretty common for me on psychedelics, and yet, on tryptamines, my thoughts are often more internally-focused, or else focused externally in a much broader sense, with topics such as space/the macro universe, and the nature of existence, being prevalent. In this way anyway, mentally the drug felt more similar to the phenethylamine psychedelics than it did to the tryptamines.

We got back to the car at about 4:15, which was just under 2 hours into the trip. I was still tripping, but it had lessened in intensity some, already on the way down. As others have noted, this one seems quite short in duration. My girlfriend and I had been talking about her childhood, some, towards the end of the hike. She had a rough childhood and it's a huge source of problems for her. I found myself quietly ruminating on that a lot on the way home. Since my girlfriend was driving, I was free to just look out the window and think. She was feeling quiet as well, so there wasn't much talking. I kept imagining scenes of her father terrorizing her as a child, I imagined her child's face, terrified and hurt, and I imagined myself standing over her and facing down her father, intimidating him into backing off and leaving her alone. How much different would she have turned out if that had somehow been possible? It's so incredibly tragic, and it's so tragically common, too. What could possibly possess a person to do that to their child, the one being they should most be protecting? I know that it comes from a perversion, caused, generally, by the very same traumas as a child. I know that his father, her grandfather, was like that to him. But then, some people grow up from that and resolve to never, ever treat another human that way. My girlfriend is an example of that, as is one of my best friends, whose father used to beat up on him and his mom, but he himself is the kindest person. My ex-wife, however, is an example of that happening to her as a child, who grew up to inflict the same behavior on others. I wondered what it is that determines that? How much of our personality is shaped by our early experiences, and how much is due to our inherent, inborn personality traits? And how much is due to the conscious decisions we make along the way? Some people, like my ex, developed a suit of armor around their egos, desiring to protect themselves as much as possible, to the extent that everything wrong with them becomes someone else's fault, and they grow up with a personality disorder and rather than face the things they hate in themselves, they take out their self-hatred on others. And some choose to take all of that hurt upon themselves, and never treat another that way because they realize how wrong it is to do so, although they struggle mightily with self-loathing. Still, I can respect the latter so much more.

The car ride went by with thoughts such as these occupying my awareness, and it was quite pleasant despite the slightly dark thoughts, which were really not presented as negative, but instead as something interesting to think about. We got home, and at 5:25, exactly 3 hours in, I was down. I still felt the drug's energetic imprint on me, however, until I slept, in fact. But the acute effects were history, and I decided to take myself to the grocery store, to buy some stuff so I could make a one-day-late round of my two favorite Thanksgiving dishes, chicken pot pie and strawberry jello cream cheese pretzel casserole (look it up, it's so good even though it sounds weird, everyone I have introduced to it is obsessed with it). The rest of the night consisted of me spending 5 hours cooking, I even made the pie crust from scratch. It was immensely rewarding to finally eat the fruits of my labor at the end. I also thought a lot, and started writing this report. I developed a residual headache, I believe from the head tension I felt from the energy of the drug. It was not a bad headache, but it was present until I slept. A few hours before bed it got to the point that I took some ibuprofen, which helped a good bit. I was in a great and contemplative mood for the rest of the evening/night, and I slept fine, and woke up feeling refreshed.


Conclusions

This is a very interesting/unique tryptamine! It is short in duration, though aspects of it hang on far beyond what I would consider its main duration. It has a high bodyload for a tryptamine, but I only found it uncomfortable during the come-up. After that it became a somewhat tremory but powerful energetic field that really felt like it wanted to draw my awareness inward to the core of my body and mind. I felt very tethered to a peaceful emotional state, it felt like nothing could pierce my equanimity. The thought patterns reminded me of DOET, or perhaps to a lesser extent, DOiP, oddly, more than anything else. As in, there was a lot going on, and my thoughts were empathic without being classically empathogenic at all, ie, there wasn't any euphoria, there wasn't desire to communicate my thoughts, but yet I was feeling the emotions of others quite strongly. Also similarly to those two psychedelic amphetamines, I was tripping pretty hard, but it was difficult to describe what was actually happening and why I was tripping (although there were more classically psychedelic qualities to it than there are in DOET/DOiP). I could see psychedelic naïve people perhaps not reporting this as being psychedelic, as happened with DOET in the literature from long ago, yet it most unquestionably is psychedelic.

I would summarize the duration (for me in this trip anyway) as follows:

Come-up: 20-50 minutes
Peak: 50-90 minutes
Plateau: 90-150 minutes
Aftereffects/Residuals: 150 minutes until sleep

Next time I will take a little more (probably 50mg, or maybe I'll just go for it and try 60mg as I don't have a whole lot of it), and I will spend the trip at home, by myself, probably outside on my deck or something, surrounded by the forest. The drug certainly seemed to be wanting me to go within, with my eyes closed. I have the feeling that, in this sort of setting, perhaps with music, or perhaps without, it has the potential to go very deep. I can see it being amazing for meditation, because unlike some tryptamines, which make the thoughts explode uncontrollably, this one seems to instill a sense of mental quiet, clearing up the cluttering thoughts and creating stillness within. I look forward to my next trial.

Exp Year: 2020	ExpID: 114998
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 37
Published: Dec 8, 2020	Views: 2,328
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4-HO-EPT (777) : General (1), First Times (2), Nature / Outdoors (23), Hangover / Days After (46), Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53)