DOSE: T+ 0:00	160 mg	oral	MDPR	(capsule)
T+ 2:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 4:05	20 mg	oral	2C-B	(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

I was flipping through PIHKAL one day, dreaming of trying all these exotic compounds (who hasn't?), when one caught my eye: MDPR, closely related to MDA, MDMA and MDE. Shulgin says MDPR is basically inactive on its own, but can be a primer to other psychedelics, often with great success (see the PIHKAL entry here). No one I had ever heard of, anywhere, knew anything about or had ever tried MDPR, outside of Shulgin and his crowd.

Some time later, I was chilling with my local wizard and he mentioned to me that he had recently conjured some MDPR. What a coincidence! I told him about my interest in it, and he gave me a gelcap which he claimed contained 160 mg of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-propylamphetamine HCl. The material seemed to be pure - it was white and granular and had little odor. Its taste was much less biting and bitter than MDA or MDMA. But, the wizard told me, he was not sure of the quality of the powder. He had followed familiar spells, but he had no analytical means of testing what he had conjured. He wished me luck and disappeared in a cloud of burnt-plastic-smelling vapor.

At 3:30pm I ate the gelcap. I had eaten only a bowl of cereal an hour earlier. 60 hours previously I had taken MDMA, and I felt fully recovered.

t+0:00 - eat gelcap

t+0:28 - slight desensitization of touch?

t+0:47 - off baseline in an indistinct way - entirely physical

t+1:02 - definite but still indistinct physical response. slight touch 'fuzziness'. stimulant sensation in my limbs - more like amphetamine than MDMA. very slight.

t+1:18 - effects don't seem to be evolving much more

t+1:35 - a little more stimulating, without a change in the character of the stimulation

t+1:39 - I find myself wanting to tap my foot or bounce my leg up and down

t+1:54 - hunger. not what I would expect after taking a stimulant.

t+2:00 - time for the psychedelic.

Now, two hours into the experiment, I followed Shulgin's advice and ate a tab of acid. I have no way of knowing how much acid there is on a tab, but I'm guessing it's less than 100 micrograms, since my friends have told me this acid is pretty standard strength. Shulgin's primer experiments used acid in the 60-100 microgram range.

t+2:09 - slight metallic taste in my mouth?

t+2:12 - I find myself stretching my arms

t+2:26 - first hints of acid effects

t+2:45 - acid is definitely there

t+3:15 - starting to notice acid visuals - rippling color on walls, general blurriness

t+3:55 - this feels no different than one single tab of acid

t+4:05 - fuck it. eat 20 mg 2C-B

t+4:31 - enhanced visual effects - rippling, etc. due to 2C-B?

t+4:40 - a little jaw clench?

t+4:50 - clear 2C-B visuals

And then I stopped taking notes. I felt like I had taken one hit of acid followed by 20 mg of 2C-B.

I was completely baffled. Both the acid and 2C-B felt exactly as they would have without the MDPR - or at least what I thought was MDPR - that I had eaten first. Had the wizard given me MDIP, N-isopropyl-MDA, instead of N-propyl-MDA? Or something else?

Still tripping, I embarked on a wild subway ride to visit an oracle. I brought him a sample of the supposed MDPR, explained my situation, and asked him if he could tell me what it was. The oracle did a melting point test and told me it melted at 191-191.5 degrees C, right on the money according to Shulgin. Two days later the oracle contacted me and said that he had put the MDPR in his NMR spectrometer, and it was in fact MDPR. He also said the first wizard was no fool, because the sample was at least 97% pure.

Okay, so what was wrong with my brain chemistry? The only possibility I could think of was that the MDMA I had taken two and a half days earlier was strongly cross-tolerant with MDPR.

Then the explanation hit me like a lungful of amyl nitrite: I had taken a single pill of Prozac a few hours after the MDMA to reduce the chances of frying my brain. Prozac's half-life is several days, so I undoubtedly had a bunch of it still blocking serotonin reuptake. Prozac nullifies the effects of a subsequent dose of MDMA, and it could probably nullify the effects of MDPR too. Now this was an explanation that made sense. I'd have to wait a couple weeks for it to go away.

Time passes. And finally I have time to try MDPR again.

t+0:00 - eat 180 mg MDPR. had a small lunch 1:20 ago.

t+0:15 - something indistinct

t+0:23 - slight desensitization of touch; an indistinct and mild stimulated feeling - alertness

t+0:45 - body stimulant sensation - fingers tingle a little

t+1:25 - feelings have plateaued. no mental effect. body feels stimulated but relaxed. but there is the occasional feeling of stiffness or tenseness in the limbs and fingers, like a sharp tingle.

t+1:50 - spent the last 10 minutes driving to a friend's house. driving skills are completely unaffected by the MDPR.

t+1:55 - hungry

t+2:00 - eat 1.5 tabs of acid (same kind as the first MDPR experiment)

t+2:22 - first hints of acid

t+2:53 - acid feels pretty normal. it's getting a little harder to write.

t+3:30 - feels similar to acid still.

t+3:50 - there is a different body sensation here

t+4:30 - definite different body sensation... but not much. mentally, feels like 1.5 hits of acid.

And once again I stopped taking notes, mostly because writing seemed like too much of a challenge and was not what I felt like doing. There was something different happening. The acid had more of a body high. Not a feeling of energy, tightness, fatigue or outright stimulation, just simply *high*. This high seemed to be in the same class as an MDMA/MDA/MDE high, but was much more mild.

I did not notice much mental change at all. The level of visuals, complexity of thoughts, etc. seemed to be just what I would expect from 1.5 hits of acid. About six hours after taking the acid, I looked back at the way I'd been feeling and I could not identify any noticeable alteration from the MDPR except for this comforatable, friendly but undeniably subtle body sensation. The intensity of this sensation was more than what the MDPR had produced before I took the acid, so synergy between the two drugs had come into play.

Around this time, a friend of mine started playing with a frighteningly freaky audio-feedback program he had written for his Macintosh. We gave a microphone to another friend (who had taken 2C-I) and let him talk to himself. He'd hear clips of his voice from seconds to minutes ago and be reminded of what he was thinking of previously, and he literally had a conversation with himself for the next 10-15 minutes. This was endlessly fascinating to everyone in the room (all of whom were tripping). I was surprised how long this game held my interest and how much it made me think about the nature of conversations and how internal and external stimuli influence the direction and content of a dialogue. We kept playing with my friend's program for a couple of hours and had a great time.

Like many people, I am a little wary of LSD because of the way it makes me introspective and the way my mind can get caught in loops that sometimes spiral away in undesirable directions. Recently I have been feeling a lot better about my life in general. During this MDPR/LSD experiment, I sometimes found myself thinking about things that have bothered me in the past, and about things that bother me still, and it seemed much easier to put those thoughts aside and not dwell on them. This is certainly due in part to my overall better attitude, but it may also be due in part to the MDPR, but this is pure conjecture. In any case I was very happy to have had an acid trip that was all-around good for the first time in quite a while!

But the strong synergy between the MDPR and LSD that Shulgin wrote about was not there. A few weeks earlier a friend of mine had tried the MDPR/LSD combination, and he told me that there was a definite difference, but that it was far milder than Shulgin described. He didn't seem to be able to explain it well, but did say that it was mostly body-oriented. It's been tough for me to explain the differences too. I wonder why we haven't been able to reproduce Shulgin's results. We know the MDPR is good. Acid quality, maybe? I can't say.

So let's try an experiment without LSD. The psychedelic drug I hold closest to my heart is 2C-B, since it was the first psychedelic I ever took and it has been perpetually interesting and fun the countless times I've taken it since. So I know it well, I can measure it with milligram precision, and I should be able to identify any synergy with MDPR. I chose to take 25 mg of 2C-B, which is the minimum I consider necessary to get me to about a +++ level.

t+0:00 (8:45 pm) - eat 170 mg MDPR. Had a filling dinner at 6:00.

t+0:20 - go shopping at home depot

t+1:00 - return from home depot. mild effects, pretty much the same as last time.

t+1:50 - eat 25 mg 2C-B

t+2:20 - starting to feel the 2C-B. I'm in a cool room, but my palms are a little sweaty.

t+2:30 - muscle twitchiness, in my legs. visual effects starting.

t+2:37 - dim vibrations with eyes closed

t+2:47 - 2C-B is starting to take hold. the body sensations seem different.

(I listened to music for a while here)

t+3:50 - smoke marijuana - a couple hits of bud, several more hits of strong iso-hash.

t+4:20 - a bit more off-balance when walking around. I don't think this would happen with 2C-B alone. the pot had strong synergy. music much more mesmerizing. body sensations continue - easy to ignore where body is. visuals have returned.

t+4:50 - my mind seems to wander quite a bit more now - it is harder pay attention to music. maybe change the music? smoke a little more too. the general body sensation for this trip seems to be that my body matters less - it feels like less. it isn't getting in my way. very comfortable. as time goes on, it becomes more obvious how the MDPR is making things different. so it was with LSD too.

t+5:10 - 2C-B is starting to weaken

t+7:00 - spent the last hour and a half reading the beginning of PIHKAL and enjoying it greatly.

As the 2C-B wore off, the MDPR disappeared with it. On a pure intensity scale, the MDPR definitely made the 2C-B more intense than what I would usually expect from 25 mg. It might have been more like 27 or 28 mg - a small mass difference, but noticeable to anyone familiar with 2C-B.

The music I listened to was enjoyable. I recognized all the 2C-B effects I know and love. Music was spacious and I was attentive to the textures of instruments and samples. The signature body blur and delocalization of 2C-B was there too, and the MDPR seemed to make this a bit more important than usual. While listening to good music during previous 2C-B trips, the body seems forgettable, as the mind plows through the universe of the music. With MDPR, I was more interested in observing my body diffuse inward and outward as I laid still and time passed.

I went to sleep a little after 8 am, and I needed to take a pill of melatonin to make going to sleep easier. I woke up a few times but slept for a totally unexpected 15 hours. The drugs must have had something to do with this. Mentally, however, I felt normal.

In retrospect, my first Prozac-tainted experiment might have borne more fruit if I hadn't been expecting more obvious effects... and if I hadn't added that 2C-B, which was poor experimental technique but did make for a very fun night. I do believe, though, that the Prozac made the ordinarily subtle effects of MDPR even more difficult to find.

Many people think that Shulgin's dose estimates in PIHKAL and TIHKAL are generally on the low side - he seems to get more 'bang for the buck' than many people. He and his research group have trained themselves to learn as much as possible from every experience, even weak and indistinct ones. So it might have been with Shulgin's comments on MDPR. I'm very familiar with psychedelics, and it has been a challenge for me to characterize what MDPR does. Maybe this is because the territory is new. I have only explored single drugs or combinations of active drugs, never 'primers' which are virtually inactive on their own. I could see how, if I had more primer experience, I would be able to see more of what MDPR is doing.

After these experiments I am intrigued by how primers work and what they do. The feeling of an essentially inactive drug rising from the depths of my mind, encouraged by a familiar psychedelic, then dropping back into the shadows is new to me.

Now we come to some of the most important questions: Is MDPR useful, and if so, why? Would I take it again? Is there any reason I would not take it, or why others shouldn't take it?

MDPR seems to be a fairly 'safe' drug, though I realize that 'safety' is very tough to define at the bleeding edge of amateur psychedelic chemistry. Some drugs (mushrooms, 2C-B) seem to be at peace with my body and mind, while others (MDMA, MDA) feel like they are doing something bad, somewhere inside me. MDPR feels better than MDMA or MDA. It does not seem to have any lingering effects like post-MDMA depression. Yet it has a stimulant nature that warrants attention. Do I have any reason to worry that occasional use will hurt me? No.

MDPR seems to smooth out some of the physical bumps of LSD and 2C-B. During these experiments my body never felt out of whack, stressed or disturbed. I simply felt energized and perceptive of my body. MDPR also seems to put me in a good mood, though as I said earlier it's not clear if it's the MDPR or just my recent better outlook on life that has made these experiments so satisfying. I thought about some very personal topics during the most recent experiment, and I didn't get dragged down by them.

MDPR may be useful as a social lubricant for other psychedelics. While MDMA produces real emotional disinhibition and pure mood-elevating stimulants like (meth)amphetamine speed up the body and mind, MDPR seems to bring almost no character of its own. Instead, it seems to make a psychedelic experience more tangible and shareable with others. It may reduce anxiety.

I am not sure if I would ever choose to take MDPR if I didn't have an academic interest in it. In part I think this is because I don't yet know what it is really good for. I do think that MDPR is useful for something, and that it needs more study. I definitely want to take it again, simply because it is a thrill to explore the unknown. There are a couple ideas I have for future experiments. What if MDPR were taken a couple hours after a psychedelic, instead of before? This might make it easier to see the change that happens as the MDPR takes effect. I'd also like to try MDPR with mushrooms, because mushrooms are one of the most antisocial psychedelics I have taken, and it would be interesting to challenge shrooms with the pro-social effects of MDPR.

It is very exciting to try a virtually unexplored drug, especially when the drug turns out to be worthwhile. I hope that someday I'll have the chance to try a completely unexplored drug, following in Shulgin's footsteps. Dr. Shulgin did an awful lot of great work, but when you are familiar with what he has done, you begin to understand how many paths he had to leave untrodden, for other researchers to uncover. The study of inactive primers is an interesting side path to follow, and one that I think will lead to some enlightening discoveries.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 11880
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 19, 2002	Views: 58,521
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2C-B (52), LSD (2), MDPR (235) : Alone (16), Combinations (3), First Times (2), General (1)