1P-LSD (1-propionyl-lysergic acid diethylamide) is an analog of the psychedelic substance LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) that became legally available for purchase in certain countries in early 2015. 1P-LSD is sold for research purposes only and not intended for human consumption. If one were to consume it, however, it would act as a ‘prodrug’ for LSD, meaning that it is sold in an inactive form and then metabolizes into an active form in the body.
I may have tried 1P-LSD – I may also have fabricated this entire post meaning that it is 100% fiction.. read on and decide for yourself :)
You can also read about my experience microdosing with 1P-LSD for 30 days
Trip Report – 50ug 1P-LSD
This is a trip report of sorts with 50ug/micrograms of 1P-LSD. 50ug is not a large dose, and it was initially meant as a ‘test run’ to try out the strength of the drug.
It ended up being stronger than I thought. Based on prior experiences with LSD, I get the impression that 1P-LSD is either stronger than regular LSD, or that the LSD I had before wasn’t very strong. (It could also be both.)
I didn’t keep track of time very closely, so there are only approximations and not exact time stamps. I took 50ug at about 10AM on an empty stomach and the whole experience lasted around 12-14 hours. It peaked around 3-4 hours in, which is standard, and probably kept me awake 1-2 hours later than usual that night.
If you’re wondering, the effects are exactly the same as regular LSD.
LSD in under 10 words:
Here’s the real beauty of the universe. Don’t forget!
..then inevitably you forget & have to go back again…
— Freedom & Fulfilment (@Aaron__FF) March 7, 2016
The following is something like a ‘highlight reel’ of my trip – in rough chronological order – of what I thought were the most interesting parts of the experience. At the end there are some general observations are summed up. I hope you enjoy!
‘Woo-woo’ caveat:
Some of this is very typical of a psychedelic trip and might seem like new age/hippie clichés – I’m not making any claims about profundity, just describing my experience for anyone who’s interested. If this isn’t your thing, I get it – all I would do is suggest that you approach it with an open mind.
Compassion/It’s hard being a human being
About 3 hours in, I start to feel like I understand that there’s somehow some fundamental difficulty in being human that each one of us is dealing with at a very deep level.
Here’s what I mean:
1) If the universe is everything, then that encompasses every experience, event, sensation, feeling, thought – every possibility that is ever possible, happening all at once.
2) Underneath the ego and the illusion of separateness, each human being is fundamentally the entire universe. On some level, then, each of us is all of those experiences, feelings, thoughts, sensations, and so on.
This experience of being is itself somehow overwhelming – after all it is everything.
Inside every person is the energy of a highly sensitive newborn baby, thrust out into the crazy and over-stimulating external world and freaking out.
This fundamental difficulty of being human then manifests in different ways – neuroticism, addiction, self-destructive behaviour, negative thought patterns, violence, and so on. Underneath it all is a primordial energy that just suddenly banged into existence and doesn’t really know what to do.
Thinking about this leads me to feel an overwhelming sense of compassion for every human being – not in the sense that “life is hard” or something trite but rather that at the deepest level everyone is this primordial energy of the universe struggling to adapt to just existing.
There’s so much going on all the time – how could we not be overwhelmed?
It seemed clear to me that at some level everyone feels this, whether they’re aware of it or not, and that is the cause of a lot of the problems we face.
Looking in the mirror – Don’t worship the devil
What is it about LSD and mirrors? The last time I took LSD I spent a good amount of time staring in the mirror at the tiny reflection of myself inside my own pupil – realizing eventually that the warped and exaggerated miniature version of myself living inside me, staring back, was my own ego.
This time around I look in the mirror and begin to see myself as a kind of devil – not in an ‘evil’ way but more the way the devil is sinful/forbidden and it’s kind of sexy. My hair is sticking up and sort of looks like horns, I’m pretty muscular and tripping hard by this point – sexy devil.
The devil can be sexy because it’s forbidden and ‘sinful’ – the same way that sex is ‘naughty’ or ‘dirty’ in our repressed culture.
Think about it:
Girls dress up as a ‘sexy devil’ for halloween – no one dresses up as a ‘sexy God’. God is supposedly the exact opposite type of energy. Judeo-Christian God is an old, wise, strict grandfather/king sitting on a throne – not forbidden or ‘sinful’ at all.
(Although really God is you, me, everyone and everything)
So here I am appearing as a devil to myself in the mirror – not in a negative way but in a sexy way. This is quite an egotistical way to look at yourself, obviously.
Then my head sort of starts floating and I see it in the mirror as if it was floating above the fiery pits of hell and people were worshipping it like they would worship the devil.
I don’t actually see this happening in the same way, for example, you can see your hand in front of your face right now. It isn’t 100% there visually – but the thought and the sensation is there. The lines between imagination/thinking and visual perception are blurred.
Anyway I get the message – the devil-head represents the ego (my ego in this case) and the point is not so much that the ego is evil, but that it is the wrong thing to be ‘worshipping’.
From the Judeo-Christian perspective again, devil worshippers are misguided or mistaken in some sense because the devil is the wrong thing to be putting credence in and directing your attention towards. People who are too caught up in their egos are misguided and fundamentally mistaken in the same way.
The ego is a sort of ‘false idol’ of fascination where as being ‘closer to God’ would be putting your focus on a way of being truer or closer to the nature of reality (oneness).
When girls laugh at things that are masculine it’s because they like them
I had always experienced this from the side of being a guy – we laugh at feminine aspects of girls’ behaviour, but we still find them attractive (at least I do). Painted toenails, perfume, pink girly stuff, it’s ridiculous, but we still like it.
In the same way, some girls act like muscles, facial hair, ‘manly’ stuff is funny – it’s just because they like it. I guess this seemed like a big realization to me because I’d always seen it from the masculine side but never understood that it works both ways.
Sometimes girls who liked me would seem to think ‘masculine’ things about me were funny – drinking black coffee, eating a lot of food, working out a lot. I didn’t really get it – they liked me, why were they laughing?
Now I get it. It’s the same reason I think she’s goofy for matching her toenails with her outfit.. but it’s still attractive that she takes care of herself.
Some guys seem to think that girls should only relate to the masculine with some sort of fearful reverence – that’s not how it is at all. It’s an interplay between two energies – sure one is leading, more dominant etc. but the relationship is not antagonistic – it’s complementary. (At least, it’s a lot more fun that way.)
What’s more, joking about something is an effective way to highlight it without the vulnerability that comes with talking about it openly and honestly. So next time a girl jokes about how you go to the gym or something… it may just be because she likes it.
Angry dragon = Scared cat
Lying on my bed, I’m looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling – it has frosted glass and there’s some designs of fruit or flowers.
The way the light is shining through makes part of the design look like an angry dragon breathing fire – not a realistic dragon but something a kid would draw. Imagine a 10 year old’s drawing of a dragon terrorizing a medieval village – something like ‘Trogdor’ (if you remember that), minus the muscular arm.
The dragon soon became a double-image optical illusion. That’s where you can look at it one minute and it’s one thing, then the next minute it’s something else. The classic example is the beautiful young girl that’s also an ugly old woman.
The image of the dragon alternated with one of a scared cat – again as if drawn by a 10 year old kid. But the cat wasn’t just scared, it was in pain.
The cat looked like it was being electrocuted, and had all its limbs splayed out with its hair sticking out on end.
The scary fire-breathing dragon and the frightened, tortured cat were the same thing. I understood this to mean that the people/things that are being frightening and trying to cause pain to others are usually the ones who are in the most pain themselves.
It would be boring to just be the Universe
With LSD there is a certain feeling of immediacy that is difficult to explain. It’s like more and more things are coming to the forefront of your experience, all at once.
The ‘doors of perception’ are opened wider and wider and you get to see and experience that you are actually everything. Largely this feels great.
I imagined what it would be like to be on a really strong trip – incapacitated and just lying there, no longer in your body or connected to your mind or anything but completely at one with the universal consciousness.
This would be cool for a while. But can you imagine staying like that forever?
Again it would be the experience of every possible experience, all at once. Everything that could ever be felt or experienced in any way would all be felt and experienced instantly at the exact same time.
It would just be a continuous state – timeless in a sense, because time is just a particular aspect of the way humans experience reality.
Then I realized that existing only in this state – of everything that is ever possible happening all at once – would actually be quite boring after a while. There’s nothing to it – it is, after all, everything.
I imagine the experience of being human is like if you took everything that exists ever, then narrow narrow narrow narrow it down to the most microscopic, minuscule point – that’s your entire life.
(Or even better, the whole history of humanity is that tiny blip)
So it’s actually pretty cool we get to run through this game of being people with things like time, continuity, past and future. It’s a fun way for the universe to express itself in this particular ‘dimension’ (or whatever you want to call it).
A ‘wiggly world’
Alan Watts rang as true as ever during this trip – especially this clip:
I kept listening to him say “Here are we sitting in this room all built on straight lines but each one of us is as wiggly as all get out!” and just laughing at how true it is.
The whole series is worth listening to, here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHBKM7mBHUM
You can also get the CD set or Audible download on Amazon.
The possibility of having a bad trip
On two separate occasions I saw how the trip could have ‘turned sour’ or gone badly. I was able to get out of the negativity right away both times, probably partially due to the dose not being that high.
So although it never actually got close to turning into a ‘bad trip’, this was interesting because I saw very clearly how in another circumstance it could have. This was the first time I experienced any hints of negativity with LSD at all.
Going for a walk, calling a friend, ‘words aren’t good enough’
I stayed in my apartment for the first 5 hours of the trip, because until that point it seemed like the outside world would be too much to take in.
At around 3PM I decide to go for a walk along the road by my apartment building – a quiet back road with lots of nature that’s not too busy.
I start talking to my friend on Facebook chat, he also likes experimenting with psychedelics. He had called me one time before when he was on mushrooms, so I decide to return the favour.
We end up talking for 40 minutes and I try to explain to him what I’m feeling, but probably only make sense ~50% of the time.
He comments that it seems there’s some innate need to connect with other human beings as part of the psychedelic trip – I hadn’t thought of that before but I think he’s right.
He described it like there’s a deep feeling of wanting to share the experience with someone else and of wanting them to have the same experience that you’re having. But of course, as we experienced firsthand, it’s impossible to really transfer it over.
While trying to explain how I felt to my friend, I experienced the complete inadequacy of language when it comes to experiences like these. I would say or write something and it would come out sounding completely stupid. I kept coming back to the fact that words aren’t good enough to really convey experiences like these.
“Once you get the message, hang up the phone”
Initially 50ug was planned as a test run for a stronger trip later (2 or 3X the dose) but by the end of this I didn’t feel like I needed it anymore.
As I was coming down from the trip this quote from Alan Watts kept coming up in my head:
“Once you get the message, hang up the phone.”
A similar saying I heard is once is ‘When the door is answered, stop knocking’ or something like that.
Unconsciously I had gone into the trip expecting it to be as equally eye-opening as my first LSD trip, but eye-opening in a completely different way. Of course it wasn’t, as it’s the exact same drug.
I guess at the end I realized that there are limits to what a psychedelic experience can give you. While psychedelic experiences can be incredibly profound and transformative, they are not the ‘be all end all’ of human experience or human life.
(Although the problem with “Once you get the message, hang up the phone” is that it can be difficult to know if you’ve gotten the message or not. That’s kind of how I feel.)
Next-day comedown
I experienced a bit of a ‘comedown’ the next day. It wasn’t a super strong one but it was very noticeable at one or two points in the day.
I didn’t think about this beforehand and treated the next day like a normal day, trying to fit in a bunch of different activities – work, gym, girls, friends. It ended up being busier than usual and I kind of felt like shit at times. A busy day right after the trip was a lot to deal with, and I should have had a more relaxed day.
General observations
To finish up I’ll list some general things I noticed:
- Laughing a lot. I was laughing very often, and not at anything in particular. It wasn’t that something or anything was particularly funny, I just felt like laughing. Everything seemed like a big joke (it is).
- Sense of not knowing what to do/wanting to do everything at once
- Sense of ‘oneness’ and connectedness with everything
- Gratitude and compassion, love and appreciation for people in my life
Again this wasn’t everything that happened, but a ‘highlight reel’ with quite a bit of detail of the most interesting things.
Overall it was an overwhelmingly positive experience – and it did serve the original purpose of testing out the strength of 1P-LSD. You can also check out my post on microdosing 1P-LSD.
More on Psychedelics
Can We Derive Values from Psychedelic Experience?
Psychedelics, Personality Traits, and Values: A Closer Look at the Research
Mystical Experience & Psychedelics: Meaningful, Measurable, Life Changing
How to Have Mystical Experience: A Research Based Guide
How Psychedelics Take Us Back to The Garden of Eden
