There are a few hundred psychedelics. When I was 15 years younger, I wanted to try them all — or at least as many as possible.

I ended up trying two dozen. Not the great success I was hoping for. Please send me your virtual hugs and drugs.

I live in London now, but back then I was living in Moscow. Russian drug laws were almost as draconian as today, but the official list of verboten chemicals was a couple hundred of chemicals, mostly not psychedelics. Most existing psychedelics weren’t scheduled — and thus 100% legal.

So I’d order them from slightly sketchy websites pretending to sell “Research Chemicals” for research purposes. They would arrive in plain white envelopes blending with the rest of international mail.

Inside there would be small ziplock bags with white and brown powders. Bags would be properly labeled with a shorthand name, a full chemical name, and a weight, something like : “2C-I / 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenethylamine / 0.5 g / Not For Human Consumption”. That “Not For Human Consumption” label would provide the seller with a thin veneer of plausible deniability — they weren’t selling drugs, they were selling “Research Chemicals” for, you know, “research”. Feeding them to your lab rats.

I’m sure some people buying these “Research Chemicals” were actually university researchers, but I’m also sure they would ignore the “Not For Human Consumption” just like the rest of us would. University researchers also want to have fun. There are legit lab suppliers like Sigma Aldrich, but the stock lists of the sketchy RC websites would be almost entirely psychoactive compounds with great recreational potential.

To significantly simplify everything. The brain is a nanomechanical mechanism. Drugs are “gears” that you can “throw” into it so it “ticks” differently. A drug’s 3D matters — hence the gear analogy. Molecules with similar structures tend to “fit” similarly in the brain

Start with a known compound — say a naturally occurring one, like mescaline, psilocybin, or DMT. Then nudge its structure bit by bit obtaining new chemicals of potential interest.

1. Some will end up inactive because they cannot even get to the brain — they cannot cross the blood-brain-barrier which is there to prevent this exact scenario of weird foreign chemicals being in the blood.

2. Some cross the blood-brain barrier, but don’t really properly fit anywhere in the brain — so they are inactive for different reasons.

3. Some might end up causing severe unwanted side effects, e.g. significant vasoconstriction (tightening of blood vessels), serotonin syndrome (toxic excess of serotonin), and many others.

4. And some might end up being fun psychoactive chemicals, perhaps even at far lower doses and with a much lower safety margin — which creates its own set of dangers.

The chemicals in the picture before are all psychedelics. Notice their structural similarity. But their active dosages span two orders of magnitude — from ≈1-7mg (DOM) to ≈100-1000 mg (Mescaline). They are Sasha Shulgin’s “Magical Half-Dozen” phenethylamines — a set of particularly interesting Mescaline analogues he created.

The way you handle the risks is to start with an ultra-low dose and slowly increase it watching for side effects. That’s exactly what the American chemist Alexander Shulgin did. Over decades he discovered two hundred different chemicals. He described them in two classical books on psychedelics:

1. “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved” (aka PiHKAL, 1991) about mescaline analogues

2. “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved” (aka TiHKAL, 1997) about DMT, psilocin, psilocybin analogues.

Each book has two parts. The first one is a story of developing them. The second one is dedicated to listing them all with synthesis instructions and short trip-report-like descriptions of their action.

He’d test a compound on himself first, then — once it looked safe — share it with a small, trusted group of his friends.

Pretty much all of the psychedelics I tried were Shulgin’s creations.

Some people collect postal stamps. Some collect watches. Some want to climb as many mountains as possible. Some want to travel to all the countries in the world.

I was collecting psychedelic experiences. There was a brief, three-year window after I turned 18 and before Russia passed an “analogue law” banning entire structural families, not just specific chemicals.In that window I tried two dozen psychedelics.

My first psychedelic was 2C-I — a mild, bright, fun and with lots of visuals. It’d often give me sound-vision synesthesia — regular visual geometric patterns on it would synchronise to music. Among other 2Cs I tried later, 2C-E stood out: it could feel, generating some sense of profound semi-disconnection from reality and immersion in the inner world. 2C-E’s geometric patterns would often tessellate 3D space morphing with music.

God, I miss that synesthesia of initial psychedelic explorations. My trips now — usually LSD or psilocybin — aren’t like that. Maybe it’s the substances or maybe the 2C family was just uniquely good at synesthesia.

I tried insufflating (snorting) 5-MeO-DMT and tasted that famous sense of unity with the universe — the sex on it was particularly fun. 5-MeO-DMT isn’t quite “psychedelic” in the classic, kaleidoscopic way; more “transcendelic.”.

I tried oddballs like DiPT, one of the rare psychedelics that warps hearing, shifting the pitch of sounds downward in a non-linear fashion. Music on it was a highly discordant experience. Once with closed eyes I saw the most beautiful spiral on it with impossibly pastel colors.

I tried Proscaline — a Mescaline analogue that wasn’t particularly psychoactive, but it injected nice sparkling novelty into the experience (the sex on it was fun).

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

My initial psychedelic exploration was akin to putting a screwdriver into a TV and watching it create interesting patterns on the screen. There were a lot of different substances, but not that much substance. I’d talk to people on Bluelight — a forum about psychedelics. I even wrote a few trip reports, one of them is on Erowid for a rare chemical that only has a dozen chemicals (not telling you which one because I don’t want to find out my old ). My English wouldn’t be enough to enjoy reading psychedelic celebrities like Terrence McKenna, so the psychedelic culture of my younger self is that of harm reduction forums.

I wasn’t really sure what to do with psychedelics beyond — you know — trying a lot of different ones. I was a student studying applied math and computer science — neither a chemist nor a neuroscientist. My most “scientific” habit was reading Wikipedia and staring at receptor affinity tables—numbers showing how tightly a drug binds to different receptors.

Here’s one for 2C-I, my first psychedelic. Lower numbers (Ki) mean higher affinity — a stronger interaction.

I’d stare at tables like this, trying to correlate them with my experience. Some correlation would show up, such as:

• Stronger 5HT2A activation would produce a deeper trip that you couldn’t simply out-dose with a higher dose of a shallower compound. Imagine a psychedelic experience having two correlated-but-independent dimensions: intensity and depth.

• Stronger 5-HT2C activation often meant a greater chance of nausea and that unpleasant muscle tension (aka body load).

Beyond those simple patterns — already known in the community — I wouldn’t see any grand unifying theory.

A psychedelic medicine company Mindstate Design aims to precision engineer mental states in order to heal mental health problems such as depression. Their plan is to create combinations of chemicals that reliably produce the exact necessary healing states — without the “hit and miss” “heal or bad trip” randomness of individual psychedelics. They are currently doing Phase I clinical trials for their first oral proprietary formulation of a mild psychedelic 5-MeO-MiPT (fun fact: I tried that one too).

Then they intend to use 5-MeO-MiPT as a base for combining with add-on helper chemicals. And to discover these they use a LLM-based platform that ingests tens of thousands trip reports online and combines with receptor/chemical interaction data (including affinities). Basically a far larger and far smarter version of what my younger self tried to do with a browser and a spreadsheet.

They haven’t said exactly which trip-report sources they used, but Erowid and Bluelight are the two biggest. Odds are, my Erowid write-up and a couple of Bluelight trip reports are in the mix.

It’s fun to see this personal quest make a tiny indirect contribution to the science of psychedelics. In the end “Research chemicals” people all over the world would turn into trip reports did end up contributing to research. The nominative determinism of the euphemism for the win!