TL;DR: MXE is a mind bending substance far more potent than I initially knew. The following is an account of 1 1/2 years of my life with this drug.

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MXE – Methoxetamine, a dissociative chemical analogue of Ketamine

Well boys and girls, today I will be talking about something very, very special. I am not sure what your experiences with drugs are. Some of you may be very experienced users who have seen the ups and downs of an encounter with a substance like this and some of you may be interested in finding out what it is like and may even want to try it. I would like to immediately say: Don’t trust anyone just selling you something called “Mexxy”. That shit could be anything. The EZ-Test can help identify substances sometimes but if possible, stick to my guide.

I will be talking about what an absolutely immense impact this drug had on my life, how it almost became a danger to me and how I ended up destroying a huge stockpile of it because I just could not live around it anymore. It feels like the story of a deep friendship lost in the merciless torrents of reality. If this drug affects one thing, then it is the world you live in and how you perceive it.

We humans are naturally removed from our environments to a certain extent. Everything we see, hear, feel, taste and touch has, within miliseconds undergone an inconceivably advanced filtering process allowing us to only really spend brain-resources on what the brain considers to be useful, aka “necessary-for-survival”-information. For example, try this: Focus on one word in the middle of this paragraph. How many of the words around it can you identify? What you are experiencing is the falloff of in your brain’s capability to process visual input. Everything surrounding a relatively small point in the middle of your field of vision is considered increasingly less important. The only way to now raise the importance of a certain visual stimulus is to make it fast-moving for example. If something moves quickly in your peripheral vision, your brain will automatically focus its attention on that. Clever stuff. The thing I am trying to get at is that reality, everything, absolutely everything is really just a giant mechanism of biological variables designed to make us as efficient as possible at surviving; and on top of that sits some seemingly even more complex social interaction business.

So, what if we changed some of the fundamental variables of how we perceive our reality? This is where things get interesting. To some extent we do this on a daily basis. We drink coffee -> we become more awake and capable to work longer hours. We drink alcohol -> We loosen up, lose inhibitions, emotions are amplified and our vision becomes limited, our blood is thinned by the alcohol and our vestibular apparatus, which relies on the viscosity of our blood to coordinate our balance eventually loses its ability to do so, turning us into stumbling idiots, incapable of speaking, with an over-inflated sense of self-worth. We do this to forget reality, to numb our senses. This is followed by paying the price the next day when those very senses we tried to numb away make us think of all the stupid things we have ever done in life and feel like shit for the whole day. Genius.

It is as though things such as alcohol, coffee, valium, weed, tramadol (and what they all are) only affect very specific parts of your brain’s functionality. And then there are stronger ways to change our perception.

Enter MXE. It changes everything. A formerly legal substance, currently under a 12 month quick-ban process the government has introduced for designer drugs, which I used to procure by the gram on the internet. Yes, shops were selling this stuff out in the open as research chemicals.

Ok, let’s get to it. The first trip ever. Well, quite frankly, if your first ever trip is with a very powerful dissociative, then you will spend most of the time just going “wtf” instead of really letting the trip take you anywhere. The first thing you will notice is quite in line with the typical substances we’re used to on a daily basis: A change in physical feeling. A pleasant lightness and warmth. This is where you start to think “Oh, nice, I like this”. Then, soon after, colours become more intense and your sense of hearing changes. This is where MXE shows its first signature moves. Everything starts to take on some sort of a strange reverb.

It is as though your brain’s priorities have shifted from focusing on loud foreground noises to quiet background ones. This is quite freaky the first time you experience it. You will most likely try to fight this effect, making it worse. The last change in your auditory perception will be a complete and utter loss in your ability to judge the volume of either yourself or any music or film you are watching. (So a word of warning to anyone living in shared flats, conversations can get unintentionally loud on this stuff.)

The next thing that goes are proportions. This is where shit goes weird. Your hands for example could all of a sudden seem impossibly big compared to the rest of your body. You will suddenly think you are like the size of an ant compared to the sofa you are sitting on, the room seeming amazingly huge. The funniest effect here being that the second you focus on it, the effect goes. This gives MXE in low doses a very nice side attribute for the more paranoid of us: You can control whether to let go or stay ‘up’, to observe what is happening with you. (Being of the aforementioned type, this is in fact what I elected to do for my first trip). The change to proportions applies not just to size, there is also no real cold or hot anymore, or even pain for that matter. MXE tends to numb the fidelity of your touch-sense quite a lot. This results in one of its more annoying effects. You will lose the ability to talk properly. And now for the whole point of all of this: MXE seems to change how your brain composes thought. Leading you to some incredibly strange conclusions, ideas and concepts. Many of whom may well seem like gibberish the next day I am afraid. However, some of them will fuel your creativity, connectedness with yourself (and nature, to sound like a hippie) and the overcoming of fears and inhibitions. But for this you really need more than one trip.

MXE keeps you awake and really restless. You have idea upon idea upon idea. Many of revolutionary nature. You will think you can change the world if you just gave this drug to everyone so that they would all finally ‘get it’. (What a utopia we’d be living in if that was actually true.) When you eventually manage to fall asleep (I later discovered valium helps a lot in achieving this) it will be a dark, comatose-like state. The duration of your sleep does not seem to be affected by the drug too much. Here, however, is something entirely unique about the drug: Its residuals. This stuff lasts so insanely long that in the early days of your useage you will actually feel it until mid day the next day. I Should have kept that in mind when I did it on a Sunday and had to get to work the next day.

So what is that next day like? Well, you will feel very positive, energetic and truly ready to take on the day. You move about swiftly and lightly, but your mind will also be quite scattered. Your ability to remember things, particularly small details is severely diminished and your ability to string together coherent sentences is also still quite reduced. This isn’t too bad if you can hide from your colleagues for long enough until the drug finally lets you go. Here’s a funny one I noticed: Any stimulant (dopamine or adenosine affecting substance) such as cigarettes or coffee will briefly bring back a strong MXE buzz. This was really rather entertaining.

So now I was curious for more. The first stage was to try MXE with my usual crowd of movie-enthusiast friends, comparing different types of movies on MXE vs non-MXE. Seeing which movies affected us more, which movies affected us less. I might be biased, but, in my opininon, anything like a bombastic space opera, or beautiful nature documentary will blow you away. I went on like this for a few months, with my Fridays and Saturdays becoming trip days and us sharing lines of 40-60mg each (weighed with a cheap microscale off eBay. Very handy tool), either insufflating or taking it sublingually (which can cause nasty ulcers, consider yourself warned).

It was time to become bolder. It was time to increase the dose. People on the internet were talking about something called the “M-Hole”. Something similar to a “K-Hole”.

What was this mysterious place that some people described with an almost spiritual, religious awe? Was it like seeing god? Was it like finding the answer to life? Being a raging atheist spiritualist (don’t ask, in my brain Freud and Jung are still in the boxing ring) I upped the dose. 40 and 40. Two lines, set 30 minutes apart, along with a good movie and again, friends. As the first line was taking me to the place I was expecting to go, I snorted the second line. As we kept watching the movie, something started to feel sort of not quite right. As in, less right than my reality being twisted and changed already. The things the actors in the movie were saying had stopped making sense. Scenes seemed to repeat themselves. This was worrying. It seemed as though I had now reached a stage where the comfort of controlling the trip was gone. I could not do the ‘pull yourself back out’-thing anymore. Add to this the fact that MXE makes your mind race, which means you will very quickly jump to very radical conclusions. My first thought was, a classic, “Fuck, I’m dead”. I found myself in some strange space, where the voices and visuals of the film had completely melted with all my surroundings. I had no idea where I was. For some reason, possibly luck, I managed to muster one thought: “So long as you stay stationary, everything will be fine, just don’t fucking move off the couch…if that is where you still are.”