PURPOSE: Outside of personal archival purposes, I'm writing this report primarily to highlight the potential for a bad trip on “friendly” psychedelics as well as what it's like, review the empathogenic properties of AL-LAD, discuss psychedelics for relationship healing and point out some (retrospectively obvious) mistakes that were made in hopes of harm reduction education.

BACKGROUND: I'm a 19 year old male, 155 lbs, with limited tripping experience (~15 acid trips, ~5 trips on various tryptamines). I have GAD and MD-NOS, so I'm normally very careful in preparing for a psychedelic experience and don't feel comfortable doing it alone. Despite this, I hadn't had a single true bad trip until this one. My partner (we'll call him T) is an 18 year old male, 260 lbs, with at very least 50 trips under his belt, only one of which was ever bad. He has GAD as well, on top of MDD and what I suspect a personality disorder of some sort due to his unusually pronounced domineering, self-centered tendencies. (MISTAKE #1, tripping with mental disorders. This is more of a calculated risk given both of our positive tracks records with not having bad trips.) I'm a very complacent, submissive person by nature, so our flaws combine into a greatly broken relationship filled with power games and attention seeking.

TRIP: I had gotten some 150ug AL-LAD tabs through the mail for T and I, mainly in hopes of mending, or at least addressing, the toxic, manipulative state of our relationship. I've done this several times before to a pronounced, though transient, effect. We'd always both just have so much fun tripping together that we'd like each other a lot more in the following weeks. It's never lasted for more than a month or so, but those times are pretty much the only times that we have a functioning relationship.

Initially, I had planned on dropping the tabs at my house when my family wasn't home, but T got impatient, so we dropped them that day, when my family was home (MISTAKE #2, SET. We definitely should've waited for a time that both of us actually wanted to trip). We started with one tab each and headed to a park.

After about two hours, at which point I would normally be tripping my ass off on LSD, I didn't feel much. A distinctly lysergamide stimulation was present and colors were a little 'off', but there was nothing resembling a headspace, and the visuals were so mild I was convinced they were a placebo. At this point, I decided to drop another tab, while T declined. Maybe an hour later, I started to get distinct visuals almost identical to those of LSD, though milder. Something like I had dropped half a tab. Still no headspace to speak of. It was just a really nice, manageable, recreational trip, and stayed that way for a while.

Eventually, T decided to go home. It had been 3 or 4 hours at this point since the second tab without much of an increase in effects, so I felt fine letting him leave me home with my family. (MISTAKE #3, SETTING. Make sure you have a place where you're 100% comfortable with being obviously fucked up for the ENTIRE trip). He dropped me off and I quietly snuck into my room to play some Touhou. I paused to give my hands a rest. Staring at my still computer screen, I realized how much the visuals had intensified in the short time I was home, and that's when it hit me. MINDFUCK.

It was like a brick wall. One minute the visuals are ignorable and the headspace is non-existent, the next I'm in fucking space. Past here, my memory gets hazy. I was terrified, so I called a now sober T. Initially, I tried to play down the increasingly downhill trip I was having so as not to worry or inconvenience him, but I just broke down crying, so he picked me up and took us to another park. All I really remember from the ride was crying a lot, because I felt sad. Incredibly sad. I genuinely believed at the time that I had reached the physical limit of human sorrow, that somehow my brain no longer had the resources to make me sadder.

We got to the park, and he tried talking me down, but by now the tabs had complete control over me. I became full-on manic. I'd be bawling my eyes out, then just burst out laughing. The mood shifts I get from MD-NOS are subtle, internal, and usually, the mood will stick for a little while. While tripping, though, I was having massive mood shifts in matters of seconds. It was as though “I” had been cut out of the equation entirely and my emotions were just using me as a vessel.

In this state, I kept claiming that T didn't “want me there” and that he was just playing mind games with me. I would say I was going home and run in the opposite direction. Even when I wasn't running away, I would forget where I was, and the visuals and mindfuck were so strong in the dark I couldn't make out any sort of landmark to help me figure it out.

One image in particular strikes me, though. I was running away, and instead of chasing after me this time, T simply called out my name. He didn't sound like himself at all, but it was strangely comforting. When I looked back, he had the same features as always, but somehow, staring at him, he seemed like a different person entirely. I've had a similar feeling in previous trips, but what strikes me as different about this time is I didn't see him as a weird stranger or entity like I normally would. The moment I looked at him, my mind IMMEDIATELY identified him as being my older brother. Not like he resembled one of my actual older brothers, but as though he had been the secret brother I never knew I had my entire life.

That image really stuck with me for the rest of the trip and beyond, which ended up being quite a blessing, as it allowed me to really trust T in the incredibly fragile state I was in. With that, he was able to get me home safely, and I trusted his word when he told me that I needed to stay in my room for a while. When I got home, AL-LAD's effects wound down surprisingly fast. Within about a half hour I was back down to a familiar, LSD-type comedown that was easier to deal with. When I was comfortably back in touch with reality, I took a 1mg Xanax I had lying around (didn't want to take it while tripping because I'm prone to inverse reactions) which put me back at baseline.

AFTERMATH: Anyone with a decent amount of experience will tell you that bad trips are often the most meaningful, and I got to experience that first hand with my first true bad trip. The most important thing I took away from the night was that I could trust T like a brother. I've always trusted him only in my mind, and AL-LAD made me realize that if I want to fix our relationship, I need to trust him with my heart. I've also always been afraid of him leaving me, but, reflecting upon my experience, I found that fear replaced with a new confidence that T loves me and will stay by my side when shit gets tough. The goal of the trip was to heal our relationship, and on my end, expectations were blown out of the water. Unfortunately, I don't think T took much from his experience, since he only took the one tab and tends to treat psychedelics as mostly recreational anyway.

One thing I must say is that I didn't find AL-LAD to be very introspective or metacognitive at all. The parts of the trip show any logical thought were all centered around the relationship, probably in part due to the fact that it was the intended focus of the trip.