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Life is Too Short
TMA-2
Citation:   Kapitan. "Life is Too Short: An Experience with TMA-2 (exp94421)". Erowid.org. Apr 18, 2012. erowid.org/exp/94421

 
DOSE:
30 ml oral TMA-2 (powder / crystals)
    oral Diphenhydramine (pill / tablet)
BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb
I recently tried TMA-2 for the first time, at 30mg. I'm male, 22, and ~150lbs. I have previous experience with 2C-I,B,E,T2, and Mescaline. I hadn't ingested any psychoactive in almost a year, following a few difficult experiences. This was my first experience with a psychedelic amphetamine.

I acquired this sample of TMA-2 in late 2011 from a small, underground, US-based vendor. I've been on the lookout for this compound for years, and I feel lucky to have come across it, at long last. It's almost white, but with a brown tint, and unique among my collection of RC powders in that it does not stick to the side of the bags or vials I've had it in. It's really clumpy. I have no idea if it's the base, or a salt.

I went into this experience looking for a bit of insight concerning the direction of my life. It's winter break. I've almost completed my chemistry degree, with a zoology minor, and I have a great GPA, but I'm not entirely sure where I want to go from here. Do I want to go to graduate school, or into some kind of medical profession? Maybe I should take a year off and hit up some music festivals and Burning Man. Or perhaps I should just try to find a job with my degree as-is. First world problems, to be sure, but they are the main things weighing on my mind during the preceeding months.

After planning this experience for about a week, I decided that I would like to try this substance with my girlfriend, and my friend K, who is studying psychology at a different college. The three of us would meet at K's house, and take 30mg of the TMA-2 in the early afternoon. K and I have quite a bit of experience with exotic entheogens. My girlfriend has tried acid, mushrooms, and 2C-T-7 on a few occasions.

We dosed at 1:30 in the afternoon on a cold but clear day, and went for a walk around campus about 30 minutes later. As this isn't my school, I'm not very familiar with this campus, and I think I've explored it more while tripping on various psychoactives than I have sober. I didn't really feel much for at least an hour. This is consistent with my other experiences with phenylethylamine hallucinogens; in my experience, none of the 2Cs kick in until about 90 minutes, and mescaline takes even longer.

Before our stroll was over, though, I felt the first alerts. It was like an inner energy building, and a bit of a head change, at around an hour or and hour and a half. I've done mescaline four times, and this stuff started to come up more quickly than mescaline ever did for me. The initial effects are difficult for me to describe, but the onset was certainly not similar to a 2C drug. It was more like mescaline, but with more body energy. There were almost no visual changes until after I had finished coming up. We arrived back at K's house shortly after the third hour, at which point we had almost reached the plateau.

The visual disturbances were, as others have reported, like a more subdued version of mescaline. There was a tiny bit of visual movement in patterns if I looked for it during the middle of the experience, around two to four hours, but nothing too crazy. K had a zebra-pattered drape over his window, and it kind of warbled and flowed a bit if I really looked. Colors were more saturated. There was a multicolored flower print on K's couch that kept catching my eye, because it was so saturated and beautiful.

Shapes seemed to pop a bit, as well. These visual changes are not unlike what I've experienced on mescaline: rather than seeing crawling, moving patterns, colors get much more intense, and shapes are more defined. All together, though, it was nothing like general intensification-of-everything that I got from the cactus. I wasn't really impressed by the open-eye visual aspect of this drug.

The closed-eye visuals, on the other hand, were interesting. TMA-2 was closer to mescaline in this respect. There were some multicolored, very intricate, tesselating patterns that swirled and moved, seemingly around several centers of gravity, or maybe whirlpools, in my field of vision. It reminded me a bit of 2C-E. However, my mind also conjured some more coherent closed-eye visual scenes, similar to what I experienced on mescaline. For example, before I went to sleep after the trip, I made love to my girlfriend, and as I came to the climax, I saw something that resembled a white flower melting into a whirlpool in a river of colored milk. Beautiful.

The emotional aspect of the experience was very subdued, but that may have just been a result of the setting I chose for the trip. There was very little to no euphoria. It was altering my consciousness, but not in a particularly 'fun' way like acid or 2C-B. I was with my girlfriend, and had hoped that maybe the experience might catalyze some emotional conversation or bonding, but that never happened. Overall, conversation was not enhanced or inhibited.

I did come to one conclusion while under the influence: For years, I've looked to psychedelic drugs to force me to confront issues that I don't want to confront while I'm sober. It's almost like I'm normally, 'emotionally lazy,' and have used entheogens to make myself work through problems that I'm already aware of, but don't want to admit that I'm aware of. Is this juvenile? Perhaps I'm missing the whole point of tripping. Where is the FUN?!

Unfortunately, the body load was very significant. This was probably the worst aspect of the experience. On the 2C phenylethylamines I've taken, there's a kind of inner tension, vasoconstriction and elevated heart rate that characterises the come-up, but which melts away as the trip really begins around the second hour. This stuff had a similar effect, except it never melted away. Mescaline was much cleaner on the body compared to this stuff. My heart rate was elevated to about 120bpm for the entire ~9 hour main body of the trip, and both me and my girlfriend noticed soreness in our joints as we were coming down. It increased mucous production for a couple of us as well, and I felt like I had a wad of snot in the back of my throat for most of the experience. My palms were consistently sweaty, and my hands were cold. I experienced mild bruxism, but nothing too bad. One good thing was that, unlike mescaline, none of us experienced much nausea from this substance. It was mostly just a general stimulated uncomfortableness.

Perhaps that could have been relieved by taking another walk, but for the most part, I was content just to park myself on K's couch after we hit the plateau. I don't think any of us got up much for about six hours. We talked, but not excessively. We had some good conversations, but nothing really deep or particularly insightful. It's strange; although I felt such a marked stimulation, I had no desire to get up or move around. It was a very ... 'chill' stimulation. Was this an effect of the drug, or just normal boredom? Maybe this is what 2C-C is like? Unfortunately, I haven't tried that one, so I can't compare.

The effects dropped off pretty rapidly at around the ninth hour. After the tenth hour, I felt comfortable driving, so we left K's house shortly after 11:30. On the way home, we listened to This Binary Universe by BT, which was only about as mind-blowingly amazing as it normally is. With the help of a bit of benadryl, were able to fall asleep easily before 1AM. The next day, I don't feel so great. My joints are still a bit sore, and I have a mild headache. I'm more tired than can be accounted for by simply getting to sleep later than usual. I slightly nauseated for the whole day. I get the feeling that my body doesn't like this compound, or maybe one of its metabolites.

To me, in a nutshell, 30mg of TMA-2 felt kind of like mescaline that never really kicked off. The head space was somewhat similar, but lacked the very marked 'de-filtering' of experience that always characterized mescaline's effects for me. That could have been a result of the relatively low dose, I don't really know. Personally, though, I would be surprised if this stuff is capable of catalyzing the type of otherworldly, alternate-reality experience that high-dose mescaline can produce. It was not like a 2C compound at all. If I were to take it again, I might almost like to increase the dose a bit, to maybe 40mg, but I'm hesitant to do so because the body load was already so uncomfortable on the dose I took. All things considered, I probably would not take this drug again. It's neat to have been given the chance to try it, if for nothing more than its historical significance in elucidating something critical about the serotonin binding site of the 5HT2A receptor, but I think I see now that this drug is kind of ... obsolete. I would take any 2C drug, or especially mescaline, over this stuff. Life is too short for me to waste it on further TMA-2 trials.

Exp Year: 2011ExpID: 94421
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Apr 18, 2012Views: 16,986
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TMA-2 (112) : General (1), First Times (2), Music Discussion (22), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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