2CB: The Multipurpose Wonder Drug With No Consequences!

More psychedelic art made on a 90s computer here.

It’s been said that taking drugs is fraught with all sorts of awful consequences: you’ll become addicted, your relationships will suffer, you’ll lose everything and it even turns out the girls in rehab and mental hospitals aren’t as hot as the ones in Girl, Interrupted.

But, if you’re clever and a reasonable human being, you can have a healthy relationship with drugs for about 25 years (drugs after 40 is gross if it’s not weed, and before 15 is a bit bad if it’s not weed), it’s all to do with the type of relationship you have with them. In human relationship terms, drugs shouldn’t be your wife, they should be your fuck buddy.

In fact, drugs should be the girl you knew at school and fooled around with a few times, who you then went on to see fairly seriously in your late teens and early twenties, who it petered out with around 24, but you kept going back because the sex was so good and you’re old friends until you were 30, then after thirty you see her less and less until you get married at 35 and you’re not really up for that stuff so much anymore (although she will be at the wedding and you may still hold onto her number until you’re forty because you never know).

That’s right, drugs are your first serious girlfriend who eventually becomes a good pal you have a laugh and a joke with. If she’s around after you’re forty it’s because your wife’s a friend of hers too, but you’re going to live at opposite ends of the country so you’ll see her every six months at best.

If you have too intense a relationship with her, however, you’ll either get really lost in each other and you’ll be one of those guys who ditched all his friends for his girlfriend that his family also hates, or there’ll be such a traumatic break up that you won’t want to see each other ever again.

The 7th result that comes up when you google image ‘first girlfriend’, she looks like a blast huh?

There’s a chance that analogy might not have been worth sprawling over three paragraphs, but you get the point. Drugs are about fun good times and relaxing in good company, they’re shit if they become anything more. Either because one of the things in the first paragraph happens to you or you become the kind of boring drugs nerd that complains that our blogpost about extracting the codeine from Paracetamol and codeine tablets was lame because it wasn’t heroin. Drugs aren’t about a pissing contest, buddy, they’re about having a retardo time with your friends.

The real problem with drugs are the consequences of doing them- if you woke up after doing four pills feeling fresh as a daisy and not like you wanted to cry and watch E4 until your jaw stopped hurting, then maybe you’d avoid your mother’s calls less on the weekend, or be able to progress a little at work instead of drooling on the bottom rung of the working world for the bulk of your twenties.

If coke left you feeling like you’d had a good eight hours and a grapefruit for breakfast and didn’t make you crippled with paranoia and insecurity during the week maybe you’d be less sarcastic and rude to people.

Well, there’s a chance that there’s a solution that until now has only been known to the kind of people that go on erowid.org and attend parties that take place in fields in near Bristol (nerdy crusties, in case you were wondering) but it looks like it’s slowly trickling down to other people, like laughing gas did a few years ago.

This guy has probably known about 2CB for years

As you might have guessed from the title, 2CB is the solution. According to wikipedia and not erowid (the funniest thing on that site is the arts and culture section, Erowid Cultural Vault,“I drew this while I was high” etc etc) it was first made in the 70s as a drug to use during therapy, then it was sold as an aphrodisiac in the 80s in Germany and Amsterdam, and now it’s illegal.

It’s a white powder (sometimes a pill) and it costs 200 quid a gram, which sounds ridiculous (apparently that’s the price of a really good gram of coke in Shanghai – communists hate to party to it’s hard to sneak it in) but it’s actually totally reasonable, because one gram is 100 doses! You put a tiny amount in the tip of your finger and swallow it or wrap it in a Rizla and do a bomb. Also, you usually just buy it by the dose.

here comes the science bit!

So it’s cheap, but so is speed and ketamine, and they are fucking horrible. What else is so great about it, I hear you ask? Well, the effects are pretty much brilliant- depending on how much you do or whether you sniff it, it can either be the funniest night of wearing lampshades on your heads and bouncing on beds or a pretty full on but ultimately comfortable hallucinogenic trip that means you’re content to stay still slumped on a sofa for five hours. People say it’s euphoric, but it’s not ecstasy euphoric, it’s being in a really good mood after a course of Prozac euphoric – a manageable kind of euphoria that prevents you from gurning or being too much of a dick, but lets you know you’re altered and having a hilarious time.

The hallucinations are also great, like a synthetic version of mushrooms- loads of colour, cartoonishness and stupid ideas. If it goes wrong (it usually doesn’t) all that happens is you smell things really intensely and feel a bit sick, but you should be ok.

erowid have photos of drugs

Fun new drugs are all well and good, but the special bit about 2CB is that unlike last year’s star turn Mephedrone, you won’t wake up the next day feeling like you caught an AIDS infected cancerous blood disease, you wake up going: ‘last night was fucking hilarious, I’m running a little late but I’m still going to make my great aunt’s funeral with a few minutes to spare to go over the eulogy I’m reading’. That’s right, nothing fucking happens to you! You feel fine, at worst like you stayed up a little past your bedtime (which you did) and you might sort of regret pouring water into your digital camera or throwing the contents of your fridge off the roof, but ultimately, you’re fine. No kidding around, you could take a load of this after work on a Friday, have a hilarious time, be in bed by 12 and more than fine to turn up to a distant relative’s funeral on Saturday morning. No paranoia, no crawling skin. Maybe avoid operating heavy machinery that morning, but you’re supposed to do that if you have a Paracetamol too.

It’d be great if this got big, everyone would be able to keep their lives together better and weekends wouldn’t just be about the evenings. Sure, it’s not as intense as some things, doing it won’t make you look cool in public (you’ll look terrible), and you won’t feel spiritually awakened or anything like that, but if you think drugs are about anything other than making life more hilarious, then you’ve missed the point.

see?