Allow me to walk you through a typical DXCK trip. You purchase a 3-MeO-DXCK vape (called a “key” by newgen psychonauts) from an androgynous-looking guy named Lav or River or Celeste. After reading through safety tips on r/dxck for an hour you give up and have a friend drive you somewhere outside civilization, where you power off your phone and give it to her for safekeeping. 

On the campgrounds of a nearby state park you admire the key: a smooth rectangular prism that fits in your hand like a tube of travel toothpaste. Below the intake is a plastic window into yellow liquid; dark, viscous. You lie down, exchange some preparatory words with the friend, and inhale… ouch… don’t cough, don’t be a bitch, exhale. Who sold you this bunk-ass pen? You inhale again and watch the landscape in front of you cease to exist. That tree you were staring at is no longer a “tree,” it’s just a pattern of brown and green light lacking shape or form. What once occupied the discrete concept of “tree” in your mental encyclopedia has broken containment and floods into every corner of your conscious experience. Within seconds, all other concepts follow: “family,” “rodent,” “career,” “7.” The borders that delineate your machinery for reason have melted.

You spend what feels like forever swimming through this conceptual bog. Is it pleasant? Is it excruciating? You wish you knew. You wish you could know. You wish any part of the previous sentences resolved into anything meaningful. 

It’s permanent. It’s over. You’ll… …. … … …. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 222222222222222222222222222222222222-hold on. Wait, hold on? Those are words. A word! You open your eyes, or maybe they were open the whole time, but now they dart around identifying things with the zeal of a kindergartener pointing at a Richard Scary picture book. Tree! Sky! Friend! How long has it been since… you latch on to the thought of “long” and savor the temporal foothold that comes with it. 

This is when you begin to cry. That “aha” moment of taking the training wheels off your childhood bicycle, the first time fractions really clicked, the familiar feeling of the softball flying off your fingertips for the ten-thousandth time; this euphoria of understanding comes back trillion-fold. You turn to your friend as did Eve to the snake. Pure knowing. The heroin of knowing. Filling your veins with platonic epiphany, the answer, what we’ve been doing wrong this whole time, what we and they had missed. As if the universe had been playing peek-a-boo and the jig is finally up. Your life will never be the same.

A day later, your life is the same. You write this report, but it falls flat. Oh well. Back to the real world.

But something strange happens during your morning biology lecture. Solving a problem on the board sends a crippling shiver of deja vu from your scalp to the soles of your feet. Your success has this incomplete, hollow feeling; as if an Oxycodone prescription for chronic pain has been switched to Tylenol. You absentmindedly fondle the key in your left pocket.