Hello all,
I'm a longtime lurker, and this is my first post. First I'd like to thank everyone for making this forum such an amazing resource.
Some brief background info: I was first introduced to the spice about 8 months ago by a friend. After 4 or 5 sessions with him, I decided to undertake my own extraction. I wanted to continue to explore this stuff, but I didn't want to be a burden on my friend, or to abuse his graciousness. He answered many questions for me along the way, but the Nexus was my main source of information, so thanks again!
Since the extraction I've gone on many trips with my own spice, and I've had a few breakthrough experiences. I always weigh out my dose and I feel like I have a fairly good handle on how much spice is required to produce an experience of a certain magnitude, although it obviously varies. My most intense experience was at 22mg, even though I've gone as high as 3o (always in the GVG.)
Here's the meat of it: Tonight I broke out the spice for the first time in a month. Prior to that I'd been smoking spice frequently, at least once every 2 weeks, sometimes 3 or more times per week. Around late October, I noticed that my spice was getting slightly darker in color. Tonight, after a month tucked away out of sight, I could clearly see that my spice was MUCH darker than before. No longer nearly white, it was a deep brown/orange. I shrugged my shoulders and loaded up the pipe with 15mg spice and 15mg 10x caapi just to get my feet wet after such a long break. To my surprise, I found the smoke to be very difficult to hold in deep, and I only barely managed to clear the gvg, and to hold it in for perhaps 7 seconds before I just about coughed it all out. I've never had too much trouble with the harshness of the smoke. I was a (nearly) pack-a-day cigarette smoker, and I quit cold turkey two weeks ago, so I chalked the harshness of the spice up to the fact that my lungs had been completely smoke-free for two weeks.
After such intense difficulty swallowing the smoke I collapsed back onto my bed and waited for the spice to hit... and it didn't. I got some mild tracers, a tiny increase in color intensity, and had a slight shift in mood/perspective, but the effects were about what I would expect from 5 or 7 mg, not 15. After 10 or 15 minutes, I re-loaded the pipe with the exact same dose. 15 spice/15 10x caapi. Once again, the effects were barely detectable (and in my experience, a tiny bit of this 10x caapi packs a sufficient MAOI punch to allow me to achieve equally strong effects multiple times in a row, without waiting an hour.) This time I even got up to take a leak almost immediately. To go into a room with a mirror in it, and to perform such a vulgar act would surely send me over the edge on a normal 15mg dose! I can usually barely stand to look at my own hands and legs, let alone my reflection or my pecker!
So at this point, I began to suspect something was wrong with my spice. Then it clicked that perhaps it had turned into n-oxide, which up until now I had assumed to be quasi-mythical; Most often just a misdiagnosis of impure spice. I knew that if you left your spice under a fan for a year you'd probably wind up with n-oxide, but mine was sealed up in a vial, and only 4 months old. Then it dawned on me that the room in which the spice was stored in is over-heated. I live on the east coast of the USA, and don't have any control over the thermostat in my building. It tends to get so ludicrously hot in my apartment that in the dead of winter I have to keep the windows open at night, and a fan on in order to sleep comfortably. I'd guess the air temperature in my apartment is in the mid to high eighties (Fahrenheit) even though its below freezing outside.
So perhaps the excessive heat has turned my spice into n-oxide? That would explain the color change, the harshness, and the loss of potency right? I smoked a 3rd 15mg dose tonight, just to be sure. This time I waited 2 hours beforehand and I used no caapi. The smoke was slightly easier to hold in without the caapi, but still harsher than I remember. The effects were once again minimal. Afterwards I had another thought: What if, somehow, my quitting smoking has affected the way my body metabolizes spice? Maybe the nicotine in my bloodstream had made me more susceptible to the effects, and now that I was clean, I was experiencing the effects "normally?" This seems unlikely, but I recently learned that nicotine blunts the effects of caffeine. I noticed a sharp increase in the effects of caffeine in the first days after I quit smoking cigarettes. So if caffeine interacts with nicotine, why couldn't spice? A quick look on Wikipedia revealed that tobacco contains MAOIs. So I'm wondering whether anyone is aware of any link or interaction between tobacco and spice? Could quitting cigarettes explain reduced effects? Or does conversion to n-oxide sound more plausible? Any other possible explanations?
Once again, thanks to everyone at the Nexus! I look forward to finding time to turn my barely comprehensible notes into coherent trip reports, and I'll post them as soon as I do!