The chemical structures of the eight most commonly encountered arylcyclohexylamines. Vice: How did your interest in the chemistry of dissociatives begin?
M.: Right, treatment for phantom limb has been one of the great riddles of neuroscience. Have you tried Ramachandran’s mirror-box therapy?
Phantoms in the Brain And what works?
corrective Fascinating. I had never considered the possibility that ketamine’s therapeutic effect on phantom limb is psychogenic—like a proprioceptive antihallucination. Recently there was an experiment done with ketamine and the rubber-hand illusion. Subjects given a ketamine infusion could feel the rhythmic strokes of a motorized paintbrush on a rubber hand in their visual field, as if the rubber hand were their real hand. So ketamine can both remove and embody an illusory appendage. Your background is in mainstream pharmacology, studying phenmetrazine 2 analogs, correct?
sacrifice You did what?
You were the first person to report on the effects of synthetic cannabinoids like JWH-018, long before Spice Gold, and the first to comment on desoxypipradrol, 1-ethynylcyclohexanol, 5-APB, and methoxetamine. You have your finger in many pies… so to speak.
1 I know you may look at an octosyllabic word and immediately be turned off by this entire exchange, but please don’t let the vocabulary boundary stop you. These concepts, at least on the level I’m discussing them, are pretty simple. Arylcyclohexylamines are a chemical class that features an aryl group attached to a cyclohexane ring. They comprise a pharmacologically diverse class of stimulants, opioids, and, most commonly, dissociatives like PCP and ketamine. They generally have a chemical backbone that looks like this:

2 Phenmetrazine is a bicyclic amphetamine analog that has become legendary since its clinical discontinuation. It’s the campfire lore of the psychostimulant aficionado and was the favored stimulant of John Lennon. Methoxetamine: not just your average recreationally dissociative phantom-limb drug.
There is definitely a demand for pharmacologists who can suggest novel structures. Some research chemical vendors keep a group of PhDs on hand to act as advisers in the selection and synthesis of new drugs.
Which ones specifically?
3 Yes, it would seem methoxetamine has already been welcomed with open arms.
blown away 4 In Singapore, ketamine dealers face 15 strokes of a brine-soaked rattan cane to the bare buttocks… probably in addition to execution. Risky business. When you were working with these things you had a psychotic episode of some sort—what exactly happened?
The death of a beloved pet is always very difficult.
So why did they section you for three full weeks?
And what happened when you were released?
That’s really terrible. Alexander Shulgin always felt that the dissociatives had no use as psychotherapeutic drugs, and John Lilly found that even when you think the effects of ketamine have worn off there is a lingering undercurrent of dissociation that prevents you from reaching baseline.
Right. One methoxetamine user reported a dissociative-identity-disorder-esque psychotic episode. He impulsively fondled a stranger’s breasts, as if controlled by an external force. A nearly identical breast-fondling automatism was reported by John Lilly under the influence of ketamine. Perhaps the suppression of a breast-honking impulse is mediated by the NMDA receptor.
3 The µ-opioid receptor is generally thought to initiate the euphoric, reinforcing effects of heroin and co. Recent work by J. V. Wallach on the pharmacology of 3-MeO-PCP has shown that it actually has insignificant affinity for the µ-opioid receptor, which suggests that methoxetamine is quite possibly an insignificant opioid as well. This is not to say methoxetamine is not addictive or pleasurable, simply that it probably produces said effects through a different pharmacological mechanism. 4 Tiletamine is the primary component in Telazol, a veterinary tranquilizer that is used to anesthetize polar bears, elk, and sea lions. Its effects are often described as “cold and clinical,” although that has not stopped a number of veterinarians from using it in great excess.

Pyschonaut John Lilly constructed this ketamine dose-to-response curve and wrote of his experiences (speaking in the third person): “Later John was to find that there was a small residual effect that lasted several hours. The falling curve did not go completely to zero. The overvaluation trap would be found much later to be caused by this small residual effect unnoticed in the first set of experiments.”
Copyright 1988, 1997 by John Lilly. From The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, John Lilly, MD, by permission of Ronin Publishing, Berkeley, CA. www.roninpub.com. How would you advise people who experiment with methoxetamine to proceed?
Wait, what was this?
And this person died?
I asked the chemist David Nichols how he felt about the deaths and amputations related to 4-MTA and Bromo-Dragonfly and he said he was “deeply disturbed.”
You never know. The chemist Louis Fieser felt no guilt for the invention of napalm.
You shouldn’t blame yourself; all technological innovations have the capacity to hurt people.