Tucibi, Also Known As "Pink Cocaine," Contains No 2C-B and No Cocaine
A Frankenstein's Monster of a drug has become all the rage
Known as the Godfather of Ecstasy, Sasha Shulgin brought MDMA to the public consciousness. As a chemist in the 1950s and ‘60s for Dow Chemical, he went way off the reservation by creating psychedelics in his lab in the woods on company time.
Wildly bearded and reportedly blessed with a 180 IQ, Shulgin was lanky, witty, and daring, and urged the legality of all drugs. He liked to get high, sure, but never without first employing the scientific method. He threw parties for his friends on his property in the East Bay Area, to test drugs he’d just invented. Though he kept an antidote medicine on hand in case of bad reactions, he only ever had to use it on himself, twice.
His lab sat on the very border between lawlessness and lawfulness, so much so that when DEA agents raided the place in the early ‘90s they had a terrible time determining whether Shulgin’s exploits were legal or not. (In the end, he was fined $25,000 and agreed to turn in his DEA license.)
Really, more than just ecstasy, he’s the godfather of the new synthetic drugs movement. He took the chemical structures of psychedelics like mescaline and began monkeying with them, adding or subtracting certain chemical groups, and then testing the drugs (usually on himself) to see how they turned out.
Of the over 100 drugs he created, his favorite was a mescaline derivative known as 2C-B. It’s described as a combination of LSD and MDMA, with perhaps meth-y undertones. As one user, quoted in Shulgin’s book PiHKAL, characterized a 2C-B trip: “My body was flooded with orgasms – practically from just breathing.”
Nicholas Sand, famed chemist for Orange County psychedelic distributors The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, also helped popularize the drug, that is until his 1973 arrest outside St. Louis, in which he was caught with epic quantities of cash, gold, LSD and other psychedelics including 2C-B.
Recently, a drug known as Tucibi has become the height of trendiness. “Tucibi” is a phonetic approximation of 2C-B, and the concoction is also sometimes called “Tusi.” As reported in the National Drug Early Warning System newsletter, Reddit posts about the drug have shot up this year, and even I, a guy who rarely makes it past 9 pm, have seen it floating around parties. Tucibi first gained popularity in Latin America years back. Linked to Columbian cartels, the powder is often branded with pink coloring, and is known in some circles as cocaína rosada (pink cocaine).
The problem is that…