Surfing the psychedelic frontier: 2C-B, “tusi” and the story behind the world’s bodgiest drug
An Australian bush doof - a popular space for taking psychedelics such as 2C-B. A national pastime, if you will. Rara Avis, 2021. Photo courtesy: Chris McClymont. http://mcclymont.photo/
I pour out the white powder from the capsule. I pause with my head bent over the crystals for a second. This doesn’t look like any drug I’ve seen before. The crystals are so fine that they look wispy, fluffy almost, like the hair of a grandparent. I think of grandma as I bring the note to my nostril and the drug practically explodes in my face. Stimulants like shard and rack kick like a mule when you snort them. But let me tell you they’ve got nothing on 2C-B. It stings.
Usually, taking a psychedelic at kick-ons is not a great idea. The infamous “kick ons tab” is only for proven sesh warriors. Our brains can struggle to handle the intensity of a trip in this tired state.
Today the drugs already in my system have given me chemical courage. It’s 9 AM on a Sunday morning. The Lord’s Day. Fuck.
In no time at all, the come up kicks in and my heart rate speeds up. The world begins to melt at the edges. Colours sharpen. The next moment my mate Steven has charged out the back gate in pursuit of kick-ons supplies, high on 2C-B. The world of morning joggers and dog-walkers is certainly not for me right now but I quickly realise that this drug in our bodies isn’t a normal psychedelic. Sure, I have the usual visuals. But it’s a little more social, a little more forgiving.
Steven comes back an hour or two later with an inflatable pool, sparkling wine and OJ. Cue: pandemonium.
* * *
In Australia’s underground party scene, there is a new drug of choice: the ‘research chemical’ and ‘designer drug’ 2C-B, aka “tripstacy” due to its similarities to LSD and MDMA. What limited data there is seems to suggest that usage of “novel psychoactive substances” has steadily increased over the last two decades. Rave, doof and queer communities have adopted 2C-B with gusto. Outside of Erowid vaults and online forums, however, there is very very little published writing on this white powder. Type “2C-B use Australia” into Google and you’ll barely find any relevant results.
At the same time, a new drug called “tusi”, “tucibi” “pink cocaine”, which recently became popular in South America, has started to enter Europe in sizable quantities and it’s started to attract the attention of international media. You might have seen the Vice documentary about wealthy young clubbers in Colombia favouring this “pink cocaine”, which is marketed by dealers as an exclusive high-end version of coke. Or maybe you’ve heard Hollywood celebrities rave about it.
Now there are signs that tusi is hitting Australian shores. Monthly summaries posted by CanTEST online, one of Australia’s only permanent fixed-site drug testing facilities, regularly contain a sample or two of tusi.
The drug’s name sounds remarkably similar to “2C”, a nickname for 2C-B here in Australia, but this mysterious South American drug has nothing to do with 2C-B whatsoever. Testing has consistently shown that “tusi” contains no 2C-B at all. To be clear: this isn’t some exotic wonder drug. In fact, the contents of tusi is remarkably boring and it’s a sign of the likely future of illicit drug production, which is slowly shifting away from plant-based drugs such as weed, coke and heroin and towards synthetic (lab-made) drugs.
Tusi is usually a kings cup mixture of stimulants, psychedelics and dissociatives – essentially whatever is easy to make or whatever is lying around on the floor of the campervan/kitchen labs used by young narco-cooks. The key ingredients appear to be ket, MDMA, caffeine and pink food colouring but testing has shown that tusi also commonly contains ice and cocaine. Police seizures across the world have also found opioids, such as fentanyl and oxycodone, and a range of new experimental drugs, such as synthetic cathinones, in tusi.
With street names like “tusi” and “pink cocaine”, this drug, more of a brand than a specific substance, must surely go down in history as one of the most confusingly named illicit drugs.
* * *
2C is the name for a specific family of “phenethylamines” drugs with stimulant and psychedelic effects. There’s a whole alphabet soup of 2C drugs – 2C-B, 2C-I, 2C-E, 2C-P and 2C-T-7, to name a few. There are dozens of them. The most common is 2C-B, which was first synthesised by the iconic chem wizard Alexander Shulgin in 1974.
According to a US Department of Justice report from 2001, head shops, adult book and video stores and certain nightclubs sold 2C-B in the 80s and early 90s as an aphrodisiac medicine under brand names like Nexus, Erox, and Performax, before national governments across the world caught on and banned the substance. (I haven’t been able to work out if any Australian stores stocked the drug at that time.)
The first widescale illicit use of 2C-B originates within the heaving dancefloors of outdoor raves and laser-filled nightclubs in the 1990s. Since then, interest in the 2C series of drug and usage appears to have steadily risen. Whispers of people beginning to use 2C-B for chemsex purposes overseas and in underground psychedelic therapy spheres indicate that it is spreading beyond rave scenes and into nearby communities.
Sunrise at an Australian bush doof, Rara Avis, in 2021. Photo courtesy: Chris McClymont. http://mcclymont.photo/
Caitlin Dooley, people and event management specialist at Dancewize NSW, tells me there is “rising interest” in both 2C-B and tusi. She compares this recent trend to the rapid surge of interest in ketamine several years ago, just before it became a prolific drug in the illicit market.
At music festivals and gigs, Dancewize staff and volunteers offer drug harm reduction advice to punters in distinctive purple high-vis vests, managing chill-out zones and roaming through crowds. Lived and living experience of drug usage is a vital part of their job description, the idea being that munted punters much prefer to chat about drugs with people like them. So they’re extremely useful sources for a boots-on-the-ground perspective of party drug trends.
Dancewize staff have seen “a significant increase in educational interactions around 2C-B, tusi and research chemicals in the most recent festival season,” Caitlin says.
Doug*, meanwhile, a Sydney local who tried 2C-B for the first time at the music festival Groovin the Moo in 2018, says the drug is still hard to find in Sydney, although “more people have been paying attention to the drug” in recent years. The last time he travelled in Europe he noticed it was fairly easy to buy 2C-B in nightclubs.
It's difficult to track Australian rates of 2C-B usage because drug surveys and industry reports usually lump the drug into the category “novel psychoactive substances” (NPS), sometime known as “research chemicals”. NPS is a broad term for new synthetic drugs and little-known plant-based highs which have similar effects and chemical structures to well-known street drugs. They’re intended to both mimic common street drugs and dodge prohibition. Think of this as a game of cat and mouse where underground chemists invent new drugs, tweaking molecular structures to stay one step ahead of the law. NPS can therefore allude to everything from synthetic cannabis products to niche psychedelics to nitazenes.
But there is some data to back up what Caitlin and Doug tell me. The latest Illicit Drug Data Report (IDDR), which covered the period 2020-21, indicated that border seizures of NPS rose by 113 percent compared to the year prior, from 609 detections to 1,299. A significant contributor to this surge was “2C-group substances”.
The sample sizes in other localised reports tend to be too small for us to draw any meaningful data from them, but the latest annual report of the Ecstasy and Related Drug Reporting System indicates that “2C substances” are the most common type of NPS people take in Australia.
If 2C-B use is indeed rising in Australia, it aligns with drug consumption trends in the US where there is more available research.
* * *
In the early 2000s Alejandro Montoya, a middle-class party boy from Colombia, was travelling in Europe, lapping up the rave circuit. At a festival or nightclub – it’s not known which – he met two young chemists who knew how to cook 2C-B. It was a chance meeting that changed the drug landscape for the entire Latin American continent.
Alejandro loved the drug so much that he brought the recipe back to Colombia where he began to make his own version of 2C-B for his friends. Seeing a business opportunity, he soon ramped up production and began selling “tusi” to strangers. Not only were the clubs and sex parlours of Medellín a self-replenishing money pit; people from neighbouring cities wanted it. Alejandro became a known face. Around this time, the drug developed its eye-catching pink colour. Sellers, perhaps Alejandro himself, realised that snorting 2C-B was extremely painful, so they added pink food dye. It gave the drug a soft edge, a pleasant smell and a distinctive look. Moreover, it encouraged Colombia’s young rich elite to associate the drug with pink lipstick and lollypop fragrances. It was the ultimate cash grab. For the country’s impressionable rich youth, this sexy representation of underground crime proved irresistible. They were willing to fork out any amount of money for the drug. According to news reports, in these heady early days for tusi a brick of pink cocaine sold for roughly 30 times the price of a brick of bland white cocaine.
Ecstasy and cocaine dealers noticed their clientele flocking to the new kid on the block and it wasn’t long before “La Oficina de Envigado”, a crime group that grew out of the debt collection wing of Pablo Escabar’s Medellín Cartel, ran Alejandro out of town. He wasn’t paying them tax.
Alejandro arrived in Cali in 2005 but, again, he had problems with local gangs who tried to kidnap him not once but twice.
At some point in the late 00s, he fled to Bogotá. By this stage, both his accomplices and rivals across the country were selling a subpar product. The drug cocktail varied from supplier to supplier but there was almost never any 2C-B in this “tusi”. What remained was the pink colour.
The rest of Alejandro’s story isn’t important here. Around 2012, he disappeared and there are a whole range of theories about what’s happened to him and where he is. He’s the Jisoe of Latin America, a mythical figure.
A bag of "tusi"/"pink cocaine", bought in Sydney. Photo courtesy: anonymous.
Alejandro Montoya, better known in the champagne and caviar circles of Latin America as “Alejo Tusibí”, was also, as far as I can tell, the Jesse Pinkman of Colombia. He was likely in way too deep.
As Julian Quintero, a researcher at Social Technical Action, a Colombian drug policy NGO, recently told VICE, “The best party places and the million-peso prostitutes at the most ostentatious parties are not in the hands of the traditional adult ‘patrons’ of the drug trade, but of daring youngsters who have learned to ‘cook’ tusi in their own kitchens.”
“With tusi, anyone can be a young man playing a drug trafficker. The teenage gangster culture has been democratised.”
* * *
“I adore the visuals,” Jane* tells me, a former Dancewize NSW volunteer, when I ask her what she likes about 2C-B. “I rarely get intense visuals from psychedelics but 2C-B really does make the whole world look so exceptionally beautiful. Every time I take it I feel like I’m looking at everything through a kaleidoscope or an Instagram rainbow glitter filter. Also there’s the euphoria and the giggles… It makes me feel like a kid again.”
Put simply: in a small dose, 2C-B feels similar to MDMA. In larger doses, 2C-B is more akin to short-duration acid. Usually lasting 4 hours, the drug will energise you, warp your vision and bring on euphoria.
“2C-B slaps,” Jane says. “It’s genuinely one of the best drugs out there. There are very few downsides.”
Some may consider Jane’s words reckless. After all, there is next to no information about 2C-B on the internet. But Jane’s perspective point to an undeniable truth: 2C-B is not only a hell of a fun drug. It’s likely also a relatively safe drug, one many consider the perfect entry level drug for people new to psychedelics.
Although there is little academic research on the safety profile of 2C-B, the reason the drug has simultaneously exploded in popularity and avoided attracting the attention of almost all media is that the drug hasn’t caused publicised deaths. Nobody in Australia is presenting at hospital emergency departments ODing on 2C-B. Nobody is pawning off all their furniture for another hit of 2C-B. Nobody has murdered anyone while high on 2C-B. There’s no story for mainstream media to latch onto. There’s no opportunity to whip up a moral panic.
Furthermore, we do know that similar drugs – MDMA, magic mushrooms and acid – are relatively safe both for the user and those around them, when compared with drugs such as alcohol and ice.
That said, the strength of different 2C drugs varies, as does the amount of time you’ll trip for. 2C-P, for example, has led to documented cases of hospitalisation overseas. It is substantially stronger than 2C-B and lasts far longer, usually between 10 and 16 hours, although some firsthand user reports indicate that in high doses 2C-P can last 24 hours or longer. While this type of 2C variant is extremely rare, you never know what you’re buying when you’re sourcing drugs illegally.
So it’s important to know that what you’re taking really is 2C-B. A fixed-site drug checking facility will give you by far the most accurate reading possible (there is one in Canberra, one in Brisbane and one in the Gold Coast currently). If visiting one of these services isn’t feasible, it’s worth using a home reagent testing kit. These DIY kits work by helping you understand what your drug isn’t. They won’t be able to distinguish between 2C-B and a more niche 2C drug, such as 2C-P, but you will get some wacky results very quickly if you’ve accidentally bought tusi.
When it comes to real 2C-B though, you’re in for an exhilarating ride. Unlike MDMA, 2C-B doesn’t deplete serotonin, the chemical in our bodies that tells us to be happy. Instead, it mimics it. It means you won’t get the same hangover and come down blues as you do after an MDMA bender.
As I like to tell mates, 2C-B is the best drug you’ve never tried. It feels like it’s only a matter of time until 2C-B becomes more prevalent, before it moves beyond the circles of inner-city art school kids, queer ravers, leathery-skinned doofers and chemist boffins.
Just be careful if you’re planning to snort the drug, Caitlan from Dancewize warns.
Most of the time you’ll find 2C-B sold in caps and occasionally pressed pills but, yes, you can snort it. It’s a free world. Take a bump from a bag though and you risky falling down a wombat hole into the depths of psychedelic paranoia, while reality bends at the edges, swirling around you, just out of grasp. Either that or you’ll slip over on your own vomit.
I’ve heard stories of people doing bumps of 2C-B on the dancefloor at doofs or in dark night clubs where it’s hard to measure the dosage properly. As someone whose tried 2C-B countless times (tested and confirmed, thank you CanTEST), this is very worrying. Don’t let tusi lull you into a false sense of security: safe dosages of 2C-B are miniscule when compared with drugs such as MDMA, ice, ket and rack. The dose is so small, in fact, that if you buy 2C-B as a loose fine powder, not packed into capsules, the usual scales you or your dealer use probably won’t cut it. You’ll have to buy scales that measure to 3 decimal places of a gram.
If you really do insist on doing a bump (I pray you’ve dosed it correctly), Caitlin from Dancewize provides valuable advice. “I have seen people walking around with spoons around their neck that are the size of small teaspoons! Not all bumps are equal and spoon size matters. So, we recommend that you start slow and go slow when bumping 2C-B or any substances.”
Furthermore, 2C-B – real 2C-B – is renowned for stinging your nostrils, so be prepared for a sharp pain that may linger if you’re snorting the drug. It hurts far more than racking up (crystal) meth or ecstasy, trust me.
One seasoned tripper I consulted while researching this article gave me this advice: using a saline nasal spray before and after snorting can help protect the inside of your nose from damage. You can buy these sprays at chemists for roughly 10 to 15 bucks in varying sizes. The more you know, huh.
For dosing info, this article I penned for Users News is helpful. For harm reduction advice and serious talk, it’s worth trawling through firsthand trip reports on Erowid and Reddit. For the computer geeks who know how to use the dark web, Dread, which can be accessed via the Tor Browser, is like the oddball distant relation who lives off grid with a concerning level of weapons. Put another way: it’s reddit for darkweb markets.
* * *
As tusi causes mass confusion, even among seasoned psychonauts, education is vital for those using these niche drugs. One friend, who estimates he has tried 2C-B 15 times, admits to me that he only recently discovered that tusi and 2C-B were completely different.
Caitlin from Dancewize suggests “many people are discovering this class of drugs through the rise of ‘Drug-Tok’ or ‘Cartel-Tok’, which is particularly big in South American. It seems to be heavily tied to algorithms associated with rave, music and party scenes so I think people might even be accidentally falling down this rabbit hole and discovering drugs they wouldn’t have known about otherwise.”
“My concern here is that many tusi videos show a pink substance being directly extracted from plants using traditional methods. Tusi in Australia is not this kind of substance… We need to remember that what we see on the internet and what we get on the ground are not always the same. Think of Drug-Tok as reality TV. Yes it’s showing a version of reality that exists for someone somewhere but it isn’t our reality and the things being made in these videos are rarely the final product sold on the street.”
Many people turn to the dark web for NPS, such as 2C-B and tusi, because they’re rare. It’s easy to score online and we assume that the dark web is a more reliable source than buying gear off your local dealer due to the publicised nature of reviews on dark web boards. While, yes, there is a peer review model, early research suggests there’s probably little difference between dark web drug markets and normal illicit drug markets. One recent Australian study found that 21 percent of drugs bought off the dark web did not contain the substance advertised, while a further 14 percent contained the expected drug as well as another potentially harmful substance. The substance most likely to be completely substituted were ketamine, alprazolam (xannies) and 2C-B, presumably because many people are accidentally buying tusi.
In the drug harm reduction space, tusi is a nightmare. It’s only just starting to pop up in Australia but we’re likely to see dealers advertising tusi as “2C-B” more and more, a marketing ploy we need to take with a grain of salt. The unpredictability of what substances you’ll score when you buy a bag mean it’s difficult for harm reduction workers to offer advice.
The main thing to watch out for is mixing tusi with alcohol. Tusi is known as “pink cocaine”. Now, coke and alcohol is like bread and butter for Australians. It’s a common pairing we love after some hard yakka. But tusi doesn’t always contain cocaine. It does usually contain the sedative drug ketamine though. K and alcohol amplify each other’s effects so they’ll more likely to provide an express route to the toilet bowl and expel the contents of your digestive system than make you the life of the party.
For 200 dollars a bag – this is what one friend recently paid – you’re probably not getting great bang for buck.
Bags of ‘tusi’. Photo source: anonymous.
* * *
“I don’t know why people buy tusi,” Carlos* says from his bedroom in Quito, Ecuador. “It’s everywhere here.”
He says tusi often costs twice as much as regular cocaine in Ecuador, sometimes even more. In short: the price has dropped from its dizzying heights 10 to 15 years ago but it’s still expensive.
Carlos and I go way back. His dress style screams psychonaut from his dreadlocks to the Hunter-S-Thompson-inspired-rose-tinted sunglasses permanently glued to his face. While living in Sydney, Carlos helped run an unlicensed warehouse venue (sesh dungeon) in Sydney’s Inner West that hosted illegal raves and a weekly renegade jazz night. He believes he’s developed Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) in Sydney from frying his brain on acid and shoving a nasal spray diluted with 2C-B up his nose “every weekend at Club 77”. It’s a rare condition where people get distorted vision and hallucinations from intense exposure to psychedelic drugs, long after they’ve stopped taking psychedelics. So let’s just say: he knows his drugs.
“Tusi has become associated with a Colombian music genre called guaracha tech,” Carlos explains. “Those rave parties popularised the drug, as did sex workers who glamorise narco culture.”
Indeed, there are reggatron and guaracha tracks dedicated to tusi, reflecting the drug’s overlap with clubbing subcultures, and it’s no coincidence that guaracha music exploded in Colombia from the late 00s.
While Carlos adores 2C-B, he expresses serious reservations about tusi. He’s wary the pink drug brand often contains opioids, and he has good reason for this belief.
See, he first tried tusi with a Colombian escort in Sydney. He’d sell her acid and ket regularly and, over time, he met the man supplying her with tusi. This man, a Colombian, approached Carlos, right before Carlos left Australia, and asked him if he wanted to buy his “secret recipe” for tusi. He was moving back to Colombia and looking for a quick buck. The idea was that Carlos could then cook up tusi and sell it himself. Probing, he told Carlos he could sell one gram of tusi for 350, even 400 bucks.
Carlos refused the offer.
In the end, another acquaintance, a Lebanese “gym bro” and ex-rugby player, bought the rights to the recipe. Let’s call him Ali.
Telling Carlos the whole recipe, Ali asked Carlos if he could source heroin and methadone for the tusi cook.
Again, Carlos said no.
* * *
Opioids like fentanyl are starting to appear in tusi in South America. It’s an ominous sign.
The sudden rise in detections of synthetic opioids in Australia has led to accusations from harm reduction workers that state and federal governments are turning a blind eye to an unfolding health crisis. Their concern centres on a class of new drugs called nitazenes. Nitazenes are a not a single drug but a family of extremely potent lab-made drugs. Like heroin, morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl, nitazenes are what we call an “opioid”. You can think of nitazenes as a far far stronger version of heroin.
Nitazene detections have occurred in almost every single Australian state and territory across the last 12 months. They’ve begun to appear not just in heroin supplies but in MDMA, coke, ice, ket and vapes, as well as in pills sold as Valium and Xanax, and they’ve attracted a lot of recent media attention following a spate of highly-publicised hospitalisations and deaths. In July this year, 4 people died from a nitazene overdose in a Melbourne home days after the Victorian Department of Heath issued a public drug warning about nitazenes entering local cocaine supplies as a contaminant.
Nitazenes are a deadly threat to people who use all kinds of drugs, not just seasoned heroin injectors. In this environment where synthetic opioids are appearing as adulterants in local party drugs, how long is it before tusi cooks turn to fentanyl or even nitazenes?
Carlos theorises that narco-cooks “add the opioids [to tusi] to take the edge off the acid”. He’s heard multiple recipes from people both in Australia and Ecuador and he says acid is a common ingredient.
In some ways, it makes sense to add an opioid. People want a trippy experience from tusi but they don’t want to be fully stuck in their own heads and unable to socialise. This is, of course, what real 2C-B offers but a combo of psychedelics and opioids could offer a similar experience.
* * *
When I think about tusi, I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth. It isn’t just the fact that it’s cut with a smorgasbord of miscellaneous drugs. Nor is it simply because opioids are starting to appear in tusi.
Tusi makes me think of a guy who went to my high school. Let’s call him Jay. He was the lead violinist in the school orchestra. I imagine he copped an ATAR of 99 like a lot of kids at my exam-factory private school.
I only got to know him – briefly – right after high school when he popped up at roundtable bong seshes with the socially-inept but well-meaning oizies I knew from school. He appeared out of the blue like a dishevelled wanderer on the doorstep of a lighthouse with wild tales. He once claimed, for example, he’d smuggled one million dollars worth of heroin out of Afghanistan. Yep… Months later, he’d shove a nasal spray with an unknown drug in it up the nose of my best mate without his consent. This is the kind of energy tusi gives me. It’s a story of privileged kids craving escape. Think Breaking Bad.
There’s an air of playacting to a lot of the tusi drama. I don’t mean the gangland killings over tusi, which have plagued South America. I mean the posturing as chemist whizzes and the jealous guarding of “recipes”. Even using the word “chemist” for a tusi “cook” seems farfetched. I struggle to grasp how mixing together misc drugs and ensuring they look like one unified drug is really that hard, unless we consider making crack cocaine rocks from coke difficult (all you need is coke, baking soda, a stove and some water).
Tusi is a drug brand that was brought into the world by non-gang-affiliated middle class kids and sold to naïve, even more wealthy, kids who paid out of their assholes for a drug that is stepped-on overpriced trash, simply, I imagine, so they could appear cool. When a clubbing subculture is desperate to carve out its own unique identity, when we treat drug use as a dick-swinging contest of one-upmanship, when young people obsessively romanticise appearing ahead of the curve, which is impossible in this virtual world of recycled micro-trends and schizophrenic post-modernist style-surfing, you get tusi.
Tusi is the death of culture. Tusi is the Coca Cola of drugs. Tusi is the ultimate con job. Tusi is (Jesse) Pink(man).
* Names changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Hazy scene at a rave. Photo courtesy: Chris McClymont. http://mcclymont.photo/
