Dazed and Confused

"All these numbers-and-letters drugs can be a problem," says Dr. Stephen Cantrill, associate director of emergency medicine at Denver Health. "And that problem lies in young people having no idea, really, what they're taking, and then having a bad reaction -- either a body reaction, a mind reaction, or both. And their friends bring them to us, and we ask the friends what they took, and they say, 'Oh, well, they had maybe a couple of Ecstasy pills at a party,' which isn't terribly helpful, since Ecstasy is becoming more and more of a generic term."

Not that Dr. Cantrill prefers to label mystery pills "designer drugs."

"'Designer drugs,' to me, conjures the image of something fancy, something of a higher order than crack or heroin. Same with calling them 'club drugs,' when in fact -- whether you're talking GHB or 2C-B or heroin or crack -- what you have in common is, you're talking about an illegal street drug of unknown composition and purity."

Partly because it's illegal and partly because it's only now becoming widely popular in Denver and other major U.S. cities, there have been no serious clinical studies on 2C-B. And while there have been no reported 2C-B overdose fatalities in the U.S., it's impossible to accurately call the drug safe. The substance induces nausea, chills, irregular heartbeat and tremors in many users. But the strongest word of caution on the drug is that a bad trip on 2C-B can be profoundly terrible.

"We saw dead people," says a 28-year-old Denver food server who wound up along with two friends in the psych ward on New Year's Eve after they each took four 2C-B pills at a party in a Capitol Hill mansion. It was the first time any of them had taken the drug, and they were told it was "more or less just like E."

"We started off with two, and we were feeling really good, really talkative and happy and in tune, like we were on clean E, and then we took the other two, and a little while later, shit started to get hectic."

One phenomenon of 2C-B is that of shared hallucinations, where a group of users in a room together witness the same bizarre sights, sort of like people free-associating with clouds in the sky: One person sees a dog chasing a mailman, and then everyone else sees the cloud the same way, unable to then see it any other way.

"It started to go bad when I saw the ghosts of Indian braves in war paint dancing in the crowd," the server says. "I remember asking my friends if they could see them, too, and they could. And these were not happy ghosts. They were pissed off. And then we all suddenly realized that the mansion must have been built on their ancient burial ground, and these ghosts wanted revenge. We thought we were going to get scalped, at least in some psychic way. We started crying. We were a mess."

Group hysteria took hold, and the trio of unmerry pranksters began shouting warnings about ghosts with tomahawks coming to get us all. They wound up being forcibly removed and transported to a happy place, where they were pumped full of tranquilizers and released the next day with a huge bill for services rendered.

Happy New Year.

"I wouldn't recommend four," he says. "But two's good. I've done two a couple times since then."