Euphotan, Protoplasmic Flash, and their Properties

by Nail, with commentary by Chevy the Scientist

The euphotan scam – though not exactly a scam, since a scam, by definition, is "a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, especially for making a quick profit; swindle"¹ — more of a scheme, really, untainted by fraudulency — was a big one that resulted in profit, an increase in flash addicts, the death of my friend and business partner,² and me in a Taos bar, discussing my constant withdrawal from life — and now the final eggshell: that of my flesh, which I hoped to escape with arms of razor, or a bullet, as I recall muttering, thick with flash and whiskey. The drug was later dissected and remodeled by the authorities and I got tagged to distribute the new product, a brainwashing narcotic under the same name, in order to rally underground support for the Dutch drug war — there's the scam, I guess, maybe not for "quick profit" but definitely dishonest and seductive in nature — one that should have been effective if executed — which it wasn't, mind you (this is where New Mexico comes in). But it all starts with flash, which was, after all, both the enlightening and addictive element to euphotan (even after its reconstruction), the sedative — and as protoplasmic flash is so rarely understood by those outside its walls, I would like to first take the opportunity to explain the drug here:

Grillo were first discovered on a snowy wasteland in the middle of the ocean — literally a wasteland, not just a desolate rock, but a desolate rock littered with more fragments of the past than a junkyard, rusted automobiles capsized into themselves, refrigerators decayed with their doors blown off the hinges, televisions with broken screens that still seem to emit static — it is here that I was born, here that flash was born, and since the place was so desolate, the place where flash addiction first became an easy blanket to cover your eyes with. While never legalized it was basically accepted. The politicians (but what politics were they really involved with, anyways?) never took themselves very seriously. I don't think they ever thought of themselves as men of power. They commanded no more respect than the bartender down the street — he, in fact, held more, for he alone offered an escape that nobody could look down on, and this was a place where people needed that.

I have a suppressed memory of the past and I do not wish to unearth it here.³

I do not know who the first person who discovered flash was.⁴ It was already in place when I materialized. I got hooked when someone showed me how easy it was to acquire — you slide a syringe into a certain spot on a grillo's stomach, through an organ⁶ right around the middle, and withdraw the flash. A syringe won't fill until you pull the stopper so you don't have to worry about shooting blood or fluids or liquid tissue that doesn't belong in the veins. I have attached a diagram of the grillo's intestinal track (see Figures A-C). The hallucinations were intense — many addicts say the first trip is the wildest and it softens from there (until you kick it and relapse. Then it starts on a whole new level, and continuously upgrades after that. Some older addicts have endured withdrawal symptoms — comparable to withdrawal from heroin — several times to keep boosting the intensity of their trips).⁷ I remember sitting on a white mountain with the consistency of charcoal, the sun saturating the ocean, sliding the syringe into my vein — and immediately, on the first tainted beat of the heart, my vision unhinged — the sky stood still then stiffened, contacting, and rearranging in the air as thousands of thin strings. Insubstantial hands swam through space and each time they collided with one of these strings a different musical note would place, scattered and isotonic, then falling into melody, lush symphony. The sky darkened and pulsed energy with the mood of the song —

I turned to my friend and found that he had turned to glass, and that I could see straight through him —

So jump through time and here I am in America, pushing euphotan. Let me start with the effects before I get too deep in the science: hallucinations comparable to psilocybin mushrooms, with everything glowing and maybe breathing, but not much — if any — materialization. The pharmaceuticals — mephobarbital and meperidine⁸ &mdash were what made it all such an irresistible package. One of the first users describes the effects: "My body is suspended in sleep-state but I am wide awake." It was cheap and delicious and easy to manufacture. My partner told me he had a cousin in manufacturing and I figured he meant legitimately. It turned out the cousin (who will remain anonymous for his own protection — anyway I think he ditched the home labs after Luis got killed over the whole affair) was just experimenting with various pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs to come up with new highs. He introduced to us the barbiturates and the opioids, substances like levorphanol and fentanyl as well as the two drugs that correlated with flash to form euphotan. The process was simple — he got meperidine and mephobarbital powdered in bags from a connection in the industry, and boiled them down together to make a translucent, silver liquid. He then extracted the flash from several grillos and ran the liquids together, stirring at a relatively low temperature (around two-hundred degrees), creating a new substance purple in color. He let this liquid set and encapsulated it in white pills with skin like porcelain.

One or two of these would give you the desired effects, though I would sit on a handful — remember my first full-blown euphotan trip consisted of listening to Miles Davis and watching the song break down to numbers — came to the conclusion that all music is just computer code programmed into aesthetically-pleasing product to communicate emotion, messages, etc.

But we came down, like most burnouts do who try to go national, through a set-up. Our Boston connection⁹ arranged for a bust when we came through with a thousand units in a heavy plastic bag. They took us down to the station and told us they'd been onto us for awhile. Several people had already suffered on account of our drug. A flash junky who had contracted reflex sympathetic dystrophy¹⁰ had to give up both when he could no longer lift his arm to shoot in the vein. The combined withdrawal effects proved fatal. Another man, named Pat Swanza, gave up the pill and went through barbiturate withdrawal. He came into the hospital with tremors, sweats, and eventually mild seizures, and on the operating table, suffered a temporary stoppage of electrical activity in the brain, which led the doctors to pronounce him dead. The lapse in activity lasted longer than normal with barbiturate withdrawals, and he was buried alive. This was confirmed after further investigation.

Rather than jail time they remodeled the drug, stripping everything but the flash and replacing the pharmaceuticals with pentothal, sodium amytal, and government-issued data strips.¹¹ The data strips held strong pro-war messages — as the authorities informed us, not yet at the level of mental manipulation but rather suggestion, which is powerful enough when working in correlation with the pentothal and sodium amytal. We were to go on pushing euphotan as if nothing has changed. But my partner was killed for suggesting that the government was involved in the recent terrorism in Boston, and I ran to San Francisco, not sure what I would be doing with myself but positive I wanted nothing to do with this SCAM.

So I grew my hair out and grew a beard, stealing a car and driving it to Frisco, stopping only in Taos where I drank under the empty and pitiless sky, and shot flash, and hoped to die. I met a man in a bar and told him that my whole life I'd been running from myself and that it's only left me fragmented. Then I got to San Fran and scrambled concrete mountains — the grillo were fat there — I started shooting flash upon arriving in the city and didn't stop, the world becoming increasingly nebulous and wet — any flash addict will know what I mean when I say "wet" — then I hallucinated the sky peeling off the dome of the planet, slapping the cement, and everything vanishing instantly —

Overdosing wasn't exactly painful, like I always imagined it would be. It was more just an intense trip — more intense than any trip I've ever taken by a mile — that ended with me crumbling into the sidewalk and waking up in a hospital bed. Chevy, the scientist annotating this paper, came to check me out and I've been off flash since.

And that sums it up. Euphotan was a relatively harmless drug that the system tried to convert to subtle propaganda. Flash is a lifestyle — "enlightenment in a syringe" the addicts call it — but one that decays its user exponentially over time.

By publishing these words I put my life at risk. The government is as fragile an animal as a human &mdahs; they told me so themselves — and leaks like these are like gasoline on their skin.¹²

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