Let me start with a confession: I had my first planned psychoactive experience at the age of 28.

Moreover, the molecule I experimented with in that first experience of “going beyond” was the oldest drug known to mankind - ethanol. Please don't fall off your chair, I was basically a geeky teenager who preferred Dungeons and Dragons to soccer. I had delayed the experience of psychoactive abandon until that evening in 1998 when I deliberately chose to get drunk. I say that was my first “real” psychoactive experience, and the mind-altering substance I chose was alcohol…

I don't mean to say that I had never tasted alcohol until that evening. I would sip wine at religious ceremonies, drink beer at a social gathering, or sip a sweet cocktail at a friend's wedding. But it was always in moderation, I was really careful not to get drunk or to reach a state of altered consciousness. That evening, altered consciousness was the stated goal. I had a date with a very beautiful and sexy girl, but that, from my perspective, was the point. I really didn't find a common language with her, but I was young and looking for a shallow physical relationship. So, in a calculated move, I decided for the first time in my life to change my consciousness proactively and simply get drunk, and that's what happened. The experiment was pleasant and successful.

But the reason I'm telling you about this isn’t to report on the quality of the date.

This decision to get drunk, due to a very specific social deficit, was also my 'eureka' moment. The idea that there are substances that can affect consciousness and the interest I discovered in this concept - started there. So yes, I started late. On the other hand, I learned very quickly because 4 years after experimenting with alcohol, I had already started releasing the first synthetic cathinone into the world, and by the time I got to it I had experimented with well over a hundred other psychoactive compounds. On the other hand, there is something very natural in the fact that alcohol was my “gateway drug” into the world of psychoactives. After all, it is not only the most common psychoactive substance in the world but also the first molecule that humans learned to synthesize, and that happened a long time ago (over 12,000 years ago).

Until a decade ago, the world's oldest evidence of alcohol synthesis was from an archaeological site in Georgia dating back to the 10th millennium BC, but in 2018, remains of ancient beer was discovered in a jar found in the Rakefet Cave in the Carmel range in Israel. The remains from the Natufian culture (a transitional culture between foragers and permanent residents who engaged in agriculture that flourished in the territories of present-day Israel between 15,000 BC and 11,000 BC) were dated to be shy of 13,000 years old. The synthesis of alcohol was probably born by mistake, and it likely happened several times and in many places. In the proto-version of the synthesis, it is enough for a piece of bread or other carbohydrates to be forgotten for two weeks in a vessel of water, and here we have beer.

Ethanol (the active ingredient in Alcohol) is a psychoactive molecule similar to the neurotransmitter GABA. This molecule releases inhibitions in the first 40 minutes of its "happy action" and then, its catabolite induces a feeling of "nervous" discomfort. We can and should talk a lot more about alcohol, but this post is already long so: "Cheers"!