EA-3167: Into the Never-ending Abyss

With thousands of psychoactive substances in the world across dozens of major drug classes, a frequent question that pops up is: What is the most frightening or nightmarish substance on earth? There are numerous substances that fit the bill, but for the sake of this discussion let’s disregard drugs that are scary due to their negative physical side effects or damaging impacts on medical health. Instead, let’s focus on drugs whose primary psychoactive effect itself is as hellish as it gets.

Of all the drug classes we have discussed so far, Deliriants are probably by far the most scary and traumatizing experiences out there. These are a class of drug that works by blocking the Muscarinic Acetycholine (mACh) receptors, leading to auditory hallucinations, fully fledged visual hallucinations, paranoia, panic, unshakeable delusions, visual and tactile hallucination of spiders crawling all over the skin, shadow people, and visual hallucinations of the subject’s worst nightmares along with a slew of uncomfortable body load.

(See previous article around Major Drug Classes for a refresher if any of these terms are unfamiliar.)

`Datura stramonium: A notorious poisonous plant known for its deliriant effects. Datura seeds contain the anticholinergic compounds: Atropine, Scopolamine, and Hyoscyamine`

Amongst the deliriants, however, one stands a league ahead of the rest as perhaps the most scary anticholinergic known to man, and that is the chemical weapon research compound:

EA-3167: A Multi-Week Long Psychotic and Delirious Nightmare

`EA-3167 aka 1-Azabicyclo[2.2.2]octan-8-yl 2-cyclopentyl-2-hydroxy-2-phenylethanoate`

EA-3167 is an extremely potent and long lasting anticholinergic compound with an intensity of effects that is generally unparalleled with any other known psychoactive substances.

EA-3167’s active dosages are in merely the 100 micrograms range (similar potency as LSD, a compound famous for being one of the most potent psychoactive drugs known) for an average person and the total duration of effects typically lasts 5-10 DAYS. This means that a near microscopic amount of the substance is enough to produce some of the most profound traumatic experience possible for weeks on end.

Effects

Typically, a full blown delirium with complete detachment from reality is persistent throughout the first few days of the experience, with complete incapacitation continuing for the next week or two. Some subjects even report not having come back to baseline for up to a month post a single initial injection. [Richelson, Jeffrey T. (2001). The Wizards Of Langley: Inside The Cia's Directorate Of Science And Technology. Westview Press. ISBN 9780813366999.]

During the peak few days of the trip, you’ll be living out your worst nightmares while suffering from the most intense panic attack imaginable. The seconds drag on like years and you are unable to trust anything you see, feel, hear, or think while objects seemingly appear and reappear out of and into thin air while shadowy figures stalk you everywhere you look. You have no real chance of actively interacting with the world around you, nor even being aware of their existence and might hallucinate talking to people for hours only to realize they were never there in the first place. Your worst fears are constantly brought into full view, with the only saving grace being that you might be far too confused and delirious to fully grasp the sheer depth of your soul-wrenching torture.

`My Eyes at the Moment of the Apparitions by German artist August Natterer`

Deliriants are also infamous for their intense distortion of time perception, with minutes potentially feeling like hours. This is liable to make the multi-week long experience potentially far more traumatizing. Though one saving grace is the sheer amount of memory loss that the experience entails, so whilst you might be feel like you are subjected to hell for all of eternity, hopefully you won’t remember the worst of it after the trip is over.

Due to the long duration of these effects, EA-3167 has severe long term impacts on neurological function in addition to the nightmarish 1-4 weeks of the trip itself. Even a single dose is possible to produce horrible long term hallucinogenic effects (HPPD) and other neurological deficiencies such as memory loss, loss of attention and focus, and loss of motivation. Not only would victims of EA-3167 poisoning go through a nightmare of absurd proportions, they might also come out of the experience a battered, broken, depressed, soulless, and incapable shell of a person.

`A “Shadow person”: Both a common deliriant hallucination and what you’ll feel like after experiencing EA-3167 Sourced from psychonautwiki: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/File:Shadowlady.jpg`

Experiences

Due to the relatively few people who have any experience with EA-3167, we can look at self reported effects from similar (but weaker) compounds to get an idea of the lower limit of just how terrifying EA-3167 can be.

In a survey conducted by reddit user u/thehol about the much weaker anticholinergic compound Diphenhydramine (benadryl) the following list of effects were experienced:

Physical Effects	Hallucination Content
92.8% - Dry mouth	75.7% - Spiders or insects
65.8% - Restless legs	68.5% - Familiar and unfamiliar voices
65.8% - Tachycardia	62.2% - Footsteps/doors creaking
57.7% - Dizziness	55.0% - Music
51.4% - Difficulty urinating	51.4% - Shadow people
50.5% - Muscle spasms	46.8% - Living friends/acquaintances
38.7% - Temporary erectile dysfunction	44.1% - An object turning into another object
35.1% - Itchiness	42.3% - Living family members
34.2% - Nausea	35.1% - Animals besides insects or snakes
27.0% - High blood pressure	29.7% - An object turning into a person or animal
22.5% - Muscle cramps	28.8% - Strangers
12.6% - Seizures (Fourteen responses)	24.3% - Ghosts/spirits
1.8% - Heart attack (Two responses)	20.7% - The Hatman
0.9% - Stroke (One response)	15.3% - Demons
	13.5% - Threatening strangers (police, robbers, etc)
	5.4% - Dead friends or acquaintances
	4.5% - Dead family members
	3.6% - Angels

Data sourced from https://www.reddit.com/r/DPH/comments/ebc1u8/dph_guide_20_featuring_dph_dose_calculator/. All credits for this work is attributed to the reddit user u/thehol.

Here is a trip report from one of the subjects who volunteered to test BZ, EA-3167’s weaker, and less long lasting cousin: https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=60851. Don’t forget that the effects of EA-3167 would be much much worse.

With such a horrifying and nightmarish compound, one must wonder why it was ever created in the first place. That’s where the Edgewood Arsenal (the “EA” in EA-3167) comes in:

Edgewood Arsenal

As World War I raged on in the early part of the 20th century, the scientific, industrial, and economic breakthroughs of the industrial revolution were exploited by the depth of human ambition in a bloody meat grinder that converted new innovations into haunted battlefields that ran red with the blood of millions. Amongst the newly minted horrific implements of war came the next evolution in chemical warfare: poison gas.

As the frontlines stagnated and advances got bogged down by the highly defensive and gridlocked trench warfare, the appetite for powerful offensive weaponry increased at a voracious rate, and the demand for poison gas similarly skyrocketed.

`Sourced from Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_WWI_Gas_mask_with_bag.JPG`

The US government owned a series of facilities on the Aberdeen Proving Ground (near Aberdeen, Maryland) that were used for the manufacture of poison gas. These facilities were named the Edgewood Arsenal and is how EA-3167 gets its name.

In addition to the manufacture of poison gas, the Edgewood Arsenal also fostered research and development facilities to act as proving grounds for novel chemical warfare agents and antidotes. Here, the labs researched and conducted experiments with numerous types of compounds including anticholinergics. The research into anticholinergic substances were aimed at the discovery of new incapacitation agents, research into potential antidopes for cholinergic poisoning, and iterating on protective gear that might shelter soldiers from hostile deployments of anticholinergics.

The most well known anticholinergic substance that was made from Edgewood Arsenal is 3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate also known as QNB or BZ, which is in itself also a highly potent and powerful anticholinergic deliriant with similar, albeit weaker, effects as that of EA-3167.

EA-3167 was eventually abandoned as a potential chemical weapon and was never deployed in any capacity. This was potentially due to the extreme effects making it very difficult to procure willing volunteers for further testing and refinement. When a drug gets rejected from a chemical weapons program for being too intense, you just know it’s going to be a good time!

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Replication Gallery

Here’s a selection of “replications” meant to simulate what the subjective experience of a deliriant trip might feel like. Note that these are all a shy imitation of the true profound depth of fear and paranoia that one would experience on EA-3167.

Note: All are sourced from psychonautwiki: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Replication_index and are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

Source for title image: Landschaft by H.R. Giger