Pink Totality

The Poster Logo in Hebrew

Originally published on Facebook 20 September 2025

In 2012 I developed a molecule called 5IT, this molecule was consumed by swallowing and afforded a mild serotonergic experience - many users reported an experience that was very reminiscent of MDMA, only milder and gentler. There was something else that I found interesting about the substance. The final compound, after being stabilized as a salt, had a loud neon-pink colour, and this also, I believe, gave the substance a tailwind. It quickly became popular.

In this context, I would like to mention that the first thing I thought of when I saw the material was the Israeli film called ‘Total Love’, (directed by Gur Bentwich, starring Herman Brood). ’Total Love’, debuted in 1999, and I saw it in the cinema and loved it. Personally, I feel the film inspired me because one of the heroes of Bentwich’s film is a young Israeli scientist who invents a serotonergic substance called total love or TLV for short (which is the 3-letter airport code for Tel-Aviv). This substance in Bentwich’s film was, of course, pink. My activity as an inventor of new molecules began a few years after the film screened.

The pink chemical in the movie was fictional. 5IT was very, very real and excelled in 'social experiments' with a lower than usual rate of negative experiences. It had all the makings of a ‘hit’.

About a year after the substance had been tried and reported on by a couple of hundred psychonauts, reports from Scandinavia and Hungary appeared in the press about people being taken to the hospital after consuming 5IT. This seemed strange to me, but warranted investigation - preliminary due diligence didn't find any problem with the molecule. But then, when I was rummaging through the warehouse, I found a package of the substance that had been sitting there for over a year. The first thing I noticed was that the loud neon-pink colour of the substance had changed to a much darker muddy brown. A substance does not just change colour; if the colour changes, it is a sign that something has happened. This is, in many cases, a harmless accumulation of moisture, but it could also be oxidation. If it is oxidation, then a bona fide chemical reaction has occurred and the compound with the new color is no longer the same substance.

Except for 5IT, all of the molecules I’ve developed have shelf lives of 5 years at least. The case of 5IT shows that this cannot be taken for granted and is important to verify (it always has been, but this incident served as a wake-up call - procedures are in there for a reason).

I immediately analyzed the muddy brown substance labelled 5IT and discovered that it was an oxidation product. At that moment, I issued an alert regarding the substance and destroyed all of the stock I had, leaving only a small sample bag, relabeled for any future inquiry.

In any case, if you accidentally encounter a substance suspected of being 5IT, remember the short shelf life. You may be safer putting it in the same waste collection facility that you use to get rid of old drugs.