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Posted by pinksharkmark (64.32.117.137) on January 17, 2002 at 09:38:46:

In Reply to: Pinky... posted by Flash on January 17, 2002 at 06:07:00:

***BUT the shrooms also contain other things, and those things make them different. What I'm suggesting is that certain shrooms may be better at delivering psilocybin to certain individuals than others.***

Perhaps marginally so. But a properly prepared extraction of psilocybin gets the job done regardless, often virtually instantaneously. We have had many reports of individuals feeling the effects within two minutes of drinking the tea. I would say that there seems not to be a problem in getting the psilocybin delivered, at least when ingesting the extracted active compounds as a tea.

***Also certain shrooms may contain other CH friendly compounds that assist the psilo in reaching the parts that certain other shrooms might not.***

Improbable. The shape of the psilocin molecule is what determines which synaptic receptor sites it will bind to. Regardless of which "piggyback" molecule may be involved (and I have seen no suggestion in any of the literature that such a thing exists) once the psilocin molecule is in the blood, it will reach every potential binding site on its own. By its chemical nature it cannot do otherwise.

***...scientists have found EXACTLY this effect with Mary Jane and THC. THC is not as effective at treating MS isolated on it's own as it is when ingested as dope. Also certain strains of marijuana produce better results than others ***

Correct. But mushrooms and marijuana are not even remotely comparable. There are dozens of cannabinols and cannabinoids and their various isomers in a marijuana plant that are known to be psychoactive. Scientists no longer refer to "THC", they refer to the "THC complex".

With mushrooms, however, only psilocin makes it to the bloodstream, with the possible exception in some species of baeocystin and nor-baeocystin. And it is not even known for sure that baeocystin and nor-baeocystin are in fact psychoactive. They are presumed to be, due to their chemical structure, but to the best of my knowledge no studies have ever been done with either isolated compound to determine one way or the other. And I must point out that so far all of our reports are from those who have taken either P. cubensis or P. semilanceata. No one has yet reported an experiment with P. baeocystis or P. stuntzii. So it would appear that psilocin is all that is required for success.

***Also we are all aware that certain shrooms produce less gastric upset, taste marginally better...***

These two characteristics have nothing to do with the hallucinogenic properties of the mushrooms. You could say the same when comparing culinary mushrooms to each other.

***...come on faster, produce a mellower trip, produce a more gradual uptake, produce a longer lasting experience etc etc, largely independantly of their psilo concentrations.***

I submit that these variations are in fact largely (probably exclusively) due to the AMOUNT of psilocybin/psilocin involved.

As an example from my wild and crazy youth, there was a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1970 who produced a huge quantity of blotter LSD. Each sheet of blotting paper was ruled off into squares, with a single drop of dilute LSD solution administered by hand to the center of each square. It was very easy to see where each drop had landed, because he had used the world's cheapest blotting red blotting paper, and the red dye had been faded by the solution. The drops were off-center, and varied in size considerably.

My friends and I obtained a sheet of a hundred, and kept ourselves entertained for an entire summer. I must have done at least a dozen of those "red blotters" and I can guarantee you that every single trip was different, often substantially so. Sometimes taking half of a blotter containing a small dot would produce an intense trip. Sometimes taking two blotters at once, each containing a large dot, would barely produce a tingle.

Not only was the intensity of each trip more or less random, but so was the character of the experience. Some were highly visual, some were profoundly spiritual, some were hilarious, etc. Yet all of it was from the same batch of LSD. My friends all had the same variety of experiences, so it was not just my imagination. We soon started calling it "the blotter crapshoot", because we never knew precisely what kind of experience we would be in for.

This personal experience has convinced me that most of the perceived differences between subjective effects generated by different species of mushrooms are due entirely to expectation, mindset, and the setting of the experience. If I was able to experience such a wide variety of reactions from nothing more than varying concentrations of LSD, there is no need for me to hypothesize an interaction between several mushroom ingredients to explain why one mushroom trip is different from another.

pinky









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