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I don't see how to access that. Not even the abstract.

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Yup. This is why I prefer LSD.

With shrooms I don't know how intense my trip will be. It could be way more intense than expected or, more often than not, barely affect me at all.

I've had shrooms from the same batch where less than an eighth had me seeing trees turn into A.L.F., but more than a quarter didn't even give visuals.

There's just no good way of knowing exactly how much of the important chemicals are present in any given mushroom, and that means the experience is very inconsistent.

With acid, I know exactly how many tabs to take to get the trip intensity I want, and I don't have to worry about taking too much or feeling ripped off.

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I feel that enough anecdotal experiences should have been relevant to previously determine this. Not that it's good to use that but it seems like everyone already knew this.

Would you believe a food like bread has a different makeup than other foods?!

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This is an embarrassingly flawed study and shouldn't have been published. Samples are known to have rapid degradation, and weren't controlled for time since harvest or storage condition. Literally not one single magnitude content comparison in this entire study means anything at all.

Edit: figures this is another Alan Rockfeller study. Same guy that tried to do a shroom aging study using plastic bags and no environment control and buried that in an equally horribly written study. Who is peer reviewing this stuff? It should be professionally embarrassing at this point.

This study is trash. Contents are variable yes, but this study was uncontrolled even for that.

Yeah same. The thing that baffles me the most about this big push in psychedelics studies is the very strong deemphasis on LSD. Anecdotally, myself and most of the people around me have always preferred both its outcomes and psychedelic effects.

It almost seems like a political decision honestly, in the sense that mushrooms are an easier sell to the public due to being “natural”, but I hope this is not the case, and that even if it is, that we can eventually get high quality studies and eventual legal availability of LSD.

I've done a good amount of both substances and although I enjoy the more... Exploratory effects of LSD, it's mushrooms that really help me be in a good mood for the next 6 months or so afterwards.

I’m also convinced that diet has an effect. I’ve found that carbs/sugar decrease the effect. I say this because of a similar experience: two trips from same batch of mushrooms. I actually took a smaller dose the second time when I was on the keto diet and I tripped waaay harder then I did the first time with nearly half the dose.

It's by design. LSD got such a bad name that they decided to focus on mushrooms as it was more politically palatable. I will say that the fact that mushrooms are a natural substance and you don't need a chemistry degree to manufacture them is a big selling point for me personally.

LSD is like driving a psychadelic car, you have some control, while I find mushrooms are more like getting on a psychedelic roller coaster - strap in and enjoy wherever the ride takes you.

End result, mushrooms seem to address some issues I might otherwise avoid interacting with while in a tripping state.

This is a very weird viewpoint. With acid you have no idea how much is on a tab. We are talking about micrograms, it’s impossible to tell how much is on one tab or where it is on that tab.

Not to mention that any chemical could be on there if you don’t test it. 2 tabs of nbome and you can OD. That takes it from a fun psychedelic experience to all the sudden we need to test these drugs so we don’t die.

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Also, you can see a mushroom. It’s the legit thing. It’s relatively easy for anyone to grow. Acid is always in disguise. You need test kits to make sure you won’t OD, you can’t tell how much is on each tab, it often lasts 10+ hours, etc. I love acid but there are some barriers to entry.

*Alan Rockefeller. While he is a contributor…he doesn’t appear to be PI on this?

How would you build a study like this? Consider that the mushrooms come with legal challenges. Also that they were sourced from around the world as well as collected wild from a couple of places - which is always going to come with a high degree of variability.

I've always found the 7+ hours of LSD to be a bit exhausting. Also, it usually took me a good week or two to feel normal again. Usually with psilocybin I wake up feeling fine the next day.

If there was any attempt to characterize active content for comparison purposes, the starting point would be harvesting at similar growth phases, then immediate desiccation and sample preservation. Testing old unpreserved samples is worthless beyond demonstrating presence of the active compounds. You can't not know if one sample degraded to 10% of original content and another sample degraded to 2% of original content and then make comparisons between them and imply there's relevance to fresh harvested samples. That's junk science.

You've never experienced a variation of one tab from one source and one tab from another? From the same batch that makes sense. Because its a liquid thats been mixed. And thats why many of us prefer to grind up our shrooms into a mixed powder and put it in capsules. At that point every capsule from the same batch is of equal potency the same as a tab from the same bottle of acid.

I have had exactly the opposite experience. Mushrooms don't make we want to walk over and talk to the cops because of the pretty flashing lights.

I guess I struggle to see how this could be done with wild harvested mushrooms in a meaningful way. Perhaps with cultivated mushrooms. But then we won’t really know if the results are relevant to real world situations.

Have you considered contacting the authors with feedback?

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> harvesting at similar growth phases,

How would you characterize the similarity of a growth phase in a meaningful way? The size of fruits and rate of growth is variable within the same flush. How do I know that one fruit is at the same point relative to it's final size or age as another? Are you using the start of sporalation as a landmark? How do you control for sporalation variability, especially in wild-type species with no ability to cultivate?

It may be a bad study, but almost ALL alkaloid production in anything living is quite variable…. This is nothing new really

I don’t know anyone who has taken wild grown psychedelics since the 70s. It’s all cultivated these days. It’s dangerous to take wild mushrooms and thankfully we have gotten that point across.

Heaps of folks near me (Australasia) hunt wild Psilocybe. I help moderate several specialist groups focused on ID and harm reduction so do get to see quite a lot of activity. Although US and some EU countries loosening restrictions definitely has skewed things towards cultivation.

Anyone who has done mushrooms more than once knows this.

This is very true. I once found a small, strange looking cyanescens, and ate it thinking it would be a microdose. A few hours later I was feeling the equivalent of 2 grams of Cubensis. Maybe it was because I ate it fresh, so the psilocin hadn’t degraded, but I was not expecting such a strong trip.

I mean, cyanascens are some of the most potent mushrooms in circulation. My first trip was with a sixteenth of cyanescens, and it was so much more potent than any other subsequent trip I've had with mushrooms (along with MANY other psychedelics), despite having taken up to 5g of various other strains.

You don’t understand. This thing was small. Dry weight would have been a feather. I don’t know what happened there.

Although I do not have empirical evidence, I can say this hypothesis may be true based upon real life situations.

>nbome

Did not know this existed, and always considered acid one of the safest things you could do. How prevalent is it actually in the wild?

Fun fact:
LSD doesn't have a known LD-50.
Nobody (that we know of) has ever died from overdosing on LSD alone, every death that has been connected with an LSD overdose also had other chemicals/circumstances involved.

(LD-50 is Lethal Dose - 50%, it's the amount of a chemical it takes to kill a test subject 50% of the time.)

Getting too big of a dose and having a really bad time is a thing, but "overdosing" as in taking a lethal dose, isn't really possible.

Watching Pete Davidson talk about how the psychoactive effect of mushrooms takes a while to kick in. It is important to be aware of this and be patient so as to not overdose.

It wouldn’t be difficult. Go out and collect some mushrooms. Bring them to a lab, dry them out and then do the extraction. As long as that was done quickly and consistently and then the results would be fairly reliable.

Ahh yeah in North America you only really get to do that if you're near a horse farm with a cool owner.

You’ve basically described what the authors did. But the other commenter is saying several variables were not suitably controlled for. Which I don’t think is very easy given the hurdles and complications of wild Psilocybe collection from around the world.

< You’ve basically described what the authors did.

Not at all. The criticism is that the authors didn’t perform the analysis at a consistent time point after sample collection or account for the different times in their analysis. I described an analytical method that would fix some of those concerns.

> Collecting and possessing wild Psilocybe isn’t very legal for most folks or labs in most places.

I’m not sure how that is relevant. The people involved in the study are already collecting these samples, so either they are licensed to handle controlled substances or don’t care if they are following the law. Either way, they should standardize their sample collection methods or not run the study. If they can’t run the study correctly then they shouldn’t perform the study.

> On top of that these mushrooms don’t just grow everywhere. Or at the same time. And they’d would all probably need to be sent to the same lab.

Somehow, other scientists have been able to run these analytical studies correctly. If it is not feasible for the authors to use the correct procedures then that is a good reason not to attempt the study.

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>Ahh yeah in North America you only really get to do that if you're near a horse farm with a cool owner.

Not true.Which psilocybin mushrooms grow wild in my area?

Yeah you're probably trying to hop the fence in your backyard, because that seems equally reasonable..

>Edit: figures this is another Alan Rockfeller study. Same guy that tried to do a shroom aging study using plastic bags and no environment control and buried that in an equally horribly written study. Who is peer reviewing this stuff? It should be professionally embarrassing at this point.

u/AlanRockefeller wasn't even apart of that study PDF Stability of psilocybin and its four analogs in the biomass of the psychotropic mushroom Psilocybe cubensis you're hating on and attempting to defame someone for no reason..

A good chunk of these people very likely have never actually taken true LSD. Instead, it was probably various RCs with similar effects, another reason I trust mushrooms a little more. That said, the past few years have definitely shown an increase in psilocybin mimicking RCs being sold as mushroom edibles.

Strains do vary. Some just make nature come alive and you feel connected to it all, some turn you into a lizard person for a few hours and you can’t leave the house or see people for a bit. Much to be studied.

Exactly why you need test kits. You can’t see acid yourself. And I’m arguing that kinda takes the stigma from “whoa dude let’s trip out” to a serious drug that could easily result in death.

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All the mushrooms in the study have the same growth pattern. I would document how open the cap was and if the veil was still in tact / partially in tact. There is a goldilocks period for picking mushrooms. But more importantly I'd make the huge investment in glass sample jars and desiccants. Especially if my last even worse written study went on and on about mushroom stability yet actually only showed that mushroom samples are wildly unstable when not kept fully dessicated because of botching sample handling in that study as well.

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