Girzo

The burden of proof is on the hecking church and that's the whole point of this topic. You can totally say something is a placebo. For example give people the same thing in a pill, and say one is psilomethoxin and one is psilocybin. Then analyze their reports. That's one way of doing it. There are many other methods. Scientist routinely test for placebo. Wishful thinking, delusion, whatever, that's just how the mind works. We often have to try to get around it, even though it's difficult.

What we are talking about here is qualitative research. For that we need to collect data. For example write-ups of the trip with all the set&setting and other important info. Sizeable amount of such reports. And then do a proper analysis of them. Code them, look for patterns, look for differences. Erowid reports, or random comments like yours are of little value. They are of too poor quality to be studied qualitatively, and there's too few of them to be studied quantitatively. Research based on such data would be inconclusive. Back to ground zero. If you want to be willy-nilly with methodology, then we can already say there's no psilomethoxin in the mushrooms based on the tests already done on the church's merchandise. I am not saying that's 100% sure because I want to be diligent. Your personal reports are not diligent research. They are obviously cool and good enough for you, but don't expect them to be a sufficient proof for others.

@Enlightement What are you talking about? Obviously everything can have a placebo effect. But if those mushrooms are normal mushrooms and the differences are due to placebo, then they are overpriced junk. You can have an infinite supply of normal shrooms basically for free if you grow them in a shoebox yourself.

Because in this case "experience" is easily twisted by placebo and methodological inaccuracies. Science is experimental, but random experiences don't constitute science.

@Benton Can you give a short write-up of your tolerance tests? It's an immensely interesting topic. Dosage and time in-between dosing for both tests of psilocybin and church mushrooms will do. Edit: Hah, I have just noticed, they aren't the psilomethoxin church anymore, they are the "church of sacred synthesis" now. https://thesacredsynthesis.com/

This forum thread already ranks higher in Google than church's website for the keyword "4-HO-5-MeO-DMT". And for "psilomethoxin" keywords there are other sources that critique them. I really think it warrants an action from the church and I am extremely skeptical of anyone posting here who I don't recognize. I am also having fun, so sorry for having it at your cost. Better than Andrew Gallimore, the leading DMT researcher, actual neuroscientist? This is the guy who develops the protocol to administer DMT for 10 hours continously. His recommendation is at the end of this Twitter thread is to avoid this product and organization. And here he discusses the arXiv paper, this guy really knows his stuff: Oh and I have just seen Psymposia released something on the topic, might be a good read, I haven't started reading it yet: https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/church-of-psilomethoxin-part-1-sacramental-skepticism-is-the-church-in-denial-church-of-the-sacred-synthesis/

It's very hard to prove tolerance build-up or lack thereof. To my knowledge, there doesn't exist a proper, scientifically proven graph of tolerance from psilocybin. There obviously is some tolerance, but who knows the details. It can't be simply extrapolated from the results of research on LSD tolerance, because it's proven that LSD has a unique mechanism of action, not surprising given it's ultra potency and long duration of action. Be honest, how thorough-fully have you tested the tolerance effect to normal psilocybin mushrooms? Your own experience, not stuff from internet. Were your tests of mushroom tolerance diligent and repeated? Do you have write-ups? You can't judge this stuff from memory. It's a serious scientific matter. Serious information on psilocybin tolerance would be valuable, companies are not doing such tests, because no-one is trying to do mushroom therapy day after day. THIS POINT CANNOT BE IGNORED. Scientists know this, because they experience everyday in their work how their minds and memory deludes them when doing novel research. It's very hard to counter brain's tendency to distort reality to fit into a narrative. It would also help to test everything on the same batch of mushrooms, with the same potency. Or even better, test in on a pure synthetically made compound. Because dosage most probably affects strength of the tolerance effect. Which leads us to another point. How the hell does the church guarantees what's inside if no-one knows how to test for the compound. One batch of their product could have 0.5% alkaloid content and another batch 2%. But this generously assumes the possibility of them succeeding in creating 4-HO-5-MeO-DMT mushrooms.

I care about science and the existnece of such compound. I care about proving that this method of feeding shrooms tryptamines can indeed. produce such compounds. I don't demand more reports of users of these shrooms. I demand reports with better methodology, at least looking for a report of someone experienced I could trust. Proof of better quality. Seriousness is needed. The church organization is not serious. "We believe" ...

@Enlightement As I say, very very improbable. It might be hard identify an unknown substance in mushrooms. To say it's exactly this. BUT IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO SYA THERE IS SOMETHING UNKNOWN, but we don't know what. And in those mushrooms that had been analyzed there was nothing unknown. So a chance of finding a compound like 4-HO-5-MeO-DMT in them is very, very, very small. Apart from that, this compound might not be even worthwhile to purse. We don't know anything certain about it, other than that it probably can be synthetically synthesized. (We can't be sure even of that, as it has been done back in 1965, and chemistry papers from that much back in time are unreliable.) Don't be mad at me, but your account stenches like PR efforts from the church. Intelligent, tactical effort, but still empty PR effort. Call me paranoid, be we are dealing with overtly smug people who have called their organization "a church". They think they are smarter than lawmakers, they probably believe they are smarter than some drug-loving hippies and are not afraid to use sociotechnique on them.

What you are saying seems improbable. Like very, very improbable. Unless they are irresponsible and putting whatever in different batches of their product. Are you the old user Enlightenment, or someone new to these forums?

At this point after all the stuff the church's representatives have said, I would be sceptical about content of the product. It's all pill, gummies, chocolates. How do you know it's pure mushrooms and not adulterated with some iMAO for example? Also, as for the chemists testing this. As I have said, Hamilton Morris is being nice and balanced, as a public figure. It would be surprising if there was this substance after the results of his tests. That's one. Secondly, Morris and Usona are not the only chemists that have analyzed the contents of the mushroom. There's a tryptamine chemist with an access to a fully-equiped lab, who ran the tests and also found nothing. He wasn't as polite in voicing his opinion as Morris. I would be very surprised if he had been wrong, because this guy's a real passionate and professional.

Why does this forum allow such blatant astroturfing?

Normal stuff, no brain damage. Just take break from psychedelics for 2 weeks.

That's not the way. That's the whole point, humans are gullible and fallible. It's a matter of what you care about. With your statement you care about getting high, I care about truth.

Yeah, maybe right now, or maybe he hasn't given it much thought, maybe he was thinking about making a reference sample and proving it is this. I can't quickly find a part where he says it would take months. Maybe for some US based chemist. I don't know maybe it is hard to make 5-methoxy 4-hydroxy substituted indole. But my first instinct would be to say it isn't difficult for a Chinese chemistry company. I have checked and there are listings for it for $500 a gram. I haven't checked if anyone is actually willing to make it and sell to anyone at this price. But that would be the main needed component and the rest should be quite straightforward with little experimentation. To prove you got the right product would still be difficult because you would need to have the reference sample, but whatever, at least you have the product in theory. It's also all an off-topic discussion. Let me say this again, there's no proof that these mushrooms can actually hydroxylate the 4th position of 5-MeO-DMT and the theory is leading to the conclusion that they can't because the enzyme most probably needs the 5th position to be free to add the OH group to 4th position. He is being nice and steel-manning their position. The fact is he hasn't found anything interesting using less sophisticated methods and the Usona institute hasn't found anything using more sophisticated methods.

Chemoenzymatic Synthesis of 5-Methylpsilocybin: A Tryptamine with Potential Psychedelic Activity | Journal of Natural Products (acs.org) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00087 Here's some science. So it seems to be possible to make something like 4,5-PO-MeO-DMT (in this case it has been 4,5-PO-Me-DMT, they have tested it on mice and it has activity.). BUT they started with material that already has OH group in the 4th postition, that is 5-Methylpsilocin. So they only had to go from psilocin to psilocybin. AND they did it using extracted/isolated enzyme. So it is not proven to work with living mushrooms, but there is some hope. BUT for simple 4-HO tryptamines. NOT psilomethoxin. The evidence leads to that 5 substituted tryptamines can't be hydroxylated using mushroom enzymes, as those enzymes use both the 4th and the 5th position during that process. BUT the biggest BUT is... If this compound (psilomethoxin, 5-Methoxypsilocin, 4,5-HO-MeO-DMT) can be made using standard Anthony-Speeter procedure, then why the hell even bother with all this low-tech natural synthesis bullshit? IMO it's only some ape games to fool with authorities. You can synth psilomethoxin directly instead of illegal 5-MeO-DMT. You don't use any illegal product when you synth a legal substance using this synthesis pathway. Someone should do it, and it shouldn't cost a fortune. If the church really wanted, with all the profits, they could hire a Chinese company to synth them a kilo of it next month. They probably lack connections to do so, because they are some hippies fooling around. It's not that hard, all the procedures already exist. It's lack of will imo, that they still don't have solid proven results. One person who has worked on this paper is from Usona Institiute, an organization that analyzed the church's shrooms and published this pre-print paper from the previous page of this forum thread.

@forestfog Your first quote, is exactly what I have said. No methodology, just Martin's opinion. Holds no weight, thousands of people keep to their beliefs that some psilocybe cubensis strains are more visual and some more mental. As for Martin's judgement, he has been defending Octavio Rettig in the past. But this is not about Martin. It's just that there's nothing new in what he said, and nothing that would negate total lack of scientific evidence. He just repeated his previous words.

@Squeekytoy Basically turns out Martin rambles about it "not being placebo, because I am not susceptible to placebo, because I have a very rare extreme sleeping disorder and no treatment has worked, but something would have worked if I had been susceptible to placebo." Like no. Martin, please stop. Your health condition is serious matter and of totally different nature. Placebo is not some magic cure-all, and people are not simply susceptible to it, or not susceptible at all. Also, it's well-proven that the placebo effect is stronger when the effects of placebo and desired effect are close to each other, like in this example of psilocybin and new psilocybin-like substance. Assuming it even is placebo and not just bad methodology on-hand of trippers. There's a field of qualitative methodology both in social science and medical science, with solid guidelines on how to write-down experiences and to code and analyze them. It might turn out that objectively written trip reports given to a third person to code would turn out to be more or less the same experience. Everyday folk lack this scientific approach to psychedelics. I have to say that even Shulgin's methodology is not a good methodology to analyze contents of psychedelics experience. It's an OK methodology to check if compound is active and not harmful, but it's not good for comparisons between substances. Plus one, two, three is not enough to find doses of different substances with similar intensity.

Unless they share their tech of growing these mushrooms and some third-party or even they themselves validate existence of anything else than psilocybin in those mushrooms, then it's a dead discussion. We can't know who here is associated with this organization.

@forestfog I don't deny you having a unique experience. I deny it comes from anything other than psilocybin. Yes, it is placebo. Mind is a powerful force easily capable of changing experience subtly. Provide more details on set and setting, like dosage, and what exactly you can pin point as differing from standard experience.

@Thought Art do you have other accounts of MB trip reporting it at dosage other than 1g?

They have no proof, every evidence leads to the fact they are selling normal psilocybin mushrooms. It's very irresponsible and bad for psychedelic community to start a hype train without having any material evidence of your claims. I feel justified in pushing hard against them.

@Thought Art yeah, maybe I shouldn't look for malice when stupidity is enough of an explanation. They might really be so high on hopium and copium that they really believe they are dealing legal substances.

Ah, here's some calculation why I call this church a scam. An ounce of dried mushrooms costs around $6 to produce. (Yes, it's that cheap and sellers have ridiculous margin on this product, but also people grow them on a small scale, but it is that cheap on a large, non-regulated scale from my analysis. Legal psilocybin mushroom growers have more costs, because they have to work according to regulations and properly dispose of waste and have a high-tech sterile laboratory.) This church is selling it at $355 per ounce, that's minimal amount plus a year subscription to their church. THAT'S $349 OF PROFIT ON A FIRST TIME BUYER!!! They have claimed to have 500 members back in October, at this rate of growth they easily have over 1000 members now. $350 000 for a year and a half of work doesn't sound bad, ain't it? And you also get to be a star on podcasts. This is all what I have to say for their claims of being a non-profit. It doesn't matter, they still probably funnel this money out of organization in various ways, for example as wages for their work for the organization (I haven't really checked that, it's my assumption, maybe they indeed save that money for some truly non-profit use).

That would be true on a full dose. But on a 1 gram shrooms versus a few milligrams of 5-MeO? I wouldn't be so sure. People claim all kind of stuff. Like they can distinguish 4-AcO-MET from 4-HO-MET. Or that they can tell difference between 1A-LSD and 1P-LSD. I call bullshit on that. By the way, as we are on the topic: How much would you say 5-MeO-MiPT differs from 5-MeO-MALT? Is there a serious difference on a full dose? oh, and if someone wants to side with the church, here is their response: https://psilomethoxin.com/psychedelic_capitalism/ Everyone can make sense by themselves if their arguments make sense. IMO, they are super-weak. They are referencing Shulgin, as if Shulgin ever tried to do anything practical in that domain. No. Shulgin has nothing to do with this method of feeding shrooms tryptamines, other than theorizing about it without deep knowledge about mushrooms and enzymes. He was a chemist, not a biologist. Although, synthesis of new drugs using specially engineered enzymes is a super sexy idea that's in development right now. Making leaps as big as AI tech is making, or so I have heard. But it comes from the scientific community and not some hippie folks. And the enzymes don't come from the mushrooms.