Girzo

@Danioover9000 This isn't facts over feelings scenario. There's proper science on the topic of consuming alcohol. "Facts over feelings" is when your facts are not facts but feelings. BUT THIS IS MERELY AN ANECDOTE. I can say that I don't experience any brain fog from having 10 amalgam tooth fillings removed last month. Does that have anything to do with safety of amalgam fillings? No. Zero. Nada. Responsible use of alcohol from the perspective of maximizing your health is zero. You can discount your health for the sake of something else you value and still drink alcohol, but be aware that you are taking a risk, even if you're drinking only as often as once a month.

@Princess Arabia I don't care about your health nor your reasons for drinking, I am stating facts. As factual as they can be. The scientific consensus is that ethanol is not healthy at any dosage. This is a very unsound reasoning for making a lifestyle choice. You could justify anything this way. You can go make friends with Andrew Tate, that's similar to how he justifies everything he says.

@Princess Arabia It's all cool. It has nothing to do with the question whether someone should drink alcohol or not. There had been some discussion of the possibility that alcohol may be healthy in some situations, but a long-term (20+ years) study released a few years ago cleared everything up. No amount of alcohol is healthy. I don't really care about you or your lifestyle. The discussion is about alcohol and it's advertising. I believe alcohol advertising should be heavily cut. I am happy with alcohol drinking numbers going down. Alcohol industry marketing jerks advertise their products illegally on Instagram and sometimes they even advertise their products to kids on purpose. Because it's harder to get proof of such action on the internet.

@Princess Arabia You are not defying any odds. You are healthy with drinking, you would be "even more healthy" without drinking.

@Princess Arabia every type of alcohol is a poison with no health benefits. The brain damage after drinking a single dose of alcohol takes up to three months to heal. Yes, from a single drink.

On low to medium dose - watch music videos or movies.

@Davino Yes, but this is not science, this is an reinforced urban myth. It would be a little bit accurate for LSD, but then... Who the hell knows how much LSD they are getting on their blotter. LSD blotters are commonly misadvertised, like 90% of it. Basically, only synthetic analogues like 1P-LSD straight from Lizard Labs can be trusted to really be 100 mcg per tab. The same applies to mushrooms, you don't know the potency of your mushrooms, some are weak, some are strong. Such tests should be done on a standardized extract or a close synthetic analogue of psilocybin.

I still do think that, you, Benton and this kconsciousness guy give off a weird MLM-vibe. Disclaimer: this one is purely my opinion, not based on evidence. On the issue of psilomethoxin, there's enough evidence in this thread for anyone to make up their mind.

@Enlightement Yeah, it's better to stop talking because the issue is plus-minus settled and your proposed experiment design is not so good. We can say that the mushrooms are probably bunk and wait until something new happens. Maybe someone will synth this compound, or the church will release their tek of growing mushrooms, or maybe they will get put in jail for distributing controlled substance in the US. Till then, no talk. Reply to the post below: Chillout man, you are making yourself look funny. I am saying probably, not to aggravate you folks anymore and finish this pointless discussion. I don't want to hear the "but it doesn't have tolerance, bro, it's different, trust me" anymore, not even once.

This is not a speculation. All the church's in-house tests failed. All the independent researchers' tests have failed. I know of at least three, done using different methods. Everything is pointing to the fact it's bunk. Here's David Nichols chiming in on this topic, the OG psychedelics chemist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Nichols), more important figure than Shulgin in my opinion: Source: https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/the-church-of-psilomethoxin-part-2-unraveling-the-chemistry-of-canned-peas-with-david-nichols/ Obviously I don't really care about those silly mushrooms and silly drama. I am genuinely interested in chemistry and mycology, though. And I don't think there's a lack of substance in my posts in this topic, it's almost only substance, from day one. I don't need to be buying a scam product to tell you it's a scam. I might do a serious psilocybin tolerance study in the future. I think it's an important topic. Too much bullshit around it. Around dosing, too.

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.