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Psychedelic dosages wrt bodyweight

perpetualdawn

perpetualdawn

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Nov 20, 2013
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What's the best practice for dosing psychedelics consistently between people of different sizes?

Say you have a group of 3 people; Small, Medium and Large. You're giving them all a psychedelic drug, and you want them all to receive roughly the same subjective strength of trip. Do you scale the doses by bodyweight? Or is trip intensity more of a function of number of receptor sites, blood volume, etc?

I know there's lots of other factors at play in the equation, like differences in metabolism, differences in tolerance, but putting all those aside, if bodyweight is the only piece of information you have to go one, should you scale doses for Small, Medium and Large accordingly?

I know that in medicine a lot of drugs (or all?) are dosed in this way. What do you think?
 
Most dosing recommendations ignore bw and give straight numbers (idk 10-20 mg light trip, 20-30 medium, 30+ heavy). Scientific research with tryptamines uses ~0,45mg/kg.
 
Yes, I agree that most dosing recommendations ignore bw, and that med research tends to take it into account, but my question is, which way is the more accurate way to dose PDs?

On the one hand it seems that a bigger body would need more drug, on the other hand I see that a bigger body might have the around same number of receptor sites as the smaller body, so putting more drug in that bigger body might actually be tickling more receptors. Know what I mean?
 
I don't think there's much clear evidence either way, so your guess is as good as mine. I'm leaning towards mg/kg being more correct (at least for tryptamines), there's even a thread somewhere on this board discussing the same issue.


Regarding the second part idk if it's as simple as that. Even if everyones brain has the same number of receptors, there is still the question of how the drug distributes in the body. Evenly? Concentrated in some type of tissue? And so on.....
 
As black53 alludes to, different drugs seem to distribute themselves differently in the human body, according to many factors, known and unknown. I've personally witnessed a person who confirmed he was nearly twice my mass start to get scared on the same 60 mg of aMT freebase I was having an easy time with. This was fairly early days with aMT and all psychedelics for both of us, too. We may be mostly water, but we're not swimming pools. Though with some drugs, like ethanol, the swimming pool analogy with dose, mass, and subjective effect seems to be more accurate (Andre the Giant used to have to drink a liter of vodka to get his buzz going). Maybe alcohol just permeates the relevant tissues more readily than most psychedelics.

There's no doubt that body weight is a variable, but the relationship between dosage and subjective effect isn't linear (if you're twice the size it doesn't mean you get half the subjective effects). Gauging dosage based on an average of that reported in as many reports (preferably with body weight included) as we can read according to what we're looking for is the informal community standard for these reasons.
 
I don't think body weight would be as accurate. Say you dose 2 ug/1 kg and you have a small person at 50kg and a large person at 100kg there is a huge gap between a 100ug lsd trip and a 200 ug lsd trip. Just doesn't seem right based off of experience
 
Only thing we can say for sure is we don't really know how/if dose and bw are related. Differences in purity, salts, claimed vs actual doses (pills/blotters) make comparisons even harder. Not to mention that what A considers a normal trip B could consider a mind blowing experience even if the effects (not that we can measure that completely, lol) are the same for both. So we're back at the beginning - use the suggested doses as a starting point, start low and adjust the dose until you get what you want. And don't try to make substance A give the effects of B by using crazy doses. Especially for the dangerous ones (hint don't take 15mg 25i-nbome to try and make it LSD, it wont work + 15mg 25i-nbome is dangerous).
 
I'd say forget about trying to dose based on bodyweight, from the reports of people it seems like it is unpredictable how people will react and body weight says as good as nothing. Actually beyond alinear, plenty of people came on here to say that they saw the reverse of what was expected from a small light weighted person and a big heavy weighted person.

It is not safe to jump in with a dose that you think is appropriate for someone's body weight, always start low and work your way up.

The fact that they do it in clinical tests is standard procedure and it seems to work for a lot of other compounds active in human or animal bodies. It is not like they will just dose randomly if there are much more significant factors than body weight. So that proves nothing.
 
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