Saffron

[Foreigner]

Nobody said your experience wasn't real, they just said that it wasn't due to any psychoactive effect from a particular substance.

I would never tell somebody they didn't experience something, however if they took 0.1 mg of Valium and said that they felt completely sedated I would say that it wasn't from the Valium, categorically.

When you look at the actual scientific evidence and you see that the dose of safranal needed to provide protection to pentylenetetrazol seizure was 145 mg per kilogram, you realize that from the 25 pieces of saffron that you made tea from you weren't going to get any appreciable benzodiazepine like sedating effect.

The following paper describes administration of safranal (the main essential oil distilled from saffron) at 90 mg , 180 mg, and 360 mg per kilogram to mice to determine if it increased sleep in mice that were given pentobarbital.

90 mg per kilogram did not cause any change meaning it had no activity.

180mg/kg did elicit a response.

Even if you allometrically scale that to a human by a factor of 10 that means a 70 kg would need
1260 mg or 1.26 G. Of actual safranal essential oil to get that effect. We could say that somewhere between .62 and 1.26 g would be needed, neither of which you would approach from your saffron tea.

Now this does not mean you didn't experience something. It just means that all evidence points to the fact that it was something other than the effects of saffron that caused you to feel relaxed, considering the safranal content of saffron stigma is from 0.2 to.22 percent.

This is just a complicated way of saying that you know better than I do if what I experienced was placebo or a genuine effect from saffron.

I assure you it was the latter, I don't really give a shit what else you have to say about it. You're not me and you don't inhabit this body.

You can't use a scientific study to tell somebody in a conversation what their reality is. Statistics are about probabilities, not certainties, and you would know that if you had any scientific training whatsoever. You can't use statistics to make absolute statements. That is not the purpose of science. Stop it already.

A study adds supportive evidence or not to a greater body of knowledge. It doesn't make truth statements.

The best you can say is that the study does or doesn't support what I'm talking about. You can't say in absolute terms that what I'm talking about didn't happen. I wish the armchair science crowd of the internet understood this because I'm tired of explaining it.

 

[snmfmy]

This is just a complicated way of saying that you know better than I do if what I experienced was placebo or a genuine effect from saffron.

I assure you it was the latter, I don't really give a shit what else you have to say about it. You're not me and you don't inhabit this body.

You can't use a scientific study to tell somebody in a conversation what their reality is. Statistics are about probabilities, not certainties, and you would know that if you had any scientific training whatsoever. You can't use statistics to make absolute statements. That is not the purpose of science. Stop it already.

A study adds supportive evidence or not to a greater body of knowledge. It doesn't make truth statements.

The best you can say is that the study does or doesn't support what I'm talking about. You can't say in absolute terms that what I'm talking about didn't happen. I wish the armchair science crowd of the internet understood this because I'm tired of explaining it.

I never said that your experience didn't happen.

But I can state that based on the evidence the dose of saffron that you got from making a tea was extremely unlikely to have been the cause of your experience.

I also noticed that you referenced safrole in your original post and also stated that you understand how the plant saffron is associated with MDMA.

Safrole is not a component of the crocus flower, which is where saffron comes from.

There is no association between saffron and MDMA.

 

[snmfmy]

Saw it... but there's no talk of how it compares to MDMA in terms of serotonergic down-regulation, just that it seems to be long lasting.

I like how it feels but I don't want to fry myself from over use.

Because saffron is not related to MDMA at all.
Even though saffron sounds like safrole, It is not produced in the plant.

And I think that your assumption that saffron is somehow related to a precursor that is used in MDMA synthesis is the basis for your belief that the saffron tea made you feel high.

Saffron and MDMA are not related chemically in any way shape or form.

 

[snmfmy]

I've done a BL search for past discussions about it, but they're as old as 2006. Hoping there's more recent info on it. All I've been doing is researching the traditional uses for medicine. Apparently safrole has a sympathomimetic quality to it, but I can see why this plant has a relationship to the MDxx drugs.

It doesn't have any relationship to MDXX drugs or safrole in any way.

But you believed it did when you made the saffron tea.

 

[Foreigner]

I never said that your experience didn't happen.

But I can state that based on the evidence the dose of saffron that you got from making a tea was extremely unlikely to have been the cause of your experience.

I also noticed that you referenced safrole in your original post and also stated that you understand how the plant saffron is associated with MDMA.

Safrole is not a component of the crocus flower, which is where saffron comes from.

There is no association between saffron and MDMA.

Because saffron is not related to MDMA at all.
Even though saffron sounds like safrole, It is not produced in the plant.

And I think that your assumption that saffron is somehow related to a precursor that is used in MDMA synthesis is the basis for your belief that the saffron tea made you feel high.

Saffron and MDMA are not related chemically in any way shape or form.

It doesn't have any relationship to MDXX drugs or safrole in any way.

But you believed it did when you made the saffron tea.

You're grasping at straws now. Just because I misunderstood the pharmacology of saffron doesn't mean my stated experience of it was inaccurate. You're conflating two different things in desperation to continue pushing your failed point. I tried saffron tea before I ever knew anything about its effects on serotonin.

What the fuck is your problem? I gave an experience report and you're trying in vain to prove that my interpretation of my own experience was incorrect. Don't you have anything better to do?

You're basically trolling at this point. Go learn stats 101 and STFU.

 

[G_Chem]

Safranal is but one substance of many present. Seems crocin is psychoactive too, or there could be another unknown component.

How many times have researchers gone after the most prevalent compound only to discover it was something else causing the true effects.

-GC

 

[snmfmy]

Safranal is but one substance of many present. Seems crocin is psychoactive too, or there could be another unknown component.

How many times have researchers gone after the most prevalent compound only to discover it was something else causing the true effects.

-GC

Yeah, but there are literally 450 strands or threads in one gram of saffron. So 20 or 25 threads is equivalent to 20 mg of saffron.

Crocin, picrocin, crocetin, and safranal are the components identified with any psychoactive or other active effect.

But the fact remains, the source material only weighed 20 mg.

Obviously the individual carotenoids and safranal would be significantly lower than 20 mg.

Optimal extraction of crocin from dried powdered saffron averages 30% by weight of stigma, picrocin approximately 15%, crocetin 19%, safranal 0.5-1%.

If we give a 50% efficiency to the hot water extraction process to make tea compared to the production method for aqueous extract of saffron, we get a yield of 3 mg crocin, 1.5 mg picrocin, 2 mg crocetin, and .25-.5 mg safranal.

None of which are active at that dose, even in combination.

7.5 mg of MDMA Doesn't even give a threshold response, yet we're expected to believe that less than 7.5 mg of constituents of a saffron aqueous extract, (meaning tea) is psychoactive enough to make somebody feel high and be horny?

People can delude themselves into thinking something because they made a bad assumption. But I don't have to participate in their delusion.