So, the rumor has been going around for a while that eating mangoes 30-60 minutes before smoking marijuana will intensify the effects, purportedly due to myrcene.
This was discussed in a previous thread (only notable posts are the first, with a link to a non-reputable source making the claim, and the last, with a few links to studies tangentially related to it).
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=497967
There's currently a thread on GC about it, with people trying to test it, with a lot of bickering, and very little scientific rigor. I don't think you really find much rigor on GC (at least outside of the grow forums).
I crossposted this here and on GC; I am proposing that we apply some scientific rigor to trying to investigate this mango theory.
There is a claim that mangos will intensify the high of weed because of Myrcene in the mangos. However, i've yet to see a cited journal articles substantiating this claim (High Times doesn't count as a reliable source). We should not be invoking "scientific evidence" in defense of the mango-theory, unless we can refer to placebo controlled experiments. Anyone got any references? (something tells me there aren't any - the one in the other thread mentioned peripheral analgesic activity of myrcene, but no more than that)
In the absence of published data, we need to do our own tests - but we need to approach it with a greater level of rigor than i think most people trying it are.
First off, let's deal with the easy part:
* In any experiment of this nature, the experimenter must know with some degree of certainty, how much they are smoking. Weigh a sample of weed sufficient for a bowl, and use the same size sample for all tests, from the same batch of weed (preferably, the samples to be used will have been pre-ground and well mixed)
* Smoking technique should be consistent. Smoke out of the same piece. Do not use a bowl that tends to let bits of weed get sucked through the bowl. It is preferable to smoke the entire contents of the bowl in one hit, if that is practical to do with the users tolerance, equipment, and weed.
* Smoking schedule should be consistent, tests should be done on different days. It's meaningless to compare your 4th bowl of the day w/out mangos to the 1st bowl of a day with mangos, and vice versa.
* Smoke a quantity which you expect to get you moderately high, not totally baked. Verify on a different day that the chosen quantity does indeed give the level of high that you expect.
At this point, you should now be able to smoke a weighed quantity of weed, and get equally high every time you smoke it. And compare the effects with and without prior consumption of a mango. This is a good start, and would be more meaningful than any post i've seen regarding someone's experience testing the mango/weed thing.
For the more rigorous:
There's another pressing concern, and that is the placebo effect as many have said. The subjective strength of a cannabis high are sensitive to set and setting, more so than most classes of drug. Expectations will significantly change one's perception of the strength of a high. Plus, i think all of us _want_ it to be true (who doesn't want to get higher with less weed?) Therefore it is imperative that we rule out the placebo effect in our experiments (for those who swear by this, do recognize that without controlling for this, many people will assume it is a placebo effect until demonstrated otherwise).
Unfortunately this is hard. While it's really easy to give someone a sugar pill vs an active pill, it's very hard to give someone a mango which they won't be able to distinguish from a fake mango.
In the extremely unlikely event that there is someone reading this who is, ah, mango-naive, and has no idea what they look or taste like, they could get a friend to buy a mango or another fruit that they are not familiar with, prepare one, and not tell them which is which - this would achieve placebo control. This person would need to do one sample with a mango, and one sample with the fake mango (without figuring out which is which).
A more practical placebo-controlled test would be to consume myrcene itself, and cut the mangoes out of the equation entirely. Myrcene is dirt shit cheap if you are a company, or want to buy a barrel of it (i've yet to find supplier who will sell small quantities of it to individuals - most of the respectable chemical suppliers have agreed to refuse sales to individuals (I can rant about this, but i don't want that discussion here), and the wholesalers will sell to anyone, but only in bulk - it's used in the fragrance and flavoring industry). So, pure myrcene is out, for now at least - but myrcene is found in a heck of a lot of plants. Being a hydrocarbon, it ends up in the essential oils of those plants. Lemongrass oil is generally 10% or more myrcene, and sage oil can exceed 50% myrcene (and there are a ton of others).
So, we can add a small quantity* of the appropriate essential oil to a gelatin capsule (since it's oil it won't dissolve it, though you have to store it upright so it doesn't leak out). Double encapsulate it to hide the smell, and put salt or something around it in the outer capsule, so you can't see if something is in the inner one. The person who prepares the capsules will prepare one of each, and mark them (ie, A and B, with only him knowing which is which), and leave the room while the test subject enters, and chooses one, and writes down the markings.
After some delay (30, 45, or 60 minutes) the subject smokes the chosen amount of marijuana (with all the procedural caveats described in the first section). Effects compared to reference experience
Experiment is repeated on a different day with the other capsule.
If myrcene enhances the effects of marijuana, this should make it apparent.
This proposed test requires two pieces of data, and has one important caveat...
First, how much myrcene is in a mango? Does anyone have any figures on that? I have been unable to find any such data. The second article cited in the earlier thread gives unrealisticly low numbers (if those numbers are accurate, it's almost certainly not the myrcene - they work out to a few hundred ug per kg of mango)
Secondly, is the essential oil being used safe to take internally? Obviously they're all marked not for internal use, but some will be safe, and others will not be. An investigation of the oil content of the plant, and the safety of the plant, would be a good place to start, here. I suspect that the quantities that would be needed are small enough anyway that this won't be a problem.
An important thing to note about this placebo, is that it can't prove whether mangoes enhance the effects of marijuana. It tests whether oils containing myrcene do. Ideally, if results are positive, it should be repeated with more than one kind of myrcene containing oil (or pure myrcene) to rule out the effects of other constituents of the essential oil.
If we show that myrcene is effective at enhancing the effects of marijuana, in quantities comparable to that in mangoes, we will have proved that, absent some other effect, mangoes will enhance the effects of marijuana.
If we show the opposite, it is still possible that mangoes can effect the high of marijuana, due to another compound in the mangoes.
Anyway, thanks for reading this to anyone who made it through. This is, i think, the level of rigor that is needed to demonstrate that it is not a placebo effect, to a sufficient degree to settle the debate. We will need more than just one or two people adhering to this protocol.
Contributions to this process (sources for myrcene that ship to individuals, data on myrcene content of mangos, and oil content of plants with myrcene in their essential oils, or carefully done experiments) would be greatly appreciated.
This was discussed in a previous thread (only notable posts are the first, with a link to a non-reputable source making the claim, and the last, with a few links to studies tangentially related to it).
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=497967
There's currently a thread on GC about it, with people trying to test it, with a lot of bickering, and very little scientific rigor. I don't think you really find much rigor on GC (at least outside of the grow forums).
I crossposted this here and on GC; I am proposing that we apply some scientific rigor to trying to investigate this mango theory.
There is a claim that mangos will intensify the high of weed because of Myrcene in the mangos. However, i've yet to see a cited journal articles substantiating this claim (High Times doesn't count as a reliable source). We should not be invoking "scientific evidence" in defense of the mango-theory, unless we can refer to placebo controlled experiments. Anyone got any references? (something tells me there aren't any - the one in the other thread mentioned peripheral analgesic activity of myrcene, but no more than that)
In the absence of published data, we need to do our own tests - but we need to approach it with a greater level of rigor than i think most people trying it are.
First off, let's deal with the easy part:
* In any experiment of this nature, the experimenter must know with some degree of certainty, how much they are smoking. Weigh a sample of weed sufficient for a bowl, and use the same size sample for all tests, from the same batch of weed (preferably, the samples to be used will have been pre-ground and well mixed)
* Smoking technique should be consistent. Smoke out of the same piece. Do not use a bowl that tends to let bits of weed get sucked through the bowl. It is preferable to smoke the entire contents of the bowl in one hit, if that is practical to do with the users tolerance, equipment, and weed.
* Smoking schedule should be consistent, tests should be done on different days. It's meaningless to compare your 4th bowl of the day w/out mangos to the 1st bowl of a day with mangos, and vice versa.
* Smoke a quantity which you expect to get you moderately high, not totally baked. Verify on a different day that the chosen quantity does indeed give the level of high that you expect.
At this point, you should now be able to smoke a weighed quantity of weed, and get equally high every time you smoke it. And compare the effects with and without prior consumption of a mango. This is a good start, and would be more meaningful than any post i've seen regarding someone's experience testing the mango/weed thing.
For the more rigorous:
There's another pressing concern, and that is the placebo effect as many have said. The subjective strength of a cannabis high are sensitive to set and setting, more so than most classes of drug. Expectations will significantly change one's perception of the strength of a high. Plus, i think all of us _want_ it to be true (who doesn't want to get higher with less weed?) Therefore it is imperative that we rule out the placebo effect in our experiments (for those who swear by this, do recognize that without controlling for this, many people will assume it is a placebo effect until demonstrated otherwise).
Unfortunately this is hard. While it's really easy to give someone a sugar pill vs an active pill, it's very hard to give someone a mango which they won't be able to distinguish from a fake mango.
In the extremely unlikely event that there is someone reading this who is, ah, mango-naive, and has no idea what they look or taste like, they could get a friend to buy a mango or another fruit that they are not familiar with, prepare one, and not tell them which is which - this would achieve placebo control. This person would need to do one sample with a mango, and one sample with the fake mango (without figuring out which is which).
A more practical placebo-controlled test would be to consume myrcene itself, and cut the mangoes out of the equation entirely. Myrcene is dirt shit cheap if you are a company, or want to buy a barrel of it (i've yet to find supplier who will sell small quantities of it to individuals - most of the respectable chemical suppliers have agreed to refuse sales to individuals (I can rant about this, but i don't want that discussion here), and the wholesalers will sell to anyone, but only in bulk - it's used in the fragrance and flavoring industry). So, pure myrcene is out, for now at least - but myrcene is found in a heck of a lot of plants. Being a hydrocarbon, it ends up in the essential oils of those plants. Lemongrass oil is generally 10% or more myrcene, and sage oil can exceed 50% myrcene (and there are a ton of others).
So, we can add a small quantity* of the appropriate essential oil to a gelatin capsule (since it's oil it won't dissolve it, though you have to store it upright so it doesn't leak out). Double encapsulate it to hide the smell, and put salt or something around it in the outer capsule, so you can't see if something is in the inner one. The person who prepares the capsules will prepare one of each, and mark them (ie, A and B, with only him knowing which is which), and leave the room while the test subject enters, and chooses one, and writes down the markings.
After some delay (30, 45, or 60 minutes) the subject smokes the chosen amount of marijuana (with all the procedural caveats described in the first section). Effects compared to reference experience
Experiment is repeated on a different day with the other capsule.
If myrcene enhances the effects of marijuana, this should make it apparent.
This proposed test requires two pieces of data, and has one important caveat...
First, how much myrcene is in a mango? Does anyone have any figures on that? I have been unable to find any such data. The second article cited in the earlier thread gives unrealisticly low numbers (if those numbers are accurate, it's almost certainly not the myrcene - they work out to a few hundred ug per kg of mango)
Secondly, is the essential oil being used safe to take internally? Obviously they're all marked not for internal use, but some will be safe, and others will not be. An investigation of the oil content of the plant, and the safety of the plant, would be a good place to start, here. I suspect that the quantities that would be needed are small enough anyway that this won't be a problem.
An important thing to note about this placebo, is that it can't prove whether mangoes enhance the effects of marijuana. It tests whether oils containing myrcene do. Ideally, if results are positive, it should be repeated with more than one kind of myrcene containing oil (or pure myrcene) to rule out the effects of other constituents of the essential oil.
If we show that myrcene is effective at enhancing the effects of marijuana, in quantities comparable to that in mangoes, we will have proved that, absent some other effect, mangoes will enhance the effects of marijuana.
If we show the opposite, it is still possible that mangoes can effect the high of marijuana, due to another compound in the mangoes.
Anyway, thanks for reading this to anyone who made it through. This is, i think, the level of rigor that is needed to demonstrate that it is not a placebo effect, to a sufficient degree to settle the debate. We will need more than just one or two people adhering to this protocol.
Contributions to this process (sources for myrcene that ship to individuals, data on myrcene content of mangos, and oil content of plants with myrcene in their essential oils, or carefully done experiments) would be greatly appreciated.
