I said I didn't want to post here anymore but it's been bugging me. Sorry for the long text, I may be under the influence of an amine that causes me to write long texts
schiff bases have been around since the 60s, this is all ready well documented. nothing about the op is false but it's basically like you buying a "slime making kit" to just throw it away afterwards. Even if you did drink the slime, it's going to be no different than any other acidic ethanol extraction+whatever flavor you added (cinnamon/peppermint/vanilla, etc.) You will have nausea, vasoconstriction, everything associated with regular ingestion of the acidic favored epimers (LAA/LAP).
Nothing about the OP is false? Well, that's one statement to make.
The namesake of the Schiff base, Hugo Schiff, died 1915, so safe to say they have been known for a longer time. Well, to be fair you are correct about the 60s, just that it is 1864:
https://zenodo.org/records/1427225
Schiff bases/imines occur under (preferably) anhydrous conditions by stirring aldehydes or ketones with
primary or secondary amines, some form nicely, some do not, a tiny bit of catalytic acid can help, as well as heat and sequestering the water that is formed during the condensation. They are also typically only in an equilibrium (depending on their stability and the exact conditions) with the carbonyl/amine and may quickly hydrolyse back with any water present. LSA is a
tertiary amine.
So what would it react with? The amide group. This is a reaction that is not really taught in the standard ochem curriculum because for the most part it is not really relevant. Why? Because the nitrogen electron lone pair in amides is conjugated with the amide carbonyl and thus not available for nucleophilic attack on the aldehyde or ketone carbonyl, making this reaction extremely unlikely. Why does it work anyways in that one publication tregar and Allylbenzene like to cite? (
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja01335a085) Because it really only works if you push things enough, by using anhydrous conditions, heat and long reaction times which limits the scope in such a way to (in my opinion) to exclude LSA from the possible substrates to make these N-acyl hemiaminals/N-acyl imines (which
every chemist aside from tregar will tell you). Besides that it doesn't even make the N-acyl hemiaminals, but N,N-diacyl aminals, which are a little more stable than those pesky hemiaminals. In any case, just tossing some questionable aldehyde source with some acid and stirring in non-anhydrous conditions will lead to zero conversion (well, never say never, but if it is more than 0.05 % conversion under the conditions tregar describes, I'll burn my degree). And besides even if you were able to form these N-acyl hemiaminals (like LSH is one), I'd be surprised of them being pharmacologically relevant as anything but a prodrug as they'd very rapidly degrade in the aqueous soup that is your body.
Now you may ask if LSH does not form from acetaldehyde and LSA, how is LSH in the seeds then?, and this is an excellent question - there is a trick. Lysergic acid reacts with a protein bound alanine, the alanine carbonyl is oxidised to a monothiocarbonate, then NADPH reduced the monothiocarbonate facilitating bond cleavage to form an LSH formate ester which is hydrolysed to LSH. All LSA arises from the eventual hydrolytic degradation of LSH (spontaneously, without enzyme catalysis):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10034635/ So in a way LSH is a very good precursor for LSA, but LSA is not a particularly good one for LSH (there are ways to prepare these N-acylhemiaminals in the literature, and the sane ones would start from the acid, not the amide, just like in nature, but much different reactions).
There is of course also the other theory tregar came up with that an adduct may form on the indole nitrogen between LSA/aldehyde/ethanol, but if that arises, it would unlikely to be psychedelically active (just like the N-acyl hemiaminal is unlikely to fit into 5-HT2AR but eh I've had better conversations with my wall than trying to talk to tregar) and would at most exist as a pro-drug. Now while pro-drugs can change the properties of a drug, they don't typically change the whole character of an experience.
It's all quite complicated too in that one would need to have a standard of either the amide adduct or the indole adduct to really verify that whatever analytical method one is using does not hydrolyse the compound during the analysis. But then one could work with an internal standard and just compare if the peak size changes meaningfully. And of course here too tregar has not yet confirmed for us the structure of his LSI, or rather it changed from being proposed first as an amide adduct, then the indole adduct. I must confess I have not read about the concentration of the aldehydes in the plant extract because I see the chemistry side a bit futile.
I'm glad tregar has nice trips with whatever he is doing but I think this is a good example how a mixture of overconfidence (if tregar is a chemist, then not a competent) paired with sycophantic LLM hallucinations (tbf, tregar had these tendencies pre-LLM) can lead to delusional thinking.
I don't really have the same confidence in the method working beyond (delusion-induced) placebo but if anyone is up for some blind experiments (tregar did not seem to care) and does find a significant difference (make sure to not use the absurd dosages tregar suggests), that would be quite interesting and worth a closer look. But the adduct hypothesis is just way too flimsy to be considerable.
@bluelightbird I think a prep-TLC extract of isolated LSA may be of interest to confirm (by bioassay) whether it is responsible for the main psychedelic action or not.