I'm curious how potent you would rate it in the context that up to 81% is excreted unchanged? Or are you perhaps assuming that some/all of this excreted % first activates receptors then gets excreted [unchanged] ). I thought you said MAOB was the enzyme of interest here.
Are you serious? Plenty of active drugs are excreted almost entirely unchanged. This has little to do with whether something is active or not. Likewise, the potency of mescaline itself implies little about the likelihood that active metabolites are responsible for the effect. If you think mescaline isn't the primary active just because it's weak, well what about DOB? DOB is still "weak" compared to LSD or many NBOX or serotonin. This proves nothing.
I've often wondered whether mescaline has an active metabolite in addition to its own activity. Out of all the PEAs I've tried, mescaline has by far the strangest come-up. It almost feels biphasic, as if I had taken two drugs with one having a delayed onset. When I take mescaline dissolved in water on an empty stomach, I usually notice the first effects within 15-20 minutes. The experience then gradually builds over the next 2โ3 hours until it seems to plateau. I've been fooled by this more than once, because around the 4-hour mark there's always another distinct surge in intensity that catapults me into its beautiful peak. Then again it could also just be slow absorption, prolonged distribution and many other things. Other drugs feel biphasic too now that I think about it. Many of the DOx and 4C-x, also LSD, but in the case of LSD D. Nichols did show that there is an active metabolite responsible for some of its jangly effects when the peak wears off.
Oh yeah. Mescaline always takes 4 hours to fully blossom for me, and last time I had it, I actually didn't peak in terms of visual intensity until after 6 hours. Indeed, I thought I was stable at T+4hr and went on a hike, and when we got back at T+6hr, the visuals were way way more intense, such that I was reaching out to lean against walls and shit because I couldn't tell which way was up and down.
My own description of the phases of mescaline is roughly like:
T+1hr: GI effects peak;
T+2hr: peripheral/body effects peak;
T+3hr: mental introspective effects peak;
T+4-6hr: trip fully develops with peak visuals, body high, etc.;
T+8-9hr: reconstitution
T+12-24hr (depending on dose): return to (mostly) baseline
When I take other phenethylamines, I notice a fairly similar multi-phase development, except the time courses are stretched or condensed. Let me give examples of approximate timing for full development / peaking: 2C-B: 1.5-2hr; 2C-I: 2-2.5hr; 2C-D: 1.5-2hr; 2C-E: 3 hr; 2C-T-2: 3hr; 2C-P: 5-6hr. Note I think 2C-P takes even longer to fully develop than mescaline.
In general I think it's easy to underestimate the importance of pharmacokinetics in influencing the subjective qualitative effects of a substance. It's not just that different drugs will tend to be distributed within parts of the body brain differently at different time points, but also that receptors may respond differently depending on how rapidly the concentration of agonist changes. Serotonin is a
signaling molecule, and the timing of signaling can often convey meaningful if not crucial information. This is an area in serious need of more research though.
Lastly I'll say that once I identified the multi-phase aspects of phenethylamines, I started to notice that they are still there for tryptamines, it's just the phases peaks are crammed together and the phases essentially overlap. So with psilocybin for example, one might have GI effects peak at T+0:45, peripheral effects peak at T+1:00, introspection peak at T+1:15, and full development at T+1:30. The phases are staggered but mostly overlap whereas with mescaline and other things that take a long time to develop, the time separation makes the phases more discrete.
