Oral DMT: Psychotria viridis vs. Mimosa hostilis

[psood0nym]

I see. I have one foot in the other camp in spirit. There's just little I can talk about sensibly there right now.

 

[Ismene]

So, at least in my experience, the qualitative differences between oral synthetic and plant-based oral DMT may have little intrinsically to do with the source and more to do with digestive dynamics.

Have you tried using moclobemide with oral DMT? How did it compare with the rue/caapi? I tried rue once - just took a small dose to see how it felt and felt so sick I didn't want to take that into a DMT trip with me.

 

[Ismene]

how it works, so it seems ignorant/arrogant to say that it's not possible - there is different shit in plants than just the DMT and the MAOI so why would it be impossible for it to affect the brain differently? It makes perfect sense to me.

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but the trouble is pretty much all psychedelics have such a vast range of effects you can't really pin specific effects on trace amounts of other drugs.

I mean every effect you can put down to the "other compounds" can be caused by DMT iself so how do you know it's not the DMT?


It's just like how smoking a cigarette is different from taking nicotine

In what sense is it different? If you inhaled the same dose of nicotine through a vapouriser would you notice a different effect to smoking?

 

[Swimmingdancer]

Yes, it is very different. If nicotine were an effective replacement for cigarettes there wouldn't be so many smokers I am vaping an e-cigarette as I type this and while it gives me a degree of psychological comfort from the fact that it looks and feels similar to a cigarette, the effects are not the same. Theorectically this one should be giving me the same amount of nicotine as a cigarette. It doesnt have many of the side effects of a cigarette but it does have side effects cigarettes don't have and the effects on my body and brain are different.

Just trying to point out that I think that when we think we humans have discovered the primary active ingredient in a plant most people are too quick to assume that means it is the only active ingredient and dismiss the possibility that other compounds may very well have an effect also. In the case of ayahuasca there have actually been other active compounds isolated in the plants, and tons of additional compounds that we don't yet understand at all.

 

[Ismene]

Yes, it is very different. If nicotine were an effective replacement for cigarettes there wouldn't be so many smokers

That's not all down to the nicotine tho is it - it's easier to carry around a box of cigarettes than a £500 vapouriser made of glass, they look cooler, people get addicted to the procedure of lighting up etc.

It doesnt have many of the side effects of a cigarette but it does have side effects cigarettes don't have and the effects on my body and brain are different.

Are those effects down to the other chemicals in the cigarette tho? Or are they placebo? Arn't most of the chemicals in cigs things like hydrogen cyanide?


Theorectically this one should be giving me the same amount of nicotine as a cigarette

To be honest I'm not sure we're going down the correct route by trying to compare a small dose of nicotine with an overwhelming psychedelic like DMT.

Just trying to point out that I think that when we think we humans have discovered the primary active ingredient in a plant most people are too quick to assume that means it is the only active ingredient and dismiss the possibility that other compounds may very well have an effect also

True, but not always. Opium has a different effect to morphine, but that doesn't automatically mean mimosa has a different effect to DMT. Some plants do just have one active constituent.

 

[Foreigner]

I don't have much experience with DMT any form, but I know people who have extensive experience and they all say that the plant-based experience is more complex with more nuances.

I'm an herbalist and I believe firmly in plant synergy. Modern pharmacy tries to extract the "key ingredient" from herbs and it's never as effective as taking the whole plant. Also, the properties of different plants evidently potentiate one another, which is why herbal formulations are so effective. We don't really know how they are doing this most of the time, but we know that they do it based on the effects on the body.

Even with nutrition... we can say which vegetables have good vitamin and mineral content, but if you extract those vitamins and minerals and take them separately, they won't have the same health benefits as if you ate the whole vegetable. There are always going to be constituents that modern science does not know about, but you are still benefiting from them.

I haven't done ayahuasca yet but I do believe it will be different from an experience with a DMT extract or synthetic DMT. Modern science is far too reductionist for my taste. It takes the magic out of a lot of things. Though I still do appreciate all the knowledge it has attained.

 

[psood0nym]

Have you tried using moclobemide with oral DMT? How did it compare with the rue/caapi? I tried rue once - just took a small dose to see how it felt and felt so sick I didn't want to take that into a DMT trip with me.

No, but I've always been curious to try "pharmahuasca" (never enough to actually go out and find it, though). Harmala works fine for me, and it's cheap and plentiful. I know it's supposed to be the rue or caapi that causes the nausea with ayahuasca, but I've taken up to 8 grams of ground and encapsulated harmala and never experienced any nausea. The nausea always comes after taking whatever DMT plant I'm using.

 

[Ismene]

I don't have much experience with DMT any form, but I know people who have extensive experience and they all say that the plant-based experience is more complex with more nuances.

Difficult to decide whether that's genuine or simply placebo tho. If I gave you a capsule and said "That's synthetic DMT" and I gave you another one saying "That's boiled down mimosa direct from the amazon" you'd probably "sense" a difference.

But if I gave you them blindfolded and didn't tell you which was which I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference.

 

[Foreigner]

Difficult to decide whether that's genuine or simply placebo tho. If I gave you a capsule and said "That's synthetic DMT" and I gave you another one saying "That's boiled down mimosa direct from the amazon" you'd probably "sense" a difference.

But if I gave you them blindfolded and didn't tell you which was which I'm not sure you'd be able to tell the difference.

Well, if you could post some studies proving this, I would be happy to consider your idea.

 

[Ismene]

^^
There was a study done done at Oxford University last year i believe by Professor Mindwarp.

 

[psood0nym]

Well, if you could post some studies proving this, I would be happy to consider your idea.

There are studies indicating many cannot distinguish between drugs as different as psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline. While a quick search didn't find them, I did find references to these studies on Erowid.

If a psychedelic is taken several days in succession, some degree of tolerance (failure to produce a trip) develops. If a different psychedelic is then taken and this also fails to produce a trip, the two compounds are said to produce cross tolerance, which strongly indicates that they act in the same way and create roughly the same kind of trip. LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin (and probably the hallucinogenic amphetamines) all produce cross tolerance, and there are some studies which indicate that people are unable to tell them apart.

Source

This has to do with distinguishing between heroin and methadone:

Many users claim that the problem with methadone is that it lacks heroin's
intensity. It doesn't give you the same rush when injected and many users
believe that the high is inferior compared to heroin. How much of this
resistance to methadone is psychological is unclear. Many users become
obsessed with the rituals of drug use - cooking up a hit, or rolling a bead
around the foil.

In blind trials, users who were given both drugs orally were unable to
distinguish between the effects of the two drugs. Where heroin does have a
real advantage over methadone is in withdrawal. Withdrawal from heroin
should be over after seven to ten days. Withdrawal from methadone though,
can take up to a month or even longer.

Source

So, if people can't tell the difference between powerful and distinct drugs by the subjective inner experience of the drugs alone there is reason to believe they can’t tell the difference between one powerful drug like DMT and the subtle contributions to subjective experience of a complex array of other suspected compounds we’re not even sure are active. There is reason to believe expectancy contributes to the experience in a highly overlapping way with the contribution of the drug itself.

I’ve been harping on this point and similar for years. People really don’t like to hear it. They want to be able to rely on the accuracy of their perception. They want to be able to distinguish things like the purity of a substance from their experience of it so they can rest assured they retain a degree of control (over being ripped off, or over having a bad trip for instance e.g. "the Zorak blotter is lucid and I can trust it, but the Space Ghost blotter is dirty and metallic"). They want to orient the source of their experience in the drug’s physical composition itself, because the drug is tangible. If the real source of an experience is, in fact, lost to comprehension in a maze of unconscious inner and environmental phenomena it remains out of the experiencer’s control (or at the very least it’s more difficult for the experiencer to discern). Maybe some can distinguish, it's not impossible, but the point is that based on the evidence the default assumption should be that one cannot. Only an exhaustive blind test can indicate otherwise (and nobody actually bothers to try this in practice, they just tell themselves they're one of the ones who can tell).