This is very interesting. I wonder if Blue Lotus might some of the long-term benefits of psychedelics including rapid-acting anti-depressant effect with minimal psychological risk?
This is definitely my suspicion so far. I most definitely did feel that the kinds of cognitive signs that occur during, immediately after, and more gradually after that as the trip gets further in the past were present with this blue lotus experience, not to the strongest degree I've ever experienced but not to the weakest degree either. I would say the way it felt overall reminded me more of tryptamines than phenethylamines, although particularly the bulkier-tailed synthetic ones that do remind me more of the phenethylamines with respect to the tryptamine realm compared to natural tryptamines. But phenethylamines don't usually give me the same sort of feeling that tryptamines do where it sort of feels like the trip is still sort of spinning out of my mind in waves over the next few days on and off, where I feel like my immediate response to the trip is to feel a little manic and still dissociated afterward but then also sort of plateau into a happier frame of mind that just sort of becomes my general headspace after the trip until the next time I find myself feeling like I need to trip again. The blue lotus has felt that way to me so far.
It's certainly something I'm going to remember and keep experimenting with. I was extremely expressed with what the extract capsules can do, and I only took one so far. The bottle says take up to three in a day, so I guess I'll push it at least that far, heh.
I wouldn't say a higher dosage seems necessary for me to be satisfied by it though, I'm just curious. I already feel like I "got to trip again" even despite how simple it was, which is actually pretty nice. I really needed that right now I think.
What an ordeal you've just gone through! I'm glad you made it through and hope these new developments lead you to more freedom.
Thanks, I appreciate it, and I hope so too.
It's been a very strange time in my life but I managed to make the most of it I think. I feel like my longtime interest in altered states really helped me to handle it and take a lot more out of it than a lot of people might have been able to, but it definitely did fuck up my life in multiple ways too, and put a lot of burden on people I love in different ways. I'm very much looking forward to completely moving forward into the next phase.
Thank you for sharing these anecdotes. I am very interested in and encouraged by information like this.
This fall when I decided to return to psychedelics, I never expected to experience these dramatic improvements. It has been unexpected and mind-blowing, but I barely understand what's going on. I don't know if this improved state can be sustained, with or without periodic dosing. What I do understand is that my long COVID is almost certainly related to the many health problems I had going all the way back to my childhood. Before I hadn't ever considered I had CFS becuase fatigue was not one of my top complaints. I now speculate that the fatigue and some other stereotypical CFS symptoms may be less pronounced in *men*, who may exhibit different symptoms instead. It's the analogous problem to autism, where the diagnosis criteria was developed by observing mostly boys, and so austic girls tend to be greatly underdiagnosed.
I'm now trying to research a bit more into 5ht2a pharmacology in hope of getting some insight into what's going on. It's very fascinating stuff, but while it's abundantly clear that there is a strong connection between 5ht2a and inflammation, understanding remains very crude, to restate what I said earlier. Furthermore this area is fundamentally difficult to study for reasons I'll elaborate on later.
I'm happy to contribute.
I hope you're able to find the perspective you seek and that the scientific research in this area continues progressing further too. Something else I think you may not have seen is that earlier this year, a user created a thread in this subforum claiming to be using psychedelics as a way of combating her terminal illness which she did not explicitly name, but said that it was related to inflammation. She said that doctors basically told her she'd have to go through some very unpleasant-sounding treatment that still might not work well, and she decided to try taking psilocybin mushrooms instead. I think that's what she said.... I can't check now as she eventually deleted the thread. She said she was using 5+ g dosages of mushrooms several times a week and was worried about going crazy as a result of it because she hadn't been a user of psychedelics beforehand and didn't realize she was getting into, and she was having extreme out-of-body, entity contact-style trips on a regular basis, but despite her complaints and concerns about this, she said her blood work was coming back extremely well to a point that was shocking her doctors. I can't verify this as I didn't see the data, but that's what she said.
Unfortunately as I said she deleted the thread. She reached out to me through PM afterward and gave me a little more perspective about what she was going through. She described some miserable physical symptoms and basically said she felt very much like death when the symptoms would kick in, but that taking the mushrooms would make the symptoms get better. She also started taking DMT and I think she said it might have been working even better, or maybe she just thought the trip was more manageable or something. I remember she was talking about trying to get into a continuous DMT infusion trial to see if it has a more lasting beneficial effect on her.
Sadly she stopped responding to me eventually privately as well. I'm hoping the worst didn't happen; if it didn't I'm assuming I might have scared her off or something. She was tripping very hard every time and I was trying to reassure her that she could experience crazy things and still be a sane person as long as she treated the experiences correctly. She was handling it better than I would expect the average non-tripper to but was disturbed by the things she was experiencing which were getting into the sorts of magical realms I can also relate to from my extreme experiences and psychotic breaks. I tried to help keep her grounded but fear I may not have done that well.
In any case, like you, she did seem to report that the psychedelics really did help her symptoms and she did seem convinced that there was an inflammation-related reason. Again I hope that scientists will continue to pursue this avenue of research, because if psychedelics really can help with these kinds of conditions, then we need to be using them for it like yesterday.
While I may experience fatigue on 5ht2a psychedelics but it's usually quite transient and most likely to occur early. On balance, I find 5ht2a psychedelics to reduce fatigue considerably, especially during and after the peak. I think my experience in this regard is fairly typical except that I might, if anything, have an even more energetic experience than the average subject.
Also, I tended to experience worse body effects from tryptamines than from LSD or phenethylamines. With mushrooms, I often feel faint and need to lie down for the first 3 hours or so. This is challenging because I still get intense body energies, and I also tend to get strong mental effects as well. For these reasons, I tended to prefer LSD and phenethylamines because they didn't seem to get in the way of being on my feet and active.
A favorite trip activity is dancing but not in any particularly prescribed way. Instead, my body just seems to do its own thing. In the old days, I was young and in good shape. I could easily dance for hours without feeling it, and even when the drugs wore off, I found the fatigue much easier to tolerate than it would have been.
I do get that as well, the fatigue is only there while coming up but most psychedelics feel very clean and smooth and wonderful for me in the later hours and even leave me feeling that way for days afterward to some extent. I should say that while I say I get it worse with phenethylamines, it's really mostly the amphetamines I think that are biasing my perspective on that. Actually, aside from one experience each I can think of on 2C-I and 2C-C, I generally find 2C-I, 2C-C, and 2C-B to feel extremely smooth, although 2C-C does still tend to make me feel heavy in a lazy way. 2C-E and 2C-P do have more body load for me, but I think it's comparable to some of the moderately bad tryptamines I've taken (and not the worst). On the other hand, amphetamines are definitely harder for me to enjoy, and I think it might be a combination of the fact that they produce heavier effects for me in this way and also take several hours to peak, which can add up for me. One of the smoothest amphetamine and honestly even phenethylamine trips I ever had was on DOPR which may actually be my favorite I've taken because it was so beautiful, deep, and generally smooth mentally and physically in the body compared to other trips like it, and I still felt like I had to go through several hours of malaise while first coming up on it, although it was nowhere near as bad as my DOC trip that was literally crippling or my 3C-P trip that was physically painful to the point of making breathing feel harder. So if I did remove amphetamines from the equation and only compare simple phenethylamines to tryptamines and lysergamides, I'd have to say the indoles can be worse, although also often aren't. But things like ETH-LAD and MPT, yeah, I've had some pretty uncomfortable body loads on them at times, but I was still able to overcome eventually them too in the way I mentioned before.
The problem you mentioned with mushrooms is something that applies to 4-substituted tryptamines in general for me mostly, although mostly just them. They were the first group of research chemicals I got to thoroughly explore and I enjoyed doing so a lot, but after having made my way through multiple other groups now, I honestly find it hard to return to them because of just how generally overwhelming they feel. Pretty much any other kind of psychedelic just feels so much more lucid and less disorienting to me, and I did enjoy their ability to massively distort my mind at one point too, but I think I may have gotten to the point where I don't see it as that important to what my real reasons for taking psychedelics are, and just started to prefer other kinds of trips. For what it's worth, base tryptamines for me are actually the easiest psychedelics to just sit there through, and not because they immobilize you despite making you want to move, but because they actually make you kind of not want to move despite not being that disorienting, or at least that's my experience with them. I feel like most of them keep the element that makes DMT trips make you just sit down and take it, even when taken orally and lasting for several hours. I feel like I don't have many memories of dancing on base tryptamines that immediately come to mind, although it is also one of my core favorite activities to do on psychedelics in general usually (and I probably have done it plenty on base tryptamines too, but it's just not the kind of thing that stands out in my memory about them). Just some food for thought and advice, I suppose. This may be a just me thing, but I think if I had to choose a kind of psychedelic trip to have where I wanted to be able to not move that much and not feel like I'm suffering for doing do, I think there's a high chance I'd choose to take a base tryptamine.
I feel extremely fortunate, especially now that I know these drugs might be essential for my health. I don't know yet, but hopefully plant psychedelics can substitute if I have to give them up for some reason. If I have to leave the country, maybe I can just grow a bunch of cacti and stay under the radar.
I don't know how it would be in whatever country you would have to go to, but that's the kind of situation I'm in right now since I don't have my old stash anymore. I don't suspect that blue lotus will substitute forever for everything I could ever want to get out of psychedelics, but there certainly are options if you know what you're doing, which may or may not be helpful for things you need even if the internet subculture conditions us to think of certain things are less appealing options. For instance, I'm thinking about exploring with morning glory or Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds again. I also personally like nutmeg essential oil, which contains high amounts of myristicin, one of the primary proposed active chemicals in nutmeg, which does have proven 5-HT2 receptor agonist effects although this is not commonly discussed either scientifically or by drug users that I'm aware of. I find it to feel like a very pleasant psychedelic personally, although it also reminds me of a deliriant in a similar sort of way to how MDMA also does that when its hallucinogenic potential is brought out. I wouldn't be surprised if it has some stuff going on like muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonism too. Eventually I think I'll get around to trying some of those other essential oils that contain phenethylamine-like compounds in them to see if they have notable effects in this way too. If blue lotus can turn out to be a 5-HT2A receptor agonist, who's to say they can't?
Oh yeah, I want to try ololiuiqui too. I haven't actually taken that one yet ever, it could be cool. And bufotenine-containing seeds, I always forget about that.... Bufotenine has given me a pretty nasty body load before, though. Also 5-MeO-DMT....
I'm not really rushing out to try to trip on a serotonergic psychedelic right now, though. I've just been thinking this way lately to make sure I'm aware of my options in case I do feel like I need them at any moment. Psychedelics are all around us even if the options aren't as luxurious as having a fat research chemical stash.
Also glaucine, from the yellow-horned poppy, the one that's very close structurally to nuciferine from blue lotus. I most definitely want to try that now after my recent experience. I think the next essential oil I try is either going to be elemi or basil.... I've heard of some pretty impressive and believable effects from both. I'm not going to go full oilahuasca with them though I don't think, I don't want to fuck with enzyme inhibition and such too much, but I'm certainly willing to at least give the oils a try on their own, since nutmeg essential oil works for me that way.
I'm also hoping psilocybin legalization is going to explode in this country soon like cannabis legaliztion and ketamine clinics have, fingers crossed.
That sure would be convenient.
Speaking of cacti, you said earlier that you've sampled around fifty 5ht2a agonists. That's way more than I've sampled which is probably fewer than 20. And yet you've never had mescaline? My heart cries out to you! When can we rectify this omission? Forgive me but mescaline is very special to me. I don't know about now, but my younger self regarded it to be the most healing of the psychedelics. Maybe to you it will just be another one of many phenethylamines. It was my first, and it has given me many of my most meaningful and treasured experiences of my life. I feel like it completely rebuilt me, emotionally speaking.
I hope you can try mescaline some day and that you are able to find or achieve a good strong preparation. I looked over the B&D thread here and noticed most people seem to struggle to get off properly with it. It seems difficult for most people to get a good dose of mescaline without excessive nausea-inducing plant matter. In this regard I also got lucky and came across some excellent material, but some day I will likely have to find another source or grow my own. I can only hope I'll be so lucky again.
It is a very unfortunate circumstance that I would like to rectify. It's one of those things where I basically just always had easier options than extracting it myself and never came across anyone who was offering an already extracted form of it or anything. As I got deep into my research chemical collection this just got even worse, as I basically already felt like I had anything I could want at any time, and it was too easy to just take something I already had, and there's always something genuinely new for me to explore among them anyway. Again though, where I find myself now, I could definitely see mescaline coming into clearer focus for me finally. It's one of the only drugs I haven't taken that I still have a very high interest in obtaining and experiencing at some point, and I genuinely don't have much else to use instead now (at least compared to what I'm used to).
I can only base any possible expectations off of what I've heard others say, but I'm anticipating that it may still stand out in comparison to other phenethylamines for me. I do know that there are some reasons to expect some pharmacological differences between mescaline and most of the research chemical psychedelics generally, and I have met plenty of people who have taken both mescaline and many others and still confidently claim that mescaline is the best. I'm sure it won't make me stop loving the phenethylamine psychedelic experiences I've had, but I could easily see it being something that I like a lot I think just based on what I have heard about it.
I do think I would likely pursue it to the point that I felt I had managed to achieve an at least relatively powerful experience with it. I'm cautious with research chemicals, perhaps sometimes to a fault, but I have a strange recklessness about things I feel that I can reasonably assume to be safe to push. I don't think I would settle for less than immersive dreamlike visions from mescaline based on what I've heard, I know it has that potential, and I know I can get those kinds of effects usually relatively easily from things that can produce them these days. I'm looking forward to the psychological and therapeutic effects too, but I don't want to build up my expectations too much for things that are harder to grasp. I just know I'm not going to back down just because I might find it subtler or somewhat uncomfortable at lower dosages until I know I've really gotten it to do what I know it can do.
It definitely is still up in the air when I'll actually get around to it though. I'm just not really seeking serotonergic psychedelic experiences right now, and I have to admit, when I do think about it, the only one I think I'd really want to take right now is LSD, for some more specific reasons. But the next time I want to dive into the unknown, I could definitely see mescaline specifically being where I want to dive. And I'm sure I'll report on it here when I do.
I hope you are lucky enough to find some more as well. There's little better than reuniting with one of your favorite drugs after being away from it for so long.
(I know how it sounds and I don't care about social stigmas, it's the truth.)
I haven't done edibles in a long time. They definitely are more psychedelic for me, but I also notice they reliably carry on after a night's sleep. Hence, I liked to save them for very special occasions like festivals. Edibles in appropriate doses actually go nicely with long duration serotonergic psychedelics like LSD or mescaline because you get a smooth extended effect instead of the bumpiness that comes with smoking repeatedly during a trip.
They're something I've been experimenting with since moving to my new state since it's the first time I've ever been able to actually get them easily and in reliable dosages (other than while on vacation). I think they're freaking great, although very strong for me. My first time taking 50 mg I actually had vivid visual hallucinations and a golden body high that I don't think I can actually say that anything other than lysergamides has compared to for me before. Really great stuff (although the next time I took 50 mg sucked, heh, although I'll also say it was still lysergamide-like for me).
I could definitely see it being amazing for mixing with psychedelics like that, I'm sure I'll try it at some point in the future. Psychedelics and cannabis is already a very potent combo for me, and one time I smoked JWH-250 while on LSD and it blasted the synergy I'm already used to from cannabis and LSD into another level, and while JWH-250 was quite trippy for me, it still doesn't compare to cannabis edibles. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it mixes with psychedelics, although to a point that gives me the slightest bit of apprehension (but in a good way).
Edibles alone I usually take in the morning so I don't have much effect the next day. I do get a nice sleep generally when I take them though. I also smoke cannabis most days so I might just not notice the lingering effects so much. Although I think there's a good chance that will change when I get out on my own again, I don't have the kind of cannabis budget my parents do unfortunately, although that's probably not actually a bad thing though, anyway.
(I say 'although' a lot.... Hmm.)
Thanks for the responses, I hope your week has been going well.
Anyway, next time I will write more about pharmacology and 5ht2a in particular. It seems even more complex than I had imagined. The gist is that the 5ht2a receptor should not be thought of as a lock waiting for a key to activate it but a multi-functional socket.
5-HT2A receptors are fascinating. Did you know
they are constitutively active, or that is to say, they signal on their own without requiring a ligand to attach to them? This is why inverse agonism is a thing at 5-HT2A receptors; an agonist at the receptor will increase the amount of signaling, and an antagonist will not increase the amount of signaling but will also not decrease it, leaving the constitutive signaling active, while only an inverse agonist will actually decrease the amount of signaling that is already present by default. Of course, as you say, it is not valid to think of a 5-HT2A receptor ligand as simply being strictly an agonist (full or partial), antagonist, or inverse agonist, because it is also possible for the same ligand to behave in different ways at different 5-HT2A receptor-mediated functional pathways, not only to different degrees as an agonist, but also in these completely different ways simultaneously. To my understanding, this is why, for example, clozapine can seem to act as a 5-HT2A receptor agonist in some ways (as I mentioned in my first blue lotus post recently) while still behaving more like an antipsychotic rather than a psychedelic due to the totality of its 5-HT2A receptor interactions.
I like to think of it as 3D shapes bouncing around. The 5-HT2A receptor itself is a construct that signals in certain ways based on its 3D shape, and is already doing so by default. And when a ligand comes along, binding to the receptor, it changes that 3D shape into something that signals in a different way from what the original shape did. That's literally how I tend to actually visualize it anyway.
Looking forward to what you'll have to say.
That's so cool.
Twenty years ago I did something similar, using acoustic means to mimic electronics. I didn't use my voice, but I used a piano. And I didn't mimic a video game sound track, but my favourite techno track at the time. I think it must have been the very track that finally made classical musician me understand techno. My friends at the time told me to send the cover track to the original artist. I never did it. Professional artists were like gods to me back then, I didn't dare approach them. But maybe I should do it after all. People are gone before you know it, aren't they..
They most certainly are, and even if they never respond to you, you can at least know you gave it a shot while they were still around.
I also learned that lesson from this forum, although not recently. People disappear. Don't miss your chance to try to connect with them if that's what you desire.
Personally, if I ever made a techno track and then someone sent me a classical reconstruction of it, I'd be ecstatic. The intersection of electronic music and classical music has created some of my favorite tracks of all time. I'm also a fan of swing being thrown in there.
Some years back I did experiment with blue lotus. Most of the time it was a dud. By way back when fourwindsbotanicals had some great stuff. The owner Theo (RIP) told me when you have quality blue lotus it can be wonderful. And he sent me a bag of beautiful blue flowers. It actually created a headspace that was totally unique and crystal clear. Subtle but undeniable. Thanks for the write up Kaleida. I may have to revisit. Kanna was ok, but a quality blue lotus impressed me. I wonder if I could recreate that with some current stuff.
Some of these botanicals get overlooked because of the product quality. I can say quality blue lotus and mulungu are impressive. Mulungi is become more popular. I said that 10 years ago but really has not happened yet. Some drug will come of it. It would be wonderful if blue lotus could produce a new type of drug. Or a new class to ponder.
Good to see some posts and people. I have a lot of catching up to do.
I too have experienced the dramatic difference in quality between different batches of blue lotus and the impact it has on the effects. Genuinely good blue lotus truly is something special. Mid-tier stuff is weak and gives me a headache. I once bought a quarter pound of it for almost nothing and it didn't take long to understand why it was so cheap.
You're welcome, and I'd certainly like to hear what you think of any current stuff if you try it.
One would of course hope that the extracts are being made from quality products. The brand I used was the same one I got for my kanna, Nine Mile Botanicals. It seems fine from what I can determine.... It at least got me at least as high as the best blue lotus I ever smoked if not higher at times. It was literally a 100X extract, though. But I've read on Reddit that it's not even uncommon for people to take like 200X extracts these days. I do feel like the world of legal herbs is being revolutionized somewhat, I think probably starting with kratom as it just started being propped up more and more in places like CBD shops over the last many years, and now I feel like the others are becoming steadily more mainstream too. I'm certainly not complaining, I love being able to drive just down the road to a professional store and buy good drugs, talking with the owner about them as drugs out in the open with no paranoia or secrecy and everything. It's like this is just the kind of thing people do now, and if that's true I'm all for it.
I saw they have mulungu at that store yet, I've never tried that one before. What kind of effect does it have on you? I just bought some cordyceps capsules from them yesterday, I'm excited about that as I've never taken it before and was just reading about the active component cordycepin. It seems like a good way to expand my pharmacological perspective and potentially be another handy tool to add to my repertoire.
I definitely feel like kanna is... okay, aggressively. It's sort of really nice and also not that amazing at the same time, at least for me and in the ways I've been testing it so far. I did recently try taking another 100X extract capsule along with 24 mg of oral THC and drank a glass of Merlot during the peak while eating lunch at a fancy restaurant with family (yes, that's the kind of environment I take my drugs in, lol...). It produced a pretty nice buzz. It had qualities reminiscent of a good roll on MDMA, but was still definitely distinct. As much as I like it though, I agree that the blue lotus has been better, and I do feel like the comparison is similar to how I feel about MDMA compared to things that are primarily classical psychedelics, where the former is super fun and reminiscent in some obvious ways of the latter, but it just doesn't really grab me and feel as truly deep and personal as the latter do. I eventually retired from MDMA but still don't feel like I've done so for psychedelics despite reaching a point where I'm not seeking them currently.
There are actually a good number of other active molecules similar to nuciferine that I don't think are actually in blue lotus, and could be considered thus different drugs of the same class (and they definitely would be as isolated individual chemicals anyway too). For instance, the previously mentioned glaucine, a component of the known active plant yellow-horned poppy, which has in more recent times been sold as an isolate and actively claimed to have psychedelic effects, although usually described as weird and weak ones but, but still, I imagine it could be similar to blue lotus which I liked just fine, and some people do seem to like glaucine too. Another one that has interested me in the past is
pukateine (a name which I find amusing) which Wikipedia claims is extracted from a plant called Pukatea which was used in Māori medicine as an analgesic and has that same type of pharmacore which makes it most likely bind to 5-HT2A and D2 receptors among others in a way similar to these other alkaloids.
Another one for comparison which is also interesting is
nantenine, from another plant called heavenly bamboo or sacred bamboo, which binds to 5-HT2A and alpha1-adrenergic receptors and can antagonize the effects of MDMA (which, again, I think blue lotus could probably do too, and that doesn't necessarily mean it won't have more agonistic effects when taken alone).
Here's a scientific study about some of their synthetic derivatives too, if you're interested. It seems to further support these observations. I need to give it a read-through myself.
Glad to see you too, I hope you've been doing well.
Seriously, I never stop talking about pharmacology. I think about the pharmacology of the molecules in the food that I eat. I think about the pharmacology of the molecules in the air that I breathe. We are neverending pharmacological processing units. You get better at it if you acknowledge the ubiquity and importance that it holds.
