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The Big & Dandy Natural vs. Chemical / Synthetic Psychedelics Thread

Do you (tend to) prefer synthetic psychedelics (incl LSD) or natural ones?

  • Natural

    Votes: 1 12.5%

  • Synthetic

    Votes: 7 87.5%
  • Total voters
    8
I do tend to (certainly not exclusively) find the naturally-synthesized drugs to be deeper and more complete experiences. However, this is, I believe, due to the fact that most natural plant sources actually contain a delicate balance of a handful or even hundreds of individual alkaloids, which combine together to create synergistic and more complex effects than any single substance alone in its isolated form. For example, mushrooms contain 4-HO-DMT, 4-PO-DMT, 4-HO-NMT, possibly 4-PO-NMT, and traces of DMT and perhaps others. If you take pure 4-HO-DMT, it's very reminiscent of mushrooms, but yet it's definitely not the same. The other alkaloids don't entirely change the experience, but combined together, they certainly alter it and it becomes mushrooms, rather than just psilocin/psilocybin.
 
Thinking about the subject a little more, there is one exception for me Marijuana. I have tried vaporizers before and hated them when it comes to marijuana I want all of those other strange chems they taste so good and really ad to the experience.
 
Hmm, vaporizers still vaporize all the alkaloids... they just don't cause a combustion reaction which creates toxic byproducts that definitely affect the high. For me they dull it and make the body high worse, but stronger. What kind of vaporizer have you tried? If you get a good one, they;re great. It's not exactly the same, but it produces a more psychedelic, in-your-head buzz that takes like a half hour to full hit. I love 'em. But I do smoke it as well because it's a bit different. But overall I prefer a vaporizer.
 
'Enter the Pedant!' =D

Cannabis doesn't produce it's effects via alkaloids as to be an alkaloid requires a nitrogen atom, that can act as a proton acceptor, to be present. Cannabinoids are (I think) classed as terpene derivatives and only contain carbon, hydrogen & oxygen (which is one of the main reasons it's not water soluble - it can't form a salt ).

[/pedant]

I much prefer vapourizers these days as there's no smoke to poison my taste buds & potentially cause various cancers (due to things like polycyclic aromatic compounds). At first it was weird, but now I find not having a heavy. congested feeling after getting stoned a massive plus. You don't even need to shell out a fortune on a vapourizer - I built mine using an old soldering iron, a metal bottle cap and a long M4 brass bolt with a couple of brass nuts (with an old Irn-Bru bottle to act as the chamber to contain the vapour!). Might even build a more refined one using a 12V soldering iron so that I can adjust the temperature via a motor speed controller circuit.

Even if I had loads of money, I'd still want to build one as it has a feeling of satisfaction every time I use it (and it fits in with all the other Heath Robison devices I've built over the years! =D)
 
I agree... when I switched to a vaporizer I was amazed at how much healthier I felt. I didn't realize how much routinely smoking cannabis and inhaling hot combustion products was fucking with my lungs and overall health. And the few negative aftereffects I have ever gotten from marijuana are completely gone with a vaporizer... no paranoia, no confusion, just clarity and euphoria. And it uses a huge amount less... my stash will last around 4 times as long, at least. Plus, the short-term memory loss is negligible in this way. And there's no damage to the lungs or toxic smoke products whatsoever.

I use a vapor box style vaporizer. The Volcano or another digital vaporizer is the best, but very expensive. A vapor box style is quite affordable. The glass globe vaporizers are what most people who say they don't like vaporizers have used, and I agree that those are completely useless.
 
^^Maybe my dislike for vaporizers is just a psychological resistance to change thing, not sure haven’t used them enough to make a clear evaluation of it. But a lot of my enjoyment from marijuana comes from the taste and the mild differences in the high. I don’t smoke that much lately but when I do I like to be a coinsurer. I like good cigars also it is the same kind of thing with cigars for me all the mild complex oils blend tighter and create and unique complex taste and experience.
The vaporizer just seemed so strange; to look at a big kind bud and taste an all-together different flavor then what I was expecting it just tasted so plain.
 
Sorry , I'm lazy and didn't read through all the responses and am just being an egoist who must get his opinion out on this controversial topic.

Neither is inherently safer. As far as we know, during the "thousands of years" all those folks who were sensitive to the natural compounds had their bad reactions and died leaving only the less sensitive tribe members to reproduce. Still to be considered is that we modern folks might have higher standards of health and mental health than indigenous peoples and our societies are much less tolerant of aberrant psychologies than indigenous peoples as well.

This really is a silly topic but very understandable when the psychedelic tendency towards magical thinking is considered. Ultimately the important and responsible thing to do is treat all psychoactive chemicals with respect. Treat yourself with respect and learn before you burn.
 
Xorkoth said:
I do tend to (certainly not exclusively) find the naturally-synthesized drugs to be deeper and more complete experiences. However, this is, I believe, due to the fact that most natural plant sources actually contain a delicate balance of a handful or even hundreds of individual alkaloids, which combine together to create synergistic and more complex effects than any single substance alone in its isolated form. For example, mushrooms contain 4-HO-DMT, 4-PO-DMT, 4-HO-NMT, possibly 4-PO-NMT, and traces of DMT and perhaps others. If you take pure 4-HO-DMT, it's very reminiscent of mushrooms, but yet it's definitely not the same. The other alkaloids don't entirely change the experience, but combined together, they certainly alter it and it becomes mushrooms, rather than just psilocin/psilocybin.
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My thought is that the specific type of pharmacological interaction that results in the ever elusive deep and rich experience (as opposed to more stimulating, more sedative, more body, etc.) becomes, on average, less likely the more psychoactive substances you add. A delicate balance is an unlikely balance, and in plants, that balance is always variable. If different psychoactives have subtly different effects, throwing a bunch in will, in general, result in an averaging of those effects rather than an optimization of their desired experiential effects. It might be, for instance, that opening the doors to the neural events that are a direct reflection of rich and immersing experiences is done optimally by just one or two keys. Using just one or a few substances is more likely to affect a specific and cleanly defined experience by virtue of its comparative simplicity. Other substances might greatly or slightly inhibit the relevant pathways--directly or indirectly--skew the path away from the bull's eye, or create experiences of confusion or ambiguity. The straight path down is the deepest, and I think pharmacological complexity is more likely to bear an indirect relationship to desirable experietial richness and depth than a direct one because there's simply more ways to mess something up than there are ways to get it precisely right. Great highly complex combos are the exception not the rule. Of course I don't doubt your personal experiences, just the degree to which this suggestion alone has informed their outcomes.
 
psood0nym said:
My thought is that the specific type of pharmacological interaction that results in the ever elusive deep and rich experience (as opposed to more stimulating, more sedative, more body, etc.) becomes, on average, less likely the more psychoactive substances you add. A delicate balance is an unlikely balance, and in plants, that balance is always variable. If different psychoactives have subtly different effects, throwing a bunch in will, in general, result in an averaging of those effects rather than an optimization of their desired experiential effects.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I believe that that is always true, though. For example, I've mixed 2C-C and 2C-I and gotten a new effect independent of either but with similarities, reliably. Same with 2C-C, 2C-E, and 5-MeO-MiPT - it creates a brand new effect with unique features to taking any alone. I can think of examples where such combinations result in a less profound experience, but I can think of plenty where that's not true as well.
 
Xorkoth said:
I'm not sure I believe that that is always true, though. For example, I've mixed 2C-C and 2C-I and gotten a new effect independent of either but with similarities, reliably. Same with 2C-C, 2C-E, and 5-MeO-MiPT - it creates a brand new effect with unique features to taking any alone. I can think of examples where such combinations result in a less profound experience, but I can think of plenty where that's not true as well.
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Yes, one or two components often result in great effects. I'm talking about the highly complex combinations of chemicals that are often found in plants. At a standard level of "quantitative intensity" in a controlled, blind trial with numerous repetitions using pure psychoactive compounds I would expect the likelihood of an immersing or in depth experience to go down with each additional component. In general.
 
Well, the ways psychoactives produce specific types of experiences is pretty much in the dark. My rationale is much more simple than talk of receptor types and G-proteins. It's just that the more factors you throw in the more muddied the results tend to be. The more muddied the results the more difficult they are to work with and think through. [Edit] Greater complexity of chemical interactions in the brain does not necessarily mean (and I would argue, rarely means) greater complexity of experience in any desirable way. There aren't that many ways to build a house of cards and each card added risks toppling the structure and loosing the form that made it special [/Edit]. If psychoactive X is more likely to produce the desired experience than psychoactive Y then it is less likely that combining them will produce an experience of equal or greater desirability (esp. a specific quality like depth or immersion.) If Z has effects whose desirability is equal to or less than the effects of Y then adding Z to X and Y will make it even less likely that the desired effects will ensue. In the case of plants we're usually talking about one chemical that really stands out and a bunch of others that have effects but aren't as special as the chief chemical on their own. What your actual experience is depends on numerous other factors. I'm just saying if you could isolate these specific factors you would likely find more complex pharmacology due to more drugs is not usually better. That's all.
 
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If anything I think combinations are _more_ likely to result in a good experience, if aiming for a powerful experience - because all drugs, at the higher doses, start the levelling off of the curve of dose level vs. positive effects. The positive:negative ratio starts to decrease.
By combinations I mean activation of different receptors. I don't think it's possible to avoid the lowering if the P:N ratio of you're simply taking two drugs that have the same receptor targets (but, say, you _could_ take a 5-HT2A specific psychedelic along with a less specific one, if you liked a specific level of -2C activation, which you couldn't get from either compound on it's own!).
To avoid the P:N decrease I think you need to approach the problem from different receptor targets - my favourite combination far and away would be MDMA + LSD + GHB + Ketamine + Nitrous Oxide. You get all the serotonergic, dopaminergic and norepherinergic component from the MDMA, the 5-HT2A activation from the LSD (and a fair bit of dopaminergic behavior too which i believe what makes the synergy of MDMA + LSD so fantastic), the GABA activity of the GHB which causes further dopaminergic activation, and then the NMDA activity from the Ketamine and Nitrous.

Combinations where you use a little bit of each thing to achieve a synergy are far better than mega-doses of any one thing. But you have to treat them with caution. Taking whole doses of each thing is not recommended. The idea is to introduce a "fraction" of the total effects desired with each bit, and by doing so you end up with a whole greater than the sum of their parts (synergy).
(IMO)
 
Yes, I agree about combinations of drugs that work on different receptor types and affect different types of symptoms through different routes. However, in natural plant sources you're likely to come across a spectrum of chemicals that all belong to the same chemical class and may interfere with the optimal action of the most desired chemical of that class, and maybe some others out of the class that have effects that are more likely to be neutrally or even negatively impactful than aggreeably synergistic--because plants don't care how well you trip. Unlike the synthetics you've mentioned you have no ability to discriminate which of those chemical you're ingesting or their ratio to one another in dosing. You're not likely to find a natural source that will give you the effects of an optimal balance of LSD, MDMA, GHB, ketamine, and nitrous. Ketamine and nitrous--there's a noticeable synergy for sure!
 
Ptah: Which one ;) ? There's been a few occurrences.
But, sure. I'll write one up for my last trip, which was VERY special - it wasn't quite the combination I mentioned earlier - it had the LSD swapped out for P.Cubensis, and the addition of some pFPP and cannabis honey oil. It was just indescribably awesome. Ever since that trip (4 weeks ago now), i've been getting mild nystagmus whenever I feel happy (which had been pretty much ALL of the time lately, as well), along with intense color brightening and and a feeling like my sense of self expands so that I feel like a part of everything at once, a feeling of transcendence. Beautiful :) .
Anyway, will provide link when done.
 
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