Dr Shrooms

One of the questions our team here receives more frequently than almost any other about the potential uses for magic mushrooms is: can they help me quit smoking? There has actually been quite a lot of research done around this subject, and although the results are still preliminary, and there’s a lot of additional supplemental research that needs to be done, the early results are quite promising. In the content of this post, we’re going to provide a little background context to smoking and nicotine addiction in United States, discuss the results of some of the most prominent studies that have been conducted on psilocybin and addiction, and conclude with our own recommendations as to how you might be able to use psilocybin to help you out in your own battle with addiction. Smoking in United States Why Is Smoking So Hard to Give Up? Well, I think we all more-or-less know why this is the case as well. Tobacco contains the chemical nicotine, which is a central nervous system stimulant that triggers the release of dopamine when it’s absorbed into the bloodstream. And nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet. “From a scientific standpoint, nicotine is just as hard, or harder, to quit than heroin … but people don’t recognize that,” says Dr. Neil Benowitz, a nicotine researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “Every drug of abuse, including nicotine, releases dopamine, which makes it pleasurable to use,” said Benowitz. “And when you stop smoking, you have a deficiency of dopamine release, which causes a state of dysphoria: you feel anxious or depressed.” Gary A. Giovino, a nicotine researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said as helpful as medication can be, people who really want to quit smoking also have to be willing to modify their lifestyle. “People need to focus on behavioral change … they need the right skills and knowledge and social support. They need a plan,” said Giovino, a professor and chair of his school’s Department of Community Health and Health Behavior, who quit smoking 40 years ago. Giovino said good nutrition may be an important factor in helping people quit. He hopes to launch a study that will look at whether there is a correlation between smokers’ vitamin D levels and their ability to stop smoking. He said he’d also like to see researchers explore whether plant-based diets, B vitamins and hydration impact nicotine addiction. Giovino advises people to tap into the “mind-body connection” and try yoga and deep breathing techniques to help them quit. “After a meal, instead of taking a long breath on a cigarette, (a smoker could) try taking a long, deep breath and exhale without the 7,000 chemicals,” he said. It’s also important for those who have decided to quit to prepare themselves for how difficult it will be, says Giovino. “There’s this real roller-coaster ride of not feeling well and being irritable and having cravings,” he said. “The first few days might be very intense, then it might level off and come back again. But the longer you’re off cigarettes, the more your brain goes through the process of neural adaptation, the more you recover. And eventually, the ride subsides.” And yet still, more than 80% of people who attempt to quit smoking will relapse. So where does psilocybin factor into all of this? Well, here’s where we come to the part of the article focusing on the new research emerging that indicates that psilocybin might be able to help many people in their efforts to quit. Psilocybin Therapy Helps Create a Lasting Change In 2016, a team of researchers led by Albert Garcia Romeau, PhD, published an article online in the United Statesn Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse which detailed the summaries of their findings using psilocybin-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy to help chronic smokers kick the habit. A grand total of 15 daily smokers participated in the experiment, which consisted of 2-3 sessions of psilocybin-assisted therapy. These participants were paired with trained therapists who used the time with their patients to create a “mystical” experience in which the patients were guided through a psilocybin-induced high with a focus on helping them abstain from smoking over the long term. Researchers were attempting to beat the average results that have been achieved in clinical studies not involving psilocybin. As of the time of the study, the most effective smoking cessation studies that had only shown about a 35% rate of success in graduates remaining abstinent after a period of six months. Romeau and co. were interested in seeing whether they could beat those numbers through psilocybin therapy, and the results were incredibly encouraging. Participants were relatively well educated, with all individuals reporting some college, and 11 (73.3%) having received at least a Bachelor’s degree. The sample was racially homogeneous, including 14 (93%) White participants and 1 (7%) Asian participant. This study was approved by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent. Participants underwent a 15-week smoking cessation treatment intervention, with moderate (20mg/70kg) and high (30mg/70kg) dose psilocybin sessions occurring in weeks 5, and 7 respectively, and an optional third high dose session in week 13. The intervention consisted of weekly meetings for 15 weeks and was delivered by a team of 2 to 3 facilitators. The Target-Quit Date (TQD) was set for week 5 of treatment, concurrent with the first psilocybin session. Afterward, study treatment facilitators met weekly with participants to discuss psilocybin session experiences, encourage and socially reinforce the use of CBT techniques, and provide support for smoking abstinence. Although definitive conclusions about the role of psilocybin in this study’s smoking cessation outcomes cannot be drawn due to the open-label design and lack of control group, the mystical-type qualities of psilocybin sessions (measured the same day), as well as their personal meaning, spiritual significance, and impact on well-being (measured 7 days after these experiences) are significantly correlated with measures of smoking cessation treatment outcomes at 6-month follow-up. Furthermore,

Psilocybin mushrooms, commonly known as magic mushrooms, or more simply, shrooms, are considered a psychedelic. Psychedelics are commonly known as drugs with hallucinogenic effects, and while that is partially true, psychedelics are actually a very specific set of drugs that can bond to the 5-HT2a serotonin receptor. Shrooms contain a drug called psilocybin. When ingested, your body breaks that psilocybin down into its dephosphorylated cousin, psilocin. Psilocin is molecularly very close to serotonin – a naturally-occurring neurotransmitter in humans, other mammals, and even some worms and insects as well as plants and fungi. It’s so close to serotonin, in fact, that it’s capable of bonding with certain serotonin receptors, especially the 5-HT2a receptor. It’s not perfectly understood how exactly shrooms cause their psychedelic trips, it’s understood that it has to do with this interaction. How long do shrooms take to kick in? How long it will take for you to start feeling the effects of magic mushrooms depends primarily on how they are ingested. If the mushrooms are eaten as whole mushrooms, the onset can be anywhere from 20-40 minutes. If the mushrooms are ground into a fine powder and mixed with lemon juice or made into tea, the onset can be much faster – around 5-10 minutes. Gummies and chocolates tend to come on in about 15-30 minutes. How long does a shroom trip last? How long your magic mushroom trip is going to last will depend primarily on the following factors: And many more. In general, you should budget about 4-8 hours for the trip to completely end, including any sort of “afterglow.” Typically the peak will be around 1-2 hours in, and will fade from there – although it is common to experience “waves,” so if you think you feel yourself coming down, don’t be caught off guard if it was just a bump on the roller coaster! What’s it like coming down from shrooms? Coming down from shrooms by most accounts is considered to be a generally pleasant experience as compared with coming down off other drugs. Psilocybin is not inherently addictive, and it is quite rare for people to get addicted to mushrooms. There are a few reasons for this – but a big one is thought to be the fact that psilocybin doesn’t affect the body’s dopamine receptors. Most addictive substances somehow manipulate the body’s regulation of dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical that makes us feel motivated, accomplished, and productive while serotonin (which is what psilocin mimics) is what makes us feel calm, relaxed, and happy. In general, your “come down” from shrooms will be about the back half of your trip. So, a 6-hour trip you might spend 1 hour climbing, 2 hours speaking, and 3 hours “coming down.” It’s a very gentle kind of experience that tends to lend itself well to introspection and deep conversations. It’s a really important and wonderful part of the experience, because it gives you time to connect the wild thoughts and deep insights that came to you from the fungus with your conscious, sober mind. This is also a great time to journal about your experience, and record your thoughts. Just make sure not to jump behind the wheel of a car or anything, until you’re sure you’re firmly planted back in reality. How Long Do shrooms stay in your system? Shrooms are almost completely flushed from the body’s system within 24 hours. If you’re being tested for drugs, shrooms are completely undetectable after 48 hours in urine tests. Traces can last up to 90 days in hair follicles, but this form of testing is extremely unlikely. Unlike with LSD which can have a longer half-life, psilocybin and psilocin are both completely broken down by the body and expelled within a couple days. The chances of experiencing flashbacks, etc. as you might have heard of before is also quite small. How long are shrooms detectable in a drug test? Shrooms are detectable in your urine up to 48 hours after consumption – so if you’re planning a camping trip with some buddies, try not to have to piss in a cup on Monday morning. It is, however, quite likely that shrooms will go completely undetected, as the majority of commonly used urine tests for drug use do not actually search for psilocybin or psilocin. It’s worth mentioning that there are certain drug tests that are capable of detecting much more trace amounts of psilocybin in the body’s hair follicles, and those can stick around for 90 days. These are extremely uncommon in day-to-day use though – so if you’re not training for a boxing match, or applying to the CIA, you should be A-OK. Summary So, there are a number of factors but the Cole’s Notes: Shrooms will last in total anywhere from 4-8 hours. You’ll be at the “peak” of your high from about a quarter of the way through to halfway through, and start coming down from there. Shrooms will be completely undetectable in a urine test after 48 hours, and all traces will be gone from your body within 90 days.

For starters, assessing risk is tricky. A lot of what both scientists and the general public think they know about the potential risks of psychedelic use comes from the first wave of research and experimentation in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But this body of knowledge includes studies that wouldn’t meet today’s scientific standards; urban legends, and unsubstantiated news stories. Also, reporting and describing adverse events is often subjective to some extent, psychiatrist Rick Strassman noted in a 1984 paper. Some people consider the drug-induced state itself pathological, he wrote, while others believe even the worst reactions are part of “throwing off ‘straight’ society’s ‘shackles’ and in reaching a higher level of consciousness.” And many of the more recent studies on the potential harms of LSD and other hallucinogens draw on data from the 1950s and 60s. Those studies had a lot of methodological problems; many lack baseline data about their subjects, didn’t use placebos and/or failed to specify the source of the drug or the setting in which it was given. Also, though it’s tempting to generalize from case reports or news stories, Krebs and Johansen argue it’s important to take a “statistical perspective to risk” and they point out that nothing we do is without risk. Here are some of the specific reasons why they say case reports (and news reports, I’d argue) of mental distress/problems arising from psychedelic use should be taken with a major grain of salt. Several issues are important to keep in mind when considering case reports: 1) Adverse effects of psychedelics are usually short-lived; serious psychiatric symptoms following psychedelic are typically resolved within 24 hours or at least within a few days. 2) Both mental illness and psychedelic use are prevalent in the population, likely leading to many chance associations; for instance, about 3% of the general public will have a psychotic disorder sometime in their lives. 3) The typical onset period of both mental illness and psychedelic use occurs in late adolescence and early adulthood, again leading to mistaken causal inferences.4) Most case reports do not rule out preexisting psychiatric difficulties, life stresses, or use of other drugs. Many psychiatric disorders are believed to be heavily influenced by genetics and earlier experiences, even if symptoms are often first triggered by a stressful event. Note, however, that people with first-episode psychosis often have no apparent family or personal history of mental illness, whether or not if they have previously used psychedelics. 5) Because of the subjective effects of psychedelics, some people attribute psychiatric symptoms to the use of psychedelics even if the symptoms started months or years later.6) Some health professionals may have a biased view since they meet people with mental health problems and have little or no contact with the majority of psychedelic users. 7) Caution should be used when generalizing from LSD to other psychedelics because of emerging evidence of unique effects of LSD. 8) Case reports of mental health problems following psychedelics are often comparable to case reports of mental health problems linked to intensive meditation, visiting holy sites or viewing beautiful artwork and sublime natural scenes. To complicate things further: People may think they’ve taken LSD when they’ve really taken something else. For example, a West Virginia man was charged with murdering his wife in 2013. He and his wife took what they thought was LSD and the wife started having convulsions and died. There were a number of media reports blaming her death on LSD, but it later came out that the couple had unwittingly taken a synthetic hallucinogen 25b-NBOMe, which isn’t illegal in West Virginia. The husband then pled guilty to a lesser charge: involuntary manslaughter. I also found a case report about an 18-year-old man who called 911 saying he’d tried to kill himself after taking two hits of acid. He’d actually taken NBOMe, as well, which seems to be more dangerous and potent than LSD. General safety information In Drugs – Without the Hot Air, David Nutt calls psychedelics “among the safest drugs we know of”. He and a team of experts in addiction, drug policy, psychology, and other fields ranked 20 drugs on their harmfulness, using criteria ranging from drug-related mortality (death by overdose) to environmental damage. Overall, psilocybin mushrooms were ranked as the least harmful drug, followed by LSD and the addiction drug buprenorphine, which had the same score. Alcohol was ranked most harmful (more than ten times as harmful as mushrooms or LSD), followed by heroin, then crack. Referring to mushrooms and LSD, Nutt writes: “It’s virtually impossible to die from an overdose of them; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they are anti-addictive, as they cause a sudden tolerance which means that if you immediately take another dose it will probably have very little effect.” Matthias Liechti recently published a paper in Nature that reviews all of the clinical research on LSD that’s been done in the past 25 years. In these controlled settings, subjects’ experience of LSD was “predominately positive”, he writes, and no severe adverse reactions to LSD were reported. Hardly Any Emergency Room visits LSD and psilocybin accounted for just 0.005% of US emergency room visits, according to federal statistics published in 2013. There were an estimated 4,819 emergency department visits related to LSD use in 2011, according to the most recent federal data available. Another 8,043 ER visits that year were attributed to “miscellaneous hallucinogens”. Note that the substance use in both cases was self-reported, not toxicologically confirmed. For comparison: Drug Estimated number of ER visits in 2011 LSD 4,819 Misc. hallucinogens 8,043 Heroin 258,482 Marijuana 455,668 PCP 75,538 Toxicity and Overdose In their 2008 guidelines for the safe administration of high doses of LSD and psilocybin in a clinical settings, Matthew Johnson, Bill Richards, and Roland Griffiths write that hallucinogens aren’t considered addictive and they don’t appear to cause organ damage or neurotoxicity. They can cause side effects like dizziness, blurred vision, weakness, and tremors, while they are active. The authors also note that hallucinogens can raise the pulse and blood pressure, but they say none of

So, if you’ve ever done magic mushrooms, it’s extremely likely that you’ve experienced the nausea that is widely reported as one of the most common unpleasant side effects of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms. Often, this is a mild nausea that starts to come on about 15-20 minutes after ingesting the mushrooms, before the psychoactive effects kick in – but sometimes, it resurfaces later in the experience. For most, it’s a nuisance that passes relatively quickly, but sometimes can be quite severe and even result in vomiting. So, what is it exactly that causes nausea? Why does it happen? And maybe most importantly, what (if anything) can we do about it? All this and more, answered in this article! How Humans Digest Mushrooms Obviously, magic mushrooms are different than their non-psychoactive counterparts, but mycologically speaking, aside from the presence of the psychoactive compounds psilocybin and psilocin, the human body digest magic mushrooms in much the same way as it digests normal mushrooms – so looking at what we know about how mushrooms are digested might offer the first clues. Paul Stamets is the author of Psilocybin Mushrooms in the World, a leading mycologist, and psychonaut who has been at the forefront of helping to classify and organize human knowledge around magic mushrooms for some time. He explained that, outside of instances where people are looking to eat mushrooms for their psychoactive potential, we should almost never be eating mushrooms raw. “Raw mushrooms are largely indigestible because of their tough cell walls, mainly composed of chitin. Raw mushrooms and raw mycelium may pose health hazards from harmful pathogens and heat-sensitive toxins—potentially causing red blood cell damage, gastrointestinal irritation, and allergic reactions, such as skin rashes.” – Dr. Paul Samets Another mushroom expert, Dr. Andrew Weil, in an article on his website, noted that “mushrooms have very tough cell walls and are essentially indigestible if you don’t cook them. Thoroughly heating them releases the nutrients they contain, including protein, B vitamins, and minerals, as well as a wide range of novel compounds not found in other foods.” He goes on to explain that not only is the chitin material that composes the cell walls indigestible, but it’s possible for it to cause inflammatory and immune responses in the process of being broken down. Chitin doesn’t occur naturally in the human body, but we do produce an enzyme called chitinase – this enzyme breaks up the chitin in our system, and the smaller molecules that occur as a result of this breaking down can potentially cause these inflammatory responses. So, when it comes to mushrooms that are being used for culinary purposes, on all fronts it seems like the best bet is to simply prepare them beforehand by cooking them in any number of different ways. However, cooking shrooms is not necessarily the best option when we’re talking about magic mushrooms. This is because heating them can destroy the psychedelic compounds; this is why magic mushrooms are traditionally eaten raw, or, most commonly, dried. It’s entirely possible that the nausea experienced from eating magic mushrooms is simply related to eating raw chitin, but there are some other ideas that have surfaced related to the different array of chemicals that can be found in magic mushrooms. The Other Chemicals in Magic Mushrooms So, it’s well-known (and we’ve even mentioned earlier in this article) that psilocybin and pislocin are the two main compounds found in magic mushrooms that give them their psychedelic properties. There are a number of these compounds, but the most prevalent are baeocystin, norbaocystin, norpsilocin, aeruginascin and phenethylamine. Each of these compounds are similar to psilocybin, varying primarily in the different methyl groups on their amines. We do have records of studies in which people have taken pure, synthetic psilocybin and reported nausea as a side effect. These people had never taken mushrooms before and were not told beforehand to expect nausea as a side-effect, so it’s highly unlikely that this was a placebo effect. So, contrasting what we just read in the preceding section, there may be something specific about the psilocybin compound itself that causes nausea, even when isolated from the other compounds found in the mushroom. We also know that the human body process psilocybin into psilocin in the process of digestion, and so it might be the psilocin being formed, or a side-effect of the processing that causes these issues Of all the compounds we listed, phenylethylamine is the most distinct. Phenethylamine is a central nervous system stimulant and neurotransmitter that has potential hallucinogenic effects in humans. Amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA are all examples of phenethylamines that enjoy widespread use in modern society for recreational, medicinal, and therapeutic effects. It’s also widely noted that these substances can cause side effects such as raising heart rate, increasing blood pressure, and inducing – you guess it – nausea. However, Alexander Shulgin (author of the famous books, Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved,) believes it is unlikely that phenethylamines in mushrooms are responsible for these effects. According the Shulgin, phenethylamines by themselves are “rapidly and completely destroyed” when ingested by humans, and that it’s only in the presence of a specific set of other molecules that phenethylamines will remain intact long enough for their psychopharmacological effects to be felt – and that these molecules are not present in psilocybin mushrooms. The Role of Beta-Glucan So, we’ve isolated the potentially nauseating components of magic mushrooms to: the chitin in the cell walls, and the psilocybin itself. Obviously, we don’t want want to do anything that would eliminate psilocybin from the mushrooms, as that would defeat the entire purpose – but can something be done about the chitin? Well, in order to understand that, we first need to understand what’s actually happening when it’s being broken down in the stomach. Biologist Ian Bollinger says that even though no one has pinned down exactly what it is that’s causing the nausea, there’s strong evidence that points to a substance called beta-glucan. Beta-glucan is a type of sugar that’s commonly found in oats,