Answers to questions you never knew you had about psychedelics

One day if this proves useful enough I might be bothered to use a proper format and turn it into an actual FAQ, but for now this will do. I hope this helps you out. I was motivated to write this while smoking Changa a few days ago.

If your question is missing, please ask it in the comments.

I’m an anarchist, in that I endorse the individual pursuit of radical independence from every societal structure, regardless of whether that’s a church, a government, a university, a worker’s council or a company. For this reason, I trust that you can do your own research.

The topics covered so far are as following:

1. Who the hell do you think you are to give advice on psychedelics?
2. Why do you insist on claiming psychedelics solve every single problem out there?
3. You’re basically arguing this is a free lunch. How is that possible, wouldn’t we have noticed by now, what is the downside that keeps this from being used on a wide scale to revolutionize society?
4. So you’re arguing for a conspiracy?
5. But then what about all those horror stories of these people who went insane and believe they’re a glass of orange juice or who stand on the street mumbling to themselves without any clothes on?
6. I want to take psychedelics but have zero psychedelic experience, where do I start?
7. I’m acutely suicidal/severely depressed, what do you recommend?
8. Don’t psychedelics make you stupid?
9. Haven’t psychedelics fucked you up, I hardly see you write anything interesting these days?
10. Anyway, what about mixing psychedelics with weed?
11. What are some thing I should NEVER mix under any circumstances?
12. They say that weed becomes different after psychedelics, is that true?
13. I want to smoke DMT, any tips?
14. What is the most underrated psychedelic?
15. What are psychedelic substances that mix well?
16. What are some obscure psychedelics we don’t know a lot about?
17. What if I have autism, do psychedelics help with that?
18. What if I have suffered from traumatic experiences?
19. I’m younger than eighteen and don’t feel well, can I take psychedelics?
20. Why do people smoke Salvia when it’s such a terrifying experience?
21. I only ever take Mushrooms/LSD, am I really missing out on something by not bothering with all those more obscure psychedelics?
22. What about deliriants like Brugmansia and Datura?
23. Can you give a short summary of which psychedelic fits which purpose best?

 

Who the hell do you think you are to give advice on psychedelics?

Phd’s don’t tend to take psychedelics. Psychedelics users don’t tend to spend their time reading scientific research, they spend their time dancing at Psytrance festivals.

I’ve taken mushrooms, mescaline cactuses, LSD, cannabis, Changa, Salvia Divinorum and Syrian rue. So far, I regret none of these experiences, psychedelics have helped me greatly.

Why do you insist on claiming psychedelics solve every single problem out there?

That’s not what I’m arguing. Psychedelics solve some mental problems. Other mental problems can be made more manageable through psychedelics. I wouldn’t argue that psychedelics are the only possible solution to mental health problems. The thing I’m willing to argue to you is that an abundance of scientific research suggests that psychedelics can help with a variety of mental health problems. For depression in particular, there isn’t really something out there we know of, that works better than Psilocybe mushrooms. You don’t need to believe me and my stories, you can look up the research for yourself.

You’re basically arguing this is a free lunch. How is that possible, wouldn’t we have noticed by now, what is the downside that keeps this from being used on a wide scale to revolutionize society?

Most psychedelics are known to us from indigenous non-Christian cultures that had their rituals looked at with severe distrust and hostility by the dominant culture for centuries. Then in the 60’s, countercultural movements that sought to radically change society embraced psychedelics. This led entrenched power structures (people who had an interest in maintaining the status quo) to suppress access to psychedelics. This thus prevented serious research into their effects for a long time. Renegade scientists not motivated by profit studied them, but pharmaceutical companies that have a stranglehold over the scientific community only profit from substances that can be patented. You can’t patent a mushroom that grows on cow shit. What you can patent is Prozac. You sometimes hear STEM nerds on Reddit claim “if alternative medicine worked, it would be called medicine”. In reality it’s more like this: “If alternative medicine was patentable, it would simply be called medicine”.

So you’re arguing for a conspiracy?

It’s not so much a conspiracy, as it is the fact that capitalism stimulates anti-social behavior in blind pursuit of profit that we end up interpreting as a conspiracy. The incentives of capitalism generate structural societal absurdities that appear conspiratorial to outsiders. There’s no drug company CEO in a smoke-filled room out there saying “that renegade psychologist out there needs to die in a car accident by next friday”. It’s simply hard to understand something when your salary depends on you not understanding it. What’s profitable are drugs that don’t solve problems but need to be administered regularly to keep the condition “manageable”. In the long run, that leads you to the situation the average American adult is in: Obese, diabetic, miserable, addicted to painkillers and dependent on a chemical cocktail to get through the day.

But fundamentally it doesn’t really matter why psychedelics were suppressed. What matters is that it works, in accordance to multiple lines of evidence. Take rats, make them depressed, give them psychedelics and they become happier again. Take neurons in a petri dish, give them psychedelics and they start making new connections again, whereas depression is a disease in which inflammation generally prevents neurons from making connections. Give patients psychedelics and they report feeling less depressed for months. If you understand how the brain works at a theoretical level, you would expect this to work. What we observe at an experimental level, is that it works. The most obvious conclusion here is the correct one: It works.

But then what about all those horror stories of these people who went insane and believe they’re a glass of orange juice or who stand on the street mumbling to themselves without any clothes on?

There are a few things you shouldn’t do:

-Don’t take an absurd dose of psychedelics. Besides being disrespectful to the organism itself, if the dose is too high the experience can be traumatic.

-They slightly raise your body temperature, so don’t take them in the middle of summer during a heatwave, it could get rather uncomfortable.

-Don’t mix psychedelics with other substances, unless you know what you’re doing. Especially don’t mix psychedelics with stimulants, that’s the worst possible thing you could do.

-Don’t take psychedelics on your own initiative if you have a history of predisposition to psychosis or schizophrenia.

-Don’t just take psychedelics in some third floor shitty apartment you’re renting in Amsterdam. Go out in nature and seek a place where you can be by yourself, or take them in some place where you feel really comfortable and secure (ie not your childhood bedroom where your mom can walk in at any random moment). When I lived with my parents, I would go out by myself in nature and take them in a secluded spot. Obviously I had to walk past boomers with dogs who noticed I was high as a kite and frowned at me to get to my secluded spot, but you can handle that if you then get to be by yourself for hours.

-Make sure you know that what you’re taking is the real deal instead of something entirely different marketed as classical psychedelics.

If you eliminate those cases, then you’re left with very few cases of negative outcomes that can be linked to psychedelics. There are studies showing decreased mental health problems in people who have taken psychedelics, it’s a common finding. I’m not saying there are zero cases of harm. I’m saying there are far more cases of harm from the conventional pharmaceutical arsenal, than from responsible use of psychedelics. I have personally known someone who was institutionalized, had his dose of antidepressants and other medication upped, then jumped in front of a train once they released him. That made it abundantly clear to me that I would personally never seek help from the normie medical system.

I want to take psychedelics but have zero psychedelic experience, where do I start?

Do some basic reading first. Then, buy mushrooms. Figure out what the dose is for a normal experience. Go to a place you enjoy and where you feel safe, where you won’t be disturbed. If possible, have a friend there to tripsit you. Bring some sugary food, that you can eat if you need a mood boost. You can also make some tea from herbs normally used to induce sleep. A tea with valerian, chamomille and lavender will reduce whatever fears you might experience. Divide your dose in half. Take half the dose, wait roughly an hour until you notice the first effects, see if you enjoy those effects. If you enjoy the effects, add the other half, otherwise, don’t add more.

I’m acutely suicidal/severely depressed, what do you recommend?

Generally speaking, these feelings are irrational. If negative emotions are severely strong however, suicide can seem like a rational response to feelings that are themselves irrational. I mean, if you’re a deformed quadruple amputee then yes, I can imagine that you’re done with life, but people in those situations actually seem to adjust to their plight. The thing I notice with most people I know who have committed suicide, is that they had a position in life that most people would consider enviable, in the sense that their life might not be perfect, but it’s nonetheless perfectly possible to make something good out of it, if only their mental shackles hadn’t kept them down. The real disease is that they can’t be content with the situation they’re in. The depressed mind looks at the world from the most negative perspective.

So my first advice would be to realize at a fundamental level that the desire to die you might experience, is a product of emotions that are irrational, the product of a diseased brain. That doesn’t make the feeling go away, but it helps you understand that you shouldn’t give in to the feeling. Generally speaking, any lifetime psychedelic experience reduces risk of suicidality by about sixty percent. The psychedelic that is most effective against severe depression and suicidality is the Psilocybe mushroom. The mushrooms are very forgiving the first time in your life that you take them. Find someone who is experienced with psychedelics and have them tripsit you.

Psychedelics generally don’t fundamentally solve the problem, but they give you a “honeymoon period” of a month or two, during which you can start addressing problems. Even in the period after those two months, the problem is less intense. I don’t claim psychedelics magically solve the problem on their own, but they’re the equivalent of pushing a car stuck in quicksand. During the honeymoon period you can focus on getting your shit together: Exercising, vitamin D, cannabidiol, N-acetylcysteine, vitamin B12, going out and talking to people, looking for a (better) job, cleaning your house, etcetera.

Don’t psychedelics make you stupid?

No you retard, untreated depression makes you stupid. A depressed brain is a brain that is literally decaying. “I know this guy who was very smart, then he started taking psychedelics and now he’s an idiot who still lives with his mom and works at a bowling alley and when you talk to him it always seems like he’s barely present”. Well gee dipshit, that’s what depression does too. You find yourself missing the energy to type a full sentence, to read a book, or to pursue your passions. You’re stuck in your own miserable thoughts, endlessly replaying scenarios that happened in the past. You know what Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have in common? LSD.

Haven’t psychedelics fucked you up, I hardly see you write anything interesting these days?

It’s called growing up. One of the things you notice as you grow older is how often you were wrong when you were young, so you start voicing your opinion less often. Another thing you learn is that some things might be true, but there’s no benefit in stating them out loud. If you look back at my writing you’ll notice it was very hit or miss anyway. I also have a full time job now, whereas I lived as a NEET in my early twenties. If anything, psychedelics helped me get my shit together. I have a laid back job, I live by myself and I have enough savings to buy a house (how I pulled that off is a story for another day). I’m less idealistic and more realistic these days. Realistic people don’t spend their days writing manifestos, you should consider yourself lucky I could even be bothered enough to publish this shit.

Anyway, what about mixing psychedelics with weed?

Weed and psychedelics tend to increase each others effects, so if you insist on mixing them, try a lower dose of both. An excessively high dose is a good recipe for a bad time. I would recommend against mixing them, unless you’re well experienced.

What are some thing I should NEVER mix under any circumstances?

Don’t mix psychedelics with stimulants. Never. Under no circumstances. I have personally never taken any stimulants, but cocaine or meth can trigger delusional symptoms. You don’t want to experience delusional symptoms on psychedelics. There are anecdotes of people who endanger or injure themselves on psychedelics. Often those people had preexisting mental problems, but in most other cases, they had mixed cocaine or meth with psychedelics.

They say that weed becomes different after psychedelics, is that true?

In my experience yes, it is true. If you smoke weed when you have recently taken psychedelics like mushrooms, the weed experience will share similarities to the mushroom experience. As an example, I would get visual hallucinations when I took weed in a period when I took mushrooms and cactuses quite regularly. Through my own conscious control, I could look at the wood pattern of my floor and witness beautiful scenery start to unfold. If you take weed after taking salvia a few times, the weed experience can feel like it has salvia influences, weed becomes a more dissociative experience.

For me, weed now simply feels like weed again, because I’ve spent a period of a few months now without any high dose psychedelic experiences, during which I did take cannabis once or twice a week, to help me exercise. If you want to understand how this happens, my guess is that it has to do with the fact that the psychedelic receptor (5ht2a) can form a heteromer with the cannabis receptor.

I want to smoke DMT, any tips?

Yes. I would recommend against smoking DMT, because there are better alternatives. The Amazonian tribes don’t use DMT on its own, they take a DMT containing plant and combine it with the Ayahuasca vine, to create the brew known as Ayahuasca. If you drink that you’ll start shitting and vomiting all over the place, so I understand if that doesn’t appeal to you.

There’s an alternative, known as Changa. Changa is essentially DMT combined with a MAO inhibitor, a smokeable form of Ayahuasca without the diarrhea and vomiting. You can produce your own Changa, but it’s also available for sale on the darkweb. With DMT, you need special equipment to vaporize it at the right temperature, to get a high enough dose to override your own MAO enzymes which break down DMT and related substances. If you inhale or ingest a MAO inhibitor, you need far less DMT and the experience lasts longer. With Changa, you can just use a regular lighter and a bong. Make sure the Changa is not directly exposed to the blue (high temperature) part of the flame, you gently want to heat the plant material, to vaporize the DMT. Use it within a few days of purchasing it, it starts rapidly losing its strength when you open the package.

Changa production is an art, a respectable profession for modern alchemists. Every craftsman has his own technique to combine different herbs in different amounts, depending on the type of experience you’re looking for. There are beginner blends with anxiety reducing herbs added to them, as well as advanced blends for people who have already explored the hyperspace realm. Smoking DMT is like strapping yourself onto a rocket, smoking changa is more like traveling on a spaceship. Most people who have tried both prefer changa over DMT, it’s the more sophisticated way of taking DMT. Personally I don’t take DMT, I take changa. If you enjoy Changa, please consider growing the plants yourself, as they are under threat.

You can consider the MAO inhibitor as the equivalent of a “tour guide”, while the DMT is the vehicle that takes you to the other realm. There are broadly speaking, three types of MAO inhibitors you can use in a Changa blend:

-Banisteriopsis Caapi, aka Ayahuasca. The most popular and well known of the guides. You could consider him the patron saint of the Amazon rainforest. He adds a “spirit quality” to the DMT experience. He is gentle but demanding, in my experience, in the sense that he expects your respect for the Amazon rainforest. Indigenous Amazonians tend to abstain from meat and dairy for days before having Ayahuasca.

-Passionflower. An exotic choice for a guide, but it can work. You need a pretty strong extract to notice this one. It’s a MAO inhibitor that additionally has sedative and anxiety reducing effects.

-Syrian rue. In contrast to the others, Syrian rue is cheap and abundant. It’s a MAO inhibitor that grows wild in the desert. Syrian rue is not very gentle, because one of its ingredients is Harmane. Most MAO inhibitors work through a class of substances known as Harmalas. In (apparent) contrast to Master Caapi, the Rue contains harmane, an inverse agonist of the benzodiazepine site of the GABA-A receptor. What this means is that it basically has the opposite effects of Benzo’s. Instead of calming you down, it can make you anxious. In my experience, Syrian Rue is a guide who is less forgiving and more anxiety inducing than Master caapi.

Theoretically, you could use more exotic herbs as your guide. Theoretically it should be possible to use Curcuma for example, but I haven’t heard of anyone who tried it. There are however other herbs that are commonly added. Many people use anxiety reducing herbs, a few brave venturers want to explore darker or surreal realms and add Brugmansia (not recommended) or Salvia Divinorum.

What is the most underrated psychedelic?

It’s my dear friend, Mescaline. Mescaline is the main natural 5ht2a agonist that is not a tryptamine. It’s more similar to phenethylamine instead. Mescaline is found in cactuses. You can take Peyote, which is typically thought of as having clairvoyent properties. Native Americans took it to gain knowledge through supernatural means. However, most modern users prefer San Pedro and its close relatives over Peyote. San Pedro is a good psychedelic for beginners, who have had Mushrooms and want to try something new.

To avoid vomiting, it’s important to prepare your stomach for the cactus. The way to do that is by drinking strong ginger tea. Then, to numb your stomach, you should chew on mint. By using this method, I have never vomited from mescaline cactuses. I call mescaline the extraverted psychedelic. You want to be in nature and you want to socialize with friends. Mescaline has mild stimulating properties and mild entactogenic properties. That’s a complicated way of saying it feels a bit like a mix of LSD and MDMA.

The mushrooms are very philosophical in nature, but Mescaline just wants to tell you that life is in its essence an interesting, beautiful and enjoyable experience. I think this is useful to comprehend: The different psychedelic substances have different philosophical perspectives on life.

What are psychedelic substances that mix well?

Mescaline cactuses with mushrooms. It produces a state of sheer delight, the closest thing I have experienced to bliss in this world (not counting that time I managed to convince a girlfriend to sit on my face). Obviously you need to halve the dose of both. You take the cactus first, then an hour or two later, you take the mushrooms. Happy travels!

What are some obscure psychedelics we don’t know a lot about?

DMT is a tryptamine, closely related to Psilocin, the psychedelic found in magic mushrooms. However, there’s a substance similar to DMT, 5-MEO-DMT. 5-MEO DMT is subtly different from regular N-N-DMT, in that it has a methoxy group added to it. What we known about 5-MEO-DMT is that whereas regular DMT is a very visual experience through which you visit alternative realms, 5-MEO-DMT seems to somewhat reliably trigger the “ego death” experience that makes psychedelics so therapeutic for mental health purposes. 5-MEO-DMT is rather harsh however, compared to the other psychedelics out there. In contrast to other psychedelics, there is a risk of death involved with 5-MEO-DMT, if you take an extremely high dose. Normally, people don’t take isolated 5-MEO-DMT, they take 5-MEO-DMT together with bufotenin, which is found in psychedelic toads. Yes, if boomers still want to win the war against drugs, they will have to hunt down toads. On the darkweb, the toad excretion is sold, by hippies who want to be good friends with anyone who buys the toad excretion from them. If you happen to feel suicidal and find that mushrooms don’t solve it, do me a favor and try toad excretion before pressing exit. You can PM me on Reddit if you need help (/u/mushroomsarefriends).

There are also Kappa opioid agonists. This is the weirdest class of psychedelics out there, I have written a bit about them here. We really don’t know a lot about them. The main Kappa opioid agonist we know of is Salvia. There is also Iboga, but Iboga hits all sorts of receptors.

What if I have autism, do psychedelics help with that?

MDMA in combination with psychotherapy is successfully used to treat social anxiety in autistic adults. It becomes much easier to empathize with other people on MDMA. Overall my advice to people with autism would have to be to seek out other people on the spectrum. It’s been shown that people with autism communicate much easier with others with autism. It’s essentially like people with high-functioning autism and normies speak different languages. Other than MDMA, there’s reason to believe other psychedelics may help with the social impairment associated with high-functioning autism too. The receptor that psychedelics use for their effects is reduced in parts of the brain in people with Asperger’s. Other than that, cannabinoids, particularly CBD, are known to help people with autism.

What if I have suffered from traumatic experiences?

MDMA is used in clinical trials for PTSD, but personally, I think Ayahuasca is the better candidate here. It’s thought that Ayahuasca heals traumatic memories through a Sigma 1 receptor mediated epigenetic-mnemonic process. Changa is essentially a smokeable form of Ayahuasca, which deserves consideration too.

I’m younger than eighteen and don’t feel well, can I take psychedelics?

I’m supposed to act like a responsible adult now by saying “NO DON’T DO THAT TALK TO A SCHOOL COUNSELOR WHO WILL MAKE YOU WRITE A SUICIDE CONTRACT TO ABSOLVE THE SCHOOL FROM BLAME WHEN YOU END UP KILLING YOURSELF” right now. But I plan on being honest to you. We don’t have a lot of evidence on what effects psychedelics have in children, but what little evidence we have so far suggests they’re safe. A study was done in adolescents who regularly participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies. The studies suggest their mental health was better than that of a comparison group who didn’t participate. What we know is that untreated depression in children will damage their growing brains. Dutch teenagers are different from most teenagers, in that they have relatively easy access to magic mushrooms. I have a friend who took them as a teenager, he’s probably the mentally healthiest person I know.

Why do people smoke Salvia when it’s such a terrifying experience?

The reason it’s terrifying is because people smoke it in concentrated extracts. They basically take an overdose. The reason those extracts are sold however is because people’s susceptibility to the effects seems to vary widely, some people need stronger extracts than other. The ideal way to take Salvia is to gather a bunch of fresh leaves and to chew them one by one, which leads you to gradually experience an increasingly strong psychedelic effect. A second best option is to make a tea from dried leaves and to chew those rehydrated leaves in a dark room. A dark quiet room really helps experience the effects. Essentially, Salvia is a dissociative psychedelic. Chewing Salvia is a pleasant experience, but what sets it apart is that the psychedelic experience is surreal and extremely weird. I’m not just referring here to turning into objects. The visual effects you will see from Salvia are extremely weird and cartoonish, you tend to see certain archetypal visions that seem to have a fundamental message to share about the nature of the reality we inhabit.

I only ever take Mushrooms/LSD, am I really missing out on something by not bothering with all those more obscure psychedelics?

The Earth is four billion years old. The darknet markets are less than ten years old. You and me are some of the few people in human history with the ability to expose our brains to just about every psychedelic out there on this planet, but you’re telling me that you’re simply going to skip that opportunity. Bitcoin consumes half a percent of the world’s electricity, if people are not even going to bother using it to buy Changa then I give up on this species.

Now a more serious answer. I think you’re kind of missing out yes. I think you should at least give Changa/Ayahuasca and Mescaline a chance. If you truly want to comprehend how weird the totality is, you need to try Salvia too. I can’t do proper justice to Salvia. My personal suspicion is that the Aztecs had a culture that was strongly influenced by the widescale consumption of Salvia Divinorum.

What about deliriants like Brugmansia and Datura?

Yeah, they’re the most frightening Lovecraftian thing out there. Salvia is scary, in the sense that your surreal tropigoth (that’s a real thing, Google it) girlfriend can unnerve you. But Brugmansia and Datura and the other anticholinergic deliriants transport you to the realm of the dead. From what I have read on Erowid, at sufficiently high doses of Datura you will encounter a woman with a pale white face and her black dog. People who meet this woman seem unwilling to publicly share the conversation they have with her.

Sorry I’m making it sound far too exciting. I need to point out that Datura is extremely uncomfortable. Normal psychedelics, especially mescaline, make your body feel more comfortable. Datura does the opposite. You find yourself suffering extreme thirst and you become unable to urinate, although the urge to urinate doesn’t go away. It can damage your brain for the rest of your life, Datura can leave you mentally ill forever. It can also kill you. I don’t think you want to have conversations with people who suddenly disappear. I don’t think you want to have visions of your friends committing suicide or having blood dripping from their eyes. I don’t think you want to experience non-existent spiders crawling over your skin. Datura is hellish. There’s no excuse, I’ve never encountered anyone who said “yeah Datura is fun if you do it the right way”.

Don’t do it.

Can you give a short summary of which psychedelic fits which purpose best?

Sure.

Psilocybe mushrooms. This is the therapeutic psychedelic. Taking mushrooms is a therapeutic experience. You look back at your own mistakes, you reexamine the struggles you currently face from a different angle. It’s like lying down on a therapist’s couch, but you’re your own therapist. There’s also of course a strong mystical aspect to the mushroom, but in recent experiences the mystical aspect has somewhat reduced for me personally.

Mescaline cactuses. This is the fun and energetic social psychedelic. Take the mescaline cactus out to nature on a sunny day and he’s your best friend, who reminds you that life in its essence is fun. Lie down on your couch and your body feels extremely comfortable. His visuals are more simplistic and two dimensional.

DMT/Changa/Ayahuasca. Fuck it, I’ll say it. This is basically a communication medium, that entities separated from each other by time and space use to communicate with each other in a realm characterized by non-euclidian hyperbolic geometry. DMT on its own is not particularly easy to use, you combine it with a MAO inhibitor to generate a more meaningful experience. DMT is a very visual experience, in fact, it is the most visual of all psychedelics out there.

Salvia. This is the weird psychedelic. Words can’t do justice to how weird this is. If you want to take an attempt to understand the nature of reality, you need to try Salvia, but be warned that it’s an extreme struggle to make any sort of sense of it. It seems Salvia wants to convey a message, but she does so by revealing visual archetypes. In small to moderate doses Salvia is generally pleasant, but if you go deep enough to gain a lot of insight into the nature of reality, you might not be happy about what you discover.

Cannabis. I think there’s an argument to be made that Cannabis is what made us civilized. Unfortunately people tend to lose access to the cannabis plant, because central governments end up suppressing the plant in favor of grains. This then leads to a more authoritarian and miserable society. Cannabis is a mild psychedelic that’s mostly meant for an enjoyable experience.

LSD. LSD is an odd one on this list, in the sense that it’s synthetic. LSD is somewhat unique among the psychedelics in the sense that it generates an experience that you yourself have strong control over. It allows you to explore your own peculiar thought patterns and see where they take you. For this reason, it’s a very useful psychedelic for rational intelligent people who are seeking creative solutions to specific problems they’re confronting. For me personally, I find that compared to the other psychedelics, LSD can give me somewhat delusional (but benign) thoughts.

MDMA. MDMA is generally thought of as a party drug more than a psychedelic. I understand that it doesn’t appeal to some people, but it’s worth trying in a good setting, because it makes it very easy to make social connections with other people.

5-MEO-DMT. This is a peculiar one. It’s similar to DMT, but less visual and tends to lead people to directly experience the ego death phenomenon that occurs with high doses of magic mushrooms. It may be uniquely potent as an anti-depressant, but it is capable of being deadly in excessively high doses, which the other psychedelics do not seem to be. I think it’s probably best to take 5-MEO-DMT in its naturally occurring state, as part of Colorado river toad venom together with bufotenine.

Iboga. This is another peculiar one, originating from Africa. It’s mainly used in an effort to help cure people suffering severe opioid addiction. It’s a very harsh experience and it seems you have about a 1% chance of not surviving it, but from a chemical perspective it’s a very interesting critter.

There are numerous other psychedelics out there, particularly a wide variety of synthetic derivatives of mescaline discovered by Shulgin, but to me personally these don’t really appeal, I struggle to see their added value. I think I’ve covered the main ones here that I think are worth looking into.