After washing with acetone, the taste is much milder. SWIM adds a little vanilla and peppermint to mask the taste. The peppermint also helps mask the smell of the tea. These are somewhat effective, but he’s still searching for better ways to mask the taste.

SWIM upped the dose to 12 grams, and the effect was a little stronger. No nausea, no sedation, just mescaline-like effects, with mild LSD-like visuals. Again, coffee goes really well with it and potentiates the effects just like it does with mescaline.

He’s nervous about jumping into a high dose all of a sudden so he’s slowly incrementing the doses.

The tests will continue with acetone washed root, each time using a larger dose until either very solid psychedelic effects are felt or unpleasant side effects show themselves.

So far the psychedelic effects are there for sure, but very mild.

Once SWIM finds the maximum comfortable dose, he’s going to start experimenting more with combinations.

Is SWIY still going to try a limonene extract sometime soon, or after figuring out his dosages with the acetone extracts?

He's currently working with sassafras, and getting some interesting results he never got before.

He'll get back to this subject and try the d-limonene wash on calamus and a few other ideas he has, probably in a few weeks.

Anyone want to comment on similarities to the effects reported in the TMA-2 PIHKAL entry?

TMA-2 has a big mix of trip reports in Tihkal. It’s hard to really get an idea of what TMA-2 is. Shulgin has a nasty habit of giving trip reports that cover a wide range of effects rather than the typical effects of a substance. He says he does this on purpose. I don’t like it. If he’s going to do that, he should state which trip reports are more the norm, and which are unusual reactions, but he doesn’t do that. By reading the trip reports in there, I can’t get a grip on what TMA-2 is supposed to feel like. This is the typical problem with Shulgin’s work.

SWIM has no experience with TMA-2 or any other RC, except some unknown ones sold as LSD (which were likely to be DOI, DOC, etc.). He’s not even used XTC before. But another SWIM he knows has experience with XTC, and that SWIM says there are similarities with it when used as normal tea (not acetone washed).

From what I gather, TMA-2 is like mescaline, but more toxic, and less visual. But some say it’s like XTC or MDA. So it’s really hard to know what TMA-2 is without experiencing it.

The acetone extract was totally unlike mescaline. It was very sedating. It was almost like a midly psychedelic kava, with some visual effects, and lots of toxic effects. But after an acetone wash a cold water extract was like mescaline, but with mild LSD-style visuals. SWIM says it was very nice and wants to try a much higher dose at some point.

hey ron i think its worth mentioning, while i was surfing around trying to find more info on calamus, i came across a forum where the people were smoking/vaporizing calmus oil and were reporting psychoactive effects. they said the smoke was very harsh but quite active....

Kazoo, did they say if it was sedating? Did they mention getting any nausea from smoking it?

ron, its hard to tell what the effects were from what i could gather off the limited notes, it seems most reported a "rush" and stimulating and sedating effects simultaneously, and an enhancement of a priory ingested compound, but again its a bit hard to tell from the descriptions...

see for your self...

http://www.entheogen.com...e/index.php?t-18401.html

That link talks a lot about using calamus to potentiate other psychedelics. It seems it goes very well with MDMA, or at least that seems to be what they are hinting at.

One guy found smoking cinnamon with calamus potentiated it’s effects. That’s very interesting.

As with all of these, as Bufoman always points out, such effects could be nothing more than placebo. I know SWIM is sometimes a victim of placebo effects, so if an effect is extremely light, he’s not sure it’s real. But once effects like tingling and other bodily effects kick in, it’s no longer placebo for SWIM. While he can imagine very slight psychedelic effects that are purely placebo for him, bodily effects are never placebo.

Calamus itself is quite active and it’s effects are clearly not placebo. Cinnamon might potentiate it. It does contain some similar compounds. Cinnamolaurine has the structure of a psychedelic and is present in both cinnamon and sassafras, so maybe it’s potentiating the effects of calamus? It’s possible. Who knows. The potentiation could just be placebo.

This is an interesting quote from that thread Kazoo...

In the name of science and curiosity, some sp. resin was smoked, a smallish piece was maybe half a pencil eraser's worth sandwiched between shredded Mullen leaf through a water bubbler, no notable effects, 5min later a whole pencil erasers worth was smoked again between Mullen leaf through bubbler, no noticeable effects above a placebo effect were noted. orally this amount would have given a nice(noticeable) abet low body high.

20min later 50mg of powdered Acorus calamus root(freshness not known, smells nice still) was smoked on top of Mullen leaf through water bubbler, very very harsh smoke, no notable effects above placebo were noted.

On its own shredded mullen leaf was smoked through water bubbler, no effects, slight light headiness comparable to combined smoked effects of both sp. resin/mullen and 50mg. powdered calmus root/mullen noted....

I'm not much interested in smoking it. I don't really like smoking anything. But what would the typical dose be if smoked?

what is this person talking about?

I’m not exactly sure.

I believe he's talking about mixing essential oils like asarone, eugenol, elemicin, safrole, myristicin, with active phenethylamines to potentiate their effects. Mescaline is a phenethylamine.

I have read elsewhere that sassafras potentiates san pedro quite a bit, or san pedro potentiates sassafras (depending on how you look at it).

But maybe he’s talking about mixing them with phenethylamine specifically to cause them to form phenethylamines in the body? There’s been some theories about that being possible, but nothing’s been proven. The idea was that by supplementing the body with phenethylamine, that the theoretical conversion from myristicin to MMDA in the body would be more likely to happen. And that this was the reason some people got good effects from nutmeg while others did not, it all had to do with dietary phenethylamine intake.

You can buy pure phenethylamine at many herb and nutrition stores. If the proposed theory works, you should be able to take a small dose of nutmeg, and a good dose of phenethylamine, and it should cause the body to make MMDA from the two.

I don’t know enough about the metabolism of these compounds to have any idea of how realistic or ridiculous that theory might be.

But mixing these oils with things like MDMA and mescaline has generally given very positive results where the compound’s potency was increased. This seems to be real. There are plenty of trip reports showing that happens. But that is drug "synergy" at play.

Ron, take advantage of your following and design some experiments that people could hypothetically conduct to get to the bottom of this. Lots of SWIMs would love to help.

thanks ron. I always thought MMDA looked interesting. Shulgin said it caused dream-states at the conscious level, that were easily remembered. and is a link between the subconscious and the conscious.

hola

may i ask whay you used calcium carbonate.

i would like to try this for madical purpes.
i very low dosige.

greedr panormaix

No special reason. Any dry powder could be used. It was just used as a carrier for the oil so that it could be easily weighed and then put into capsules. Calcium carbonate is good for that purpose, so is cellulose.

I don't think that taking combinations of the mentioned compounds causes the body to metabolize one of them into a psycho-active phen.
It seems more plausible to me that potentiation of psycho-active phens by these chemicals is caused by the fact that the body would probably want to get rid of the most toxic substances first. So if you take mescaline and safrole toghether and safrole is the most toxic of the two and broken down by some of the same mechanisms, if the body then prefers to break down the safrole first because of it's higher toxicity, maybe a lot of mescaline is left untouched for a long time by all the bodily mechanisms involved in getting rid of it.

Something like this happens when you drink alcohol and eat something sweet or fatty. People who often do this grow fat, because the body wants to get rid of the alcohol so much that it put's less effort in getting rid of the fat. That's the reason some drinkers develop a beerbelly.

In another thread it was bought up that possibly gamma-asarone is the main hallucinogenic component of calamus. I thought this information should go in this thread as it’s more appropriate here.

In calamus we have alpha-asarone, beta-asarone, and gamma-asarone. Typically beta-asarone is the main oil present at up to 75% of the essential oil. Gamma-asarone is present in very small amounts, like 3.20%, with alpha-asarone being about 1.32%. So gamma-asarone is a very minor player in the oil in most calamus. However, look at this:



So there do exist strains of Calamus in Czech that are high in gamma-asarone. You may want to look into those. Perhaps those are the ones that are the most hallucinogenic and least nauseating. I know for a fact some people get hallucinogenic effects from Calamus. It’s often said that only certain strains are active, and they must be fresh. So maybe gamma-asarone is the main hallucinogen, and it is not stable, so fresh material is needed.

Now if gamma-asarone absorbs well sublingually, and alpha-asarone and beta-asarone do not, then maybe that’s a good way to get the positive effects from it while avoiding the nauseating effects of ha-asarone and beta-asarone.

Definitely more work needs to be done on this.