Swim had a wonderful experience this morning. His spice seemed to have a pinch of jungle about it and he swears that he could see and feel that the life energy of the Mimosa Hostilis plant was being delivered to him through the extraction process....that DMT is THE Life Force that makes us the animate creatures that we are vs rocks and chemicals.
So....we know that we can draw this life chemical from plants, but has anyone tried drawing it from animals????? Please don't get too judgemental, I'm not talking about from cats or dogs. But how about from a pile of higher level sealife, like crabs, seaworms, small fish, or form any of the myriad of living objects in the sea or even on land. Just "MAYBE" one could get a catch of sealife, dry it and powder it, and pull spice from it.
Am I thinking outside the box or out of my ass?

What do you think? Could this concept open a whole new source of materials to test for DMT? Or has this been tried before?

I bet there's DMT all over the ocean! Beware, you don't want to pull any toxins or unknown compounds!

Mass spec the world!

As one who lives near the ocean and goes boating in the summer a lot, I think my Swim might be so inclined to do some collecting and testing this summer.
I would hate to waste a lot of time if this has all been tried before, so if anyone knows of others who have tested extractions from various forms of sea life /sea plants..or for that matter from higher organisms like fish, bugs, worms, etc... please let me know.

Aside from our anthropocentric conceptualizations, what differentiates a kitty or puppy from a "higher level sealife"? What gives us the right to harvest any animal solely for their neurotransmitters? I'm not judging you, just trying to point out some inconsistencies in what you posted. There IS a difference between caring about the well-being of life, and pretending to care about life/caring solely about life that seems cute, cuddly, or otherwise love-able. This is one of my qualms with many animal-rights activists I've encountered on campus who would be more appropriately entitled "cute and cuddly animal" rights activists.

In the case of frogs or other animals that may have secretions containing these alkaloids, I think that would be interesting to study as it would not require killing the animals to get to the desired chemicals, but again, I would ask how ethical this is as well. It's probably more ethical than outright killing said animals, but is a life led in captivity for the sole purpose of providing alkaloids for your captor the kind of life you would wish to inflict on another living being?

Honestly, both of these thoughts strike chords that resound with the practices of the "Skexies" from The Dark Crystal. I dunno how many people saw this classic Jim Henson movie from back in the day, but the Skexies use the Dark Crystal to suck the life essence out of "lesser" beings and then drink their life force to sustain their own power. I'm really trying not to judge, these are just the parallels that come to mind whilst pondering your question.

If the spice has taught me anything, it is that life (and love) is sacred. To harvest animals for their endogenous dmt (if it's indeed there) seems antithetical to me, but that's just my take on it.

peace
SB

oh man it took me a while to comprehend this post for some reason...apologies for misinterpretation...

as long as there are plant sources I don't feel the need to go out and fish for DMT.

I do fish for food, however.

and DMT is a kind of soul food.

I'd fish for it if that was my only option. Giving thanks for the life that provided the spice.

I understand and appreciate your thoughts on this, but one could say the same about plants. How about insects? Is that ok? How about worms?
How about jellyfish? How about fish? After all we harvest and eat fish all the time.
As one who doesn't even like to fish for sport because he hates to see the fish die, I appreciate your opinion, yet on the other hand I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about grinding up some sea worms in a blender.....although yuck....

I was really hoping that this wouldn't go all moral and would be more technical/experimental.
Ok, so what if we eat the fish and try grinding the heads and tails....would that be ok? ( Not that I care, but just to get past the morality issue and to the possibilites of technical success.)
Maybe by keeping open to this suggestion we may find that certain fish ( or other sorts of sealife be it seaweed, jellyfish, etc...) contain very high levels of DMT....just who knows if it hasn't been tried?

Ichthyoallyeinotoxism: Hallucinogenic Fish

There's also a thread around here about hallucinogenic fish.

Hmmmm the first part of your statement worries me deeply. There is a reason that ethics boards oversee science and medical facilities. This is because before anything goes technical/experimental it must be ethical/moral. I know, I know, it's a lot to ask for . Who wouldn't want the impunity that an individual like Dr. Mengele had in the Third Reich under Hitler? I mean you could test any hypothesis you had and not have to worry about those awful restrictions ethics and morals so frequently impose upon our research. I really don't like that you feel it's acceptable to sidestep morality and jump straight into scientific design, it flies in the face of what I would consider to be legitimate research protocols.

As to the second part of your post, sure, that would be fine, imo. If you notice in my earlier post I specified that I did not support animals being used solely for their endogenous alkaloids. I think i reiterated that several times and this is exactly what I was getting at. It may seem laughable or inconsequential to you, but this is very similar to say Indians and Buffalo. When you have to use every part of the animal (as dictated by your culture) you tend not to go crazy hunting for pelts and discarding all the meat (like numerous pioneers did). So yea, if you're using the whole animal (or all the usable parts), I see no issue with making use of any psychotropic chemicals it has inside of it.

Cool , thanks for the info. Thats more of a toxicology issue though I think. But what I'm really asking about is has testing for DMT content been done on varieties of sealife?? be it sea plants or lower sea animals? Does anyone else see the possibilities of what I'm suggesting, like if some form of seaweed or sea star or something had really high contents?
There could be some really good sources of DMT out there in the ocean that have not yet been explored... thats all I'm saying.

BTW, I'm an avid scuba diver so thats why I probably think of the things I see in the ocean as possible untested sources. I'm also a very eco-concious diver, so I'm not advocating being a Dr. Mengle....so please....

From a purely technical standpoint, it would be extremely difficult to extract just DMT from animal tissue of any sort. Plants like Mimosa work well because they have few compounds other than DMT and related alkaloids that are soluble in NPS when put in basic solution, but insoluble in acidic solution. Animal tissue would presumably have many other such compounds.

I never said you were advocating being dr mengele. So please...what? That remark may have been hyperbolic, but you completely ignored everything I posted (or at least chose to respond only to the least relevant section). I was very clear about the issue I saw with your desire to surpass ethics and go straight to experiments. I am interested in whether these are viable sources as well, but feel as with any scientific undertaking, there need to be clear guidelines (this is one reason ethics boards are used in clinical/experimental facilities) and understanding of what those guidelines are and why they are in place.

Also given Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha's above post, I think it's valid to establish clear experimental protocols before animals are killed for compounds that turn out to be impossible to extract due to properties of animal tissues. This is another issue that should be covered in the ethical/moral discussion that should precede an undertaking of such nature.

Snozzle,
I wasn't trying to diminish your response in particular, I just mentioned that as a direction I didn't want this thread to go....and as for the please, what I meant was please keep this thread on topic. Thats why I didn't respond to your thread...not that I might not like to talk about ethics, but not in this thread. We could start an ethics thread if you like. Already the thread is fairly ruined by discussion of ethics while I was trying to keep it technical as to simply what, if any, sealife, plant or animal, might yield DMT.
Example...what if someone found out that lobster shells or certain seashells contain DMT. You could eat the lobster and then use the shell? That would be really cool, and who knows if there is DMT in lobster shells if nobody has tried it before. ( as unlikely as that may be I'll readily admit... ) thats the kind of thing I'm talking about perhaps researching if nobody has ever done it before.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack your thread. I don't see ethics as separate from this, but I am only me, and thus limited by my viewpoint. I will quietly watch the experimental discussion unfold. As I said, I AM interested in this, I just have different sentiments than you regarding where ethics should be applied in the experimental design process. I'm sorry, I have no intention of derailing this thread and look forward to seeing the direction it takes.

humble apologies
SB

I heard about this ages ago: Two 90 year old dudes starting tripping their tits off after eating some type of fish in a restaurant in France. Crazy story. They claim the heads might have had DMT inside them or some other psychoactive substance. Here's an article about it, as well as someone's views on some mistakes made in it. Check it out!

http://bigmknows.postero...ic-fish-an-investigation

Peas

DK

Shit! Sorry amor_fati... didn't notice you already put a similar link up dealing with the same topic. My bad!

Its a legit concern. No apologies needed. I agree to share your concerns about ethics. Like I said, I don't even go fishing cause I hate to see things die.

Its a valid question..and a hard one to answer either way really..

A subject like this will always call ethics into question..there is no way around that..because you are talking about ending the life of another organism, simple as that. So, is it worth it?..do your ethics morally support the ending of that life?

Is it ethical to kill another organism like a fish or crab in order to extract DMT, when other sustainable sources are available, like mimosa, chaliponga, chacruna, phalaris etc?..all these plants can be harvested without killing the actauly plant itself..to us in the west these plants are available..so that is the first thing you must concider..

That being said..there is also much to say in relation to local wildcrafting..using plants etc from your local area..and hunting a fishing sustainably. Now if you hunt some animal to feed your family, I would say that that can be eithically argued in favor of (to a degree, there are still valid points against it in modern society as well)..if you then extract DMT from the remains of the animal and eat the meat, you could argue that ethics morally suports that becasue you are simply respectingthe animal and using all of it instead of wasting anything.

Now if you are isolated, a native or something, without access or knowledge of the other plant sources for DMT..than that changes things ethically as well..it supports a better arguement for the use of that animal as an entheogen in that case, becasue there are not more sustainable alternatives weighing in against it..

Even milking frogs might be more ethical due to the fact that you dont have to kill the frogs, but still..a lifetime of imprisonment in a little tiny aquarium might ethically weight against you..I think keeping frogs and milking them is perfectlly moral as long as the environment is large enough so that the frogs dont realize they are in captivity, which I doubt is most often the case.

This is the way ethics is, its all about weighing the situation...alot of the time there is not one single well defined answer.

BTW..there are fish that contain DMT.

I'm going to guess that since the only response I'm getting is about ethics questions ( again I share the concern but another thread please if possible) that nobody has probably even tried extracting from any sealife.
Does anyone think that ...doing an experiment like grinding up ( say for instance a bunch seaweed or mussels or something ) to try to do a STB extraction of DMT, and smoking any naptha precipitation results from it could be hazardous? Could the naptha possibly extract something poisonous? Without special lab equipment I don't know how else anything could be tested for psychoactivity other than human testing.
I dunno, maybe my whole idea is off....but I figure there must be DMT containing life in the ocean, and maybe worth researching, particularly if nobody has looked before.

edit...I just noticed that House suggested not to human test, rather to mass spec the results before testing. Maybe thats a good idea and not worth trying what I'm talking about without getting access to a mass spectrometer, (which I have no access to.)

Taken from TIHKAL:




https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=2563