http://www.practicalfishkeeping.../pages/item.php?news=911

"Two men have suffered terrifying visual and auditory hallucinations after eating a popular local seafish in Mediterranean restaurants.

According to a clinical study on the patients, which is due to be published in the journal Clinical Toxicology, the men started seeing and hearing things after contracting a rare form of hallucinogenic poisoning from the Salema fish they were dining on.

The species is a popular food fish and is not normally hallucinogenic.

Ichthyoallyeinotoxism, or hallucinogenic fish poisoning, is caused by eating the heads or body parts of certain species of herbivorous fish and has previously only been recorded from the Indo Pacific.

The effects of eating ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as certain mullet, goatfish, tangs, damsels and rabbitfish, are believed to be similar to LSD, and may include vivid and terrifying auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes of "dream fish".

Pommier and de Haro of the Toxicovigilance Centre Antipoison at Marseille's Hospital Salvator, who undertook the study, said that the men had both eaten a fish called Sarpa salpa, and subsequently suffered from CNS disturbances including terrifying hallucinations and nightmares.

One of the men, a 40-year old, was admitted to hospital suffering from a digestive problem and frightening visual and auditory hallucinations, which took 36 hours to disappear. The second man, a 90-year old, suffered from auditory hallucinations a couple of hours after eating the same species of fish, followed by a series of nightmares over the next two nights.

The poisoning can start to cause vivid hallucinations within minutes of eating a poisonous fish and may last for days, often with no other effects. There is no antidote.


Ichthyoallyeinotoxism
Indoles, with similar chemical effects to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) are believed to be responsible and may be consumed when the fish eat algae or phytoplankton containing the chemicals. All of the species effected by ichthyoallyeinotoxism are algal grazers.

Others have claimed that different species of ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as Kyphosus fuseus, contain much more potent hallucinogens, such as dimethyltryptamine or DMT, which is considered to be one of the world's most mind-bending hallucinogenic chemicals.


Sarpa salpa
The fish consumed by the men was a member of the Sparidae family and is commonly known as the Salema porgy.

The fish reaches a size of around 50cm/20" and occurs through much of the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean. You can view the distribution of Sarpa salpa on Practical Fishkeeping's Fish Mapper.

According to the paper, Sarpa salpa was consumed as a recreational drug in the Med during the Roman Empire.

For more details on the hallucinatory fish poisonings see the paper: de Haro L, Pommier P (2006) - Hallucinatory fish poisoning (ichthyoallyeinotoxism): two case reports from the Western Mediterranean and literature review. Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2006;44(2):185-8. "

Is it possible to ban animals?

"No sorry..your fish is illegal ma'm"

Seriously..thanks for posting!

(I'm a vegetarian though)

mmmmh.. yummy! i wonder how one would go about extracting from the fish .. i bet the extract will smell like fish.. ewwww. now that'd be disgusting!

Just about time I was thinking to set up an aquarium...!

haha i read that in the papers awhile ago , it is true though , "anyone seen a mermaid " -says a saylor to his mate
"no"-replies the other one "but there's a big ass monster rocking the boat from underneath us"-says the same one


(im veggie if you guys ever tried it , let me know , has could never eat an animal, but love to now what it feels like to eat fish and trip)
hummmmm perhaps one can open a new shop in the uk instead of fish and chips....
Fish and trips - where the food is allucinogeniclly great (feel your stomach and your mind )

heheh just an idea hehehe

haha.. fish and trips! -good one!

anyone got bufo alvarius or bufo marinus? i was thinking on getting some and letting them mate. they're pretty cheap.. like 9 euros for a frog. bufo alvarius is high in 5-MeO-DMT and bufo marinus contains alot of 5-HO-DMT. the alvarius venom is said to contain up to 15% 5-MeO-DMT -most people smoke the venom as it is. it also contains adrenaline and some 5-HO-DMT. it is said to be a pretty cool mix. but one could probably seperate the stuff easily.

They sound pretty cheap! Usually they tend to cost $100-$150. But I would never have a frog as a pet because I am not particularly attracted to their lifestyle; But I have friends who are maniac frog and toad lovers and I have first hand experience with them. They tend to sit immobile almost all the time and they are blind to anything that does not move. They are ferocious predators and they will attack ANYTHING that moves in front of their eyes. And once the prey is in the mouth, there's only one way - INSIDE the stomach! I have seen a few frogs suffering because they accidentally swallowed the wrong thing (a leaf, some moss from their substrate, pieces of wood etc.)

Plus, venom milking from the toads you mentioned is rumoured to be fairly distressing to the animals. I can understand that because frogs proud as they may be really feel distressed when the are lifted or grabbed by human hands! I wouldn't like to imagine someone to squeeze the poor frog for venom extraction...

That's a VERY good price in Europe, though I'd want to be sure that the toads being sold at that price actually produced active venom as I believe there is a good bit of mis-identification of these toads.

they do!.. a friend of mine once asked the petshop owner if he could milk it..just for his private venom collection.. he got like 3 hits from one milking.

also if you do it right no harm is done to the toad. it is supposed to take some practice tho. some people say you gotta press em hard.. but you just need to know the right spot for the pressure to be applied to. you gotta feed em good food for them to produce alot of venom.. also you need to feed the food good food -a timeconsuming hobby! and its very difficult getting them to mate.

they have been mated for the first time indoors last febuary in the zürich zoo in switzerland. they have shipped their first batch of indoor bred toads to the zoo in frankfurt which is now also trying to get them to mate.

you must be a very quiet person to keep them. they don't like music at all. you will need an extra room to keep them in because one shouldn't disturb their night/day cycle which is VERY important when one wants them to mate.

i'd love to have some.. but i got 2 cats and i dont have the needed room. once i will get to buying myself a house i'll make a toad-room.

in the states the toads cost 100$ upwards just because they are sold as drugs. usually they are pretty cheap. they aren't even really rare.(hey're one of the cheapest frogs which my local tropical pet store sells) if you live in colorado you can probably collect them in your back yard when it has rained. alvarius is a little rarer than marinus.. what i find quite attractive is that the venom also contains adrenaline. this could produce quite an initial rush!

I am racking my brains to remember the web site advertising Dream Fish for sale. I saw it three or four years ago. They were selling all sorts of odd things, even human placenta. I was looking 5meo DMT originally but I found a better online vender and never went back to this one. Dream Fish Dream Fish Dream Fish....I shall come back on this one.

If you can't get your hands on the fish and smoking dried, dead cats didn't do nothing, there's always the option of toadlicking.
Just be sure to pick the right toad, not that curare-one where the indians poison their arrows with, it contains poisonousarrowpoisontoadpoison.

I breed fish like crazy, in two freshwater tanks now (120 , 36 gallon)... So the joys of fish breeding just got even better - and then imagine preparing an angel-fish soup from your own loving efforts! !

Imagine the fished-out trip ..! What would the fish spirits be like .?.. the fish's god connection would be something all aquatic, you'd assume...

I'm going for marine tanks now !

Please don't compare this thread to the one on drying out cats. This was posted for information and some humor only. I don't expect anyone to start fishing the seas for this particular fish..In fact, the interesting thing about this is that it was the Alge that origionally contained the tryptamines, this might be a more sustainable form of DMT production than Mimosa.

Indeed, drying out fish and extracting them is slightly less odd then doing the same thing with cats, although koreans might disagree on that one. And i have heard that japanese farmaceutical companies seek to find uses for the poison in fugu, wich they then hope to synthesize.
But if it's the alges, why is not every fish that eat's them psycho active?