Natural or synthetic psychedelics?

What type of psychedelic do you think is best?

1 - Plants or tea (shrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, yopo, salvia, pot, etc.)

2 - Purified extracts (psilocin, DMT, mescaline, bufotenine, salvinorin A, THC, etc.)

3 - Natural but synthesized (psilocin, DMT, mescaline, bufotenine, salvinorin A, THC, etc.)

4 - Man made unnatural drugs (LSD, 2C-I, 2C-E, DOI, DOM, etc.)

5 - Doesn't matter

love the natural psychedelics..but dont like a lot of the side effects of the whole plants...SWIM likes to isolate the goodies and get rid of the junk

except for purified salvinorin..unless its taken sublingually..SWIM would rather smoke dried leaf material for that..but mostly he likes the purified extracts

I'm at a toss up between 1 and 2. I think mushrooms are best eaten plain or as soup. I think bufotenine is best as a purified extract. I think pot is best as is. With smoked DMT, you have no choice, it has to be a purified extract. With mescaline, it depends. If it’s peyote, I think the raw plant is best. If it’s San Pedro, I think an extract is best. For ayahausca, I have to say an extract is also best. For salvia, I think a quid is best.

The only time I think an extract is best is when the whole plant is either too bulky (as with San Pedro) or difficult on the digestive system (as with ayahuasca), or the plant has some undesirable compounds present that you want to avoid (like yopo).

I don’t like anything artificial. I prefer all natural over synthetic or man made compounds.

yes mushrooms are nice on their own..so is pot...but getting to really know the plant through extraction processes is really cool..and SWIM feels a connection being made as he gets to know and extract the actives

Extraction is definitely a lot of fun, especially when it's a new extraction and you’re learning new tricks.

yes indeed...like the one he learned recently when trying to purify bufotenine...he would use the 2:3 MEK:heptane ratio..and for some reason he couldnt get it as pearly white as he has in the past..so hes just been trying it slightly different every time..and the last time he boiled off the MEK and then immediately put the jar under a fan to cool it and evaporate some solvent to get it cloudy..well he noticed that a bunch of yellow crude was rapidly forming on the sides and bottom of the jar...he let it continue doing this for another minute or two..and then poured the now cloudy white solvent into a shot glass...what is left looks like little globs of oils and fats..and is very amber...the toxins and fats he has been trying to get rid of..

its interesting though because he had been working with tannish crystalline powder..so he figured most of the fats were gone..but guess not

To SWIM purified extracts give a cleaner and more intimate experience of the particular psychedelic substance.

Except in the case of peyote/san pedro because its more of a mixture of certain alkaloids in the cacti that give them their unique quality.

Can't answer this one, well maybe I can. It's all Good LSD was the ally closest to my heart. Mushrooms mescaline and dmt are all wonderful. As far as shrooms go I always wanted to eat fresh mushrooms but once I finally had fresh shrooms I realized that they sat in my stomach like a lead ball. Dried shrooms are preferable. Back in the day we got this synthetic "Strawberry Mescaline". It is the only psychedelic I've had that would not allow for a bad trip, it was beautiful! I now believe that it was probably a Shulgin creation. Supposedly a guy got popped with some and at the court in amongst the Thai sticks etc. it sat with a label that said "No drug content detectable apparently strawberry koolaid". Looking forward to Bufo!

Swim would say it doesnt matter because its all chemicals at the end of the day. Though he does tend to go towards natural things these days. There was a thread about this a while back im sure.

Swim would love to try the 2c drugs but has never had a source. Swim loves mdma but cant get a source. The pills going round here dont have any mdma in them or he would maybe try an extraction but theres none in them, so there goes that idea, who knows what shits in them so swim doesnt touch them.

Swim is kind of chemically challenged and would love to be a wizz at extracting the purified extracts as they sound great. He tried a bufo extract last week but with no success, though got more seeds and will try again. It sounds great. Swim was shown how to make spice by a friend so maybe if he manages the bufo extract it would help him get better at this chemistry lark.

Well SWIM's most impressive and enjoyable experiences have been with 2C-E. At just the right level (different levels for different situations), it is social, mystical, sympathetic and extremely visual all at once, while maintaining total control over every aspect of the experience. Swim would have to go with 4. But he completely agrees with all of the above for all their respective reasons. It's really not as simple as choosing the entheogen on the right or the entheogen on the left.

The first true psychedelic SWIM ever had was LSD-25. He did it hundreds of times before ever getting a taste of mushrooms. Once he tried mushrooms, he was very impressed that such an awesome experience was available in a 100% all natural form, and was actually healthy food (mushrooms contain vitamins, minerals, protein, etc.). From then on SWIM made the switch to mushrooms for many reasons:

* SWIM could not get bad trips from mushrooms, even with massive doses. (About 1% of SWIM’s LSD trips were horrifying bad trips, but most were fantastic trips.)
* SWIM could easily digest mushrooms without stomach problems. (Badly made LSD caused SWIM to vomit, get diarrhea, stomach cramps, etc.. About 10% of the LSD SWIM ingested caused such problems.)
* Because they are natural, they don’t pollute the earth. (LSD manufacture pollutes the environment.)
* SWIM loves the taste of mushrooms. (LSD has no taste really.)
* They contain vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc., so they are actually good for you. (LSD is not beneficial to your body in any way.)
* SWIM could grow his own mushrooms so he new they were always 100% pure all natural mushroom. (LSD had all sorts of crap in it from time to time from it being badly made and adulterated with who knows what.)
* Because SWIM could grow them himself, he always had a fresh supply whenever he wanted them. (LSD eventually completely disappeared and was replaced by research chemicals and MDMA. SWIM can no longer find real LSD.)

After SWIM’s love affair with the mushroom blossomed, he began to seek out other natural psychedelics and found LSA, then mescaline (and cacti), and then ayahuasca, and then freebase DMT and finally 5-MeO-DMT and 5-HO-DMT. Since then, SWIM has exclusively used 100% natural psychedelics and will not go back to using any man made psychedelics again. The natural psychedelics, being made by plants, are beneficial to our environment, and SWIM found them better than DOM, LSD (and its many relatives), DOI, and all the rest of the man made psychedelics. So making the switch to 100% natural was easy for SWIM. He felt he was doing something good for the environment by making the switch and also found better psychedelics.

[quote=69ron]* Because SWIM could grow them himself, he always had a fresh supply whenever he wanted them. (LSD eventually completely disappeared and was replaced by research chemicals and MDMA. SWIM can no longer find real LSD.)quote]

It's said that there are under 100 labs in the US. The majority in Norcal.

SWIM said he gets his supply of acid from cali.. he still prefers shrooms over acid

5 - SWIM has had interesting experiences on both natural and synthetic varieties

I voted for purified extracts on behalf of SWIM, because DMT and mescaline are his sacraments of choice (and both with long enough histories of use for him to feel safe taking them regularly).

But LSD is the only man-made entheogen that he's ever tried, so it's not really a 'fair fight', and this'll probably be true for a significant enough amount of other people and could skew the results. Also, anything illegal bought from a drug dealer is not necessarily what it says on the tin... I could even imagine some people thinking they'd tried all sorts but their dealer's just giving them the same thing! I'm not criticising, just giving some food for thought

The results will be skewed a little. I except that.

Ohayoco, LSD is a lot like mescaline. I’d say LSD is more like mescaline than psilocin or DMT. But LSD has very powerful mental analytical effects.

If you take HBWR seeds processed with mint oil, you’ll get an effect that’s very much like LSD (in the low dosage range). No one knows exactly how this works, but it’s believed that the acids and acetaldehyde in mint oil convert the LSA in the seeds into LSH (lysergic acid hydroxyethylamide).

LSH is being called "organic LSD" by many who are using the mint oil tech. LSH is LSD’s closet natural relative. LSA is a sedative and normally what you experience from taking HBWR. But LSH is a stimulant like LSD. Animal lab tests showed LSH to have effects very similar to LSD but as toxic as LSA.

LSH occurs naturally in HBWR, but degrades into acetaldehyde and LSA over time. That's why fresh seeds have a psychedelic stimulant effect very much like LSD, while old seeds produce a psychedelic sedative effect which is quite unlike LSD.

LSD is the one synthetic he HAS done. Yes he tried morning glory seeds in his youth (using the water/alcohol extraction on Erowid) but he wasn't impressed. Probably just didn't take enough but he got a headache anyway so I guess the extraction failed to remove the nasties. He would like to extract some Oliloquoi one day. Good tip about the mint oil, he'll have to try that one day!

Morning glory or HBWR without the mint oil is NOT the same experience at all. For SWIM the different effects from processing with mint oil are like night and day. Without the mint oil the trip is lazy and lethargic, but still psychedelic. After processing with mint oil, the trip is simulating, exciting, and much more psychedelic, very much like LSD in the low dosage range.

What i like most about plants, is that each plant has it's own character. When you take ayahuasca or shrooms, you never get exactly the same as before, while with synthetic stuff it's all more standardized.
That could be a sort of placebo-effect though, i must admit.

Placebo partially, I'm sure, but most psychedelic plants do vary a lot in chemistry.

Take HBWR for example, when fresh they contain a lot of LSH and produce effects very similar to LSD, but overtime that LSH converts to LSA and acetaldehyde (which vaporizes away), forever changing the psychedelic effects of the seeds, making them more sedating and less psychedelic (or so goes the theory). Some HBWR are naturally high in LSH, while others are not. Some are high in other toxins as well.

With mushrooms, the levels of psilocin to psilocybin vary a lot by age and strain, the amount they were bruised, how they were handled, etc. Psilocin (XLogP3 = 2.1) absorbs faster than psilocybin and can cross the blood brain barrier easily while psilocybin (XLogP3= -1.6) can not easily cross the blood brain barrier because it’s highly water soluble. Psilocybin eventually converts to psilocin in the body and then can easily cross the blood brain barrier. But that conversion takes enough time that the difference in effects between psilocin and psilocybin are noticeable. This makes psilocybin produce more bodily side effects than psilocin and is why psilocin is said to be a cleaner experience. Also, some mushrooms contain various amounts of other psychoactive substances like baeocystin and norbaeocystin, which likely have their own impact on the experience.