Hi there!

So... I started my account here about 4 years ago, but quickly dropped out of sight. A lot has happened in the meantime, to say the least. In hindsight, I now realize that I was not truly ready for serious work with the nobler entheogens back in 2011. I was way too depressed, repressed, conflicted and embittered. Although I still only have very limited experience with traditional "plant teachers" (especially salvia, sinicuichi, morning glories and psilocybes), that element of my cynically reckless drug hobby did turn out to be spiritually helpful in the long run. I can attribute several key insights to them, which gradually coaxed me toward greater self-integration. For the first few years, though, I was desperately miserable and impatient for mindless release, rather than self-confrontation, so I quickly sunk to using alcohol and synthetic cannabinoids (JWH-018 was still legal then) to self-medicate my anxiety and existential malaise with cheap, superficial euphoria.

Okay, I won't belabor you folks with the whole, sordid story, but suffice it to say that I'm in a much better place now, thank God! I attended a spiritual retreat that prompted an ongoing shift in personal philosophy, got back into therapy, went through rehab (for the alcohol), and finally threw away all those cursed naphthoylindoles about a year ago. Still tempted by alcohol these days, but I am steadily losing interest in it, largely because I'm now on antidepressants: sertraline/Zoloft (an SSRI) for the anxiety, depression and OCD, and quetiapine/Seroquel (an atypical antipsychotic) to suppress seratonin-induced hypomania and insomnia.

I am still very much interested in entheogens, both as a tool for further self-awareness, and to replace my interest in ASCs with something more positive than alcohol. Of course, I'm fully aware that I can't mess around with any of the classical, seratonergic psychedelics (including DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, MAOI inhibitors and LSA, right?), because of the SSRI regimen. I'm wondering if there might still be some options, though, and wanted to get some feedback on that idea here first. Ideally, I would be able to ask my psychiatrist, but even experts often think of hallucinogens (= "psychotomimetics"?) as inherently dangerous.

1) Salvia divinorum - This was the very first hallucinogen I ever experienced, so it has a special significance to my. That encounter was terrifying (because of my rigid, modernist philosophy at the time), and I haven't tried it again since, but I think I could handle it now, especially as a quid or oral tincture. I'm thinking it might be okay with sertraline because it isn't seratonergic - it's a selective kappa opioid receptor agonist, which is not directly related to the monoamine system, if I'm understanding that right.

Is there a risk of indirect interaction? I considered CYP enzyme competition, and found the the following reference: "“These results suggest that Salvinorin A may be a substrate of UGT2B7, CYP2D6, CYP1A1, CYP2E1 and CYP2C18.”" (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719774/) Sertraline is also a substrate and "moderate inhibitor" of CYP2D6. I'm not sure which is a stronger competitor, but SD is so short-acting that it's unlikely to cause any complications, right? It seems to me that the most likely interaction would simply be to extend or potentiate one effect or the other.

A brief spike in seratonin wouldn't kill me. I survived several weeks of very strong seratonergic hypomania, while titrating up to my current dose. It isn't pleasant, but that's likely the worst-case scenario. Also, that very first time I tried salvia (as smoked "fortified leaf", I actually happened to be on the same sertraline regimen that I'm on now, and noticed no increased seratonin effect. (Yeah, I was reckless then.) Thoughts?

2) Sinicuichi - This was my second successful assay, and I was on the same regimen then, as well. I made a simple, water extract of whole leaves. Vaporizing a pinch of this resulted in real psychedelic effects: closed-eye visuals of tesselated geometric shapes, and what I've come to call "muscular euphoria". As with the SD, I only experienced this once before getting sidetracked with JWH-018 (at which point I immediately stopped my antidepressant regimen).

I know this plant is seratonergic, because it left me with a hypomanic "hangover" for a few days - mainly the same agitation I get from starting a new regimen, plus some hypnagogic "flashbacks". It must be quite weak for a psychedelic, though. So far I haven't found any other sinicuichi reports that note such relatively strong, visual effects, and I suspect that may be because my assay was distinctly potentiated by the SSRI regimen. So, does this sound too reckless for me to consider as an option? Because of the hangover, I wouldn't mess around with it very often. A few days of hypomania could be worth it though, and I up my quetiapine dose to mitigate that.

Uh... Sorry! I'm always way too long-winded. If anyone actually read this, any feedback would be appreciated. Hopefully I'll be able to get off the antidepressants some day, and experiment with other entheogens, but for right now it's probably best to stick with it until I've made more progress. I think salvia could redirect my energy away from alcohol, and serve as an additional ally as I continue to work through this long-delayed process of spiritual renewal. :-)

You would be surprised how much an MAOI feels like an SSRI after a few days. Combine that MAOI with a low dose of DMT (no CEV's) then it makes for a great anti-depressant IME. You're not hooked on those SSRI's are you? I have heard a lot that deep experiences with ayahuasca/pharma changes peoples minds about their addiction to smoking and drinking sort of like iboga does, that is up to you if you want to take the bull by the horns and try it out though.

If you are wondering what u can and can not take with DMT then here is the list:

Known substance-interactions and their effects No combining SSRI's & MAOI's but salvia is fine but alco isn't.

It is also strange that your on zoloft as well as quetiapine as one makes more serotonin and the other stops serotonin... I suggest you get off the zoloft and see if you feel better, it doesn't sound like u should be taking SSRI if you suffer from seratonin-induced hypomania, your quetiapine will take care of that and it makes u sleep like a baby so no insomnia... After a while, once u feel more stable minded and ur ready to trip stop taking the quetiapine and a week later start tripping. I suggest you, like myself, keep that quetiapine handy when you do deside to trip incase you have any delusions the few days after following the trip. Don't check in to hospital unless u feel u REALLY have to, just take the quetiapine and wait it out for a few days. HPPD and DMT is pretty rare though unless you are already schizophrenic. BTW Half baked eggs don't need pepper as someone on here said.

A friend of mine took mushrooms occasionally on an SSRI regimen, but I can't really remember which one.
She claimed they were still plenty potent, and never had any negative effects, but likewise she never pushed the dose high.

Quetiapine will definitely damper serotonergic effects while in your body, it's a 5-HT2A & 5-HT2C antagonist.

Thanks for the feedback.

I wouldn't say that I'm hooked on SSRIs. I do have issues with chronic anxiety and OCD, but it isn't clinically debilitating. I don't think I'll "need" antidepressants for the rest of my life, but they do seem to be helpful during this time of transition, as I establish healthier cognitive/behavior habits. SSRIs aren't a magic bullet for me. I've used them twice over the past 10 years, but at those points in the journey I wasn't ready to deal with the real, underlying issues. They took away my anxiety, but I still had a terribly neurotic view of life, so that only made me more brazen and cynical.

Before I opted to try the conventional psychiatric route again, I did consider the option of self-medicating with harmal seeds. That could be a good option for the future... It does seem strange that I've been prescribed both an SSRI and an antipsychotic. I'm on a rather high dose of sertraline - 200 mg/day - because that's how they use it to address anxiety and OCD, rather than "simple" depression. I'll ask about MAOIs on my next visit.

I did try to work with iboga back when I first started growing more open to positive change. I was living in Germany at the time, where it's legal to acquire. I thought my extraction was a failure, though, because I didn't seem to have any crystals after the final step. So, I gave up on it and went off to my spiritual retreat for 3 weeks... When I got back, the product beaker (which I had left unwashed on the kitchen counter), was covered with a beautiful layer of crystals! I must simply not have waited long enough for them to form. I should have tried them then, but I was scared that iboga would put me in a three-day trance, so I put the crystals in the freezer and told myself I was waiting for my next vacation. Then I put it off for a year, and got nothing from the assay. So, maybe I hadn't performed a successful extraction after all, or it had degraded while being exposed to air and sunlight for three weeks, or sitting for a year in the freezer. Dang it!

Anyway, I'll plan on cautiously moving forward with salvia for the time being, and perhaps allow myself an occasional assay with low doses of rather weak seratonergics, like LSA and sinicuichi. A quick question about making an oral extract from my salvia leaves: I recently tried to do this with commercial fortified leaf: just a simple acetone soak, then filtered, evapped, and mixed the resulting "tar" in alcohol to make a tincture. It didn't seem to dissolve effectively in the alcohol, though, even when I used a water bath to heat it. I used only 150 proof Everclear, because that's the highest purity I can legally acquire here. Could that have been the problem? Should I use denatured alcohol, and then boil off the toxic methanol? Or should I just assay the tar directly next time around, perhaps with a small swig of menthol and alcohol to make my oral mucosa more permeable? These extraction procedures definitely involve a bit of a learning curve!

Welcome back!

1. Regarding your iboga extraction, I read somewhere here that they tend to have a fairly short shelf-life, unless scrupulously prepared and stored.

2. Making salvia tinctures, you quickly run up against the soluble limit of salvinorin-A. Water is the enemy! From memory it's something like 20mg/ml in bone-dry acetone, but only 1.5mg/ml in 190-proof ethanol. Is Spirytus Polish Vodka available near you? The yellow label is 150-proof but the green is 190...

There's a good discussion here.

I haven't tried tar directly myself, but can't see it being too pleasant, or effective come to that.

Good luck!

For what it's worth, if you don't think you'll need SSRI's for the rest of your life, I'd ask your psychiatrist if they feel it's necessary for your overall mental health now, or if they are just helping / a precautionary measure (in my experience, the western practice is to start on SSRI's, and determine if they are needed later on.)

If I could go back in time, I'd have never started SSRI's, if only because nobody made their withdrawals (even across a taper,) clear to me. If you don't plan to stay on them forever, regardless of your entheogenic regimen moving forward, my recommendation from personal experience is to get off of them as soon as possible assuming your psychiatrist agrees. (For insight into where I'm coming from, google the term "brain zaps" or "brain shivers".)

I'm of the staunch belief that a very, very small percentage of the population actually needs SSRI's, even though a very large percentage of the population is on them (even conservative studies seem to show they tend to be prescribed to patients who do not immediately need them ~70% of the time.)

I also have been through a 30 day stay at a drug alcohol treatment facility, and know that SSRI's, along with seroquel or trazodone, tend to be essentially handed out along with a nightgown and directions to the bathroom.

None of this is to suggest that you do not need these drugs, I have no way of knowing. That's a decision between you and your doctors. But I would recommend you do some reading / researching on your own, as my experience has shown me that these medications are not nearly as benign or warranted as those prescribing them will lead you to believe.

With all of that said, I've smoked both freebase DMT and changa (I know, a no-no...hindsight is 20/20...) to very obvious results now that I look back on them: It took slightly more for me to get to where I wanted to go, even my full on breakthroughs seemed to lack the clarity I get from similar "trajectories" now, and many of my trips were centered around whether I needed many of the medications (not only SSRI's,) I was on at the time. In this way, it was a helpful tool in that it may have taken me years to realize that I was the one who needed to be doing the work, and that these real world solutions weren't to be found in pills, but in hard work and coming to terms with the up's and down's of life. And for that, I am grateful to DMT.

Yeah, the iboga could have already lost all it's virtue. I did let it sit in storage for a few months before attempting the extraction. I got some kind of crystals out of it, though.

Hmm... Looks like I still have more research to do on salvia preparations. Thanks for the hints. Unfortunately, 190% drinking alcohol is literally illegal to buy where I live, so it isn't an option (unless I make my own still?). I now recall that denatured alcohol can't be detoxified by simple boiling, so that's also a no-go. It seems that salvia can be quite hard to administer effectively, except when smoked, but I'm hoping that a reliable method could be achieved with practice (and enough material - I'll start looking for cutting sources so I can grow my own).

As for the SSRIs, yeah, I agree that they're over-prescribed. In all likelihood, the only people who really need them have rare and severe problems with their brain chemistries. I certainly do incline toward anxiety, OCD and neuroticism, by nature (I've been like that since childhood), but the real problem is that I never learned effective coping strategies and fell into a viscious cycle of negative cognitive-behavioral adaptations. I think it's helpful for the time being mainly because I'm still recovering from alcohol addiction, and suppressing my baseline, unmedicated anxiety makes it easier for me to stay on the wagon and resist my neurotic defeatism enough to keep working on CBT. Once I've established healthier habits, I will wean myself away from SSRIs, and turn to deliberate, reflective use of entheogens when I feel too world-weary.

Also, I'm planning to experiment with coleus. It might very well be a myth, but I'd like to confirm that by trying many cultivars, growing conditions, harvest times, preparations and doses. That kind of thing keeps me busy and out of trouble. :-)

For higher-proof ethanol, I wondered whether you might be able to chemically remove the water, as you can with 'wet' acetone and dehydrated magnesium sulphate (i.e. oven-roasted Epsom salts)?

A quick search brought up this, which might be even easier, if it works at high-proof:

http://www.purdue.edu/ne...10913LadischTapioca.html

Thanks for the tapioca tip. I'll look into it.

Dang. I was hoping that the ethanol content of any given neutral grain spirit could be determined from the ratio of volume to weight (at a given temperature), since EtOH is less dense than water. However, upon further research on-line, I see that it's actually much more complicated than that... (viz. http://www.scienceforums...ntage-volume-percentage/)

Thanks again for the support here. I'll try not to be too terribly annoying for a newb.