I've had my first two experiences with pharma in the last week or so. I know it's not much, but the difference between that and plant brews is so striking I believe I can share some initial thoughts without getting ahead of myself too much.

I've been drinking Aya-style brews for many years and with some regularity, both in group ceremonies and solo sessions. I've had teas made with B. caapi and P. viridis, D. cabrerana, M. hostilis and A. confusa, and occasionally other admixtures. I've also had teas made with P. harmala on the force side of things.

A few months ago I started extracting harmalas from rue and drinking them (dissolved in vinegar) in combination with crude admixture brews - e.g. extracted harmine/harmaline with Aya-style ACRB or Chaliponga tea. I found that these preparations were not much different to traditional brews. There were differences, but they didn't detract from the quality of the experience; I would still get powerful, healing experiences. I liked it as a cheaperer alternative to caapi, which mimicked it quite well, even though the alkaloid composition was different.

Recently I did my first DMT extraction. It was from MHRB and used lye and naphtha. The resulting product was mostly white and presumably very pure.

When I drank that with extracted harmalas, I was surprised at how different it was. Some of the difference I observed:

- The DMT felt as if it came in chunks, as opposed to the flowing, liquid way of the plant brews. It interacted with my consciousness in a jagged way, like gravel, as opposed to the plants, which are more like magical water filling my consciousness.
- There was no love, no warmth, no emotions, no sense of beauty or divinity.
- The visual aspect was still there, but more abstract.
- Beside the visual aspect, it was purely mental. I still had my short term memory affected, thoughts and ideas mixing and blending, but there didn't seem to be any meaningfulness to it.
- My conclusion was: this is not medicine.

I'm surprised that it was so different. It would seem to suggest that there is much more going in in the light-bearing plants than the DMT; that either the other alkaloids (in some cases trace alkaloids) or something else plays a huge role. And they're all good medicines compared to isolated DMT, so their common denominator may not even be DMT as one would think.

Of all the plants, I'd say it was the closest to Chacruna, but still very different.

Now I realize the extraction technique I used was very pure and other teks (e.g. involving veg oil) may yield broader spectrum products, which may be more medicinal. I'm curious to experiment with those and see how they compare.

For now I'm left with around 1g DMT freebase and I don't know what to do with it. Perhaps, after converting to a salt, it could be used to spice up plant brews and make them stronger without diluting their medicinal properties linearly.

I noticed myself that my trips became more mechanical too after overdoing it with aya. A few horor trips made me hessistant towards flood doses and I began sipping less.

It's not about the form. It's about the dose. With pharma you know exactly how much of each you're getting. I know because I isolated to and found out that a good filtered just enough maoi high dmt brews were quite indistinguashable from my pharm trips.

Except for the potency. With aya yiu never know.

Other than that I believe it is very likely when you brew aya that you go overboard with harmalas or both and thus get a different experience because it hit you way harder than you anticipated. With pharma you would chicken out weighting out thise doses but with aya as said before you necer know.

I like a good dose of harmalas, whether it's isolated alkaloids or tea.

When I drink tea, I usually have a general idea of how strong it is, because I make large batches (30+ doses at a time) and the first 2-3 sessions allow me to gauge the potency. I've drank Aya hundreds of times and had experiences ranging from "I feel nothing" to 72 hour multiple-dose reality-shattering marathons. I've experienced strong and weak vine and strong and weak admixture plants, so I know what they feel like. I've also experienced serious overdoses, e.g. Mimosa tea which was already uncomfortably strong for me at 1g, and which I once drank 13g of in one dose.

I don't think the differences I observed between pharma and teas were dose-related. The harmala dose was my standard dose, and the DMT felt strong, just very different. It was unlike any Ayahuasca or rue alloyed brew I've had.

Also with the pharma I missed the nausea. It made me wonder if the nausea could be one of the most important aspects of the Ayahuasca experience. We think of nausea as purely physical, but in the medicine space where boundaries between the physical and the spiritual disappear it seems to facilitate bringing one to a place of repentance and Truth.

Well I suposse I don't need to question about your experience then, if you drank it that many times you clearly know what you're doing.

It seems from your post that you vastly prefer it in its natural form and that's okay. Looking at it from a scientific point of view stricly it is a bit healthier for you to use isolated alkaloids. The neusea isn't a sign of a cleansing or detoxification process, it is your bodys way of trying to eliminate all the gunk and tanins which aren't supossed to be ingested.

I do however agree that this body load gives a specific twist to the experience. It reminds you how bad you could feel at some point of your life, and thus gets you to take better care of yourself.

In my trips this specifically had put me at times in a nasty headspace because of the physical aspect was so rough. The magical thing about aya is that you can identify that your physical sypthoms are contributing to your mental state as well.

I do not believe this suffering holds any sort of health benefits to it, but it surelly can take your trip in a way different direction that it would if this element was lacking. The afterglow seems also a bit more pronounced because of it because instead of you going back to a baseline you feel a big relief which in itself is very blisfull.

It is interesting that you pointed out some of the differences and it seems that this could be a good topic about the variety of ayahuasca and its analogues. Among all the drugs I tried, only working with DMT seems to have countless possible variations and outcomes.

I hope more people will chime in into this discusion.

Try the ethanol tek in the eco friendly section. The changa I make from that is a lot more medicinal. The build is slower and the peak more intense. I suspect the other alks color it a lot. So far I have never had nausea but in a ritual one person who had done some energy work removing an entity from a person earlier that day with us vomited heavily. My supposition is this was in line with his intention more than a eeaction to a chemical.

Thanks for the input AwesomeUsername and skoobysnax.

I guess the recent experiences with pure DMT dispelled my false assumption that the 'spirit' of the admixture plant was the DMT, so my next quest is to find what it is, or what kind of extraction one can perform without losing the medicinal value as I've learned to know it.

For starters, the basified mimosa tea I've been extracting with naphtha from must have the other alkaloids intact, so I'm going to pull them with vegetable oil and see what results from that.

I often read that THH might add some missing things to the experience with pharma.

It might, but when I drink Mansked rue alkaloids with admixture plant brews the resulting experiences are still quite similar to the real deal and have great medicinal value. It's extracting DMT that takes that away.

In any case, I have some THH obtained from harmaline, so a bioassay is coming soon.

Can't relate to

"- There was no love, no warmth, no emotions, no sense of beauty or divinity."

I experience these things deeply with Pharma (see my trip reports).

Do you take the DMT in acetate form?
I wonder if there might be something wrong with my DMT, and even whether it is DMT at all. Could the lengthy extraction have converted it into some inferior alkaloid?

I did another experiment, which combined the usual harmalas with chaliponga tea and extracted DMT. I was hoping that the DMT would somehow mix or 'soak' into the complex, rich chaliponga tea with all its minor alkaloids and non-alkaloid constituents, and create something that's still like chaliponga, but stronger.

Oddly, it felt like the two different DMT sources working independently of each other, separate and having different effects: the wonderful, loving chaliponga and the annoying extracted DMT. Or more like the DMT getting in the way of the magnificent leaf. Like a mosquito buzzing around and distracting me from the beautiful music of the Universe. I wanted the 'bad DMT' out of my system.

The two were so different, it reminded me of the notion of non-miscibility... like the naptha layer sitting on top of the plant soup the DMT was extracted from. Just like they don't mix in the bottle, they don't mix in the consciousness.

Gaiaphile: it sounds great in theory, and that was my motivation for the extraction. But after trying it, I don't think the product I have can bring about or facilitate a mystical experience, or any useful experience for that matter. The only description I can come up with is an irritating experience.

Vitamin C is even easier to dose and doesn't cause any discomfort, but it doesn't lead to mystical experiences. I don't think my DMT is more likely to lead to a spiritual experience than vitamin C, and yet it does feel uncomfortable in the head. Hence my questioning of whether it is DMT at all. It was extracted from MHRB, it is white (with some yellow and light red from the later pulls) and it smelt floral after drying, but now, having sat in a medicine bottle in the fridge for a while, it smells more like semen.

I wish I could share it with a real-life friend and ask it feels what pharma should feel like, but I don't know anyone who has experience with pharma.

If it's not DMT but something else (oxide? NMT?) that would invalidate much of what I've said here.


I don't think I agree. Mystical experiences are neither necessary nor sufficient for healing.
Healing with plant medicine such as Ayahuasca is complex and involves a synergy of many elements - pharmacological, spiritual, physical, behavioral (changing habits). Taking DMT to have mystical experiences 4 times a week doesn't guarantee healing. There is no magic pill.

Now for a positive result

I mixed some freebase DMT (?) into the full-spectrum sunflower oil MHRB extract. The latter had excess vinegar in it, so the freebase dissolved without adding more vinegar.

I then let that sit for at least 24 hours and drank it.

I didn't experience the 'bad DMT' effects, it didn't feel annoying and it seemed to have blended into the full-spectrum extract fairly well (maybe 90%). The DMT, first separated from the other alkaloids (and possibly non-alkaloid compounds) was reunited with them and it was good again.

That didn't work with Chaliponga (with the tea and the DMT consumed separately) and I wonder if it's because of the different plant, or the longer wait, which allowed the alkaloids to mix properly or react in some way.

It was still different from the full-spectrum extract without the 'extra' DMT, more visual and had a lighter feel. I prefer both the full-spectrum with less DMT, and Mimosa tea (which I find indistinguishable). But I'm happy to have found a use for my freebase DMT - hopefully I can mix it into Mimosa tea and wait a couple of days for a result as decent as with the full-spectrum extract. I was once worried I'd have to throw it away.

That sounds peculiar. Having only ever smelt my own semen, I cannot confirm that this generalises to semen as a whole but would observe that ivy (Hedera helix) blossom smells remarkably similar. So, if you are familiar with ivy blossom that would be a point of confirmation, as it were.

Interesting that the typical floral odour equated with well-purified DMT can transform to that of another blossom which I would not have thought to be indole-related, incidentally.

Judging by your most recent post, it would seem that the alchemical principle of solve et coagula has remedied the issue with your DMT anyhow Perhaps a spagyric process would optimise this approach, that is, when the spent plant matter from the extraction is thoroughly incinerated and the ashes are added back to the final extract. But if that sounds to woo-ish, you don't want to hear the full method

Thanks. This looks like a nail in the coffin in motivation for my own pharma experiments... along with the impossibility of estimating proper dosage for a person.

We had great results with harmala tea + smoked DMT.

I'm still interested in trying other full-spectrum avenues, e.g. xylene salted with vinegar.

Vegetable oil produces good results and is eco-friendly, but takes a lot of pulls and creates emulsions. Working outdoors in nature where you don't have the convenience of a private and flushable toilet, I can see benefits to (full-spectrum) pharma But at home, simple tea is as good as it gets.

This is my experience as well.