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For the last five years, my lead chemist, Armando, has developed new products that people with advanced chemistry degrees have assured me are impossible to make.
From putting powderized functional mushrooms into vegan softgels to creating squeeze dabs with different cannabinoids and variable melting points, my guy keeps proving the naysayers wrong. He’s done all of this despite lacking a chemistry degree… or perhaps because of it?
Armando’s out-of-the-box feats make me think about the current state of the psychedelic space. For years, biotech companies have invested billions of dollars in psychedelic research and development (without any real products to show for it).
Researchers are studying the claims that psychonauts and traditional medicine healers have been making about substances like psilocybin, ayahuasca, mescaline and LSD for ages, most of which have been historically dismissed, sometimes even referred to as “hippie mumbo jumbo.” But the more we investigate, the more it turns out they were right about what they believed psychoactive plants and ceremonies did: from increased neuroplasticity, ego dissolution and the influence of set and setting to the impact that community care and intention have on a psychedelic experience.
What else are the legacy psychonauts right about?
Science and well-funded research companies are following the leads reported in tens of thousands of anecdotal experiences. All psychonauts, from the ancient shamans to the Beat Generation, laid the groundwork for the scientific breakthroughs we’re seeing today.
Synthetic Psilocybin vs. Magic Mushrooms: Experiments vs. Experience
One example of the gap between psychedelic research and everyday practice is 21st-century scientific research on psilocybin. Psilocybin is the central hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms. The vast majority of this research is done with synthetic or lab-made psilocybin because you can’t run clinically precise double-blind studies without consistent doses.
However, this need for consistency means that we’re drawing all of our clinical conclusions based on synthesized psilocybin — which is not what humans consume in the wild. Emerging science says that we may be overlooking insights into the impact of the actual mushroom itself on the human brain. More than 200 mushroom species produce psilocybin — but some species produce different types of psychoactive compounds as well. We know very little about these other compounds
The Rolling Stone Culture Council is an invitation-only community for Influencers, Innovators and Creatives. Do I qualify?
What are we missing when we don’t use whole mushrooms in psychedelic research? A DoubleBlind article titled “Synthetic Psilocybin: What’s Lost Without The Mushroom?” notes that trace compounds in psychedelic mushrooms may work together “and that their healing power might be diminished when psilocybin is taken on its own.” Indeed, a recent study showed that naturally derived psilocybin may promote neuroplasticity better than lab-made psilocybin. “What researchers are not pursuing is what happens when psilocybin is given to a human in concert with aeruginascin, or with norpsilocin, baeocystin, or norbaeocystin, some of the other compounds discovered in psilocybin mushrooms,” noted The Observer.
DMT, Science and the Nature of Consciousness
N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is one of the compounds in an ayahuasca brew, and it famously produces short but extremely intense trips. A strangely common report is that the user feels they’ve gone someplace they’ve been before — common enough that scientists are trying to understand why.
Big Think reported on this oddity: “Unlike other psychedelics, DMT…can induce a sense of profound familiarity in users, making them feel as if they have entered an alternate reality they have visited before.” After decades of these reports, even scientists are considering the proposition that DMT gives us access to another world or dimension. Researchers have actually figured out a way to extend DMT trips so they would have more time to observe and study them. People are now trying to map out the topography of the “DMT universe” — not just a hallucination, but an actual place that we travel to.
It sounds like more hippie nonsense — but psychedelic pioneer Terrence McKenna was convinced that DMT confirmed the existence of alternate dimensions. Rick Strassman, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and author of the book “DMT: The Spirit Molecule,” also posits the idea that parallel universes might actually exist, and that DMT somehow allows users to access them.
As the saying goes, “Not everything that matters can be measured, while not everything that can be measured matters.” Stories do not equal data, or empirical evidence — but look at how many stories of the past are now being confirmed by science. The people who have been studying, consuming and serving these plant medicines for generations are like space monkeys for scientific breakthroughs.
Psychedelics are pushing the limits of what we consider scientifically impossible. Growing acceptance of these compounds means we’re researching what shamans have held as spiritual truths for years. What if the psychedelic underground ultimately helps us prove humans’ ability to astral project, communicate telepathically or visit other dimensions? All of these experiences have been reported by countless people over thousands of years of taking psychedelics.
Proving these theories is way harder than postulating them. Some may never be proven at all. But slowly but surely, as more evidence is found for unexplained spiritual plant medicine experiences, people will be inspired to re-examine the meaning of life, the nature of reality and the potential existence of the other dimensions.
Any pharmaceutical company would benefit from hiring my chemist, Armando. He can show these institutions how he’s found ways to make products they thought weren’t possible. In the same way, the underground provides countless leads for research companies to follow that challenge the accepted paradigms, expand the limits of what’s scientifically possible and help us understand ourselves more fully.
