Psilocybin Mushroom Potency & Testing Panel | Spirituality & Beyond #4
by Church of Ambrosia
Rating: 5 of 5
Video date: October 1, 2024
Presenters:
Reggie Harris, co-founder of Hyphae Labs
Dan Huson, Rose City Laboratories
Dave Hodges, Church of Ambrosia
Synopsis: A discussion of the intersection of science, politics and psilocybin mushrooms with three movers and shakers in the field.
Review: The video is hosted by Reggie Harris of Hyphae Labs, an advisory board member for Decriminalize Nature. He is joined on stage by the West Coast's odd couple when it comes to drug law reform: the seemingly straitlaced Dan Huson of Rose City Laboratories, Oregon, conservatively attired in black, and Dave Hodges of the Church of Ambrosia, California, flamboyantly sporting a green psychedelic surplice.
When asked to introduce himself, the youthful Dave quips: "I run the Church and I eat a lot of mushrooms,"
And so, even before the laughter subsided, the question had been officially begged:
"How much is a lot when it comes to psilocybin mushrooms?"
And, in fact, the rest of the video focuses on exactly that question.
It turns out there are a wide variety of factors that could determine the potency of a given psilocybin trip, factors concerning the mushrooms themselves, the substrate, the user and their mood, their weight, the medications that they may be on, their expectations, etc., and even their previous experience with shrooms or lack thereof. And so while Dave introduces his Church's "new magic mushroom dosage standards" in this video, he emphasizes their preliminary nature in light of the many unknowns. The fact is that hard and fast dosage rules do not exist for such substances. And so when Reggie asks Dave to "define a dose of mushrooms," the latter simply replies:
"You need to go to where you want to go to for what you're trying to do."
For all his understanding of variability, though, Dave himself was surprised to hear Reggie report that he had had a breakthrough psilocybin experience at the end of last year after taking what would generally be considered to be a mere microdose of mushrooms. The Church founder is no stranger to breakthrough experiences himself, but his epiphanies are generally associated with the ingestion of what Terence McKenna called "heroic" doses of psilocybin, from 3.5 to as high as 30 grams, though Dave is quick to add that he does not recommend that latter dose. "You don't want to go too far," says Dave. "It won't kill you (but) if you don't remember what you did, why did you do it?"
But I can relate to Reggie's low-dose epiphany, at least in part.
When I visited the Psilocybin Center in Salem, Oregon, three months ago, my most impactful experience with the medicine was on day 1, after I had ingested what I was told was little more than a microdose of psilocybin powder. Bear in mind that I was taking a daily dose of 225 milligrams of Effexor at the time (as I had dutifully reported to the Center staff prior to my arrival). Day 2 was slightly less impactful, though I was given a significantly higher dose of psilocybin. On day 3, I was given the official "large" dose that I had been looking forward to by then for weeks, and the results were disappointing.
So in my case, there was actually a negative correlation between increased dosage and the potency of the experience. How does one create dosage guidelines from such upside-down data?
My results are no doubt explained in part by my concomitant use of an SNRI and the fact that tolerance for psilocybin can build rapidly. I should add, however, that the biggest benefit of psilocybin for me came after the intoxication phase, when I got home to my Salem B&B after the day 1 experience and realized, for the first time in decades, that the world was my oyster. Things were possible again in my life! My positivity had skyrocketed as an apparent indirect result of this "drug use." That very night, I began writing a diary for the first time in my 65 years of residency on planet earth. Effexor had never inspired me to write anything over my 25 years on that drug, except for essays complaining about the dependence-causing psychiatric pill mill and the drug war that made such pharmacological dystopia possible, if not inevitable. In fact, the greatest tangible benefit of my Spring 2024 psilocybin experience was that it persuaded me "once and for all" to get off of Effexor entirely (a drug which I now saw as a tranquilizer rather than an antidepressant) and to devote my "golden years' to golden teachers -- and to the study and ingestion of as many other psychoactive godsend medicines as possible, for I was now determined to stand up (at long last) for my own right to mother nature, which politicians never had the right to take from me in the first place (or from YOU, for that matter, truth be told!)
As a recent retiree, it is encouraging to see these young and youngish leaders (Reggie, Dave and Dan) speaking such long-overdue truths to power. The very names of the organizations for which they work speak volumes of democratic home truths. The very existence of a group called "Decriminalize Nature" is an implicit reproach to modern drug policy, because it reminds us that the drug war is essentially the criminalization of mother nature -- and let's face it, folks: Thomas Jefferson was rolling in his grave when the DEA stomped onto Monticello in 1987 and confiscated his poppy plants in violation of the natural law upon which he had founded America. And how about the entheogenic-friendly Church of Ambrosia? The mere existence of such a legally-threatened church in 21st-century America forces us to realize that the drug war represents the outlawing of religion, and not just of one church or one denomination, but of a whole religious mindset: one that finds transcendence and meaning with the help of the godsend medicines of mother nature, the substances that modern drug warriors demonize today as "drugs."
As a longtime activist on these issues, I have gotten so tired of being gaslit by the modern mainstream. "Drug war? What drug war?" The average American thinks of the drug war as just a handful of potentially problematic laws. In reality, however, the drug war is a cancer on the body politic, one which has already destroyed the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution and is corroding its way through our First Amendment rights to religion and freedom of speech even as we speak -- or even as we TRY to speak without getting arrested for doing so. In Early 2024, Oregon politicians were even floating a bill to outlaw free speech when it came to the subject of drugs. This drug war of ours is not just a few bad laws, folks, it's a head-on assault against democratic freedoms that has been cynically disguised by fearmongering politicians as a concern about public health.
It's nice to see that young Americans are no longer going to roll over and play dead on this subject, that they have seen the connections between racism, colonialism and the drug war and that they simply are not going to take it anymore, nor are they going to pretend that time-honored godsends can have no positive uses for anyone, anywhere, ever, as our mendacious DEA maintains to this very day.
"We can put a person on the fucking moon," says Reggie, "and we don't know about these things that have been around for thousands and thousand of years, because of prohibition... it keeps us fucking stupid."
Let the church say amen!
Review date: October 13, 2024
