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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

When I was a freshman at Caltech in 1969, a few of us took some fake psilocybin one evening and were looking for something to do.

We found out that there was a brand new 747 parked at LAX, one of the first off the line. It wasn't in passenger service yet, but it was open for anyone to take a self guided tour!

So we ran down there and wandered around the 747, visited the cockpit and everywhere and went up and down the staircase a few times.

I'd been on airplanes before, but never one with a spiral staircase. It was awesome!

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I've seen people refer to "friends" that took psilocybin, but never someone saying they took fake psilocybin. Were you being facetious or was it some sort of synthetic?

Not facetious, it was some sort of synthetic. We never knew what it really was. It wasn't real psilocybin, but it was something.

Sounds like something from Shulgin's book[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

I bought new copies of PiHKAL and TiHKAL when Shulgin passed away a couple years ago. Not reading for the faint of heart, but damn those 2 were dedicated to their science. Just knowing their lab was the shed in the back yard makes it a little more on the "whaaaaa?" side of things.

Sounds a bit like the Curies and Barry Marshall:

https://www.google.com/search?q=scientist+gave+himself+ulcer...

Helluva dinner party invite...

It was Hofmann wo first synthesized Psilocybin.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02160424

Here, try this! Some crazy weekends started out with that phrase. The hazy days of designer drugs. BTW, no judging, recognition from a fellow psychonaut,

A problem with unregulated substances. At the end of the day the kids are never really sure what they're taking.

"STP"?

Naw, that is a fuel additive for an automobile.

I make it a point to never drink fuel additives. I figure my car can use it better than me.

It was a bs street name made up by dealers to describe a long-lasting phenethylamine I think DOM.

Supposedly stood for “serenity, tranquility, peace”

Back then, probably DMT.

That’s not active orally if not combined with a MAO inhibitor (as in Ayahuasca)

DMT was quite niche back then and not substitutible for psilocybin as it’s not orally active. Much more likely to be a synthetic phenethylamine or tryptamine. Candidates back then would be DOM, DOI, etc.

I thought it was a SWIM thing too.

Yeah, I did that a lot, back in those days. It seems impossibly risky now. But when you're young, you feel immortal. And conversely, we were all expecting to die in a global nuclear war. So hey.

When we were young, we were immortal. Those of us who survived our youth anyway.

I was a five-year-old in Eugene, Oregon in the late 1950s. The new house being built down the hill next door had an underground bomb shelter. Of course we made that our clubhouse during construction!

The house just up the hill wasn't as far along, but they had cut down the trees and we made tunnels and hideouts among the fallen trunks and branches. We called it "The Rough Country".

And then I got a chemistry set! The real kind, with chemicals and apparatus that could burn you, blind you, or take your skin right off.

Of course, now we have eliminated all risk and the world is perfectly safe.

Nice to see another techer! My dad took me to see the first 747 that landed at Frankfurt in 1969.

what is fake psilocybin?

None of us knew. Being physics and chemistry students, if we knew what it was we would call it by its own name.

We did know that when you took it, it felt a bit like real psilocybin mushrooms.

But it came as a powder in a capsule, so we called it fake psilocybin.

I see.

Pseudocybin!

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