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Comment by thinkingtoilet | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to see how many people have access to mushrooms these days. For my 20s and 30s it seemed impossible to get, now all of a sudden I can get them no problem. I have a friend who is not into drugs at all but grows them, weighs them, and has a pill making machine to make pills so he can accurately micro-dose to address severe depression. I have other friends who love drugs and can get the literally anytime they want. It's shocking that they are so available now compared to even 5 years ago. Anyone else experiencing this?

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So I'm a stage 4 cancer patient and now there's a real fire under my ass to do a heroic dose. I talked to my therapist about it and he was like yea, here's this website where you can order some chocolate bars. My jaw hit the floor. I thought he was referencing the darkweb, but nope just a typical site in Canada I think.

I'm still incredibly new to it all and would love to grow my own at one point. I'd also love to know where ahem folks are sourcing their stuff.

Please do it with an experienced friend! High doses like that can be really jarring for your first time if you're not in a good location with someone who knows how to remain chill on them

DO NOT just go and do a heroic dose on your own if you are not VERY experienced.

Agreed. Definitely calibrate your internal register for “this is what taking mushrooms feels like” using a low dose. IMO it’s especially important to familiarize yourself with the anxiety / exhaustion that can occur as the drug takes effect.

I’ve always considered myself someone who can “maintain their shit” pretty well on drugs (granted, I rarely do drugs recreationally, my mushroom schedule is maybe once or twice a year these days). The few times I’ve hit a bit of turbulence has always been on the come-up or come-down. For mushrooms the comedown has always been smooth for me, but going up I’ve noticed a vague sense of anxiety until the full wave hits.

Look up Portland Psychedelic Society videos about how it works. It's super easy as a hobby. You buy the spores or the substrate online. Also super easy. Grow-boxes should basically be legal for your purposes.

Sounds like it very much is about time. If I were you I would also just splurge and seek out a solid ayajuaska experience somewhere in that other America down there. Good luck

Sorry about the cancer. What's the idea behind a heroic dose?

If my understanding is correct, it helps with coming to terms with imminent mortality.

Yes exactly. Basically trying to replicate some of the clinical trials in my bedroom lol.

Germany: Spores are legal in Austria (maybe also Netherlands?). Then search Uncle Ben's Tek online.

You can also grow legal mushrooms like this, King Oysters in my case. It's a wonderful project teaching you a lot. Start to finish it's about 20 hours of work spanning 2 months.

Spores are illegal in Germany. But just buy a growkit from the Netherlands, if you're terminally ill in Germany, chances are that law enforcement won't even start processing before you're dead.

PS: awesome tip!

> Spores are illegal in Germany

So are growkits, but spores are easier to transport (in a syringe suspended in water, or on aluminium foil). Problem with growkits is that it takes a while to see whether you’ve got a good (or contaminated) one, and yield isn’t that high.

Main options:

- (Learning, qulity) Start from spores (syringe or dry): do this to learn a lot, and also to have something to eat afterwards. It was one of my most valuable projects ever. Spores go into petri dish, then search for Uncle Ben’s. Two months starting from zero.

- (Learning, quality, faster) Clone a living part: get your hands on mycelium or a fresh fruiting body (possibly also a sclerotium AKA truffle), which consists of mycelium as well (the »fruit« is the same material as the »tree« for fungi, I digress but this is so interesting). Put into agar petri dish, let it grow, and search for Uncle Ben’s. (I did this with store-bought King Oysters.) Roughly 2 weeks faster than the spore process because you’re skipping the selection-and-transfer phase, and thus also contamination risk.

- (No learning, genome+contamination gambling, fastest) Growkit: don’t have experience with this, but I’ve heard that they often don’t work because they’re contaminated. I have no practical experience here.

I used a Growkit with no experience at all; and it worked beautifully. YMMV.

The yield is "not as big", right, but it's still more than you can reasonably consume. I don't quite remember, but I think three flushes yielded ~50g (dry) or so out of one small Growkit. Two big glass jars full.

I want to do it again out of enjoyment for the grow process alone. It's really fun watching these things grow!

Yeah I still have spores (ofc nothing legal ... :P) and will try the Uncle Ben's tek. Looks real easy. Thanks for the discussion! Would love to discuss more, but not on HN with my clear name attached to the profile haha.

Shroomery has all the information in the world or just youtube. Spore tend to be legal in many places, then buy sterilised kits and inject, its really easy. You can do it all yourself for a bit less money but then you'll see tricky grain infections can be.

>heroic dose. imho they arent worth it, im making assumption regarding the cancer but you might benefit more from an actual `ceremony`. Not to get spiritual but they are more guided, a guided ayahuasca ceremony might be less intense but I personally think would be a better fit.

Hope you'll be fine.

Oregon has stores now that sell everything you need to grow your own. Pre-sterilized substrate bags with injection ports and many different strains of psychedelic mushrooms sold in spore syringes. You basically just stick it in a closet, inject it and it will just do its thing - in a few weeks you will have pounds of mushrooms.

There are more than one of these stores in my city - wouldn’t be surprised if it was happening in many other cities on the west coast as well.

They're easy to grow. I can highly recommend these folks: https://sporeworks.com/

I used to do "too much" doses and go running the hills with the hounds, back when. They're a great thing; but like all good things they can be overindulged.

probably got an ounce or two under alcohol in the freezer still; haven't felt the need to dip into that for a decade.

Eh, I’ve done it a dozen times and it was amazing every time except the last one when I was expecting some bad news in the near future. If I did shrooms with my death looming, I feel like I might have lost my mind. Be careful, though I guess you don’t have a lot to lose. If I were you, I would go the stimulant (amphetamine) and opiate route since it’s a lot more easily accessible fun and will probably help you mentally cope with this period better.

Yes, they've gotten easier.

There are mushroom based gummies available in local smokeshops due to some loophole in the that this particular strain of shrooms is not explicitly illegal.

My gf just got into shrooms. She started getting them from her weed dealer. His shrooms were overpriced, and hit or miss quality. Then we ran into a girl with a shroom hat at a festival, and it turns out she's a great source. Selling shrooms is her primary source of income. She makes little vegan shroom "cookies" (which are more like fudge), and also sells raw shrooms. She's a licensed massage therapist, and seems to launder the income by charging you for a massage.

> hit or miss quality

Psiloc(yb)in content varies a lot among fruiting bodies of the same batch, genome, flush, hell even within the same cluster (example papers [1][2]). So even for known/good sources I would suggest mixing at least a couple of fruiting bodies to have something known and repeatable. Since powder degenerates faster, honey is a good water/air/light free preservative.

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17401967/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037887...

I don't believe there's a loophole, if you're talking about the US. There are indeed mushroom products in smoke shops, but they're amanitas. The effects are much more mild.

Psylocybin and psylocin are Schedule I wherever they occur.

The only practical loophole is spores, which can be sold for research purposes, though not in all states, and are illegal to germinate anywhere. Still, many online outfits sell and ship liquid culture (mycelium suspended in liquid), which is illegal but it appears nobody cares too much.

If you're in IL, I believe I know this person.

The "uncle ben tek" has been around a decade or more now and that really changed the accessibility of it. It uses shelf stable ready-to-eat (fully cooked, sterilized) rice as the medium for inoculation.

It dramatically reduces the difficulty and risk of what used to be the main failure point in the process. Now for $200 of gear and the complexity of a weekend baking project you can just do the whole thing yourself.

Anecdotally I've also seen a lot of people pick up this skill/"hobby" the last few years. I really think the accessibility of this technique is what's driving the increased availability.

Huh, I've been using PF tek as a starter for grain beds, never heard of uncle ben. I'll look into that.

It's a fun hobby. It motivated me to go back to school and pursue a biology degree. I think there's a lot we can learn from fungus, and not even in some kind of spiritual mumbo jumbo way, they're just better than we are at a lot of tasks (e.g. if you want to talk about 9's of availability, mycorrhizal networks are way ahead of us: they don't tend towards single points of control/failure like we do).

If you have the process and technique down you might end up just sticking with what you're using. My understanding is the benefit of uncle ben is its reliability for beginners, not so much yield or quality. I think there are also newer & better variants of it anyway? But yeah look around.

So yeah, fungus. Funny enough I pretty much only grow koji and some other food molds. I like to talk shop with mushroom growers though. The techniques are really different but we share a lot of experiences and... mindset. People end up with an almost spiritual admiration for the mold. Which is self-evident for psilocybes of course, but koji growers seem to develop it too.

> My understanding is the benefit of uncle ben is its reliability for beginners, not so much yield or quality.

This.

- You get sterilized substrate, which requires special equipment to produce on your own (large enough pressure cooker, mainly).

- Sterilizing rye is a bit of an art. Not too mushy, not too hard, properly sterilized, get the moisture right. Might take a couple of attempts.

- Financial investment is negligible either way.

- You’re hedging your contamination bets with 200g packs, because creating lab conditions at home isn’t that easy. (Plenty of tutorials claim it is, and then show you their special mushroom tent, which you won’t recognize as a beginner, and then you wonder why you’ve got orange fluff a month later.)

Toronto has dozens of stores (with huge colorful signs, expensive ground floor storefronts, ads all over the city, people handing out leaflets) openly selling them in the downtown core despite it being completely illegal

Availability is cultural

If you grew up around cattle country in Texas they are literally growing out of cow shit everywhere

It’s effectively decriminalized in the US at this point

Now that people realize that it’s better medicine than what pharmaceutical companies are producing they are adjusting their consumption

I've never had a hard time finding them. You could always just order spores online if you didn't know a guy. But now that it's not a crime to possess them where I live (Colorado) I'm a little less reserved about talking about it. The terrarium is out of the closet, and that's a recent change.

I smoke weed so it’s always been easy to find acid or shrooms, but now people openly advertise it (I’m Canadian)

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