Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
What stopped them?
> These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
From when this same story was covered in January
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-m...
I’ve been to parties longer than that.
Datura is definitively a different beast, and definitely something I'd recommend others to stay away from even if I and my friend was dumb enough to consume it when we were young. LSD, mushrooms and friends are 100x better and more fun.
No, they are not. Let's not generalize. There is nothing funny or therapeutic about psychosis. We are leaving the dark ages of psychedelics. We don't need to bring them back.
In my opinion, the combination of not able to estimate dosage and losing the ability to tell reality from fiction for up to 2 days alone puts datura in its own separate category.
Someone tripping in psychdelics or even Salvia is really a different category to Datura where the line between reality and fiction is thin. No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably but moving coherently and overall looking sane while doing things that on closer look don't make sense.
It's wild seeing someone fully interact with a reality that isn't there and then come back not knowing anything about what happened. I had a friend in the early 2000's that had us video tape and babysit him. He had a half hour long conversation with his dead mother on a telephone that wasn't there. Also, he chain smoked non existent cigarettes for hours. He knew we were there and interacted with us, but he had no continuity.
Ok, finally it's clear you don't actually seem to have a clue what you're talking about. "Deliriant" is not some scientific classification term, it's a subset of hallucinogens some people like to use to distinguish between more visual psychedelics and less ones. And yes, psychedelics and hallucinogens are for all intents and purposes synonyms.
Again, Datura sucks, stay away from it, horrible drug and no fun at all. But the fact that you think that psychedelics automatically mean "No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably" again gives the impression you're not actually giving these drugs the seriousness they warrant. They're wonderful tools but should be used correctly and with a proper understanding of what they actually are and do.
So if the experiences really are real, it sounds to me like something wholly unique. Apparently there are no recorded deaths from the lilliputian mushrooms, and the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
There are psychedelic phenethylamines that last 24 hours or more, so I don’t think the duration is a sign of anything really.
Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)
I've never had benadryl hallucinations, or anything of the sort, but I have had quite a few very high fevers that resulted in very similar dreams and hallucinations - and I have zero desire to repeat them, to the point where I'll often delay going to sleep if I have a fever.
3 day non stop trip sounds .. not great, if it ain't great.
This would be impossible to get past ethical review in any institution who has such a thing. You'd be forcing people to have a trip, which may or may not be pleasant for them, for days, with no guidance on wtf is happening to them. Depending on the person, that's some pretty heavy trauma.
You could tell people what to expect, but that ruins the blind part. I still think you'd have no chance of passing review anyway.
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
That's why you do randomisation and double-blinding.
/s
Also, to get stronger results you would probably want to conduct the experiment on participants who don't have an expectation of seeing little people, so that rules out locals or people who heard of or eaten the mushroom before.
Something isn’t ethical or unethical, somebody just doesn’t like it. They might have a reason for it at best.
There are very strict rules for scientific experiments _because_ we know that without them, just guided by "common sense" or "be reasonable", someone would get blinded by ambition or "the potential" and go further than the majority want to accept.
Anyone can "experiment" without it being an accepted scientific experiment. But then they're personally responsible for any and all bad outcomes. If you follow the rules and get the experiment pre-approved, you'll likely be covered by your employer's insurance and free from criminal liability . That's a very good incentive.
I agree there ought to be rules, but ethics is just a word to make things sound fair when it’s just an authoritative decision, often taking bad arguments (like religious ones or public misconceptions) unnecessarily into account.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
More so for him and his collaborator having dinner each year when the Nobel prizes were announced in anticipation of the call from the Nobel Prize Committee. Legends.
If people get rewarded for self experimentation, either directly with prices or indirectly with fame and success, more people will try do it. That certainly does raise ethical concerns. It worked out for people you mentioned but there will be many others who might harm themselves doing it.
In the case of self-testing it raises concerns of objectivity, not just in terms of perception and observation but with regards to bias and intent, throwing into question the results and reasons for the study.
Coward, basically. I have no idea why on earth you'd travel the world looking for a specific hallucinogen and then just try to sequence it and toss it, and then waste everyone's time writing papers saying you essentially have a hunch about the mushroom's effects.
Beyond terrible science.