3 ms·
It’s not hard or expensive to turn brown rice flour and vermiculite into mushrooms. The bit about expensive to create a pharmaceutical compound growing from a m
by tdy721 7y ago
It’s not hard or expensive to turn brown rice flour and vermiculite into mushrooms. The bit about expensive to create a pharmaceutical compound growing from a mushroom is just silly. Extraction can’t be that expensive.
- taneq 7y ago> Extraction can’t be that expensive. From the article, apparently yes it can: "It's unfeasible and way too expensive to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms"
- samatman 7y agoIt does say that. It's wrong, what it says, but it definitely says it.
- KarlKemp 7y agoIs there any pure psilocybin being sold? My (entirely pop-culture based) impression is that "white powder" and similar processed substances of high purity are the dominant form for almost all drugs. Cocaine isn't sold as leaves, nor can you buy dried poppies. Marijuana is an exception because it easier to smoke in its more natural state and, let's face it, because its users are hippies beholden to the naturalistic fallacy. But THC and that-other-stuff-I-cant-remember are available as concentrates. Given these preferences, psilocybin is the outlier where, as far as I can tell, only the raw, natural form is available. Since the taste is so awful it's close to legendary, I think we can exclude market preference as a cause. That leaves the extraction being rather difficult as the most plausible explanation, doesn't it?
- collyw 7y agoJohns Hopkins trials administer a pill, so I assume it's available somewhere.
- mrob 7y agoI don't think we can exclude market preference. Dried mushrooms are harder to fake than white powders, so it increases buyer's confidence that they're getting the real thing.
- samatman 7y agoNot to detract from your point, but there was a lovely, decade-long period where coca tea leaf, packaged in tea bags, was readily available online, including from Amazon. I miss that, because I have no interest in cocaine powder whatsoever, but coca tea is a nice change of pace from caffeine-based natural stimulants. With respect to psilo(cy)bin, there's a product one can find sometimes called 'tootsie roll', which is a concentrate of the alkaloids mixed with chocolate and other confectionary ingredients. A simple alcohol extraction will do the trick, and ordinary acid-base workup can get whatever degree of purity is desired. The phosphoryl group is somewhat delicate, which means what you end up with using acid-base is mostly psilocin. But no one actually cares about that ;)
- taneq 7y agoI'd love to hear more about this cheap, efficient extraction of psilocybin from mushrooms.
- cuspycode 7y agoI'd love to hear someone actually quoting dollars per milligram, and do an actual cost-benefit comparison between the mushroom production pathway and this novel yeast pathway. You can produce mushroom juice in a H20 solution cheaply at home for about $0.1 per 10mg of psilocybin. If you want pure psilocybin, it needs to be extracted from such a solution, but I am sure some similar extraction is needed for yeast-produced psilocybin as well. Obtaining psilocybin from yeast sounds like a great technological breakthrough, but I'm highly skeptical of economic arguments where no actual numbers are presented.