Are mushroom dosage calculators a good idea?

While it’s tempting to narrow down your dosage to a few factors like weight and type of mushroom, finding your ideal dose isn’t that simple.

So you want to take shrooms. If you’ve come this far, you may have already tackled a handful of questions: what’s the best way to tackle them? Can you stop your journey once it has started? Can you drink from it? What if you feel nothing? You’ve probably bought some from your local dealer and also stored them properly – now you just have to decide how many you’re going to take. There are a few options for this – you can take a wild guess, do some extensive research, or if you’re like a lot of people, go to Google and type in the words “magic mushroom dosage calculator”.

Once you click on one of the resulting links, you will be asked to enter your weight, type of mushroom – most sites let you choose between fresh and dry, but some also give you the option of mushrooms versus magic truffles – and what type of dose you want to take, from microdose to high dose. Lo and behold, you will be prescribed a fixed amount of grams for the type of shrooms you have and the trip you want to result from it.

Some calculators, like Mushrooms‘s, offer an even more detailed description of each “tier” of travel, as well as more options for mushroom species and how much psilocybin or psilocin they contain (depending on whether they’re fresh or dried) . Here the levels start at the microdose and then go up to “level five”. Mushrooms describes a microdose as “a small dose, which isn’t enough to trip you up in the traditional sense, but can cause subtle but profound internal changes,” including improvements in mood, creativity, and productivity. Level five, however, is described as “a complete loss of visual connection to reality. The senses cease to function normally. Total loss of ego. The loss of reality becomes so severe that it defies explanation.

Amusing!

Although using these calculators may seem simple and foolproof, they actually have a number of problems. “A potential problem with a magic mushroom dose calculator is that the dose consumed is only one factor in the strength of a psychedelic experience,” says Adam Waugh, the reduction charity’s team leader. harm PsyCare UK. “Factors like body weight, previous psychedelic experiences, how you feel and the setting [you’re consuming the psychedelics in] can all have a significant effect on the strength of the trip. So while getting the dose right is important, it’s only part of the picture.

Let’s say you do consider all these factors – can mushroom calculators still be a useful tool? If this recent study, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, is something to say, weight-adjusted dosage is just an exercise in futility. The researchers gave the participants – whose weight ranged from 108 pounds to 249 pounds – different doses of shrooms in order to analyze whether heavier individuals would experience a more pronounced trip. Ultimately, they found “no evidence that body weight affects the subjective effects of psilocybin.”

In other words, using a mushroom dosage calculator based on your weight is probably not the most efficient way to do this. Redditor Desperate_Ad6457 found out the hard way. “Five days ago I tripped over two grams of GT (Golden Teacher Cubensis mushrooms), and yesterday I wanted to get back some wavy, [but] I didn’t want to trip too much since I had work the next morning,” they recently wrote in r/shrooms. “I used a dose calculator and chart and came to the conclusion that I needed 4.2 grams. Within 45 minutes I knew I had messed up. I was completely overwhelmed. Each time it subsided, it came back worse (I felt like parts of my body, like my torso or legs, were gone.) This cycle repeated itself every 20 to 30 minutes for about two hours – I felt like I was in hell paying for every sin I had committed.

Although their trip ended well — they “[eventually] felt a sense of complete forgiveness and self-love” – their incorrect calculation did not provide the journey they had envisioned.

Another editor said mushroom calculators aren’t “at all accurate” because they don’t take into account a person’s tolerance. Some people might be able to take more than others, whether they are beginners or not, while even the most experienced mushroom enthusiasts might find that their tolerance resets quickly.

The best advice is to start with a lower dose and then increase gradually. According to double blindAs for psilocybe cubensis – the most common species of magic mushrooms – the following is a pretty good dosage guide: For a microdose, take 0.1 to 0.5 grams; for a low dose, you will need 0.5 to 2 grams; for a moderate dose, you’re looking at 2-3.5 grams; and for a high dose you can try 3.5-5 grams and more.

Well, good luck! It could be a glorious experience, or if you’re that type, you could spend “an hour and a half getting whipped by a 30ft troll, then [spend] the next two and a half [hours] being in euphoric gratitude, your head did not soar.

As they say, you win some, you lose some.