Please note that I rarely visit the place that was once my home, the shroomery, so there is little chance of my seeing any replies and I am only making this post to try and help some of you out.
This is a hard post for me to make, I was actually threatened, and my own family, when I suggested making it.
I used to be heavily involved with psilocybe syringes and the kits; we were dealing with them by the thousand. To the extent that I have almost certainly supplied some of yourselves and thousands of other people; globally. I am more than positive that a lot of you would recognize the companies I was working for if I mentioned their names, but I am purposefully not going to mention their names. I know this will disappoint a lot of you, but I am still concerned about the safety of myself and that of my family; and mentioning the specific names will only inspire them, messed up on other drugs and serious legal problems, to come after me again. I'm sorry, I have to draw a line somewhere. For those asking themselves why I would work for such a company or thinking I am a true asshole, I had no idea this was going on at first and, once I did, I tried to improve it and was fired shortly after, with the threat of physical violence when I mentioned telling you what I'm about to. One of the owners in particular was in some very bad problems with the law; not related to the topic at hand.
In the time that I was involved with these companies, I learned a lot about the world that so many of you rely on for supplying what you're after.
Where to start is a tricky issue, there are so many points I want to make. This could easily turn into a small novel. I have to stop myself from letting that happen. Instead, I'll try to list my experiences as bullet points. Yes, I haven't experienced the entire world... yet, but this is a fairly good insight into the people you're buying from, from someone who's actually been there with them and seen how they operate first hand. As a true tripper from my early teens, I feel the need to let other trippers know that their ideas about tryptamines being such a fair world may be misplaced.
- We sold tens and tens of different strains of psilocybe. Not only were these all coming from the same plates, the precise strain of the plate it's self was unknown. This is a nasty thing to be doing, but their excuse for this was somewhat valid, in that so many 'new strains' of psilocybe are in fact identical to each other. There are very few genuinely different strains that'll do anything different to you. Media selection is far more important. But still, pretending they exist and having you guys spending hours, days or more, like extra money, deciding on which to choose was unfair. I was quite amazed people ordering an array of different strains didn't recognize that they were all identical. Apparently, they hadn't ever had a complaint regarding that, despite sending out countless syringes and a lot of orders involving multiple strains. A worthwhile example of the placebo effect and misplaced opinions on drugs in general.
- I tried the particular strain we were using myself, as did my friend. Neither of us were particularly stunned by the results. My friend commented on it being fairly weak. I would agree with his opinion, I've had far strong trips from much less and in the same genus. I actually tried our own strain upwards toward a half ounce.
- We could turn three plates in a hundred or more syringes, each costing quite a lot of money. The markup was worse than just about any other drug you'd buy on the street.
- A common pricing policy was to simply multiple the cost to us by three. The syringes were far worse.
- It wasn't difficult for me to turn out $15k worth of syringes from our below average lab in a few days.
- Our 'lab' was rediculously poor in terms of it's sterility, the 'protocol' used for entering it and the filtration. I am confident some of you, I'm looking at you roger rabbit (you crazy bastard), have something better at home. Our flow hood was a joke. There was no way it was suitable for the quantity of products being produced and the number of times the door was getting opened; straight out into a dirty atmosphere. The other members of staff in the company actually complained that I was using too much sterilizing fluid because it stank of it in the lab. Incidentally, I have your panda photo as one of my backgrounds roger, I've also bought your DVD's as well. You're a smart, helpful, patient and funny guy. My intention on going to work for this particular company was to meet someone more like yourself. It didn't turn out that way.
- We would send out replacements for products that 'failed'. But this wasn't anything special as it not only cost us next to nothing to produce your syringes and kits but the procedure for preparing them, whilst being decent, was by no means exceptional. A ton of the products we were sending out were below what I'd consider acceptable given the price. Syringes would already be germinating in storage, which would render you in legal problems on acknowledging receipt. Media would be exposed to the atmosphere before sealing. Combined with the terrible lab protocols and overall lack of adequate cleanliness, this would almost certainly sign them off as failures before you ever got them. There must have been a lot of you wondering why your gear wasn't working, or thinking you'd contaminated during inoculation. The reality is that it was probably fucked before you ever signed for it; wasting months of time, risk, money and, probably worst of all, hopes. As I say, we'd give out spares to failures but it was generally just a waste of time, and easy to excuse failed grows on the basis of you having not inoculated correctly; something I'm hoping to make you reconsider with this post. I've seen some of the photos of 'our' products ending up in your hands and the state they've arrived in. It actually made me laugh with shock some of it was that bad, and only makes me feel worse for being involved with them. They're not just a bit damaged by the post, they're close to incinerate only biological waste. Opening some of the bags could actually kill people sensitive to what was growing within. Unacceptable.
- There are a significantly smaller number of people involved in this field on the large scale than you think. Our own company ran under multiple names and went a step further to mentioning it's self in reviews it had generated it's self, referring you to the main sites. This wasn't just on the internet, they were reviewing themselves in magazines. A lot of the sites you see are all the same people. You can start investigating this by checking the domain registers. Pay particular attention to who registered the domain, which company was involved and which servers they're using; you'll find there are some questionable similarities between things that initially appear entirely separate from one another. I actually used this method myself, whilst working for them, to not only shut down competing websites but find, what I believe to be, the person responsible for the clones, in person. They're manipulating you.
- NEVER trust the quality of the website as an indicator of how good the product will be. Ours were very impressive and looked very professional. Shame the products weren't close.
- The kits were a joke. I'd be willing to accept people with too much money and not a lot of intelligence might need them, but never feel down about your home made setups, a lot of them are not only equal to but far more advanced than you'd get from us. Some of the stuff that got sent out I was ashamed to be involved with. This is getting a little close to revealing who I was involved with but, one product in particular suggested it could provide a HEPA style atmosphere in your grow chamber. In reality, the filter was not only not a HEPA filter but it was so dense there was literally zero airflow through it, rendering it entirely useless.
- We'd use instant glue, kitchen gloves, wallmart bins and silicone to make the more expensive kits, just like a beginner would. A huge amount of it, if not all of it, was coming from places like wallmart and lowes. And I know shopping there and gluing the bits together at home is far from beyond even a very beginners skill base.
- Don't, for one minute, delude yourself into thinking that the suppliers of this kind of thing are peaceful hippies. The people I was dealing with were opiate and crack addicted guys who'd threaten your family when they owed you a lot of money and couldn't keep up with the $$$.
- I setup a lab for this company that was so advanced in terms of sterility that it put my university's key coded lab to shame; I was dancing around in there listening to my MP3 player wearing a head to toe bunny suit, with a multi-thousand dollar flow hood running and the place being so heavy with chlorine fumes I actually burnt my lungs at one point. When I tried inoculating some of the strains on the media we were selling, I was unable to ever get anything out of them; they refused to do so much as colonize, let alone fruit. Indicating that, despite using the most supreme setup possible (far better than anything you'll manage at home), these products were still essentially useless.
- The guy who knew far more than anyone else regarding the subject, bar me :P, has since left the company. They could have employed an even better replacement but, knowing the staff that would have been left, I highly doubt that.
- We had the big name books that provide beautifully detailed information on how to perform this kind of work. I read them cover to cover and loved every page. None of the other staff bothered to read them.
- We once tried cooking our own manure based substrates at home. Having not read the books, one in particular, that detailed the way this needs to be done to ensure it's pasturised, the urea is gone and such forth, it failed. I mean, it failed horrifically. The stuff had the green meany ripping through it. I'm not sure, but I believe they may have actually sold it.
I could go on, but I'm tired from all my internet posting, it's nearly 5am here. I merely wanted to give you an insight into the other side you're dealing with.
Physical violence was mentioned with regards to lab safety as a realistic option.
I'm sure some of them are much more responsible. But, as I've said, a good number of you on here will have been in contact with the companies (company) I was working for; we weren't a small scale operation, we were turning over a million $ a year. I can't go any further without revealing the companies involved, but they were here, and a lot of you will have seen them.
I don't know if they're still involved with this site, but their own sites are still up and running. And it appears they're making use of all the unpaid effort I put in by continuing with their international stores.
Feel free to scorn me for that but, as I've already said (again), I had no idea this was going on at first, was fired as I tried to change it, and physically threatened when I suggested explaining it to you as inspiration for them to pay me what they owed me.
AGAIN, I probably won't be checking back for a while, so posting direct replies or questions might be wasting yet more of your own time. Although, I will probably try to check back at some point in the future. I am very busy trying to get my life back on coarse after this and numerous other problems.
For the people in question, I hope you appreciate why I'm doing this now things have settled down a bit and that I'm not mentioning your names. Please be aware that I was not impressed by your initial response to me and that I'll come looking for you if I feel threatened again. I'm not part of it anymore and neither are you, so lets not get to that point. But these guys deserve to know a little more, I'm sure you can understand that.
There are very few people I'd actually consider murdering, four to put a number on it. Three of them were involved with this company.
They're not stupid people, by a long margin. They're very adept at knowing when and how to change their attitudes. Like bipolar patients in a hospital, they'll go from being entirely friendly and generous to threatening you. And they know how to do it without getting caught as well. The prime reason for me not going after them in the first place was that I'd misplaced my trust in them and, by the time they changed their attitude, they had me right up against a wall. For an example, they wouldn't ever discuss threats in emails or anything that'd leave a permanent record, they'd do it through a spontaneous phone call. They know what they're doing regarding the law and how to get around it.
They're the kind of people who'll throw endless excuses and blame at you, deny everything, cover themselves and then threaten you. They had some effective methods of hiding themselves from you the customers and even myself. Their address, for instance, is usually very difficult to pin down. They had a friend working at one of the big shipping companies, which all you guys in the US will have used, who was diverting their mail for them; I doubt he was going it legally.
The moral of this story is, you can easily do better at home with enough care and effort. A pressure sterilizer, the kind that doesn't vent but has temperature regulation, can easily get you to a standard that is beyond that which my univeristy tutor, a Dr interested in things shroomy, didn't manage in his own published journal entry, when he tried to sterilize a large soil sample using a standard 15 minute autoclave cycle; because that's what the manual told him.
Edited by johnuk (05/02/10 10:47 PM)
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