magicalgritz said:

lol wow, im def going to bake them, if i bake them can i save them for like 5 hours after being baked then eat em and still trip? or do i have to eat it right after?

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Entropymancer said:

deCypher said:

Entropymancer said:

Yeah, people always make a big deal about having to dry the mushrooms at such-and-such a temperature to "convert all the ibotenic acid to muscimol". But no matter how you dry them, a good portion of the ibotenic acid doesn't get converted (if it were all converted to muscimol, the urine wouldn't be psychoactive).

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Really?  Do you have a source?

I was under the impression that ibotenic acid is a lesioning agent when directly injected into neural tissue; what's its toxicity when taken orally?

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I haven't been able to find any studies on the oral neurotoxicity of ibotenic acid, even in rats (although an LD50 was determined in rats, so it seems strange that the neurotoxicity wasn't considered).  Scientists seem quite content to just inject it in localized areas of the brain to induce legions without considering the implications of its consumption orally.

The anecdotal and circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that it isn't neurotoxic to any substantial degree when taken orally.  After all, there are plenty of people who take the mushroom quite regularly without displaying notable symptoms of brain damage.  After all, it's consumed recreationally in Catalyuna in Spain, in the Shetul Valley of Afghanistan in the Hindukush, and in a couple regions of Siberia, and none of the ethnomycological reports note the mushroom being associated with any mental deficits.  If ibotenic acid were neurotoxic when taken orally, I'd expect such an association to have been commented on.  And considering ibotenic acid's potent neurotoxicity when injected into the brain, it seems like there would be drastic and permanent changes observed if it crossed the blood-brain barrier.

And no matter how you prepare the mushroom, a substantial amount of ibotenic acid remains. I'm still trying to track down the fulltext of "Change in ibotenic acid and muscimol contents in Amanita muscaria during drying, storing or cooking" (Tsunoda et al 1993) for more complete info, but the International Programme on Chemical Safety Poisons Information Monograph on the fly agaric cites them as showing that drying in the sun or under a heatlamp increases the concentration of muscimol, but still leaves substantial quantities of ibotenic acid intact.  Furthermore, ibotenic acid is largely excreted unchanged in the urine* (while muscimol is not), and the urine of a person who has eaten dried fly agaric is universally held to be psychoactive (I've not felt the need to test this personally ), and many of the same people who insist the mushroom must be dried thoroughly to eliminate the ibotenic acid also subscribe to the notion that the urine adds very desirably to the experience.

Taken together, all of this seems to indicate that if ibotenic acid crosses the BBB at all, it's only in quantities so minute as to be completely insignificant.

That said, I still make sure I'm eating plenty of garlic when I'm eating the fly agaric several times a day for weeks on end (garlic contains S-allyl-L-cysteine, a compound which protects against ibotenic acid's neurotoxicity).  I don't bother so much with this precaution if I'm just taking a single isolated dose, but with long-term chronic administration, I figure better safe than sorry.

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