At the beginning of this year, Julian Mattucci, also known as “God Emperor Myco”, was creating new generations of spores from some Psilocybe subtropicalis mushrooms that I had purchased online from a well-known supplier. He claims he hasn’t been “working them for potency,” but rather to come up with a cleaner, more robust genetic structure to fix the problems caused by sustained inbreeding, common in a field that has long been run by amateurs. . If crossed too much, mushrooms can lack overall health, produce lower yields, and sometimes have lower strength.
After three growing cycles, the self-taught mycologist, who lives in Atlanta and runs the mushroom development company Imperial Labs, decided it was time to test what he had produced. As an experienced psychonaut, he was amazed. “I was stunned: I had never been hit like this by mushrooms,” says Mattucci. He consumed them fresh in a dose that would be equivalent to no more than 1.5 grams of dried mushrooms, which is significantly below the amount generally needed to “break through” and make a significant trip. “I knew they had to be very powerful, because I couldn’t get out of bed for about three or four hours. The first two hours felt like a DMT experience.”
It’s the kind of super strong mushroom trip that people are reporting more and more. New growing methods are making psychedelic mushrooms stronger, and devilishly potent strains are taking effect faster and lasting longer, even if you eat just a fraction of what you would with another strain. Later tests showed that a batch of Mattucci’s mushrooms contained almost 5 percent psychedelic alkaloids, something never seen in the world. psilocybe gender. Typically, mushrooms contain 1 percent of these psychoactive compounds, although species such as Psilocybe azurescens are generally stronger, and some varieties within the Panaeolo genre are even more powerful.
psilocybe cubensis Mushrooms, one of the most commonly consumed species, are among the most inbred due to the imperfect methods used by amateur growers, who have propagated them for decades since the first traces of spores returned from the Amazon in the early 1990s. 1970, courtesy of the mckenna brothers. But as the mushroom growing scene comes out of the underground and becomes somewhat professional (even though the psilocybin ban continues in most of the world), more and more mycologists are using informed breeding practices to improve the genetic integrity of the mushrooms and improve their potency, which can be a recessive trait and is lost within a lineage.
“I would say that the current Mount Everest is the most powerful; milligrams per gram of biomass,” says Ian Bollinger, founder of the Center for Mycological Analysis. “That’s a mountain people are going to climb, whether we tell them or not.” Matucci, however, emphasizes that finding a very powerful variety was not his goal. “I was lucky,” he says.
Growers are using genetic sequencing and hybridizing cultivars from increasingly distant lineages to seek improvements as well as pure aesthetic novelty. Technological advances have allowed fungal cells to be more easily manipulated during cultivation, and advances in chromatographic potency testing allow growers to determine which alteration methods result in stronger fungi, which can be sold to consumers at lower prices. more than 10 dollars per gram more. . The advent of such methods means that the era of amateur “bro science” in psychedelic mycology is over, Mattucci says. The era of uninformed tinkering and anecdote-based science is giving way to cultivation driven by deeper and more complex scientific (and mycological) knowledge. “This is just the beginning” of superstrong powers, Matucci says, “and it’s going to be crazy for the next decade.”