Weāve all been there. You acquire mushrooms, eat some, and store the rest in a shoebox in the back of your closet. Next thing you know, six months fly by, and you remember the pot of hallucinatory gold sitting next to a storage bin of junk you never unpacked from your last move. You ransack your closet and unearth the package of mushies. They look the same; a little crispy, but nothing out of the ordinary.
You wonder: Are they still good?
If you ask the Google machine, youāll find an array of different answersāmost of which are written by various websites vying for your SEO clicks. (Except for maybe Reddit.) But new data points exist on this issue that, at least for now, act as an official bench marker to determine how quickly mushroom potency degrades.
āMid-last month, I decided to retest some of the mushrooms we have in the backlog from six months ago,ā says TomĆ”s, the lead chemist at Hyphae Labs, a scientific organization based in Oakland thatās built its portfolio on psilocybin mushroom research and potency testing. āAll of them had different levels of potency ranging from 6 milligrams per gram all the way up to 23 milligrams per gram to see if there was any change in alkaloid content.ā
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The data produced from this relatively off-the-cuff experiment showed patterns that surprised the chemists. āThere were two sets of distinct patterns that showed up. In the oldest sample, where as psilocybin used to be the major component and psilocin was the minor component, the two flipped,ā TomĆ”s tells DoubleBlind in a phone interview. ā90 percent of the psilocybin content was gone. But in that same sample, the psilocin content went up significantly.ā
So, what does this all mean? Breaking it down in (admittedly) oversimplified terms, fresh psychedelic mushrooms are naturally loaded with an array of alkaloids. The largest percentage of which is usually psilocybin. Among the lowest is psilocin. For context, TomĆ”s says thereās a 10 to 1 ratio of psilocybin to psilocin in most psychedelic mushrooms.
Psilocin most notably comes into play after we eat mushrooms. Psilocybin converts into psilocin in our digestive tracts, which then produces the psychedelic experience. (Of course, thereās a lot more to it than that, but for the sake of this story, thatās basically what happens). The concept of something ābreaking downā is known as the metabolic process, which is a regular occurrence in biochemistry. It also happens in nature regularly.
Where this experiment gets interesting, according to TomĆ”s, is the amount of total molecules accounted for inside the mushroom. The team at Hyphae Labs used an equation called āPsilocybin Equivalence,ā which produces a figure for how many psilocybin, psilocin, or other alkaloid molecules there are in a mushroom.
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āWhen we first tested the mushrooms, there was a certain number of psilocybin molecules,ā TomĆ”s tells us. āWhen we retested it using the psilocybin equivalence equation, even though there was a conversion of psilocybin to psilocin, the equivalent that accounts for the total number of molecules went down by 40 percent.ā
What on Neptune does this actually mean? TomĆ”s explains that while they observed the expected shift from psilocybin to psilocin, the lab results showed that likely both the psilocybin and psilocin degraded. āThis not only happened due to psilocybin converting to psilocin, but some of that psilocin also degraded into something further down the pipeline. And it left us with only 60 percent of the total molecules that we started with. So, not only did we see a drop of 40 percent in total potency, but most of the psilocybin was converted into psilocin.ā
The chemists at Hyphae Labs also tested samples from three months ago for comparison. The lab results showed that psilocybin only broke down into psilocin minimally. āIt went down proportionally, but significantly less than the samples from half a year ago,ā TomĆ”s says. āThe [amount of molecules] went down maybe 10 percent.ā
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The difference here is that you donāt see the flip-flopping of alkaloid content, where the number of psilocybin molecules nosedives and the amount of psilocin skyrockets. The amount of psilocin in the samples from three months ago never surpassed the number of psilocybin molecules, suggesting the molecular integrity of the mushroom is still intact.
However, not all of the samples tested fit the curve. TomĆ”s says that one of the samples from six months ago still had all of its molecules accounted forāand actually increased in potency. āLogically, this shouldnāt happen,ā he says, ābut this is why science is cool, and why we continuously test things and gather data.ā
Another one of the samples originally tested months ago had higher psilocin content. āI canāt necessarily explain why that is,ā he says. āIt could be because the mushrooms were old and already started degrading [when they got to us] or because thereās something different about this mushroom profile that is significantly different from the rest.ā
TomĆ”s says the Hyphae Labs team is designing a more detailed experiment around the longevity of alkaloid molecules, specifically psilocybin and psilocin. The results of the first experimentāand the publicās receptivity to itāwarrant a deeper investigation into storage conditions, including how heat, moisture, and oxygen play a role in the degradation of psilocybin and the timeline in which it occurs.
Praise the deep-space mushroom deities that someone is doing this work. Now, we can be more practical about how long mushrooms will last in the cool, dark shadows of our closets.
āThis doesnāt mean that all mushrooms six months from when theyāre grown are going to degrade 90 percent in psilocybin automatically,ā TomĆ”s says. āIt means the samples I tested did. Thatās why weāre about to design a more elaborate study.ā
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