Overview
In the conversation concerning psychedelics, a highly contentious subject frequently arises: is it possible to consume shrooms through smoking?
Adventurous youth have been engaging in the exploration of many hallucinogenic plants for unique adventures or enlightenment, and they are also curious about the possibility of smoking shrooms.
To answer this question, we should know what shrooms are.
What Are Shrooms?
Psychedelic mushrooms, colloquially known as ‘shrooms,’ are a group of fungi that contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin and psilocin. They can be found on almost all the continents.
Various cultures have used them as sacred mediators between humans and deities; however, due to their ability to induce trance-like states, they are also associated with myths of exorcism and rebirth.
Can You Smoke Shrooms?
Shrooms are ingested orally in raw or dried form, they are also brewed into tea. [1] But, can these shrooms be smoked, like cannabis or tobacco? The answer is yes, theoretically! However, it is not as straightforward as it seems, and experts do not recommend to blindly go for it.
Let’s delve into the why.
What Is The Science Behind Psychedelics?
Various psychoactive mushrooms include Psilocybe, Panaeolus, Pluteus, Gymnopilus, Inocybe, and Pholiotina, which contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin and psilocin.
Psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine) is an indolealkylamine related to hallucinogenic tryptamines. It is the main psychoactive alkaloid compound in most mushrooms, known to initiate profound, mind-altering experiences like hallucinations, poor orientation of time and space, and an emotional roller coaster. [2]
Shrooms start to degrade at temperatures around 180 °C, which is near to the heat generated by a lighter or match. Therefore, when you smoke shrooms, there is a pretty good chance that these compounds will be destroyed, resulting in reduced psychedelic effects or, even, eliminating them.
What Are The Emotional Effects Of Shrooms?
These emotions vary for everyone and depend upon the surrounding environment, being a pleasure experience for some and a state of anxiety for others. They produce perceptual changes such as illusions, sensory crossovers, affective activation, and alterations of thought and time sense, hence exaggerating the potentially dangerous behavior and risk-taking activities.
One of the noteworthy experiences after the acute effects of shrooms is Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) aka, “flashbacks”.
These effects may last from 30 minutes to 6 hours and then vanish. [3]
What are the physical effects of shrooms?
Physical effects range from mild severity of nausea or vomiting to euphoria, agitation, confusion, muscle weakness, drowsiness, lack of coordination, and heart attack.
There are pretty good chances of misidentification of toxic mushrooms as shrooms which can lead to death.
Overall Health Risks Of Smoking Shrooms
It’s not just that the safety evidence is thin on the ground, that should dissuade you from smoking shrooms; the main reason is that smoking can cause multiple lethal diseases of a metabolic nature or at the very least, it can cause respiratory tract mucosa irritation and start acute as well as chronic health disasters. [4]
Purpose of this writing is not to quibble about the trivial effects but to educate about the fact that unwanted determinants of health can increase the likelihood of different pathologies.
Do Shrooms Cause Addiction?
No, shrooms do not cause physical or psychological dependence, but they can cause other psychiatric complications. [5] There is a rapid development of tolerance, meaning that even if you take more of it, the effects on the body will be weaker.
Final Words
As the psychedelic community is known to be open-minded to new experiences, it is important to make educated decisions regarding the use of scarcely tested substances. Theoretically, you can indeed smoke shrooms, but the experts do not recommend it to be the perfect way to experience the psychedelic journey provided by these hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Whether you’re an experienced psychonaut or a curious beginner, awareness of the advantages and disadvantages is necessary, and one should be very critical about the safety of such experiences.
Currently there are many unanswered questions about the uses of these mysterious shrooms and their effects on the body, indicating a large research gap, and inciting the scientific minds to explore the shroom-verse.
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