A field guide and toolkit for psilocybin mushrooms.

About five to six hours on average for a common oral dose, with wide individual variation. Onset is 20 to 60 minutes, the come-up runs 30 to 90 minutes, the peak sits between 90 minutes and 3 hours, and effects taper over the following 2 to 4 hours. In controlled studies plasma psilocin peaked about 2 hours after dosing, with an elimination half-life of roughly 1.5 to 3 hours, and subjective effects track it closely. Higher doses last longer; lemon tek and tea are commonly reported to come on faster.

Take a spore print. Every psilocybin species has a purple-brown or black spore print; every deadly look-alike documented here, Galerina marginata, Pholiotina rugosa, Cortinarius species, has a rust-brown one. A rust-brown print rules a mushroom out, whatever else it looks like. A purple-brown or black print does not rule one in: other genera share it, so it has to agree with every other character. Blue bruising is supporting evidence, not proof, and some psilocybin species bruise only weakly. Galerina marginata contains the same amatoxins as the death cap and grows in the same wood chips as Psilocybe cyanescens.

Depends which one, and the categories are very different. SSRIs and SNRIs mostly flatten the experience, so the real risk is redosing on a dose that hasn't fully come up. Serotonin syndrome is rarely reported, which fits the fact that psilocin is a receptor agonist rather than a serotonin releaser. Lithium is the dangerous one: in 62 self-reports of lithium combined with a classic psychedelic, 47% involved a seizure and 39% involved medical attention. MAOIs make the effect unpredictable and are treated as a hard no. Don't quit a prescription to take mushrooms; stopping abruptly carries its own risks and is a call for whoever prescribes it.

Psilocybe azurescens, at roughly 1.8% psilocybin plus psilocin by dry weight, about three times Psilocybe cubensis. Panaeolus cyanescens is comparable. Psilocybe cubensis, the species almost everyone actually encounters, sits near 0.63% and is the species every published dose table is implicitly written for. Alkaloid content varies up to fourfold between flushes of the same genetics, so these figures are representative rather than exact.

For dried Psilocybe cubensis, published harm-reduction tables put 0.5 to 1 g as a light dose, 1 to 2.5 g as a common dose, 2.5 to 5 g as strong, and 5 g and above as heavy. The 25 mg psilocybin dose used in clinical depression trials corresponds to roughly 4 g of dried cubensis. More potent species need proportionally less material, about a third as much for Psilocybe azurescens.