A field guide and toolkit for psilocybin mushrooms.

Four to six hours for a common oral dose of dried mushrooms. 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. Plasma psilocin peaks at 80 to 100 minutes with an elimination half-life of 2 to 3 hours, and subjective effects track it closely, which is why the timeline is unusually predictable. Higher doses stretch it; lemon tek and tea shorten onset.

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. Psilocybin species also bruise blue where handled or cut, and the deadly look-alikes do not. No other field character overrides those two. 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, because psilocin acts on the receptor rather than flooding it with serotonin. Lithium is the dangerous one: roughly 47% of self-reported combinations with a psychedelic involved a seizure or medical emergency. MAOIs amplify unpredictably. 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: 1 to 1.75 g is a light dose, 1.75 to 2.5 g is a common dose, 2.5 to 5 g is strong, and 5 g and above is 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.