Reddit reviews Psychedelics Encyclopedia

To give a short answer. Yes.

This is from a book about psychoactive plants i have. Because there are a lot of non factual answers here, I thought i post this. I had to write it all so there might be some spelling errors.

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Plants of the gods, By Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann &Christian Rätsch.
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The chemistry of Fly Agaric

> The active principle of Amanita muscaria was thought once, a century ago, to have been muscarine when Schiedeberg and kope isolated this substance. this belief has been proven erroneous. Recently Eugster in Switzerland and Takemo in Japan isolated ibotenic acid and the alkaloid muscimole as being responsible for the Fly Agaric's psychotropic effects. The mushroom is taken usually dried. The drying process induces the chemical transformation ibotenic acid to muscimole, the most active constituent.

...Amanita muscaria may be the oldest of the hallucinogens and perhaps was once the most used...

A little background summary from me:


It's been used by many different cultures in the past and has been associated with many different gods, There is evidence suggesting it's been used in India, Siberia and The America's, (From Mesoamerica to the north of Canada.


If you're interested in these kind of things, i suggest you try to find some literature about it. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers, Psychedelics Encyclopedia. It's amazon link's but you can find them anywhere.

I had an amazing book when I was 16 or so. It was called The Psychedelics Encyclopedia. I read it over and over again, learning about the "standard" drugs like LSD and psilocybin, but also about more obscure drugs like DMT. That book led me to PIHKAL and TIHKAL, both of which should be in everyone's book collection here. Those two contained lots and lots more information about more obscure drugs. By this time I was over 18 and had had a chance to try LSD and cannabis. A few years down the road (early 20's), I was first introduced to RC's, although I wasn't aware of that term at the time, it was just an unusual drug that my guy had. It turned out to be something in the MDMA family, popular in the mid 90's. After that, whenever I heard of an unusual drug being available, I sought it out. Eventually I got internet access, and started making connections on Usenet, which was an absolute and total game-changer. Between having Usenet for discussion and for deal-making, and old-style websites like Hyperreal for reference (in addition to the increasingly well-worn books I already had), the internet changed everything. After the turn of the millennium, I started encountering drugs I didn't like, and it started becoming harder to find sources for the ones I did like. The honeymoon was over, and cops and shitheads had found the internet. Usenet became less of a deal, and web forums and IRC became the thing. Started feeling like real life, with cops and scammers proliferating online. Erowid had taken over the Hyperreal archive intact (you can still read it in its original state on Erowid somewhere, gives you a real idea of what the online drug scene was like in the mid-to-late 90s, worthy of study) and started becoming it's own thing, surpassing the limited resources of Hyperreal and essentially taking over the drug research scene, in those not-before-Google-but-when-Google-still-sucked days. Then, fast forward a few years, Facebook (bad idea), Silk Road (excellent idea), Tripsit (fabulous idea), PsychonautWiki (holy-shit-unreal idea!), Reddit (probably a bad idea, we'll see), other online markets (less excellent idea), and we're here.