Ishmael Fleishman

Packed with wet paper towel, I will get it into the post tomorrow. I found a small kanna that already has roots so I gave you that one. Most bags contain at least two cuttings, so this should get you going.

A few cacti questions: When should seedlings be replanted? I planted these Trichocereus Pachanoi Timewarp OP from NZ about 18 months ago, they struggled at the start but have picked up and now many are 10cm tall. Should I replant them now, or wait until spring or just leave them in their current pots until they are a little bigger? They are showing some fat & unusual growth, included twisted growth and lumpiness. I have a cutting of Trichocereus peruvianus that is doing something odd. It has grown roots, but it developed a cavity between two ribs. I first thought it was rot, however I used a cotton bud and tuck it into the cavity and it felt solid and nothing rotten was found. Is this kind of cavity something normal? My priced Trichocereus bridgesii cutting came to me as a 5 rib cutting, over the last 3 years it has grown over 1.2 meters and has gone from a 5 to a 8 rib beauty and its showing unusual lumpy growth. It is showing promise of becoming a 9 rib bridgesii soon. Just a boast. Lastly I have a Pachanoi that was rescued when it came to me it was a lime green, suffering rot from over watering and was badly scarred. It has been more then a year and regular feeding it has finally gotten some color and is showing new growth. Now the question of it being a PC? The areoles point up but the spine point straight out - not up. It is missing the eyebrows above the areoles but it the ribs are fat, not deep. Thoughts? Hybrid?

I think we are both right.

I grew up in South Africa; my mother was a coloured South African, and my father was a European. I know firsthand the hatred that festers in that culture. The hatred of anything tainted by colour. Everyone aspires to be white and to adopt the white man's ways. It is rare to find South Africans who take pride in being African. Apartheid bred a generation of people who loathed themselves. Like many Australians, South Africans see themselves as Europeans first and foremost and for those who cannot claim to be white have little to nothing else to hold on to. As a child, I was taught to hate Kaffirs and Muslims. I experienced how apartheid ripped people, families, and communities apart. Let me tell you a story from my childhood. I was walking home from school one day; I would have been about 8 years old. It had been raining that day, and I had to walk a distance to get home from the bus stop. As I was walking along the side of the dirt road, I came to a bus stop at which local black workers and servants were waiting for their bus to get them home. For they were not allowed to be on the street after sundown in my white-only neighborhood. As I approached the stop, an elderly black man turned around and, upon seeing me, stepped aside for me. As he did, he stepped into a muddy puddle of water. I remembered he was wearing brown leather dress shoes, probably the only pair of shoes that poor man owned. Looking down at his wet shoes, he apologised for being in my way. I will always remember his words, "Sorry, Boss.". This is what Apartheid did to us all. It broke this man's spirit and my heart. This is why I always fight for the underdog. Things have only gotten worse in the last 35 years. South Africa is a failed state because it never healed from its collective trauma. It could have been a world leader, the equal of Australia or Canada. Instead the rats are fleeing the sinking ship, stealing everything they can in the process. It is this context that South Africa must be understood.

I tend to water and feed my Trichocereus heavily, however my soil is mostly inorganic and drains quickly. The cuttings had no roots until recently and what it now has now is the bare minimum, so I do not think that it could suck up enough water to split. Therefor I suspect that the cutting had the split in it before I got it - I just never noticed before.

If you cover my cost for postage - I can send you cutting of Sceletium tortuosum Sceletium emarcidum Delosperma bosseranum Delosperma echinatum Trichodiadema stellatum Lampranthus spectabilis (red) Mesembryanthemum (Aptenia) cordifolium (purple) Message me if you are interested.

What is interesting to me is the attempt to discredit Roland Griffiths, one of the most influential psychedelic researchers, thereby casting a shadow on the whole psychedelic revival. And how the presence of spirituality and religion in Roland Griffiths research and private life makes all his research invalid, as if spirituality is pure kryptonite to science.

The Psychedelic Evangelist Brendan Borrell 21–26 minutes https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/health/psychedelics-roland-griffiths-johns-hopkins.html Credit...Caitlin Teal Price A Johns Hopkins scientist was known for rigorous studies of psychedelics. Was he a true believer? Credit...Caitlin Teal Price March 21, 2024Updated 12:34 p.m. ET Before he died last year, Roland Griffiths was arguably the world’s most famous psychedelics researcher. Since 2006, his work has suggested that psilocybin, found in magic mushrooms, can induce mystical experiences, and that those experiences, in turn, can help treat anxiety, depression, addiction and the terror of death. Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University received widespread recognition among scientists and the popular press, helping to pull the psychedelic field from the deep backwater of the 1960s hippie movement. This second wave of research on the hallucinogenic compounds bolstered political campaigns to decriminalize them and spurred biotech investment. Dr. Griffiths was known to friends and colleagues as an analytical thinker and a religious agnostic, and he warned fellow researchers against hype. But he also saw psychedelics as more than mere medicines: Understanding them could be “critical to the survival of the human species,” he said in one talk. Late in life, he admitted to taking psychedelics himself, and said he wanted science to help unlock their transformative power for humanity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he held a vaunted, even prophetic role among psychonauts, the growing community of psychedelic believers who want to bring the drugs into mainstream society. For years, critics have denounced the outsize financial and philosophical influence of these advocates on the insular research field. And some researchers have quietly questioned whether Dr. Griffiths, in his focus on the mystical realm, made some of the same mistakes that doomed the previous era of psychedelic science. Now, one of his longtime collaborators is airing a more forceful critique. “Dr. Griffiths has run his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new-age’ retreat center, for lack of a better term, than a clinical research laboratory,” reads an ethics complaint filed to Johns Hopkins last fall by Matthew Johnson, who worked with Dr. Griffiths for nearly 20 years but resigned after a charged dispute with colleagues. Roland Griffiths, director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins, in 2021.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times Dr. Griffiths acted like a “spiritual leader,” the complaint said, infusing the research with religious symbolism and steering volunteers toward the outcome he wanted. And he allowed some of his longstanding donors — supporters of drug legalization — to assist in studies, raising ethical questions. “These are serious allegations that need to be investigated,” said Joanna Kempner, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University who reviewed the complaint for The New York Times. The clashes at Hopkins, she added, mirror a broader debate in the field over “blurring the lines between empirical research and spiritual practice.” Many researchers see medical promise in the mind-opening power of psilocybin. But so far, it has not performed better than traditional drugs for depression in the only head-to-head comparison conducted to date. Its potential for treating other conditions, such as addiction and anorexia, is also uncertain. And the jury is still out on whether mystical experiences are key to the drug’s effectiveness. “The inferences drawn in the literature at large certainly don’t follow from the evidence,” said Eiko Fried, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who recently published a critical review of the field. The drugs also come with unpredictable risks, such as psychotic episodes, increased suicidality or extended emotional difficulties, which are most likely underreported. In an email, Johns Hopkins told Dr. Johnson that it was investigating his allegations. A university spokeswoman did not respond to detailed questions for this article, but said that the research “is expected to meet the highest standards for research integrity and participant safety.” Skeptical Beginnings In the 1950s and ’60s, a spate of studies reported near-miraculous results using hallucinogens to treat alcoholism and depression. Then came the backlash. Harvard made headlines for firing professors who doled out LSD and psilocybin to students. During the 1971 murder trial of the cult leader Charles Manson, a psychiatrist testified that LSD could have made Mr. Manson’s followers more likely to commit murder. Psychiatric researchers, meanwhile, began adopting the randomized clinical trials that had revolutionized other fields. Seven controlled clinical trials in the 1960s and ’70s tested LSD’s utility for alcohol addiction. Six came back negative. Dr. Griffiths, who grew up near Berkeley, Calif., experimented with LSD during college, he later told interviewers, but was skeptical of the claims around it. He was finishing up his doctoral research in psychopharmacology in 1970 when LSD and psilocybin became illegal, making them harder to study. He set up a lab at Johns Hopkins that for decades published well-regarded studies on caffeine, heroin and other drugs. He didn’t think much about psychedelics until the 1990s, when he began practicing meditation and reading about mystical traditions. Around that time, a friend introduced him to Bob Jesse, a former technology executive who founded a nonprofit called the Council on Spiritual Practices. Through legal briefs, scholarly research and a book-publishing venture, Mr. Jesse advocated the use of hallucinogenic chemicals and plants for the greater good of humanity. Now he wanted to give them the imprimatur of science, as he later said in a talk. In 1999, with funding from Mr. Jesse’s nonprofit, Dr. Griffiths began recruiting healthy volunteers for an experiment. Mind-altering mushrooms had been used in religious rituals of various cultures for centuries. Could the same kind of meaningful experiences be induced in a lab? His team distributed fliers around Baltimore: “Seeking Persons Committed to Spiritual Development for a Study of States of Consciousness.” Buddha in the Mind Dr. Griffiths’s laboratory looked like a living room, with a couch, a selection of spiritual and art books and a shelf holding a Buddha statue. The idea was to make volunteers “appreciative of the spiritual states that can awaken,” according to Bill Richards, a psychotherapist and former Methodist minister who worked on multiple trials. Dr. Richards delivered the psilocybin pill or a placebo to participants in a chalice-shaped incense burner from Mexico that Mr. Jesse had given the team. Neither the researchers nor the participants knew which pill was in the burner. Donning an eye mask and headphones, volunteers were encouraged to lie down on the couch for the peak effects of the drug, which last around five hours. At the end of the session, Dr. Griffiths came in to document their experiences. “He was just amazed,” Dr. Richards said. “He wanted to hear their story over and over.” Dr. Griffiths used a “Mystical Experience Questionnaire,” which has roots in a philosophy espoused by the novelist and psychedelic enthusiast Aldous Huxley. It asks volunteers to rate, for example, their sense of having “profound humility before the majesty of what was felt to be sacred or holy.” More than half of the 36 participants in the first Hopkins study had a “complete” mystical experience. Many ranked it among the most meaningful of their lives. When the study was published in 2006, four commentaries from drug researchers ran alongside it, praising its rigor. In his studies of other drugs, Dr. Griffiths later said, he had “never seen anything so unique and powerful and enduring.” The results, he said, suggested that “we’re wired for these kinds of experiences.” The Council on Spiritual Practices sent out a fund-raising letter claiming that the study “uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism.” The volunteers were not a random cross-section of the population. In his 2018 book, “How to Change Your Mind,” the author Michael Pollan observed that there were no “stone-cold atheists” among the participants, which included an energy healer, a former Franciscan friar and an herbalist. Dr. Griffiths was open about this drawback of the study. “We were interested in a spiritual effect and were biasing the condition initially,” he told Mr. Pollan. Some researchers suspected that the drug elicited mystical experiences because the unusual laboratory and questionnaire had primed the volunteers for that result. Dr. Richards also carried out some lengthy preparatory sessions with volunteers at his home office, he said, in order to develop trust. “Roland did not do the kind of study I was both expecting and hoping he would do,” said Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico. “He just jumped with both feet into the mystical experience world.” Years earlier, Dr. Strassman had given psilocybin and intravenous DMT, a compound in ayahuasca tea, to more than 50 volunteers inside an austere room. Only one individual, a religious studies major, had a mystical experience. An architect with an interest in computers, by contrast, reported seeing “the raw bits of reality.” Others thought they had been abducted by aliens. The drugs “had no inherent spiritual properties,” Dr. Strassman said. Psychedelic researchers have long recognized that a volunteer’s mind-set and the setting where the session takes place — “set and setting,” they call it — are crucial to a subject’s response. Such expectancy effects influence clinical trials of all kinds. Because of volunteers’ hopes around a trial, even those who receive a placebo will often show more improvement than those who receive nothing. Some experts have suggested that psychedelics function as “super placebos” because they increase suggestibility. Natasha Mason, a psychopharmacologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said that while she understood the Hopkins researchers’ goals, the experimental design had put a thumb on the spiritual scale. “Their mystical experiences results are very high compared to other groups,” she said. Dr. Richards rejected such criticism. Psychedelic drugs, he said, open a state of consciousness that allows for religious experiences. “The Buddha, if you will, is in the human mind,” he said. “Whether there is a statue in the room or not doesn’t matter.” Disappointment Effects After his splashy first paper, Dr. Griffiths began investigating whether psilocybin could help people cope with cancer. That study followed 51 cancer patients. About 80 percent of the volunteers were less depressed and anxious after receiving a high dose of psilocybin, an effect that persisted for at least six months. And the stronger their reports of mystical experiences, the better their outcomes. Image Bill Richards at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins in 2021.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times The study, published in 2016, became the most cited paper in the field. But Dr. Johnson, who was a co-author, was troubled by parts of it. He learned from the study’s therapist that Dr. Griffiths had asked a volunteer to reconsider her written rating of the spiritual significance of a psilocybin session because it was not as positive as what she had told him verbally. She then increased the rating, according to Dr. Johnson’s complaint. (The therapist declined to comment.) Another volunteer, a businessman with terminal cancer, grew frustrated that he wasn’t feeling anything during his first session and stormed out, according to Dr. Richards and Dr. Johnson. The volunteer had received the placebo, a trivial dose of psilocybin. He asked to return to the trial, but the team did not allow it. A week later, he died by suicide. The researchers reported the incident to regulators and the study was allowed to continue. It’s not especially uncommon for trial volunteers to feel disappointment when they do not experience the benefits they hope for. Dr. Griffiths suggested to collaborators that they better prepare participants for possible letdown. He also stressed that the man’s case should not be made public. “Distribution should be on a NEED TO KNOW basis,” he wrote in a 2012 email. In November 2016, a week before publication, the journal gave journalists an early look at the paper. The man’s death was not mentioned, recalled Bob Tedeschi, a reporter who covered the research for Stat. He only learned about it after sending the initial version of the paper to Katherine MacLean, who was a professor at Hopkins when the suicide took place. “Go back to Roland and ask if there were any deaths,” she recalled telling him. In Mr. Tedeschi’s article, Dr. Griffiths said the suicide was unrelated to the research. A brief description of the case, which was appended to the study by the time it was published, reiterated this point. Few took notice of the suicide until they heard the full story from Dr. MacLean, who subsequently made it her mission to share it with other researchers and practitioners. Dr. Strassman, the DMT researcher, said at a scientific conference in 2022 that the suicide illustrated the grave risks of raising patients’ hopes. “It’s a shame that this case isn’t being dissected under the microscope,” he said in an interview. “What mistakes were made? How could they have been prevented?” Such risks are beginning to be more widely discussed. In a recent trial of treatment-resistant depression sponsored by Compass Pathways, a biotechnology company, three volunteers who did not respond to psilocybin reported either an aborted suicide attempt or acquiring materials for a suicide. The results reflected a “relatively high rate of adverse events,” according to a commentary by Dr. Natalie Gukasyan, a former mentee of Dr. Griffiths. “With recent media portrayals of psychedelics as cure-all drugs, patients who have failed to find relief from other treatments may come to see psychedelics as a last resort,” she wrote. Rising Tensions In 2019, with $17 million in private funding, Dr. Griffiths opened the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Johnson, the assistant director, frequently argued with his boss, he said, over how to talk to study volunteers and the public at large. Image Matthew Johnson studies psychedelics and their effects on mental health at Johns Hopkins and the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times Dr. Griffiths regularly recommended spiritual literature, documentaries and meditation classes to volunteers, according to Dr. Johnson’s complaint. And during participant interviews, it said, he reinforced volunteers’ claims of experiencing an “ultimate reality” by “staring into their eyes, smiling and nodding knowingly.” Dr. Johnson wasn’t the only researcher who was uncomfortable with the mystical atmosphere. “I’ve seen people do some ‘namastes’ in there,” said Manoj Doss, a former postdoctoral researcher at the center. Dr. Doss was also taken aback by the incense burner and the preparatory sessions done at Dr. Richards’s home. “That’s pretty weird, I’m not going to lie,” Dr. Doss said. In 2021, Tehseen Noorani, a medical humanities researcher who embedded with the Hopkins team from 2013 to 2015, published a paper based on dozens of interviews with psychedelic enthusiasts in Baltimore, many of whom were participants in the Hopkins trials. “Despite posturing to the contrary, the clinical research team was not separate from underground communities of psychonauts,” the paper said. Around the same time, Dr. Johnson published a paper warning that, without realizing it, psychedelic researchers might “fall into the trap of playing guru or priest.” Dr. Griffiths was diagnosed with colon cancer in November 2021, and Dr. Johnson became the center’s acting director. He wasn’t widely liked. Some employees thought he could be curt and preoccupied with personal media appearances. The center’s research manager filed a grievance with human resources claiming that Dr. Johnson had made “passive aggressive remarks,” chided her about a Facebook interaction and yelled at her during an incident years earlier. The manager, who declined to comment, posted on social media about “workplace trauma.” In a subsequent email chain, 11 of her co-workers said they were taking a day off in solidarity. Dr. Griffiths was not happy. If the media got wind of the controversy, he told Dr. Johnson, it could jeopardize the psychedelic renaissance. In an interview, Dr. Johnson denied that he acted unprofessionally. In a letter reviewed by The Times, a department leader told him the allegations did not rise to the level of an investigation at the medical school, but that he should refrain from belittling others. He was removed from his role, and Dr. Griffiths returned as director. Funding conflicts Dr. Griffiths’s interest in psychedelics went beyond the clinic: He saw them as a tool to awaken altered states of consciousness. His pro-psychedelic funders allowed him to test this notion in the lab. Image A drawing of a mushroom hung in Dr. Griffiths’s office in 2021.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times Since 2008, the RiverStyx Foundation, started by a philanthropist named T. Cody Swift, has donated more than $1.4 million to support psychedelics research at Johns Hopkins, including the cancer study and five other trials. Mr. Swift has also given more than $4 million toward drug policy reform, including campaigns to decriminalize psychedelics in Oregon and Colorado. Mr. Swift enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the Hopkins team. In 2013, he served as an “assistant guide” on the cancer study, sitting in the room during sessions with volunteers and providing them support. He also co-wrote three studies with Dr. Griffiths between 2018 and 2022. In 2015, he helped pay for one of Dr. Griffiths’s final studies, which gave psilocybin to 20 religious leaders to see whether it changed the way they practiced their ministry. Mr. Swift got to know many of the participants during follow-up interviews, he said. For some, the drug had been a revelation. “It took my worldview and busted it open,” said James Lindberg, a Lutheran pastor who leads a church in suburban Omaha. The experience spurred Zac Kamenetz, a rabbi from Berkeley, to start an organization that integrates psychedelics into Judaism. Hunt Priest, an Episcopalian priest from Savannah, founded a Christian psychedelic society. Both organizations received financial backing from Mr. Swift. In June 2022, he also sponsored a retreat that brought former subjects and researchers together at a Tibetan center in the Catskill Mountains. Dr. Griffiths, who was too ill to attend, requested that the retreat take place after all the data had been collected. Over video conferences inside an airy cabin, he spoke to each participant one by one and shared the study’s preliminary results, which have not yet been published. Dr. Johnson, who collaborated on the study, did not know about the Catskills gathering. In the summer of 2023, he accepted a new job at the nearby Sheppard Pratt Hospital, and then submitted his complaint to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Griffiths died in October. The next month, after learning about the retreat, Dr. Johnson submitted a second complaint. He was alarmed by the mingling of researchers, funders and volunteers, and did not believe it had been approved by the university’s board of research ethics. Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who reviewed Dr. Johnson’s complaint for The Times, agreed that the retreat was troubling. “This reminds me of pharmaceutical companies making allies of patients,” Dr. Elliott said. “Here, it’s going through religious channels instead.” Mr. Swift said that his foundation provided financial disclosures in published papers and on its website. “I always try to hold awareness of how my personal views might influence the people I work with,” he said. ‘This Marvelous Experience’ Around 2012, a dozen years into his research program, Dr. Griffiths tried a psychedelic for the first time since college, according to an interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast in late 2022. A few trips since then, he said, had given him a powerful feeling of mindfulness, much like meditation. Image A wood carving of a mushroom in an office at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.Credit...Matt Roth for The New York Times “What we want, those of us who have done spiritual practices and have experience with psychedelics, is we want the world, humankind, to awaken to what this marvelous experience is,” he said in the interview. The public’s interest in that experience is indeed rising. In 2022, more than 4 percent of middle-aged adults reported psychedelic use, up from 0.5 percent a decade earlier. “The scientific research has destigmatized these substances,” said Amy McGuire, a bioethicist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. At times, Dr. Griffiths seemed to be conflicted about his role as a psychedelic evangelist. Last summer, he exchanged emails with a former trial volunteer, Travis Kitchens, who had written a critical article about the “occult roots” of the Hopkins research. “I have ambivalence that this narrative might be interpreted as me wanting to promote a psychedelic religion,” Dr. Griffiths wrote. And yet, he also embraced those who saw him as a prophet. Last June, he attended a dinner in his honor at the Psychedelic Science meeting in Denver. An artist unveiled a portrait of him with a psilocybin molecule hovering above his outstretched hands. Inscribed on the gold frame were words drawn from the Mystical Experience Questionnaire: holy, spirit, ecstasy, awe and paradox. Dr. Griffiths had signed the back, writing, “May you remain aware of awareness.” The painting is on view at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York.

About 6 weeks ago, I threw a bunch of Delosperma bosserabum seedlings into a seedling tray with a humidity dome. I was not expecting them to do much, and now I find that I have over 300 seedlings. IF YOU WANT ANY LET ME KNOW - Just a little to cover postage would be appreciated. I do not want to just dump them or let them die, so I am trying to repot them. I am not sure what the best way is to plant out 300 seedlings. However I do not have 300 pots. Is there a cheap and effective way to deal with this bounty? I was thinking of getting shallow plastic tubs, drilling holes in them, and planting 25 plants per tub. OR buying a bunch of Garden City Plastic 50mm Black Square Tube Grow Pots (6 Pack) from Bunnings. However, just because of money I have access to coke bolts of assorted sizes, and I am thinking of using them after burning a hole in the bottom for drainage. Also, does one have any idea when it would be the best time to repot them? They are starting to form 3 or 4 leaf-like structures. I transplanted a few, and they seem to be surviving.

Found a local seller on marketplace who solid me new 10cm pots for 50 cents each I bough 100. She has more and I will get more later.

I have found something like this - I can get 240 for $150 delivered which works out to $0.625 per pot https://www.sagehort.com.au/product/square-pot-90mm-packs-of-20/ OR https://www.bunnings.com.au/garden-city-plastic-grow-plant-pot-100mm-black_p0152848 which is $0.72 per pot I prefer square pots for storage reasons.

Are you saying the cristata will turn into a single columnar cactus again?

All good

The package came today - I am going to be splitting them up between myself and a friend. For $15 each its not a bad haul. They are mostly small, and nutrient deficient, and one is suffering black blistering possible fungal - however their is some interesting morphology amongst them. However I have potted them up in my usual mix of 50/50 organic and inorganic mix. Then I mixed up a fertilizer and iron chelate and a system fungicide and have given them a good dosing. With winter coming it is just about getting them settled in asap. The box contained three cristata one is a good size two are tiny. So bonus score. Thanks out to @Siggor

Mind sharing were you source it from and what brand you used?

@fyzygy Science has no place in Australian drug police or law reform. Science tells things that those in power that they do not want to know and therefor is irrelevant in making decisions.

Due to other comorbidity I cannot use NSAID's, now I have been recommended that I pursue medical cannabis as my primary treatment option. Now this Dr was an elderly, long haired fellow who had alternative vibe to him and he was more clue then most doctors I have dealt with. I have been able to talk to my GP about medical cannabis and he is open to it as a treatment avenue. However our discussion about psychedelics and mental health was tainted by fear of the AMA on his part. In his own words "the data looks good" and in "20 years it will be a viable and accepted treatment" however "I cannot talk to you about it". Now my GP is young, and a little quirky so he is better educated then most old farts in the medical industry. However on the flip side I had a friend who's GP an old fart vehemently opposes the use of any plants illicit or otherwise. It will be long road another 50 years before the old farts die off and new generation of medical students get trained in modern approaches to medicine. Assuming we don't get another Johnny, Trump or Dutton come to power, then it will be the good old days of 1970's all over again.

From what I see in the community attitudes the day when psychotropic plants become legal is far far ................... far away. Push back is and will continue to be insurmountable. Whole generations of people young and old have been brainwashed, into fearing nature and plants by the likes of Johnny. As I always say Australia is a deeply conservative bureaucratic dystopia. In addition to many groups have a vested interest in the war on nature and they are more then happy to stick to the statuesque. I can see many of these plants being legalized for profit pharmaceuticals in the coming decades, everything else will remain stigmatized. Just accept that as sab'er you are a pariah and will remain as such. Sorry.

In the interest of sharing. I was watching ESPD55 - Colin Domnauer - Expanding evidence of Anadenanthera in the pre-Columbian Andes as part of Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs - ESPD55. In the Q and A - Laurel Sugden and Josep Orlovac Del Rio mention that San Pedro cactus juice can be fermented and that it has a positive effect on its actions. The possibility of fermentation raised a question that fermentation of San Pedro might produce beta-carbolines. The production of beta-carbolines might increase the function of MAOI in the San Pedro brew. There is also a possibility that Anadenanthera was in history fermented with San Pedro based on iconography found on drinking vessels. The same way that Anadenanthera was fermented as part of chicha. This seems to be an interesting avenue for exploration. The fermentation could be undertaken pre-cooking or post cooking of the cactus juice. Similar to a raw ale pre-cook ferments would result in the presence of lactobacillus bacteria and some saccharomyces being the primary drivers of fermentation resulting in a sour ferment with a lower PH. Post-cook ferments would reduce the diversity of micro-organism from the raw plant and would rather be inoculated by air born yeasts. A quick search show that their is a long history of fermenting a variety of cactus juices to make drinks. These are often fruit however the cactus flesh is also fermented. The flesh would have limited sugars or carbs and that restrict ethanol production. However certain bacteria and yeast can breakdown cellulose into sugar raising the possibility of more ethanol production. However the introduction of a secondary source of sugar as an adjunct in the fermentation is conceivable. However the production of ethanol is secondary with the formation of enzymatic by-products would be of greater interest. This is definitely an area for possible exploration.

I got two plants of D bosseranum from Alchemica and they produced about 50 flowers and each flower must have 20 or so seed in it - I harvest a bunch of the tiny seeds and planted them out and they are gone grazy and I will have 600 plus seedlings. Might be giving a bunch these away in time. I harvest more seeds of D bosseranum I have put in two envelopes each with at least 50 seeds that I will post at no cost for interested people (No WA/Tas) First two to get in contact - will send ASAP From The Garden Of Eden by Snu Voogelbreinder The phytochemistry of this plant is from my understanding unknown but some find it superior to the Sceletiums While some find Sceletium to be "short acting, created anxiety and far too much stimulation", one preliminary report using D. bosseranum "two days of relief from my depression was over. It was a totally transparent experience that was all me. No depressive crash after this was over. It was like being lifted out of depression on angel wings, and just as gently dropped off back in my normal state of being two days later." D. bosseranum is currently used in a similar way to Sceletium species (Kanna/Kougoed), the unfermented dried tuber is used, as well as the fermented whole plant (aerial and underground parts together). [herbalistics]

I cleaned up the seed pods and sifted the seeds out - I would hazard a guess that I have more then a 2000 seeds. Even a dab of my finger are well over 50 seeds. I will give away two lots of 50 seeds on SAB. The rest I will sell.

I am seeking assorted brugmansia cuttings and I was wondering if anyone would be open to parting with a few cuttings to grow my collection?

OKAY

@ph7 I am still looking for more brugmansia cuttings

Sounds good lets me know