DOSE: T+ 0:00	5 seeds	oral	H.B. Woodrose	(extract)
T+ 1:10		inhaled	Levmetamfetamine
T+ 1:10	50 mg		Caffeine
T+ 5:40			Caffeine

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

Ethanolic Extraction of Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Seeds

Me:
31 year old male, 135lbs. Generally, my reactions to psychoactives are idiosyncratic. There's not much use if you can't extrapolate from them. For instance, I react badly to cannabis and MDMA, but love bufotenine and salvia. My experiences with LSD and other ergoloids are pretty typical, though (except that they are almost non-visual,) so my experience here is probably pretty representative.

Background:
Positive or neutral experiences with: BZP, TFMPP+BZP, salvia, mescaline, 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, ketamine, kratom, ghb, adrafanil, psilocybin, amanita muscaria, lsd, calcium bufotenate, ayahuasca, nitrous oxide
Negative experiences with: 2c-C, HBWR, MDMA, cannabis

Extraction:
- 100 HBWR seeds ground to fine powder in pulses in coffee grinder to keep temps down.
- Butane blasted 4 times. Inefficiently due to clogging, but probably a superfluous step anyway.
- Seed material washed with <0ºC 95% ethanol.
- Seed material covered with <0ºC ethanol and stored in fridge for 2 hours.
- Decoction filtered, ethanol added to previous wash.
- Seed material covered again with <0ºC ethanol. Stored in fridge for 16 hours.
- Decoction filtered, ethanol added to previous washes.
- 3g citric acid added, which was pretty pointless given the low concentration of water.
- Decoction reduced in cold dark environment of fridge (probably not necessary, as it doesn't seem super unstable).
- Decanted, filtered. Filtrate transparent and very, very light colored.
- Several washes of tools and equipment with several fresh everclear washes of seed matter and tools were added to filtered product. Filtrate now murkier and light brown in colour.
- Reduced at 15ºC in front of fan to 100mL extract.
- Result is ethanolic extract at 1mL:1HBWR seed ratio, not counting extraction loss.

Administration:
- 5ml ethanolic extract post butane blast (roughly equal to 5 seeds, not counting loss) put in plastic bullet blender.
- 4 drops Cassia cinnamon bark essential oil added stepwise and swirled over two minutes. No reaction observed. I would like to take this sublingually, but it's a skin irritant.
- 125mL spring water added.
- Pulsed in blender for short period of time (louching observed, of course.)

1:35pm – Started sipping product. Smells unsettlingly petrochemical, making me worry about my butane blast. First time I've detected the smell in the whole process, though, so I dismiss it as cassia oil volatiles.
1:50 – Alert. Tell myself that it's probably just the ethanol on an empty stomach or a placebo.
1:55 – Nasal congestion. I get this every time from ergoloid mesylates, sometimes from ethanol. Maybe it's not a placebo or maybe it's just seasonal allergies.
2:00 – Finished sipping product. Noticing enhanced visual detail.
2:06 – More noticeable effects. Sedation, feeling in thighs, ergoloid style feeling in brain, desire to close eyes and drift; not strong. Shulgin +1. Initial enhanced visual detail gone. Hard to bring self back from daydreams. Some mild heartburn-like discomfort from cinnamon. Ate half a honeycrisp apple.
2:15 – Hard to concentrate. Still +1. Body warm, but still feel low-key in a mushroomy kind of way. No CEVs. Nothing going on. Not interesting. Some mild swimming vision. Beginning to suspect placebo. Thinking of having caffeine.
2:25 – Things feel settled. Probably the peak. Weirdly bland but definitively psychedelic state achieved. Certainly no visuals. Thinking of eating something else now.
2:35 – Attempts to coax out OEVs from patterned surfaces are quite underwhelming. The suggestion feels more like mushrooms than mescaline. No buzzy energy rainbow lattices, more shadowy outlines crawling across my field of vision independent of external visual stimuli. Anyway, they can't be forced.

2:40 – Mild desire to defecate, tiniest suggestion of nausea (may be hunger). Face looks interesting in mirror. Experience akin to low dose lsd with no change of headspace or stimulation. Feel like a higher dosage would have been better. No change in pupil size suggests placebo effects, even though the experience doesn't feel like a placebo. Still mild warmth and tension in jaw and thighs. Bodyload negligible, all in all—certainly a MUCH more pleasant than prior experiences with HBWR seeds eaten whole (severe cramping, mental fog, depression, and anhedonia.) Ate some mint choc ice cream.
2:42 – Has it really only been two minutes? I have no desire to do anything, but there's nothing particularly interesting about the experience either. Sex drive, my constant companion, is gone. Still, I'm not experiencing apathy or anhedonia. Definitely psychedelic. Shulgin ++. It's just not interesting yet. I feel...attenuated. Sighing a lot. Breathing requires a little bit of effort. Decide not observe this but not be concerned just yet. Music is more emotionally accessible—should've started listening to it earlier, but I wanted the flavor of the stuff on its own.
2:45 – Decided that I don't like the congestion or laboured breathing/sighing, so will have some nasal decongesting, peripheral stimulating over-the-counter menthol and lev-metamfetamine in a tube. I insufflate it, as well as 50mg caffeine. Congestion and fatigue and brain fog almost immediately subside. Experience improves significantly. Still, the character feels more yin/cold/poisoning-like. Not solar, like mescaline. Not like a vacation, more like a trial to plough through. Creeping subtle muscle soreness.

2:55 – Spent time from then til now in dreamy state watching music. Closed eye visuals gradually develop more storyline. Very dreamy. pleasant somatic effects. Enjoy sucking on my cough drop, laying in my sunbeam. Shulgin ++ . No way I could read. Dreamy sedation makes it hard to write. Rather keep laying on the couch. Comes in waves. [later edit: +++ only for waves of sedation/noddiness; I couldn't have functioned in the times where the waves hit me.] On the downswing? Very nice and warm. Seems like other people would enjoy this with pot. It's like a mellow LSD. Feels mentally healthy. Similar toxic feeling in stomach and bowels as with LSD. Mentally cloudier than mescaline. I'm beginning to wonder if the butane wash was actually important, as this is incomparably better than straight seeds in terms of side effects. Character otherwise quite similar. No more noticeable respiratory depression.

3:14 – Genuine open eyed hallucination. I saw the silhouette of light cast by the sun through the window move across the wall of my room, as if it was night and a car was driving by. Obviously, that's not possible at midday. Were it not for that, I would have believed it was real. In the absence of much else by way of open eye visuals, this was really strange. I have never once had a hallucination on any 5-HT2A target psychedelic. Truly weird. Pupils normal.

3:22 – Mild chills and agitation. Oh yeah, that's because it's legitimately cold in the house and I just got up to pee.
3:45 – Effects aren't actually in decline. It just comes in waves like mushrooms. I really might've missed much of the experience if not for music.
3:50 – Woke up from my music induced trance. Open eye visuals seem to be mildly present. Hands and face look strange and over-detailed. Occasional subtle flares of light in the periphery of my field of vision. So it took a long time getting here, but the effects now are extremely similar to low-dose LSD. Arguably indistinguishable, given the variety of effects that LSD can produce from experience to experience.
4:11 – Going strong. Eating madelines biscuits and rooibos tea now, about all I can convince myself to swallow—quite a strange experience, eating while tripping. It's quite hard to stay on task (wash dishes/cook/etc.) I have struggled to keep my eyes open this whole experience. The internal dream state has been compelling in the literal sense of the word. If open eye visuals were present, I wouldn't even have noticed them, off in my waking dream like I've been.
Unknown – Struggling with typing formatting. Kind of tired of the smell of cinnamon at this point. I'm going to have some more caffeine to offset inward drifting eye closing.

20 min later – Caffeine was a good choice. So was choosing to watch Book of Kells
5:00 – Effects greatly diminished; not sober, but close-ish.
5:30 – Same as above. Thinking that the feeling is probably caffeine induced. Still, much more functional. Could not have passed or maintained well earlier. Feel like I might be able to now. Back to ++. Might actually try playing some video games. Time dilation pretty on par with LSD.
6:15 – Yawning. So much yawning. I'm not coming up on mushrooms—what is this? Took more caffeine. Effects mostly subsided and congestion has returned (probably allergies). Kind of like the tail of acid, but instead of obnoxious residual stimulation, it's obnoxious residual sedation. Still some jaw clenching. Wonder if I could sleep? Way too early to test.
6:50 – Close enough to baseline that I can read technical articles. So gassy.
745 – Mood vaguely unpleasant and dysphoric, and has been for some time. That's what I get for playing zombie games before totally reaching baseline, I suppose. Guts feel dried up, stretched tight, and gassy. Typical to an LSD comedown for me, albeit milder.

9:30 – Went to bed. Fell asleep easily by 10pm.
1:00am – Woke to drunk neighbors returning. Took some time to fall back asleep due to highly uncharacteristic anxiety. Wanted to get up to check to see if the door was locked, but was sure that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep again if I did. Noticed that I was dehydrated and drank some water.
Next day – I felt adequately rested, but a little emotionally drained as if I had had a poor night's sleep. some afterglow. Struggled a little with familiar concepts at work ('wow! Subway sandwiches are really NARROW!') High dose caffeine did not shake the feeling of emotional drain/dysphoria, it just made me more active. Rest of the week, my mood was higher than usual.

Results:
Throughout the course of the experience, it felt as if different active compounds were present and overlapping to different degrees as they were absorbed and metabolized at different rates throughout. Take that for what it's worth--a single substance can just as easily go through definite stages. Still, the profound 'noddiness' of the early experience overlapped into the clean, healthy headspace of the second part of the trip unevenly. Late parts of the trip had the dysphoric elements of a chewed HBWR experience that I disliked even more than the gut cramps, vasoconstriction, and nausea. That, coupled with the tail of the experience feeling a little like the gritty come-down off of LSD makes me loathe to repeat it. I'm just not a fan of LSD. If the positive mental headspace prevailed throughout, I might've revisited it. I really wanted to test the same dosage sans cassia oil, but considering this, I probably won't. Given its similarities to LSD, I'll venture that a lot of people would actually quite like this. Hopefully they'll do the research for me and post their results. Even better, they'll actually have analytical equipment and will be able to settle this LSA/LST/LSH/cinnamylidene-bislysergamide question once and for all.

Conclusion:
It's possible that some of the complex spectrum of effect were due to the (possibly irrelevant and either way not totally effective) butane blast step. This is further complicated, as the initially clear final product was darkened to light brown by successive washes, likely reintroducing compounds the wash was intended to eliminate in the interest of maximizing extraction efficiency. These compounds may have coloured the experience similarly to the chewed HBWR experiences that I so disliked before. Since I initially presumed that the step was pointless, I would have skipped it, if not for how negative my previous experiences with HBWR were. One more like those would prevent me from ever testing it again, so I wanted to do this one by the book.

I felt similarly about the idea of adding a source of cinnamaldehyde. Several organic chemists pointed out reasons why adduct formation with cinnamaldehyde was impossible under those conditions. Still, several organic chemists also pointed out the bk-2c-B was too unstable due to dimerisation only to be proven wrong, and we all know mescaline technically can't cross the blood-brain barrier... The difference in onset between LSA and LSA+cinnamaldehyde seemed self-testable, and I already had a bottle of cassia essential oil at home already, so I decided what the hell. The strange chronology of the effects seems to have spoiled my hopes for that.

My experience came on quickly, which is unlike most LSA experiences, but the peak was uneven. I thought the peak had been reached at +1:00, but the character changed sharply to heavy noddiness at +1:30, before returning to waking consciousness at +2:15. There was a short period of health, clarity, and insight, but the trip was mostly characterized by dreaminess and fog. The noddiness and sedation are characteristic of LSA, but warm extremities are not. My two prior experiences were 3 seeds, and both times I exhibited pupil dilation; this time, there was none. The short duration was also atypical--just under 5 hours from dosing to under level +. This is in keeping with other reports of cinnamon oil adduct formation and is not consistent with HBWR reports at presumed similar dosage levels The strong urge to sleep at the end, however, was not consistent with cinnamon oil reports. My kingdom for analytical instruments! Hell, even a blacklight and some filter paper might shed some light on this question.

It's possible that the adduct formation with the cinnamon (if it even is possible) was incomplete, or continued to react over the ~15min it took me to drink it, or (even more unlikely) was affected by the peppermint oil and other oils in the ice cream and cough drop. The reduced efficacy of the butane blast step and the presence of alkaloids not present in other adduct reports may also be a factor.

Finally, it may just be that the seeds I obtained this time were fresher than previous experiences, and that they had a higher or better ratio of LSH?/LST?/whatever to the non-psychedelic depressant LSA than my other batches.

Occam's razor suggests that it's either a placebo effect in the users that notice a difference, or that it's reporting bias (in that the users that do not notice a difference are less inclined to publish a report of their failure.) There are only a few reports online of this preparation method, but the vast majority do mention a significant increase in the speed of onset. Could there be other reasons for this? The irritant action of the cassia oil? Cassia oil inhibiting or promoting enzymatic activity? Some other reaction taking place? This would all be much easier to sort out if I intended to repeat the test with the same amount of extract in two weeks without the addition of the cassia oil, but frankly I just don't enjoy ergoloids enough to repeat the experience for the sake of science when there are perfectly good analytical tools out there that I just don't have access to.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 104833
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 31
Published: Jul 1, 2020	Views: 2,003
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H.B. Woodrose (26) : General (1), Preparation / Recipes (30), Unknown Context (20)