Hey fungi friends,

Welcome back to the Mycopreneur Newsletter — today we’ve got an article about the push to personalize psychoactive mushroom effect profiles, and an invitation to the Mycopreneur Incubator at the bottom.

As multiple states prepare to roll out legal psychedelic-assisted therapy programs to join Colorado and Oregon’s flagship regulated markets, a consortium of operators in the unregulated psilocybin space have come together to help usher in a new era of personalized psychedelic medicine. As dozens of new cultivars and hybrids have entered circulation, many operators argue that measuring mushrooms solely by dry weight is becoming increasingly inadequate.

For example, 3.5 grams of the standard ‘Golden Teacher’ variety of Psilocybin cubensis mushroom is a completely different potency level than 3.5 grams of ‘TTBVI’ or True Albino Teacher mushrooms. 

An emerging method for more accurately reporting potency has come in the form of ‘Psilocin Equivalent’ reporting, meaning that the dose is labeled based on Psilocin content rather than the more traditional route of quantifying the dry weight of the psilocybin-containing mushrooms. 

Kevin Sullivan of category leading microdosing research outfit Serenite Labs has been one of the activists at the vanguard of this push to personalize people’s mushroom experiences based on feedback and data from a growing pool of individuals.

"We learned that if you compare three mushrooms that are exactly the same psilocybin content, people report wildly different experiences. And that is a mystery and riddle that I feel like we need to understand – there are secondary metabolites and  other naturally occurring chemicals in mushrooms that contribute to the ‘Entourage Effect’, not just psilocybin,” says Sullivan. 

"People come to this mushroom experience wanting different things; If you're going out to a concert, you might want something with a ton of energy. But if you're going to a dinner party, you might want something more relaxed. 

For every strain in our catalogue, we're lab testing, collecting the lab results, and then overlaying the consumer's experiences on top of that. Patterns are beginning to emerge and our goal is to compile enough information that provide the research institutions a lead on how certain effect profiles are being achieved. The data we're producing is going to show us what profiles contribute to a softer experience, a more introspective experience, a more therapeutic experience, etc.”

Like much of the mushroom space, the evolving standards underpinning the push towards customizable and personalized microdosing experiences are being engineered in a decentralized community-based format which pools and shares open source knowledge and data rather than restricting it behind a paywall or patent like traditional pharmaceutical research. Advocates maintain that decentralized data collection allows hypotheses to emerge more quickly than traditional research, substituting real world experience and feedback for the controls found in clinical studies. Critics note that mushroom strain names themselves are poorly standardized and often genetically inconsistent, while scientists caution that controlled evidence linking specific cultivars to distinct subjective effect profiles remains limited. Still, the open source and decentralized nature of citizen mycology continues to deliver real world data that has helped to inform legislative policy in multiple states across the U.S. thanks to the grassroots advocacy of organizations like Decriminalize Nature. 

“You've got three or four different things as well as your own biological chemistry... everybody's going to have different psilocybin tolerance sizes as well,” says Ryan Spooner of industry leading mushroom spore and mycology supplies vendor Full Canopy Genetics. 

“Being able to personalize the experience could look like helping someone understand that their ideal microdose is a .05 gram dose of a particular strain versus a more therapeutic dose level of .7 grams. it's on us to be able to educate the public, but it's also on the individual too, as they go through their journey and figure out, 'All right, this variety or this potency is good for me”

Personalized dosing depends on large numbers of cultivators generating reproducible material and sharing cultivation data. A big push driving the evolution of personalized mushroom dosing standards comes thanks to the growing number of citizen mycologists and home cultivators that now have unprecedented access to turnkey mushroom growing supplies and materials. Companies like Booming Acres have found tremendous success focusing on serving the rapidly growth of independent mushroom cultivators and researchers so that they in turn can help accumulate feedback and data that can be leveraged towards efforts to personalize mushroom experiences. 

"The Booming Acres mushroom grow kits are super easy for beginners to use. A lot of people really like them... They're good for people that are just getting into the hobby, people that haven't really grown before,” says Booming Acres founder Howard Novak. 

“A lot of people are interested in mushrooms and they don't know where to start, and those all-in-one bags just make it where it's like, 'Okay, so I buy a bag, I buy the spores, put them together, and a couple weeks later, I have mushrooms.' It really can't get easier. We tell people it's easier than growing a houseplant."

The push to personalize psilocybin mushroom experiences for people is notable for many reasons, perhaps mostly so because this campaign is being orchestrated from the grassroots level up rather than under the direction of institutions or regulators. Whether these reported differences in personalized mushroom protocols and customizable effect profiles ultimately prove to be driven by genetics, secondary metabolites, cultivation methods, or individual biology remains an open question. But for a growing network of cultivators, laboratories, and citizen scientists, the era of treating all psilocybin mushrooms as interchangeable is already be coming to an end, and research into the model of personalized mushroom experiences is well underway.

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Cheers and thanks for reading today’s Mycopreneur Incubator — please let us know your thoughts by replying directly to this email or sharing on social media. We read every email and message —

DW