The rain has finally come to the pacific northwest and the mushrooms
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1 year ago
thefishingstripper
The rain has finally come to the Pacific Northwest and the mushrooms are going bananas Unless I m an idiot and this is actually their second fruiting of the year Sometimes I m the last one to the party These are Amanita Muscaria or the American yellow fly agaric These amazing mushrooms are found in conifer and deciduous woodlands throughout the temperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere It s commonly known that they are poisonous though that s not exactly accurate They contain ibotenic acid which in large doses can make you sick and have diarrhea But they have been used for thousands of years their earliest recorded use being around 4000 BCE by almost all of the Uralic-speaking peoples of western Siberia and the Paleosoberian-speaking peoples of the Russian Far East First I pick them then dry them then make them into tea So far this season I m just on step one and two When it comes time for step 3 the resulting brew will not make me trip You don t hallucinate and even when it has been used during meditation practices and dream rituals it s more of a calm relaxing state than a trip The ibotenic acid gets converted to mucimol which is one of the principal psychoactive constituents of Amanita muscaria and related species of mushroom Mucimol is a potent selective agonist for the GABAA receptors and displays sedative-hypnotic depressant and hallucinogenic psycho activity Some of its health benefits have been listed as beneficial for sore throats arthritis joint pain and swollen lymph nodes memory anxiety withdrawal from benzodiazepines and many others I ll post more on that in the next post Must sleep for mushie hunting in the morning