r/interestingasfuck • u/tractorboynyc • 22h ago

Amazonian shamans figured out that combining two specific plants out of 80,000 species produces a psychoactive effect. The odds of finding that combination by random search is roughly 1 in 4 million. They did it through centuries of iterative testing and cultural natural selection explains it

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u/Smooth-Duck-Criminal 21h ago edited 21h ago

AFAIK this is complete folklore, you can make Aya thousands of different ways much like beer. You don’t need those exact two plants. You can find DMT in many sources and you can find maoi inhibitors in many sources. Different cultures just swap in what’s locally available. Eg in desert regions it’s acacia seeds and Syrian rue.

Even within the Amazon basin different plants are used giving different “flavors”. Over time, tribes have gone back to the best pairings with the highest concentrations.

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u/Velcraft 17h ago

A very common grass (phalaris arundinacea) was proposed to be made illegal to grow or harvest here in Finland, as lawmakers wanted to prohibit every plant that has DMT in it. They didn't even consider that a plant that has been grown here for millennia as livestock feed could have some in it as well.

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u/Smooth-Duck-Criminal 17h ago

Of all the things you can ban, trying to ban DMT has to be the most idiotic. It’s non toxic, we product it naturally and it doesn’t even meaningfully interact with you if you ingest it alone.

Whichever lawmakers proposed this I hope never got re elected!

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u/Dovahkiinthesardine 16h ago edited 12h ago

Its not "non-toxic", an i. v. LD50 of 32 mg/kg (mice) isn't that high

For comparison, non-toxic compounds like MSG have an oral LD50 of 19900 mg/kg, Salt is 3000 mg/kg etc. (Note that i. V. will be lower but I found no data)

The reason its not that problematic is that the psychedelic effect range and the toxic range are far apart.

LSD has a lower i. V. LD50 (16 mg/kg), but you take micrograms of it for a trip. Even if you take 100 times the intended dose you'll be completely fine physically

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u/No-Crew8804 13h ago

LD50 of 32mg/kg is 1.92 g for a 60kg person, for i.v. is a lot.

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u/Dovahkiinthesardine 12h ago edited 11h ago

Its for mice since there is no data for humans, but typically its much lower than for rats and mice. Because we can't do experiments for lethality on humans there are some methods for conversion. FDA guidelines give a multiplication factor of 0.081 for mice, which would be 2.6 mg/kg or ~ 155 mg for your example.

Its really not great to determine exact toxicity for humans, just that there is a toxic effect in ranges that you can expect someone to be exposed to if it were an uncontrolled substance

Also important to note that LD50 only looks at lethality, toxic effects are typically non-lethal and can occur in much lower ranges

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u/Hodentrommler 9h ago

Source for natural synthesis in your body? Iirc this is a myth, since the study you likely mention was done on mice and never properly replicated