198
Scientists Engineered a Plant to Produce 5 Different Psychedelics at Once
(www.sciencealert.com)
The science we love.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
198 points (98.5% liked)
science
26361 readers
477 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Shhh, the Narcs are listening.
Now this is what I pay my taxes for.
And not one mention about how the trip was... No one can tell me they didn't try!
These are the breakthroughs I want to hear about. I’m off to become a farmer.
What's playing on the bluetooth in your tractor?
Grateful Dead in theory, NOFX in practice.
Gave myself a NOFX tattoo in 7th grade science class back in the 90's using a protractor , Bic pen ink and string from my sock
What was the string for?
Not exactly sure . I had remembered as a kid seeing a picture in a book of some indigenous people doing a sort of stick and poke tattoo with a sharpened needle and string as an inkwell (I'm guessing) and I thought it was necessary at the time.
The tattoo only says IFX these days as I wasn't pounding the protractor in far enough. Which everyone knows gets you nowhere , ya gotta pound things in
They engineered tobacco to produce triptamines and DMT 🥳
I'd give the left nut of every man I've ever met for a mushroom I could grow that produces LSD instead of psilocybin
Just get yourself some ergot-infected rye and eat that. It's basically the same thing, right?
There's the whole thing where the first few joints of your fingers and toes turn black and rot off, but sure, eat some ergot.
Also, Datura is a common weed. Collect a bunch of seeds and share with your friends so y'all can all trip for days and not even know it. The kidney failure can kind of suck.
might end up dancing until you are dead though
How non-selfish, generous and Zen of you ;-)
on the most addicting and one of the most carcinogenic plant no less.
Actually the tobacco plant species used in scientific research has hardly any nicotine, 10–100× less than the species used by commercial industry, and it's not naturally carcinogenic either. The carcinogens come from all the other shit cigarette companies add to it.
That and exposing your lungs to the products of combustion regularly.
There's no evidence linking cannabis smoke to cancer. I don't see why tobacco would be any different if it wasn't covered in radioactvity and poison and radioactive poison.
Use some form of water pipe, it cleans a LOT of the worst stuff out of the smoke, without disturbing the good stuff. All that goo that builds up on your bong? That would have been in your lungs.
Personally I only dab solventless hash oil (most of the time) at 485 F.
Cannabis smoke is not a recognised carcinogenic agent. That is different from saying there's no evidence linking it to cancer.
It's smoke in the lungs on a regular basis. That's plenty evidence.
That's the opposite of evidence, it's actually a total lack of evidence... Just because you feel like it should be true doesn't make it true.
There's plenty studies linking smoke to diseases. Smoke is a known toxic agent.
That is different from saying there’s no evidence linking it to cancer.
Okay, provide said evidence then.
I'm aware benzene and other byproducts of combustion should increase lung cancer risk, but a wide swathe of studies has failed to ever conclusively establish a connection between cannabis smoke and cancer.
(Also cannabis in California actually is labeled with a cancer risk... not due to smoking it, but due to the presence of the terpene Myrcene, which is why you'll find the warning even on edibles. Still, that's just California being California, as I understand it the warning is there simply because Myrcene has a benzene ring in its chemical structure like many aromatic compounds do.)
but a wide swathe of studies has failed to ever conclusively establish a connection between cannabis smoke and cancer.
The list of known carcinogens is quite short. That is mostly because it is difficult to conduct studies with a large enough sample to be sure that something is a carcinogen with high statistical reliability.
Given our current knowledge, it may be argued that eating fast food every day is not bad for you, as there are no conclusive studies linking it to increased death rates.
In the laboratory, most mutagenic compounds are labelled as mutagenic despite the fact that they are not known carcinogens.
The list of known carcinogens is quite short. That is mostly because it is difficult to conduct studies with a large enough sample to be sure that something is a carcinogen with high statistical reliability.
Benzene is certainly one of them, and it's present in cannabis smoke (well, all smoke from burned plant matter, so cannabis included).
Otherwise I'm not sure what your point is. They wouldn't need to identify specific compounds to establish a strong correlative relationship between lung cancer and cannabis. Such a relationship has never been established, and not for lack of trying.
Are you honestly asking for a source on inhaling smoke being bad for you?
Lay of that pipe mate
Nothing then, got it
Well if big tobacco starts selling psychedelics I guess we know who to come for lol.
They'll fuck it all up. They should be absolutely prohibited from participating in the Cannabis industry, after their egregious behavior in the tobacco industry. They should have been completely put out of business, except too many people too addicted to just cut off manufacturing.
Today, less than 10% of people reported smoking a cigarette in the previous year. When it's down to less than 5%, the big tobacco companies should be closed. Highly regulated independent tobacco companies can try to survive, but the big companies that hid the dangers of cigarettes, and strongly denied the dangers, while simultaneously making their products more addicting, more addicting quicker, and harder to quit, need to be punished by going out of business. They are one of the most evil industries that have ever existed.
Yeah for sure, which is why I found the headline so alarming. I'm a big believer in psychedelics and that they can help humanity and that they could heal the separation from nature that a lot of people are feeling, ease the anxiety of life and help people see through to what's important, but this is not the way. Mass production and commodification of things always leads to forgetting the original purpose, strips things away from their ceremonial or therapeutic use and leads to ruin.
i wonder how it's like to be on all of them at the same time
'Psychonauts' are people that explore their minds with drugs and they are really focused on exploring these things. Someone made a schematic some years ago, with a list of all kinds of drugs and how they work together.
Oc, I don't have a link, sorry..
Can’t speak to being on all of them but multiple psychedelics at once change the visuals a bit and add confusion, at least in my experience.
Instead of the usual LSD color shift and rhythmic “breathing” of the room, the visuals were more geometric and I didn’t have the same mental clarity. I got a nonstop stream of thoughts that would interrupt my ability to follow where the thought was going.
On top of all the other visual noise it was like my peripherals had a colored plastic overlaying what I was seeing, so it would appear more green sometimes and red other times.
I wouldn’t recommend it. The experience may be completely different from mine because mine was LSD, NBOMe, and a synthetic psilocybin analogue, but sticking with worker LSD or psilocybin is way better. Each drug has its own side effects that are manageable by themselves but make it really uncomfortable when they stack. I remember being itchy, thirsty, and kept swapping from being too hot and too cold. I had energy but was couch locked. I wanted to talk to my brother and room mates but when I tried to communicate, new thoughts just kept coming in and I’d forget what I was trying to say halfway through a thought. It was very frustrating.
I barely had the nerve to try a single hallucinogenic. I can't imagine saying "Let's see what happens if I drop all these at once!"
I've done acid and mushies at the same time and totally loved it. The way they played off each other and created varying peaks of intensities of each was quite the experience. Absolute rollercoaster and exhausting for sure but for me it worked out great. I wasn't really trying to communicate with anyone though and yeah if at any point I had a goal for something it was more or less impossible. Just gotta float down those rapids and see where you end up not much point trying to swim anywhere specific
4-aco-dmt?
Yep! Wanted to prevent having people think it’s related to DMT since they’re completely different but that’s the one
That one was sadly still on my bucket list prior to having left the scene; I may never experience it now. Though, I had quite the experience with 5-meo-mipt. Inspired by Alexander Shulgin, I chose administration via vaporization and inhalation. It’s probably the most intense psychedelic trip I have ever had by far… and my buddy and I used to take 10g of golden caps at the beach all the time. A little bit of that stuff goes a long way.
Interesting too, the chemical transitions from a translucent white to a deep profound red after vaporizing it. Quite the effect.
Vaporization sounds so cool, I’ve never heard of that before! I’ve likewise also left the scene but I’d I ever experiment again I might give that a try.
interesting
I'm imagining an Inception-like scenario where you start at the first/lightest level, and then work your way down to the lowest/hardest, then slowly come back up, similar to peaking and the comedown, but with more stages. I'd imagine dosage would be a real issue here.
All we need is a crispr gun and the psychedelic DNA...Cherry tree? Pewpew!
An Apple? Pew pew! Pomegranate? Heck yeah pewpew! Peach! Pewpew!
Then wait ten years and invite your friends over. Lock up all the knives!
36hrs later....you didn't lock up the forks or the garage didn't you? People running out of the front door and into traffic with a fork or a pencil in their eyeball.
Uplifting news
Wacky Tobacky