Why Make a Psiloscoby

Contents:

What is a Psiloscoby

Psilocybin has Therapeutic Awesomeness

Psilobucha is a Good Form for Psilocybin

Manipulate Your Mind, on Your Terms

A Gateway Drug to Molecular Biology

Why Not to Make a Psiloscoby

A Society on Psilo

What is a Psiloscoby

Psilocybin Brewed by Kombucha

We can genetically engineer a kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) to produce psilocybin while it ferments. We can do this by printing genes from magic mushrooms and embedding them into the SCOBY’s DNA. Once we make a single psiloscoby, it can grow and divide and be shared among friends, to brew their own psilobucha.

Psilocybin has Therapeutic Awesomeness

Recent studies have revived the discovery of psilocybin’s medical potential. Lots of people have written about this, here are a few studies:

Here are a few other resources to explore the psilocybin research renaissance:

Psilobucha is a Good Form for Psilocybin

Kombucha provides a good Set and Setting
Psiloscoby could prevent monopolization of psilocybin
Psiloscoby enables you to manipulate your mind, on your own terms
A Gateway Drug to Synthetic Biology

Kombucha provides a good Set and Setting

Consider these three forms of psilocybin:

Mushroom

In the past, South American and Scandinavian cultures would accompany consumption of magic mushrooms with ceremony. It was a sacred and ritualistic experience. Collecting and growing psychedelic mushrooms today does still require intense investment and care, thus maintaining some of the ritual. The consequences of misidentification can be severe, and contamination ruins a whole costly batch when growing. Mushroom accessibility is limited.

Pill

While medicalization is an effective first step towards legalization, pathologizing the use cases of psilocybin makes for a very different set and setting.

“In order to use this, there has to be something wrong with you.”

Furthermore, history can give us some context for the pill. Drugs tend to go through some common phases:

Use in a culturally accepting setting
Introduction to a new culture
Stigmatization and criminalization
Validation, often via medicinal use
Destigmatization:
5a. Destigmatization and widely accepted use (medicinally and/or recreationally)
5b. Destigmaization and limited use, often limited because of racial and economic barriers are not overcome.

Adderall and Ritalin have reached (5) but stayed in the hands of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies. Any other consumption remains illegal, to maintain the monopoly that the drug company owns. This means people who have the resources to navigate healthcare systems, have access to this drug. Others don't. And that can happen with psilocybin too, which is just now entering (4). COMPASS Pathways owns a patent on the chemical synthesis of psilocybin and seemingly intends to monopolize it as a pharmaceutical. Often times, the only thing that leads to the validation of a drug, and then to decriminalization or legalization is capitalization: powerful, profit-driven forces (that can then provide huge tax revenues to the government) can motivate laws to change. Perhaps, there is a way to have psilocybin skip the mass commercialization (like Starbucks for coffee, Budweiser for beer) and go straight to the hands of artists (like small farmers/roasters/craft beer brewers) who will love and nurture its use, yet still motivate legalization. Perhaps Psiloscoby is that way. Psiloscoby could prevent monopolization of psilocybin.

Bucha

The psilobucha creates many satiating possibilities.

The ritualistic aspect of psilocybin’s origins is inherited from mushrooms: the Psiloscoby requires time and care, to be nurtured into brewing the psilobucha. It is a ceremony involving forethought, investment and deliberate intent to create the experience that psilocybin provides. Yet, the process is far less finicky and demanding than that of cultivating mushrooms. Furthermore, the Psiloscoby will be easy to share, it can be divided and passed onto friends and family to brew their own batches. It is accessible to anyone with tea, sugar, a jar, and a Psiloscoby friend.

Consider what a SCOBY is: a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. Yeast, on the anaerobic side of the SCOBY, converts sugar from the tea into ethanol and carbon dioxide. The bacteria in the oxygen rich side of the SCOBY take the yeast-produced ethanol and convert it into acetic acid or lactic acid. A byproduct of this ethanol metabolism is cellulose, which creates the thick biofilm we know as the SCOBY, that houses the yeast and bacteria. All this is to say that the mutually beneficial relationship between the bacteria and yeast provides for a beautiful display of symbiosis, in which each actor contributes to the collective organism.

Psychonauts have endlessly appreciated the metaphor that mushrooms provide: the trip encapsulates ego death and rebirth of new perspectives, just as mushrooms decompose the dead down to basic molecules, thus providing for a new lifecycle.

A different metaphor exists here. Psiloscoby extends the relationship to humans and society: by nurturing the psiloscoby, we become a part of the symbiosis and benefit from the psychedelic perspective it provides: a simple metabolite, psilocybin, that binds to our seratonin receptors, helping us to accept and love. The mushrooms decompose "you". The psiloscoby symbioses with you.

Manipulate Your Mind, on Your Terms

Tripping on any psychedelic puts you in an intimate and vulnerable psyche. Everything and everyone around you will influence what you think about, and how you think about it. Choosing your set and setting is not only a question of, do I trust this context to be safe for me? But also, and even more importantly, do I want to be influenced by this context?

Maybe you'd like to be influenced only by the trees, dirt, and sky as you trip to process your thoughts. Or maybe you want an experienced guide, or two, present so they can nudge you into brave comfort as you trip to face past trauma. Maybe you want to immerse yourself in a live music and light show. Or maybe you like to microdose while endeavoring into deep creative work. All these contexts can be extremely rewarding, healing, mind-expanding, and safe.

One human might find the sterility and transactionality of a psychedelic trip in clinical setting to be suppressive or stifling. But another human, might find safety and permission in the legitimacy and explicitness of that same setting. Similarly, hiking while tripping might be unhinged, perilous, and scary to one human, while freeing and sanctified to another.

Crafting a distinct and comfy context in which to manipulate your mind, is best done on your terms. Furthermore, it should be your responsibility. The existence, and allowance, of diverse paths of access, enable people to take responsibility for how they consume psychedelics. Growing your own mushrooms, brewing your own psilobucha, or vetting a guide or therapist, all empower you to better take care of yourself.

A Gateway Drug to Molecular Biology

Molecular biology and psychedelics teach some similar meta lessons. With psilocybin, you will feel that anything is everything, everything is nothing, and nothing is everything. And with molecular biology, you will understand how anything is everything, everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.

I think molecular biology is the coolest. I think it can provide an explanation to most of how we exist and why we experience. I think molecular and synthetic biology can provide us with tools and knowledge to make our existence and experience better! And I want more people to be excited about molecular and synthetic biology.

With some basic molecular biology knowledge, you could adapt this recipe to make mescaline-producing yeast, a Mescascoby to save peyote! Or 5-MeO-DMT, a Bufoscoby, to save the bufo toads!

Psiloscoby is a gateway drug to molecular biology. Here is the Gateway.

Why Not to Make a Psiloscoby

Potential for Harm is Real

Despite the increasingly obvious therapeutic awesomeness of psilocybin, psilocybin and more generally, psychedelics, are not a holy grail, be-all, end-all solution for everyone or everything, anytime. It is very possible, likely even, that increasing ease of access will also increase the amount of people who have a damaging relationship to psychedelics. Increasing access may inevitably increase abuse and decrease sanctity. Perhaps a controlled and medicalized cultural container will restrict freedom, but also restrict potential for harm.

Psiloyeast Might like to live in Your Gut

Yeast is everywhere, it floats around in the air, lives on surfaces, on your skin, and in your gut. All this is fine and healthy, unless their relative ecosystem gets out of balance. This is why kombucha is so often lauded as a great probiotic — it supports a healthy balance of diverse gut microbes. This also implies that the yeast and bacteria from kombucha, when consumed, take up residency in your gut. Psiloyeast might do this as well, which would probably not be particularly desirable, and could lead to adverse effects. The psiloyeast will most likely be so severely disadvantaged — as it is a lab strain, and is converting most of its tryptophan into metabolically useless psilocybin — that any wild type yeast will easily outcompete the population. As a last resort, there are always fecal transplants and poop pills.

There are a few fancy synthetic biology tricks that could be engineered to prevent against psiloyeast-gut-colonization. A "genetic switch" could be incorporated into the genome that only turns psilocybin production "on" in the presence of a different small molecule. One that is not normally found in the human gut. Maybe optogenetic switches could be used so the psiloyeast is only productive under specific light. Or perhaps, half the psilocybin metabolic pathway could be in yeast, and half in a bacteria or spirulina that doesn't survive in the human gut, so psilocybin is only produced in the presence of both. These ideas require some pretty intense synthetic biology engineering that is, hopefully, not necessary.

A Society on Psilo

Before coffee in Europe, there was alcohol: a downer, that makes you slow and stupid. Clean water was not particularly common, so alcohol was safer to drink than water. Then coffee was introduced. A stimulant that makes you go go go, think faster, and stay awake longer. Coffeehouses were places to gather and commune in that go go go state of mind. Coffee was introduced into Europe, then the Enlightenment happened. Caffeine (arguably) brought revolution and rebellion, political, philosophical and scientific change to that society.

At the start and end of the day, we are just a mush of chemicals. That makes society a big mash of a bunch of mushes of chemicals. Change the balance of the chemicals and we slosh together differently, little molecular changes ripple into societal waves.

What would a modern society on psychedelics look like? A society with institutions and cultures that casually house its sale, its consumption and the activities that accompany it? What change would it bring?

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