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davmre | 2 years ago

Nitpicking, but for a technical audience it's worth noting that ibogaine is not at all a 'potent' psychedelic in the pharmacological sense of the term. A typical therapeutic dose is on the order of 500mg, which makes ibogaine something like 20 times less potent than psilocybin (typical dose ~25mg), which itself is 100 times less potent than LSD (typical doses less than 250ug).

Of course, this isn't really relevant to the subjective experience of taking ibogaine at its typical dose, which by all accounts is strange in ways that go beyond the classical psychedelics.

discuss

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fsckboy|2 years ago

sort of an interesting dichotomy in the meaning of potency. The poison that kills you with the smallest dose is the most potent, but the (hypothetical) drug that cures cancer most effectively is the most potent cancer cure, regardless of dose.

travisjungroth|2 years ago

One definition of potency is how little mass it takes to do its thing, whatever that is. Fentanyl is a potent drug, LSD is a potent psychedelic. That resolves the dichotomy.

There’s a second, softer connotation, of how strong it is in light of whatever other limits may exist. Mescaline is less potent in this way, not just because of the larger mass, but because a dose that’s going to blast you into another realm is going to be much harder on you than some other psychedelics.

Ibogaine (haven’t done it) is very potent by this meaning. Very long, intense trips are possible.

dylan604|2 years ago

You have your point of view reversed. If the poison the kills you is potent, the same is true of the cancer cure as it is killing the cancer.

sibeliuss|2 years ago

> Of course, this isn't really relevant to the subjective experience of taking ibogaine at its typical dose, which by all accounts is strange in ways that go beyond the classical psychedelics.

And lasts quite a bit longer!