4-AcO-DMT is the most accessible (and mysterious) drug on the market right now

This Double Blind magazine article gives a helpful overview of 4-Aco-DMT saying: "Legions of brands are putting 4-AcO-DMT in products, but the drug’s widespread availability has some experts worried.  If you live in a major North American city, you may have noticed a sudden influx of psychedelics-laced gummies, chocolates, and various other products in your local smoke shops or corner stores. Many of these are likely labeled as containing psychoactive mushrooms, such as Amanita muscaria. But looks can be deceiving. In many cases, these products are not made with organic compounds derived from mushrooms. Instead, they’re manufactured with a hazily understood drug: 4-acetoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, better known as 4-AcO-DMT, psilacetin, or “synthetic mushrooms.” For decades, 4-AcO has been swirling around on the fringes of the psychedelic underworld, a bit player in a drama dominated by bigger actors like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and MDMA. But now it’s beginning to have its moment in the spotlight, thanks in large part to a new wave of entrepreneurs looking to make a quick profit.  Like so much psychedelic lore, the story of 4-AcO begins in Switzerland, in the lab of Albert Hofmann—the same chemist who, in the 1940s, discovered the molecule that we now call LSD. Along with his lab partner Franz Troxler, Hofmann first synthesized 4-AcO in 1963 as a chemical analogue to psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms which he’d isolated from the Psilocybe mexicana mushroom five years earlier. Hofmann never seemed to regard 4-AcO with any special interest; it was created purely as part of a broader study into synthetic psilocybin analogues, put on a shelf, and apparently forgotten. In this respect, the genesis of 4-AcO was a bit like that of LSD: created in a lab and then long ignored, only to be embraced years later by a psychedelic subculture. And like LSD, 4-AcO has been a bit of a problem child. More than three decades after it was first synthesized, another celebrated psychedelic chemist would bring 4-AcO into the light. In 1999, Heffter Research Institute founder Dr. David Nichols published a scientific paper in which he argued that 4-AcO “may offer an economical alternative for clinicians wishing to study the psychopharmacology of psilocin.” (Both psilocybin and 4-AcO are converted by the body to the psychedelic tryptamine psilocin after being ingested.) Whereas organic, psilocybin-containing mushrooms are both relatively expensive and time-consuming to cultivate—especially if contamination becomes an issue—4-AcO could be manufactured cheaply, quickly, and in copious amounts. And given its chemical kinship with psilocybin, the two compounds would also possess similar psychoactive qualities, at least in theory … "

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