Psilocybin mushroom potency can degrade by nearly 50% in six months, new data shows

An interesting recent article in Double Blind magazine reports: "A preliminary experiment by Hyphae Labs shows that the potency of psilocybin mushrooms can drastically decrease in less than a year.  We’ve all been there. You acquire mushrooms, eat some, and store the rest in a shoebox in the back of your closet. Next thing you know, six months fly by, and you remember the pot of hallucinatory gold sitting next to a storage bin of junk you never unpacked from your last move. You ransack your closet and unearth the package of mushies. They look the same; a little crispy, but nothing out of the ordinary.  You wonder: Are they still good?  If you ask the Google machine, you’ll find an array of different answers—most of which are written by various websites vying for your SEO clicks. (Except for maybe Reddit.) But new data points exist on this issue that, at least for now, act as an official bench marker to determine how quickly mushroom potency degrades. … Tomás says the Hyphae Labs team is designing a more detailed experiment around the longevity of alkaloid molecules, specifically psilocybin and psilocin. The results of the first experiment—and the public’s receptivity to it—warrant a deeper investigation into storage conditions, including how heat, moisture, and oxygen play a role in the degradation of psilocybin and the timeline in which it occurs. Praise the deep-space mushroom deities that someone is doing this work. Now, we can be more practical about how long mushrooms will last in the cool, dark shadows of our closets.  “This doesn’t mean that all mushrooms six months from when they’re grown are going to degrade 90 percent in psilocybin automatically,” Tomás says. “It means the samples I tested did. That’s why we’re about to design a more elaborate study.”

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