Earlier this year Julian Mattucci, also known as “God Emperor Myco”, created up-to-date generations of spores from some Psilocybe subtropicalis mushrooms he bought online from a popular supplier. He claims he didn’t “work them for potency,” but rather for a purer, more hearty genetic structure to correct problems caused by long-term inbreeding – a common phenomenon in a field long practiced by amateurs. Interbreeding too often can cause mushrooms to lack overall health, produce lower yields, and sometimes be less potent.
After three cultivation cycles, the self-taught mycologist – who lives in Atlanta and runs a mushroom growth company called Imperial Labs – decided it was time to try what he had produced. An experienced psychonaut, he was amazed. “It blew me away: mushrooms had never hit me like that,” Mattucci says. He consumed them fresh at a dose equivalent to no more than 1.5 grams of dried mushrooms, well below the amount generally required to “break through” and make a significant journey. “I knew they must be really powerful because I couldn’t get out of bed for about three or four hours. The first hour or two felt like a DMT experience.
More and more people are reporting this kind of super powered mushroom hunting trip. New cultivation methods are making psychedelic mushrooms stronger, and devilishly potent strains start working faster and last longer – even if you only eat a fraction of what you would with a different strain. Later research showed that one batch of Mattucci’s mushrooms contained almost 5 percent psychedelic alkaloids, a figure once unheard of in the community Psilocybe type. Typically, mushrooms contain 1 percent of these psychoactive compounds, although species like them Psilocybe azurescens are generally stronger, and some varieties within Panaeolus kinds are even stronger.
Psilocybe Cubensis mushrooms, one of the most commonly eaten species, are among the most highly inbred due to the imperfect methods used by hobby breeders who have bred them for decades since the first spore prints returned from the Amazon in the early 1970s, courtesy McKenna brothers. However, as the mushroom growing scene comes out of the underground and becomes somewhat professionalized – even though psilocybin is banned in most of the world – more and more mycologists are using conscious breeding practices to increase the genetic integrity of mushrooms and improve potency, which can be an issue with recessive traits and loss in the family line.
“I would argue that the current Mount Everest has the highest power; milligrams per gram of biomass,” says Ian Bollinger, founder of the Mycological Analytics Center. “It’s a mountain that people will climb whether we tell them or not.” Matucci emphasizes, however, that his goal was not to find a strain with sturdy effects. “I was lucky,” he says.
Breeders are using genetic sequencing and hybridizing varieties from increasingly distant lines in search of improvements as well as pure aesthetic novelty. Technological advances have made it possible to more easily manipulate mushroom cells during cultivation, and advances in chromatographic potency testing are enabling growers to determine what modification methods result in more potent mushrooms that can be sold to consumers at prices exceeding $10 per gram. . The emergence of such methods means that the era of amateur “brother science” in psychedelic mycology is over, Mattucci says. The era of no-knowledge tinkering and anecdotal science is giving way to cultivation fueled by deeper and more complex scientific and mycological knowledge. “This is just the beginning” of superpowers, Matucci says, “and it’s going to be really crazy for the next decade.”