MAPS: Digest (cont.): LSA vs. LSD; Morning Glory Seeds (continued)

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Contributions from Tracy McLellan and Peter Webster

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From: "Tracy McLellan" <tracymacl@xxxxxxxxxxx>

At thirty-nine, I feel too old to do the Morning Glory Seeds anymore. Or 
perhaps more precisely, the last couple of times the effect wasn't worth 
the effort.  But when I was younger, say twelve or fifteen years ago, I 
has occasion to use a good bit of Heavenly Blues.  I've heard it said 
that only the Heavenly Blue variety has the active ingredient. The worst 
part was the ingesting of the seeds.  They were very very tough to chew 
and putrid tasting.  But I did have a number of mild, pleasant 
experiences.  I would guess intuitively that the seeds don't have any 
toxic effect, but that any gastro-intestinal problems they might cause 
would be due to the arduous task of digesting them.  Sometime later I 
had heard of a process whereby you could extract the essence from the 
seeds by pulverizing them with mortar and pestle, soaking them in a 
small amount of water for 14 to 24 hours and sifting this through 
cheesecloth to remove the hulls.  I went through this arduous process, 
and the resulting mixture was so thick and gooey that it would not 
easily pour through the cheesecloth but just kind of puddled on it.  So 
this experiment was a failure and I never repeated it subsequently.

As to Hawaiian Rosewood seeds, I ate them once and got very sick, and 
I'm pretty sure that it was a toxic sickness.  I would heartily 
recommend against even the thought of they're use.  

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From: Peter Webster <vignes@xxxxxxxxx>


Further observations on morning-glory seeds.

William Moxley in his online book *The Center of the Universe* says he
extracted morning-glory seeds by a lengthy process and that the resulting
amber resin was very powerful indeed, in every way comparable to the power
LSD, at higher doses, of course.
see	http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/univch2.htm
and	http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/univch3.htm

Theoretically one could hydrolyse LSA and iso-LSA to prepare d-lysergic
acid, the same way that ergotamine or ergonovine is hydrolysed in
methanolic potassium hydroxide, and react the dried lysergic acid with
N,N-carbonyldiimidazole in dimethylformamide and the resulting intermediate
with diethylamine (cf. Dan Perrine's *The Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs*
and "Syntheses Using Heterocyclic Amides" by Staab and Rohr in W. Foerst's
*Newer Methods of Preparative Organic Chemistry* 1968 Verlag Chemie GmbH)
to produce LSD. The only possible hitch is that the LSA + Iso-LSA are
difficult to extract to a purity that would allow the hydrolysis to yield
lysergic that can be crystallized from the resulting mixture (perhaps the
extract would first have to be chromatographed to purify it, and only very
small quantities produced without extended effort). Possibly, LSA and
iso-LSA are more stable amides than those having more extended side chains
and would require more severe hydrolysis conditions that would damage the
ergolene ring structure of lysergic acid. Of course, none of these
operations wd be easily accomplished by amateurs without training in
chemsitry.

Again, all this information is readily available to anyone competent to
research the chemical literature, there is nothing secret or censored here.
And, the information is largely useless to anyone who in the first place is
incapable of finding it. Chemistry is, no doubt, the most powerful of the
sciences.

By the way, for all those fascinated with the magical sound of the name
"lysergic" (I know I was) I hate to deflate the mystical, but all the name
really means, literally, is "the acid you get when you split ergot". The
suffix "ic" is used to denote an organic acid (as in acetic acid), "erg" is
the root from which we get ergot, and "lys" is derived from "lysis", to
split. Aah, with great power must come some disillusionment...
pw


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