Shamanic Revelations with Penguin Pete | Yule 2024

wThe entire Dab Connection team has put in its best year yet! Our forum is growing, our YouTube subscribers are growing, our Twitter(X?) followers are growing. And all of our favorite green plants are growing with us, in North America’s best year in legalized cannabis yet! Furthermore, we’ve bravely ventured forth beyond the mere realm of the cannabinoid. We’ve branched out into psychedelics, which has considerably widened our scope and vision for the potential of retail entheogens.

Which we are to call? The … the “___?” industry. If cannabis is sold through the “legalized cannabis industry,” then what do we call the shroom/ psychedelics/ entheogen industry? You see how pioneering this market is, but for now, we’ll call it the “psychedelics industry” and perhaps the “commercial entheogen industry” when I’m talking about both cannabis and shrooms together, say.

But still: WHAT an explosion! In a year’s time we’ve gone from reviewing cannabis only with the occasional diversion for weird stuff like Kratom, to covering multiple species of mushroom with effects ranging right on into the psychedelic realm. Even beyond, sampling several non-mushroom plants that were also not cannabis in several gummies formulas sold for their various {ambient wellness} or {brief trippy fun} effects. This part, I am sure is mind-blowing to the average consumer just now getting used to their neighborhood cannabis dispensary that opened up downtown.

My Road To Legal Psychedelics

Like many of the rest of you, I started to notice shrooms hit the US market when they appeared on the shelf at my local dispensary. I started to see the gummies at first, but shied away from anything made with mushrooms I hadn’t tried yet. Mushroom products started appearing at distributor’s inventories – just like an obvious natural metaphor that I shall not belabor here – and many of the companies that regularly reach out to us for reviewing products started offering us mushroom stuff without our even asking. Still, your humble author (yes “that” Penguin Pete Trbovich) wanted to investigate this market the hard-science way.

Caps first, gummies later.

• Boom Boyz Amanita Regalia Caps | An Exploration – I went “by the book” as in “old Erowid rumors and what I could scrounge off YouTubre” for preparing them, and got just enough of a tiny trickle of an effect to point the promising way
• Hometown Hero Magical Muscaria Gummies | Promising Effects – My first little cautious experiments with Amanita Muscaria gummies. Looking back, 2KMG in mushroom volume is a chump potency.
• Minnesota Nice Botanicals Amanita Shroom Gummies | Insightful Effects – By the time I got to Minnesota, she was waking… and I’d upped the dosage to 4200MG but even then didn’t quite have what I’d call a full psychedelic trip, but a beckoning sensation that I was right on the edge of breakthrough.
• Mushroom Lyfe Euphoric Mushroom Gummies | Finally I Tripped! – Yay, I finally tripped! At least it was an experience very like a trip on other psychedelics, be they legal or not. At the ridiculous volume of 12000MG, an entire bag of 20 sticky sweet gummies gulped down at once, we begin to see the problem with psychedelic dosing of mushroom gummies.
• Smilyn Happy Mush Mushroom Gummies | A Psychedelic Liftoff – A repeat of my most successful dosage, this time with even more pronounced effects.
• TRE House Magic Mushroom Gummies | Psychedelic, But May Need Work – And here is where I took off the training wheels and just started gulping down gummies made from plants I had barely heard of, hardly a shroom in sight.

That catches us up to today. I figure most people are after something more than an ambient “microdose” effect. If the popularity of these products as they have spiked tells me anything, people aren’t taking these one gummy per day hoping for a nootropic boost; they’re trying to get wrecked. So that is our only litmus test for psychedelic products: trip or not? And these are just the success stories! You should see all the duds.

Still, what an amazing situation this is! We had only just gotten used to legalized cannabis spreading across North America and around the world. Legally getting high had not lost its novelty, and all of a sudden have some shrooms, here’s some more shrooms, and here’s some magic root bark that is also used for DMT extraction or something, IDK.” What a time to be alive! What amazing potential we have with these new products. And what other edgy but legal substances might we encapsulate in gummy form next?

Yule Trip Report

Thus, my experiments with psychedelic gummies of all varieties brought me to mix and match from my unfinished bags, fishing for a combo that would blend well. I found it, and noted my effects in amazement. Then I sought to repeat the “experiment” for you readers and YouTube viewers at home. While preparing this set-up, I had the “eureka” moment when I discovered that Amanita Muscaria mushrooms were allegedly part of Yule (Dec. 21st, observed as part of winter festivities in most of the world) tradition. Well heavens, I said, polishing my monocle, I tend to make Yule a party day anyway – it’s far enough from Christmas to recover in time, and by New Year’s I’m more focused on getting back to work and barely notice. Why not spend the night tripping?

While I originally invoked The Plant People’s non-psychedelic shroom gummies as part of the formula, I’ll cut to the chase and declare that the 4 TRE House gummies cause most of this trip, with even 6000MG of Smilyn Amanita Muscaria gummies (half my full-trip dose) serving as a mere garnish. That’s the formula. I might advise (depending on tolerance) up to 5 TRE House and up to 10000MG of Amanita Muscaria gummies in a decently potent brand.

My full journey of experience with the TRE House gummies:

• First pass – Hit me out of the blue with the effects; at this point, I knew about root bark but hadn’t read down to “DMT” yet, but still guessed DMT-ish effects
• Second pass – Breaking down the exact ingredients in TRE House’s 7-item proprietary blend, as they call it
• Yule Trip Preview – Just announcing my Yule stunt, plus a recap of the first/second pass and my combo experiment
• Yule Trip Report – Final conclusions and findings

Indeed, a euphoric effect, with some pleasant trippy effects, a great sense of well-being, perfect clarity, feeling like you’re in a parallel dimension while still being fully cognizant and interacting with this world.

It’s a shame that the TRE House product has seven different ingredients of unknown relative proportions in this formula, or we could be more certain about nailing this effect down. We could be discovering wonderful things, but somebody had to be all coy about releasing loophole-legal DMT on the market. Nevertheless, I am *assuming* that the super-trip effect I experienced can be narrowed down to the combination of DMT and muscimol, the active (converted) ingredient in Amanitas.

2024 and beyond for the “Retail Entheogen Market”

If you follow our site at all, you’ve doubtless heard our drumbeat for improving the retail cannabis and mushroom and everything-else-entheogen scene: Transparency, transparency, transparency! Transparent third-party testing and quality control because this is serious business. Transparent ingredients, potency, exact measures, and dosages. Transparency in finding out more about these substances. We need to widen the information bandwidth in this industry by about 1000% if we’re going to develop this into a proper lifestyle. Cures for diseases are waiting to be found, improved functioning is awaiting discovery by thousands who could benefit from it.

I have declared that the industry needs to treat psychedelics differently from cannabis, for very good reasons. The difference between any two weed products is a matter of taster’s choice, compared to the difference between any two psychedelics. We have a wonderful future possible after we catch up to these psychedelics which we have missed out on all this time. A future where all of us can use the mind-expanding attitude-tuning capabilities of psychedelics to explore our consciousness, soothe our symptoms, or discover new skills we didn’t know we had.

In short, the industry in general needs to take itself and its customers seriously. Cheech and Chong party time is over. Once you introduce psychedelics into the market, your customers are now the new Timothy Leary seeking the horizon of psychotropic understanding.

Readers, share your thoughts in our forum – and have a merry whatever you celebrate!