🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that chooses its words carefully. What you take away... well, that’s between you and your subconscious. 😶

Josie Kins has tried more psychoactive substances than most people know exist. (For science, obviously.) With her project, the Subjective Effect Index, she's built the de facto encyclopedia of altered states of consciousness, where the ineffable is, err, effed in plain language anyone can understand.

We asked Josie why the psychedelic community needs a shared vocabulary, what the strangest psychedelic experience on Earth might be, and how a map of altered states could help design better medicines.

Cacao’s gotta be the most versatile, overlooked entheogen.

It opens the heart, fits into a daily ritual, and keeps you in the driver’s seat. (You decide how deep to go.)

Then there’s our favorite part… Cacao’s natural MAOIs enhance the effects of psilocybin when you stack 'em.

We swear by Kokoleka Collective because they don’t cut corners.

They source wild cacao from Chiapas and process it the ancestral Mayan way, which results in 860% more flavanols, 300% more antioxidants, and 65% more theobromine than regular cacao.

All six blends are fair trade and organic.

I stumbled across psychedelics as a teenager. I'm 32 now, and I started tripping at 17. I wasn't actively pursuing them or doing much research. I just thought they'd make me more creative. Then one day someone offered me LSD. I took it, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. This feels significant.

I went home and started googling the subjective effects of psychedelics, because I assumed there must be some kind of index or documentation online. That just seemed like an obvious thing that should exist. But during my very first trip, I realized there wasn't any real documentation at all—just some vague Wikipedia descriptions.

I was looking for something with individual effects, leveling systems, and descriptions of each one. So I was like, oh, someone should do that then. From there, I founded the Subjective Effect Index and rapidly gained a following, and that escalated over the next decade until I ended up working in the industry.

I got very into psychedelics very quickly. It was almost like a light switch. I was immediately obsessed. One of the things that really struck me was a Terence McKenna lecture where he mentioned that we're not going to understand the psychedelic experience until we map it out. I decided then and there I was going to do that, because I felt like I was capable of describing the experience.

The standard system of academic research couldn't really touch it. The drugs were illegal, for one thing, and researchers were too constrained. It was clear to me that it had to be accomplished by people outside the system.

My goal was to map out the psychedelic experience and make it more understandable and studiable. To me, it felt like the difference between looking at a planet through a telescope versus actually going there. It was more interesting to me to document the specific subjective effects that occur while you're under the influence, than to fixate on whether a molecule targets 5-HT2A or some other receptor.

Mechanism of action doesn’t tell you much in isolation. The important aspect of the psychedelic experience is the subjective experience. The receptors are just the thing that leads to what is ultimately significant.

The first one that comes to mind is 2C-P. It would induce states of what I'd call “hallucinate-everything mode,” where the resources of my brain would become entirely allocated towards generating hallucinations in extreme degrees of detail, at the expense of all other cognitive processes. I would experience unspeakable horrors—endless seas of gore and viscera comprised of condensed, innately readable geometric horror. I'd go through that for what felt like millennia at a time. It somehow didn't affect me emotionally. At the time, I was just like, whoa, this is metal.

Deliriants are also incredibly unusual. They have no recreational or therapeutic value at all, but they are very strange. And then there's DiPT, which only affects the auditory sense. I think that molecule could tell us things about how auditory processes work in the brain, and it definitely warrants further study.

But if I had to pick the most unusual experience a human being can go through, I'd probably say salvia. The machinescape phenomenon it induces, with the cogs and pulleys and conveyor belts, is something a lot of people experience, and I experienced it myself. My entire body became this complex machine, and that's all I knew to exist. It's very consistent across people, and I don't understand why the human brain does that. For most subjective effects, I can come up with some sort of hypothesis that I find satisfying. I cannot come up with one for the machinescape phenomenon. It doesn't make any sense to me.

I don't think psychedelics are any more ineffable than any other subjective experience. We have frameworks of language for describing things like flavor and music. They're all inherently reductive. Of course, you can't describe psychedelics if your attitude is that it's not possible to explain. That’s a self-defeating attitude. But if you actually sit down and put the work in, it is possible to explain, just like any other subjective experience.

That said, to convey a visual experience, it helps to use a visual medium. Text is helpful for describing the behavior of the visual experience, but to actually show what it looks like, you need to replicate it. The concept of “replications” existed long before I put a term to it. The Shipibo-Conibo people have been making them since before recorded history using textiles. But naming the practice helped spawn a community.

There are now people who've made actual careers out of psychedelic replications, like Loka Vision and Symmetric Vision, and their work is pretty incredible. For open-eye stuff, it's typically standard video editing. For high-level stuff like breakthrough geometry, these artists use 3D modeling and animation. And increasingly, I've been using generative AI to replicate high-level states, because it can do things that simply aren't practical otherwise.

I'm also starting a project with DMTx, where they'll be able to put a trip report into a system that automatically outputs the hallucinations as video generations with all the entities, landscapes, and themes they encountered. You can start building real statistical data on these experiences. And the patient gets a cool souvenir. It's like taking a ride on a roller coaster and buying a photo afterwards.

If you have a detailed map of subjective effects, you can start to understand the relationship between what's happening biologically and what's happening experientially. And if you can also map which of those subjective effects are most therapeutic for which conditions, then you can connect the dots. You get much more fine-tuned control over the therapeutic outcome for the patient.

I believe the bulk of the therapeutic benefit comes from the subjective experience, not just the physiological stuff like neuroplasticity and anti-inflammatory effects. So if you can map the subjective experience to things like receptor affinities, genetic profile, set and setting, and other individual variables, you can start to develop psychedelic drugs in a much more controlled way rather than it being kind of a crapshoot. That's a necessary step toward personalized psychedelic medicine.

Helping people via medicines is great, and I'm all for that. But I'll be honest. My motivation has always been subjective effect documentation for the sake of it. I want to better understand consciousness and the psychedelic experience. I think it has historical significance and could be hugely beneficial for society. It's not a miracle cure like a lot of people think it is, but if more people were familiar with the psychedelic experience, our society would probably be at least a little healthier.

Dig into the Subjective Effect Index, or explore her other psychedelic projects.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.