Last time anyone published a study comparing different strains was over a decade ago... but as I recall, variation between different individual plants of the same strain was more significant than variation between different strains.
Regarding this whole issue of carboxylesterase inhibitors... might'nt you be putting the cart before the horse a bit? Carboxylesterase has been identified as an enzyme that rapidly degrades salvinorin A
in the blood. So halting that metabolism will only potentiate a drug that is actually making it to the blood in appreciable quantities... and it's not clear that happens with oral
S. divinorum.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try this... actually, I think that such an experiment would be very worthwhile. It's possible that carboxylesterases are also metabolizing salvinorin A in the intestine and in the liver, in which case carboxylesterase inhibitors could very be helpful. If it works, that's some very good information (and if it doesn't, that's useful information too). But I'd caution not to get your hopes
too high due to the number of other factors involved.
The biggest factor is getting salvinorin A into your bloodstream from your gut. Medicines which are poorly soluble in biological fluids typically don't work well orally, and require special preparation. That's the part of the purpose behind the thread about complexing salvinorin A with cyclodextrins. But even if you generate a preparation with a better solubility profile, there's still the question of how readily it can permeate the membranes of the stomach/pylorus/duodenum/wherever... For salvinorin A, the question of permeability hasn't been studied yet (to my knowledge).
It's also worth considering the other metabolic processes (besides carboxylesterases) that degrade salvinorin A:
- Lactonases: The same group that found carboxylesterases to be responsible for the rapid metabolism of salvinorin A in the blood also noted a lactone ring-opened metabolite. It appeared to be the primary metabolite of salvinorin B, so perhaps salvinorin A's acetate ester blocks this lactonase from causing trouble. Or maybe the esterases are just de-acetylating the ring-opened metabolites of salvinorin A so they look like metabolites of salvinorin B.
- CYP-450 enzymes: There's some evidence that CYP2D6, CYP1A1, CYP2C18, and CYP2E1 are all able to metabolize salvinorin A to some extent. A different study found that liver microsomes metabolize salvionrin A rapidly, and that this metabolism decreases in the absence of NADPH (a CYP-450 cofactor), supporting the notion that CYP-450 likely plays a role, especially in first-pass metabolism.
- Glucuronidation: UGT2B7 (UDP-Glucuronosyltransferase-2B7) also appears to metabolize salvinorin A.