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Sassafras a hallucinogen? Really?

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SWIM's work with calamus got him back interested in sassafras.

He's done a few tests with it and YES it is psychedelic, but mildly so.

Apparently SWIM was making the sassafras wrong in all his previous attempts at using it. Like pretty much everyone else, he boiled the sassafras in water to make his tea. This is WRONG. This apparently weakens the effects dramatically.

During the tests, it was found that the best way to make sassafras tea is by cold water extraction using ground root bark.

In his latest test, he used a total of 12 grams of sassafras root bark pieces (he doesn't buy pre-powdered root, it's said to be weaker), ground them in a coffee grinder, added 250 ml of cold water, let it sit for 10 minutes, and then filtered it through cotton. It's tough to filter. It takes a while.

The effects of the cold water extract are very similar to the nauseating calamus acetone extract, but not quite the same. There were absolutely no negative effects, NO NAUSEA. Here is the trip report

T+0:00, I added a few NuStevia packets to the tea to sweeten it up and quickly drank it down. Boy did it taste GREAT! Mmmmm! Root beer tea! Very yummy!
T+2:00, I feel a slight sedation, a loosening of my body, it's very mild. There are very mild psychedelic effects noticed. No stimulation at all.
T+3:00, it seems to have peaked. I feel a pleasant tingling sensation in my body. Colors are noticeably brighter. I feel very comfortable around people, very positive. It's a definite mood lifter, but there's mild sedation felt.
T+14:00, gee, the effects are still going and still very noticeable.
T+16:00, I go out shopping and notice how comfortable I feel around people, and I feel so stress free and relaxed. I'm starting to really enjoy this. The sedation is still present but it's mild, and I actually am learning to like it.
T+24:00, the effects are almost gone, but I can feel it slightly.
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Wow, that stuff lasts a long time. I am surprised. I've had sassafras tea many times and never felt anything at all from it. Everyone who makes it boils it. Apparently boiling it weakens it dramatically. I've had up to 10 grams as boiled tea before and got NO EFFECT AT ALL from it.

Now what's interesting is that the overall effect is similar to the acetone extract from calamus, and like it, it's very long lasting. But at no point was there any nausea or the slightest hint of toxicity felt. But then again, it was a water extract and not an acetone extract.

An acetone extract of sassafras will likely pull more of this sedating psychedelic, which is probably safrole. SWIM is a little nervous to try an acetone extract of sassafras because of his very unpleasant experience with an acetone extract of calamus that caused extreme nausea and vomiting lasting many hours.

Next, SWIM is going to try washing 12 grams of sassafras with 250 ml of acetone, then drying the sassafras, and then doing a cold water extraction on it. He is curious if, like calamus, it will be more psychedelic and more stimulating, if prepared this way. From what I understand, safrole is a sedative like asarone. Sedatives in general inhibit the effects of psychedelics. So perhaps washing with acetone will remove the safrole, but leave behind something more interesting as it does with calamus? This is worth a shot. I've heard some people say that sassafras is stimulating, just like calamus, but SWIM's experience with it was that it's definitely sedating. But maybe, like calamus, there's a stimulant present in sassafras, but the sedation from safrole is covering it up?

There's been a lot of speculation on safrole and its possible conversion to a psychedelic phenethylamine in the human body, and that it's that conversion that accounts for the psychedelic effects some people experience with sassafras, but I don't believe that is true. I believe its something other than safrole that is causing the rare psychedelic effects some people experience with sassafras. The reports of psychedelic effects from sassafras are extremely hard to find. SWIM has found that boiling it causes a pretty inactive tea, but cold water extraction produces very active tea. Even hot water produces pretty inactive tea. Some would say that boiling causes the volatile oils like safrole to escape. This is true to a certain degree, but sassafras tea boiled for 5 minutes still contains a ton of safrole. Safrole is what gives it that root beer taste. I think we're dealing with something other than safrole as the main psychedelic compound, something that is heat sensitive, easily destroyed with hot water, and which doesn't survive the volatile oil distillation process, and which doesn't survive most common lab extraction procedures used to identify alkaloids in a plant.

I've run across mention of an A/B extraction preformed on sassafras that yielded a psychedelic end product. This could not be safrole. The end product was a crystal and safrole is an oil. But the details of this test are lost, and I'm not sure if the extraction mentioned was accurate or not.

I think possibly there is a highly unstable psychedelic stimulant alkaloid that is a safrole analog which is present in the root bark. Lab tests don't show it present because they destroy it when they attempt to test for it. The difference SWIM experienced between 12 grams of boiled root bark and 12 grams of cold water extracted root bark was HUGE. The boiled root was inactive. The cold water extract was very active and noticeably psychedelic (but in a very mild way) and long lasting. Maybe this is solely from the safrole distilling away in the boiled extract, but something tells me this isn't the case. Safrole is very poorly soluble in cold water and more soluble in hot water. Even a hot water extract was less potent than a cold water extract. So, that seems to point away from safrole being the active psychedelic in sassafras.

This is all speculation at the moment. Don't take any of this too seriously. Until these tests are repeated several times and the same results are had, it could all just be one batch was more potent than another batch and that's it.

SWIM will do more tests and get a better understanding of this in the near future. He still feels the effects of the sassafras and it's been over 24 hours so he wants to let his body clear up before any more tests are done.
 
Ron, thank you so much for your work and fascinating logs of your experience.

A dear friend loves rootbeer and ecstasy, but quit them both, due to the unhealthy nature of high fructose corn syrup, and impurity of substances available on the street. :p

Can't wait to hear how the saga unfolds. :twisted:
 
SWIM took 14 grams of sassafras (ground in a coffee grinder) and mixed it with 200 ml of acetone for about 2 hours. He then filtered the sassafras grounds using a vacuum filtration system to remove all the acetone. The acetone was dark burgundy in color with a strong scent of root beer. This was saved for future testing.

Next, the grounds were dried in an Excalibur food dehydrator set to 95 F for 2 hours. At that point all the acetone was gone.

Next, the grounds were mixed with 250 ml of pure room temperature water for 2 hours. This was then filtered (it was very hard to filter it). The sassafras was discarded and the filtrate saved. The filtrate (water extract) was amber colored with a slight scent of root beer.

Stevia sweetener was added to the water extract. This was drunk in about 3 minutes. The taste was pleasant, but had less of a root beer taste than it would normally have. Without the strong root beer flavor (which was removed by the acetone) the taste was slightly bitter, indicating the possible presence of an alkaloid to SWIM’s taste buds.

Effects begin in about 5 minutes after drinking the yummy extract. A pleasant mescaline like stimulation was felt. Hightened sense of touch was also present. Mild euphoria was also present. It seemed to peak after about 3 hours, but SWIM’s not sure about that. After 8 hours, the effects are still felt (SWIM is currently feeling the effects).

So the test confirmed my hypothesis at least to a certain degree. Sassafras has a water soluble stimulant in it with mescaline like phenethylamine effects. The body high is like a low dose of mescaline. Its clearly a stimulant, a mood enhancer, and stimulates the senses (sense of touch was greatly enhanced). These are the effects of most phenethylamine psychedelics in sub psychedelic doses. This stimulant is either not removed by acetone, or enough remains after the wash for it to be active. The sedative component of sassafras was removed entirely. This is most likely the safrole, and the reason the root beer taste was far weaker.

SWIM got the distinct impression that the stimulant is very much like mescaline, more so than the stimulant left in calamus after the acetone wash. In both cases (calamus and sassafras), an acetone wash removes one or sedatives and leaves behind one or more stimulants. Their effects are improved by the acetone wash.

Now with sassafras, unlike calamus, the effects were not made stronger after the acetone wash, they were a little weaker in a psychedelic way, but the stimulant effect was made apparent. Maybe safrole is slightly psychedelic even though it’s a sedative. The effect of the whole sassafras was definitely more psychedelic, but also sedating.

I get the feeling that removing the safrole is the key to getting strong psychedelic effects from sassafras at high doses despite safrole’s presence making the drink more psychedelic at low doses. The sedative effects of safrole will very likely prevent strong psychedelic effects. Like asarone in calamus, the safrole in sassafras is very similar to kavalactones in its effect. Kava is mildly psychedelic at low doses, but even at very high doses, it’s still only mildly psychedelic. I get the impression asarone and safrole will be the same. Psychedelic stimulants tend not to be this way, with larger doses producing more psychedelic effects.

I’m very curious what this stimulant in sassafras is. It’s very pleasant, but the sense of touch enhancement is a little over the top. It would be great for sex though. The sense of touch enhancement is the same as that felt from mescaline. The overall feeling of the stimulant is also the same. SWIM thinks that 2 or 3 times the dose he used would probably cause actual psychedelic effects, not just hints of it.

This is interesting. Sassafras is 100% legal in most places. It tastes GREAT. Not many people know it’s mildly psychedelic. People commonly make tea by boiling it, and that destroys most of the active compounds in it.

I’m willing to bet that 30 grams extracted as above will produce very noticeable psychedelic effects similar to mescaline. At 14 grams, SWIM says the effects were very much like a sub-psychedelic dose of mescaline. At the peak, there were hints of psychedelic alteration of thought patterns. For the entire trip there were NO UNPLEASANT EFFECTS.
 
Sounds great ron. nice work! i hope to hear more about this. I also used to make tea from boiling sassafras roots. hope to try this again sometime soon the proper way.
 
More tests need to be done. A clear psychedelic dose needs to be established, if one is even possible. It could be, even at high doses, it remains just a mescaline-like stimulant and never really becomes very psychedelic (much like MDMA never really becomes psychedelic even at high doses but is still similar to low sub-psychedelic doses mescaline).

SWIM still has more and will be doing a higher dose test very soon. The last test was very pleasant and tasted good too. Since there was no hint of negative effects at 14 grams using that extraction process, he’ll likely double the dose or go up to 30 grams.

He’s preparing the root right now.
 
I've always been told sass was mda and i have hallucinated off it for sure.Its not like L but it def shows up in the visual field. and im pretty sure ive candyflipped it with L and it was wonderful.
 
SWIM took a slight detour from the original plans.

Instead of using 30 grams he decided to process 100 grams, so he added more. Once ground to powder he stirred it in 500 ml of MEK for 2 hours. The MEK was then filtered off using a vacuum filtration system with a standard 101 filter paper. The MEK was saved for later tests. The grounds were dried in a food dehydrator at 155 F overnight.

When the grounds were dry, he took 20 grams and mixed it with 500 ml of cold water for 2 hours. This was then filtered through cotton (it took a long time to filter it) using a funnel and a vacuum source.

The water extract was consumed and within 10 minutes the effects were very noticeable.

It started with a pleasant tingling sensation all over the body along with slight stimulant effects. It felt almost exactly like the onset of mescaline, but with a slight LSD-like feel to it.

It’s been 1:20 hours since he drank the tea. At this moment there’s a lot of euphoria, the body is pleasantly tingling, there’s a mild stimulant feeling. So far this is VERY NICE.

He decided not to go with 30 mg for his first try with this new test using MEK, just in case anything is different. He’s being overly cautious.

The effects have not yet peaked, but are extremely pleasant. There are still no visual or mental effects noticed, but it feels like that’s just around the corner.

Considering safrole is highly soluble in MEK and practically insoluble in water, these effects must not be coming from safrole, but something else.

At this moment, SWIM has to say that this is as pleasant as mescaline or LSD are and it feels almost like a mix of the two, but is still nor showing any true psychedelic effects. But the dose is weak.

I'll post more after SWIM experiences the peak.
 
It’s been 3 hours, and SWIM cannot tell if it peaked or not. It doesn’t seem much stronger than an hour ago, nor does it seem any weaker. It’s seems to be at a long plateau.

So far, this is proving to be a great stimulant, like a low dose of mescaline mixed with a low dose of LSD. It feels like psychedelic effects are just around the corner. It’s extremely pleasant.

I’m really curious what this compound is that’s producing this effect. The effects start 10 minutes after drinking the extract, and then build and seem to reach a long lasting plateau after about 2 hours.

Take a look at this picture below. The top molecule is cinnamolaurine, one of the alkaloids, yes ALKALOIDS, found in sassafras. Not many people know it contains alkaloids. Most think its active psychedelic is one of the essential oils present, such as safrole, but I don’t believe that’s really the case. I think it might be an alkaloid.

For comparison, the bottom molecule below is MDMA (Ecstasy), a synthetic psychedelic.
 

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The overall main effects lasted about 12 hours, but 17 hours after taking it, SWIM can still feel it slightly. It seemed like the peak occurred at around 4 hours. There were mild visual effects during the peak, which lasted a good 45 minutes.

At the peak the effects were OBVIOUSLY psychedelic, not just a hint of it. It was very obvious. There were a lot of LSD-style bodily sensations that were also similar to mescaline. The visual effects were mild and it’s hard to really categorize them. A test with a higher dose is needed.



I know very few people are actually interested in this subject because of the carcinogen scare the FDA released about sassafras. But after washing with MEK, the suspected carcinogen safrole should be pretty much absent from the bark. The effects after washing with MEK are very different than the effects from sassafras prior to a MEK wash. Before the MEK wash, the effects are more like a sedating MDMA effect (MDMA is a stimulant not a sedative). But after the wash, the effect is very stimulating and more in-line with LSD or mescaline.

I think the volatile oil safrole present in sassafras is dulling the psychedelic effects of one of the alkaloids found in sassafras. I’m thinking possibly cinnamolaurine is producing these psychedelic effects. It’s an alkaloid that’s structurally similar to MDMA. While safrole is more similar chemically to MDMA, it’s not an alkaloid and should not be active (unless it’s converted in the body into something else, which is possible).

Take a close look at cinnamolaurine. It’s almost like MDMA combined with PMA (4-methoxyamphetamine). Both PMA and MDMA are active hallucinogens.
 

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The overall effects lasted round 20 hours, with the main portion lasting about 12 hours. Today there is no lingering effect noticed, not even a little. SWIM slept easily.

SWIM found this to be one of the nicest truly legal psychedelics he’s ever tried, and will experiment with a larger dose next time, but wants to wait at least 1 day before repeating the test. Remember, making a tea of sassafras with hot or boiling water doesn’t cut it. It needs to be prepared exactly as SWIM prepared it with the MEK wash followed by cold water extraction or it doesn’t work well at all.

He still has 80 grams of MEK washed sassafras powder remaining. He’s likely to up the dose to 25 grams next time. Not knowing the safety of this newly discovered psychedelic, he doesn’t want to jump into a high dose right away.


I’ve read that the effects of normal sassafras tea (without the MEK wash) are much more psychedelic if combined with harmala alkaloids. I read a trip report about this and also saw mention of this on a vendor’s website. I don’t know how safe that is. SWIM will at some point attempt that at a very low dose, but only after the MEK wash. Harmala alkaloids are likely to magnify the effects of any alkaloid present in the sassafras, but not magnify the effects of safrole. From what I understand, safrole is not very pleasant, only very mildly psychedelic even at toxic doses, and is classified as a sedative. There is mixed data on it though. Some places classify it as a stimulant, and some say it is not psychoactive at all. SWIM has no experience with pure safrole so he can’t comment any further about it.
 
Wow 69Ron, as usual I am humbled by the clarity of your work. Congratulations on proving single-handedly that sassafras
extractions are psychoactive and demonstrating chemically the reason why.
I wish I could give you a 3D model of the receptor which norcinnamolaurine fits, but I am not in with the scientific community much these days.

Have you thought about taking all this aquired knowledge and getting somone to pay you to use it, or have I grossly misunderstood? I don't know what your spiritual views are, at all.

Keep on brother, Keep on!
 
Thanks Shoe:)

I’m not interested in money. This is all about a curiosity I had as a teenager. I used to drink sassafras a lot and read it was hallucinogenic and it never worked for me. In doing research on calamus recently, I started getting interested is sassafras again because the subject of sassafras kept popping up when looking for data on calamus. So I had to get to the bottom of it. It turns out it IS mildly hallucinogenic, but only when prepared properly.

Note that SWIM used 25 grams earlier today, but he apparently had developed partial tolerance to the effects. It was weaker than the 20 grams used a few days ago, and it’s from the same batch. So this long lasting hallucinogen in sassafras causes you to develop tolerance to it if you do it too often. SWIM will need to take a break from these tests, maybe 3-4 days before trying again.

I really have the suspicion the active alkaloid in sassafras is either cinnamolaurine or norcinnamolaurine or both, or another analog of safrole that’s also an alkaloid. Whatever it is, it’s very long lasting. It lasts about 20 hours, so it’s no surprise that tolerance to it develops pretty quickly.

It’s a lot like LSD according to SWIM. But even at 20 grams of bark prepared as above, it was a light experience, SWIM says it was about equal to 50 micrograms of LSD. I wish I knew exactly what compound it is. If I did, then SWIM could extract it and possibly concentrate it down to a powder.

I once read of someone extracting a hallucinogen from sassafras that was a white crystalline powder. But the details to the extraction tech are long lost. It could not be safrole, which is an oil, not a crystalline powder. It must have been another compound, maybe it was cinnamolaurine?
 
69ron is a true giver to the community and just an overall great example of a human being. Thanks for all your work ron, though I'm sure it was alot of fun for you.:)
 
69ron said:
It’s a lot like LSD according to SWIM. But even at 20 grams of bark prepared as above, it was a light experience, SWIM says it was about equal to 50 micrograms of LSD. I wish I knew exactly what compound it is. If I did, then SWIM could extract it and possibly concentrate it down to a powder.
Click to expand...
This is very close to my experience with nutmeg experience I was thinking when writing a low dose of LSD, about 50 mcg. And found the nutmeg working hours later, when sober up from the alcool.
These new threads are getting somewhere really interesting, maybe lightning a possible use of this "spices" whithout the desagrement of digestive intoxication.

Thanks again Ron !!
 
I admire your pioneering work. But be carefull. If it is like MDMA, it could also have the same side-effects.

It would be too bad if you'd develop a long lasting tolerance for mescaline or something.
 
polytrip said:
I admire your pioneering work. But be carefull. If it is like MDMA, it could also have the same side-effects.

It would be too bad if you'd develop a long lasting tolerance for mescaline or something.
Click to expand...

Yea, one needs to be cautious with anything new. MDMA is not something people should be using on a regular basis, that is for sure. I’ve seen it change people for a long time. It seems to cause long term damage or alterations to the brain if over used. But I think occasional usage of it is probably ok.

I can’t say anything really for sassafras. The mechanism of action is UNKNOWN and no one has really done much work on it. Just finding conclusive information on safrole’s effects on man is REALLY HARD. Despite small amounts of the oil being used to flavor root beer and bark being used as tea for a long time, actual human tests on large doses of sassafras are sorely lacking.

Currently there are no known deaths from sassafras, so it appears to be relatively harmless in that respect, but if its effects are similar to MDMA, regular use of it in very high doses is not recommended. Also safrole is a suspected carcinogen, but this is datable.

I had sassafras tea hundreds of times when I was a teenager and I appear to be ok, my liver is functioning just fine, but I boiled it, and that pretty much inactivates it. Safrole is a volatile oil, and it easily vaporizes away when the tea is boiled. Also, the solubility of safrole in water is pretty low (13.68734792 mg/100 ml @ 20-25 deg C). At most a cup of tea made with room temperature water could contain about 32 mg of safrole per cup. The often reported 200 mg of safrole per cup used in scare tactics spread by the FDA is incorrect. 32 mg is the maximum per cup for room temperature water. And it often contains less because it distills away easily.

One problem with there being such little information is that a lot of the information out there is wrong. Most of the information out there is simply the same information copied and pasted from one document to another. 1 cup does not contain 200 mg of safrole. That’s impossible. This is a quote that’s in error that’s often repeated over and over:

Based on animal data and a margin-of-safety factor of 100, a dose of 0.66 mg safrole per kg body weight is considered hazardous for humans; the dose obtained from sassafras tea may be as high as 200 mg (3 mg/kg)
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Note that the margin-of-safety factor of 100 means that the actual predicted number is 66.66 mg/kg and not 0.66 mg/kg. 66.66 mg/kg puts the dose at 4999.5 mg for a 75 kilogram adult! WOW! That’s a big difference when you look at it like that. These numbers are inflated on purpose to detour usage of sassafras even though 1 cup cannot possibly contain that much safrole. This is pour science at work. It’s been purposefully manipulated to make it look worse than it actually is.

Sassafras tea can’t contain that much. 32 mg per cup is the maximum for a room temperature water extract. For a 75 kilogram adult, that amounts to 0.426 mg/kg, which is less than the figure mentioned above. Also that figure has never been proven in man, it is a guess, and nothing more. It’s never been proven to cause cancer in man in the doses present in the tea. But this fact means there is some risk involved.

To put this into perspective though, I know of several people who were regular alcohol drinkers who developed cancer. Alcohol is a known carcinogen and proven to be in man, and people still abuse it all the time. From what I’ve heard, the risk of a human getting cancer from alcohol is greater than the risk of getting cancer from sassafras.
 
SWIM has ordered 100g of sassafras from Maya, He will clearly be doing some tests with it when it arrives.
 
I going to have to agree that a large amount of the data about the toxicity of sassafras tea is quite exhagerated especially when you consider the doses as ron has done some calculations for. Its always important to check the dose when you read studies like this. Lots of authors have an incentive to get positive results (or the results they want) so they just give doses high enough to get those results and then those papers get cited by others on and on down the line and thats how you end up with bullshit data and myths. However those terminal methylenes make me nervous.
 
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