Maybe flowerpower used the sandy brown nutmeg sometimes and that's why it didn't work?  I think she saw my post on here from a while back about that experiment I did.

I looked up the full text of Shulgin's paper on nutmeg, which you can find here.  The second half is about his theory that nutmeg components become amphetamines, which has been disproven.  But the first part talks about the different things you find in nutmeg and the variability of composition among batches.  He considers the most likely compounds to contribute to the effect to be safrole, myristicin, and elemicin, which has been thought by others as well (check out the numeg research section on erowid for a bibliography).  In his team's analysis, Shulgin found that elemicin varied the most out of any component of nutmeg.  Maybe nutmeg that doesn't work well is low in elemicin?

I've read some wild theories that elemicin by itself will get you high, but I have yet to find any study that showed that conclusively and it seems like most people don't get anything from elemicin alone, save a few (maybe).  I'm not sure.  But Shulgin is smarter than me, so maybe he's on to something.

Does anyone know what color elemicin is?  Does it stain things a reddish/goldish brown rather than a lighter, sandy brown?