Paul Stamets on science: what the evidence says · JRE #1385
SUBJECT: SCIENCE
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
basically one gram is almost equivalent to one milligram per kilogram of body weight. 70 kilos is 152 pounds. And so at one milligram per kilogram with these mice, that's like one gram of cubensis.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
A 2013 mouse study (Catlow et al., Experimental Brain Research) found that low-dose psilocybin, but not high-dose psilocybin or saline, significantly sped up extinction of a conditioned fear response, while also affecting hippocampal neurogenesis in a dose-dependent way; the authors frame this as evidence psilocybin-class drugs merit exploration for PTSD-related treatment, not as a finding directly tested in humans. Stamets' onstage conversion of the mouse dose into a human mushroom-gram equivalent uses a simple 1:1 milligram-per-kilogram ratio, but standard pharmacology for translating animal doses to humans relies on allometric (body-surface-area) scaling, which accounts for mice having much higher metabolic rates relative to body mass; applying that standard method would suggest a substantially lower human-equivalent dose than a straight per-kilogram conversion implies. Separately, 70 kilograms equals approximately 154 pounds, not the 152 pounds Stamets stated, a minor arithmetic error. No published human trial has confirmed that psilocybin doses derived this way replicate the mouse fear-extinction effect. Overall, the underlying mouse finding is real and published, but the dose-scaling method used to translate it into a human mushroom dose does not match standard cross-species dosing methodology and has not been validated in humans.