Over my 60-year professional career, I have written about drugs and herbs in articles, newsletters, books, and online posts. During graduate school, I worked on liquid cultures of Psilocybe mycelia and isolated two new compounds closely related to both psilocybin and serotonin, which I named baeocystin and norbaeocystin. After that, I was not involved with psychedelic mushrooms for about 53 years. In 2020, when I rejoined LinkedIn to promote my book My Life & Rollercoaster Career (2018, CreateSpace/Amazon), I noticed extensive online discussions about psilocybin and other psychedelics. Within weeks, I had reentered the psychedelic movement. My book was promptly forgotten.
Within months, I began to see the movement as a kind of gold rush, led in part by greedy selfish businesspeople who were second- or third-tier leaders but considered themselves technical experts. After I distanced myself from them, they either collapsed or faded from view. I had seen this pattern several times during my long consulting career. I think my undiagnosed ADHD might have something to do with it because my inattention when dealing with their technical ignorance and arrogance might have shown myself to be dumb to them.
The fact remains that no one has produced fungal mycelia containing PBN since I first published it in 1968, more than half a century ago. To date, PBN-related materials have been only synthesized or produced through biotechnology or enzyme conversion. All of these methods require extraction and may introduce synthetic impurities. As a result, they remain within the vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy and do not eliminate the risk of using test materials with the wrong or uncertain identity in research problems that have generated a great deal of unreliable data. As I discussed in the five key issues in my June 9, 2026, post, which few of my scientific colleagues have addressed, more published studies based on uncertain or incorrect test materials are likely to continue. Examples include treating caffeine as coffee, curcumin as turmeric, or citing the notorious “ginseng abuse syndrome” paper as though it accurately represented ginseng, along with many other cases of misidentified herbs.
We can’t continue to let the VC and a handful of narcissistic gazillionaires holding the world’s wealth hence the power, dictate the direction of our health and fate. With my approach, at least starting with totally naturals (fungal mycelia containing natural PBN), we can start to bypass the VC that has controlled our research focus and health for so many decades! More on our PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium in my next post. So, stay tuned!