A Man Microdosed Mushrooms He Bought on the Dark Web.
This Is How His Organs Shutdown.
GB is a 24 year old man, presenting to the emergency room with hematemesis.
His mother Karen, tells the admitting nurse that she found her son on the floor, rolling
around in a pool of his own sweat before his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and
he started shaking uncontrollably.
About 2 months ago, GB started browsing on the dark web- a part of the internet that
helps anonymize the user at the expense of speed and accessibility.
He had heard on the news about how the dark web was full of hackers, spies, and illegal
activity.
But, he didn’t find any of those things.
Instead he found Luxury Cucumbers 2.0.
Do not purchase unless you’re famous.
You couldn’t use regular money to buy these cucumbers, you had to use bitcoin.
GB thought if he could buy Luxury Cucumbers on the dark web, why not buy Magic Mushrooms
too?
They’re both natural, they.. come from the ground.
And nothing natural is ever bad for you anyways, so time to buy some special treats here, he
thought.
GB used to take psychedelics as self treatment.
He believed he had undiagnosed depression.
But he couldn’t be bothered to see a doctor.
He would self medicate and drop acid to make it all go away, but after the trip, the bad
times would always come back.
When he got his dark web mushrooms in the mail, GB thought something was a little off.
He thought they looked a little discolored.
The bag had a weird, almond-like smell to them.
He ate one and it was a good trip.
But then he thought he needed to make this last.
GB had read online about microdosing.
Instead of dropping a whole dose at once, people have been taking small amounts at frequent
intervals to maintain a baseline trip.
The Internet forums spoke authoritatively on this: microdosing is more efficient, they
said.
It prevents any kind of freakout or bad trip that could happen all while improving mood
and enhancing cognition.
Obviously for mushrooms, the forum made it clear— boiling them to make a “mushroom
tea” that you push into your veins with a needle is the most efficient way to do microdose
them.
Immediately after injecting his dark-web mushroom brew, GB felt.. nauseous.
Maybe the dose was too small, in a few minutes ill try a larger amount, he thought as he
kept pushing higher and higher amounts in to his veins.
Eventually he tried to convince himself that he was feeling a connection with the natural
world.
With a pounding headache and while gasping for air, GB started feeling his feet become
thick.
His legs started to become sludge as they weighed him down and his toes were like roots
of a tree burying in to the ground.
Everything was in perfect harmony.
Balanced, as all things should be.
As he continued to micro dose over the next few days, he convinced himself he was keeping
his trip up, despite the pounding headache.
He could smell something when he boiled his mushrooms, but he just couldn’t describe
what it was.
He wasn’t exactly sure where everything was going.
And then he started feeling cold.
He started sweating uncontrollably while noticing his heart beating in his neck.
It wasn’t pounding harder, it was just beating fast as he noticed he was gasping for air.
Even though he was sweating, he could feel the cold touch of his own skin, as he emptied
his stomach into the kitchen sink.
Unsure if he was seeing things, he thought he may have just vomited blood because everything
that came up was red.
He didn’t think blood could just come up like that.
But he could smell the iron because when it came up, it splashed in to his nose and out
of his eyes.
And then he started believing that he was being recorded by a hidden camera.
He saw himself tied up in a chair on a red-room live stream, and people had paid bitcoin to
watch him suffer on the dark web as he has his first seizure.
Karen hears the commotion and walks in to her basement to find her son shaking and crying
as he rolls around in a pool of sweat and blood on the floor as she calls for 911, and
hes brought to the emergency room where we are now.
At examination, doctors notice that GB’s skin is discolored and cold.
The whites of his eyes were yellow.
His heart rate was high.
His heart rhythm was erratic.
His lips and his nails were blue.
One doctor thought he recognized the heart rhythm as maybe some kind of poisoning, but
he wanted to order a special blood test to make sure while telling the medical team to
give GB vitamin B12.
This SPECIAL blood test would take longer than a REGULAR blood test, which finds that
GB has acidemia.
Acid referring not to LSD, but to a chemical that releases hydrogen ion and emia meaning
presence in blood.
Acid presence in blood.
This was accompanied by a high lactatemia.
And if lactate is known as lactic acid, which is made in large amounts and released when
muscles contract chaotically like they do in a seizure, then all of this happening to
GB makes sense.
Except, the blood test also reveals that parts of GB’s liver have started shutting down.
Because GB’s jaundiced too, this tells the doctors that whatever has been happening inside
of him, could have been happening for at least a few days now.
The spleen breaks down old red blood cells.
One of the results from this breakdown is bilirubin, which is sent to the liver, to be broken down
even more.
Bilirubin is the reason why human poop is normally brown.
But if GB’s liver has started shutting down, then it can't break down bilirubin, and that bilirubin flows
out to discolor his skin and the whites of his eyes.
But it’s more than just his liver that’s shutting down.
Blood and proteins were found in his urine, meaning that while he was convulsing from
his seizure, it’s likely some of his muscles ripped apart, floated around in his blood,
and got caught up in his kidneys, tearing them apart.
Karen had no idea what her son had taken.
Doctors had no idea either.
And because he’s unconscious, he cant tell them.
Since his urine was clean for routinely tested substances, this made it difficult to figure
out why this is happening to GB.
At this time, the special blood test came back.
Having looked at GB’s heart rhythm, the doctor thought maybe he saw cyanide, which
can affect the heart by shifting muscle timings in characteristic ways.
And this special blood test confirms the doctor’s suspicion— GB has cyanide poisoning.
The blue lips.
The seizures and lactatemia.
The failing liver and kidneys.
All of this meaning that some of the dark web bought mushrooms that GB microdosed, were
laced with cyanide, as doctors transfer him in to the intensive care unit.
Cyanide starves cells of oxygen.
When it gets in to the body, it quickly binds in to the mitochondria powerhouse of the cell,
and acts kind of like a magnet by sticking to metal ions.
It snaps on, and doesn’t let anything else on.
Mitochondria, normally use these metals to shuffle around elections to produce energy,
kinda like how electricity moves and flows as energy.
But if electrons can’t get shuffled because cyanide is blocking those metals, then the
cells don’t have a powerhouse anymore.
The cyanide poisoning is kind of like someone suffocating not getting enough oxygen, but
in this case, the oxygen is there.
Cells just can’t use it, because cyanide is there blocking it.
Brain and nerve cells start to starve of oxygen, causing seizures.
The liver needs lots of energy to breakdown and process substances in the body.
Without enough energy, it starts to break itself down and parts of it die.
It can no longer process bilirubin from red blood cell breakdown, spilling the bilirubin
into his blood and staining his skin and the whites of his eyes.
Muscles need a lot of energy too and the heart is a big muscle, so it starts to beat erratically
causing his abnormal heart rhythm.
And skeletal muscles consume energy too, but they’re starving of oxygen creating lactate,
before the proteins start to slough off into the bloodstream as they start to die too.
These muscle proteins get caught in his kidneys, tearing apart the tubules causing fulminant
rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdo meaning striped or striated referring to the striated characteristic of skeletal
muscle.
Myo referring to muscle.
And lysis meaning a breaking down of.
A breaking down of skeletal muscle.
Fulminant meaning it’s happening suddenly, and it’s life threatening.
Doctors still dont know that GB injected magic mushrooms, but the cyanide poisoning alone
appears to explain everything that has happened to him up to this point.
Is there a way that the cyanide could be pulled out of his body?
Well, it was already done when the doctor ordered the medical team to give him Vitamin
B12.
You see, vitamin B12 is officially named cobalamin which has a cobalt inside.
Cobalt is a metal.
And the vitamin B12 you eat in gummy vitamins is named cyanocobalamin, which has a cyanide
ion on it, bound to: cobalt.
This means injecting GB with a generic cobalamin will cause it to act like a “stronger magnet”
pulling cyanide out of the mitochondria creating a safe vitamin B12 megadose that can concentrate
in his urine, and be excreted by his kidneys.
As time goes by in the intensive care unit, GB’s condition appears to improve.
Things are looking up.
But then things started to get worse, suddenly.
It became apparent that more than just cyanide poisoning was happening.
GB’s blood pressure started to drop and his heart rate started to increase.
He started developing a fever that he didn’t have when he presented to the emergency room.
Another blood test suggests that GB has bacteremia, bacterial presence in blood.
But which bacteria, exactly?
And where did the bacteria come from?
Doctors need to know which bacteria is floating around and growing inside his blood so that
they can give the right antibiotics.
If the wrong ones are given, then the bacteria can keep growing unchecked.
But it takes days to grow that bacteria in a petri dish, to find out.
Days that GB doesn’t have, because his chances of dying from the infection increase every
single hour.
Doctors give general antibiotics.
These can cover many kinds of bacteria, and may not be the best one for the bacteria specifically
floating inside GB, but it can MAYBE prevent things from getting worse.
As the hours pass, GB starts to go in to respiratory distress.
His blood pressure starts to drop because his whole body is now inflamed.
It’s kind of like when you get a cut and the area becomes swollen and red— that’s
the body dilating the blood vessels and letting white blood cells in, except in GB’s case,
his whole body is swelling and dilating.
And then he started bleeding from his nose.
He starts to bleed out of his eyes and ears.
Anywhere blood can flow out of GB’s body, it starts to ooze out, meaning something is
causing his blood to become thin, but what could it be?
Bacterial cultures return and tell the medical team that Brevibacillus is growing and floating
around in GB’s blood.
This usually isnt found in hospitals, but in soil, so maybe GB was dealing with some
kind of plant or something, doctors thought.
But the cultures also report that it’s not just bacteria floating around in his blood,
but fungus too, specifically Psilocybe cubensis, meaning the dark web bought mushrooms GB micro
dosed by injection were not only laced with cyanide, but they were now growing in his
blood, shutting down all of his organs again.
The psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms is usually psilocybin.
The interesting thing about psilocybin is that by itself, it’s not active in the body.
When someone eats a magic mushroom, it goes in to their stomach, then absorbs into their
liver where it’s broken down to psilocin, which is active.
In the brain is a chemical responsible for sending signals called serotonin.
We know that mood, sleep, learning, appetite and memory are all affected by serotonin,
also known as 5-Hydroxy tryptamine.
And it’s no coincidence that chemicals that have similar structures, can have different
effects in the brain.
Like melatonin for sleep.
Or lysergic acid diethylamide which you might know as LSD.
Sometimes certain mushrooms will contain “other things.”
Natural products in general, contain hundreds of different chemicals mixed together.
Like something called the phenyl ethyl amines.
A well known phenyl ethyl amine is alpha methyl phenyl ethyl amine.
Am fff et amine.
There’s a beta keto amp ff et amine, also known as cathinone, or bath salts.
These are also somewhat related to trypt-amine, which is part of di methyl tryptamine DMT
and 5-hydroxy tryptamine also known as serotonin, bringing us back to psychedelics.
GB mistakenly thought that mushrooms would help fix his depression.
But from our current understanding, psilocin works on MAINLY one type of serotonin receptor
in the brain.
There’s many other kinds of serotonin receptors that would need to be addressed in a setting
of clinically diagnosed depression, but this isn’t his only problem.
When someone injects a mushroom brew, it floats around the body before the liver breaks it
down.
So it’s not activated— it’s activated when one eats it.
Past cases of people injecting magic mushrooms describe nausea, vomiting, fevers, muscle
pain and headaches— enough pain for them to check in to the emergency room.
It doesnt look like they were able to have the regular trip one would have while EATING
the mushrooms, only pain and suffering, just like in GB’s case.
His bleeding was fixed in the ICU because the bacteremia and fungemia were directly
acting on his bone marrow, which wasn’t making all of the blood clotting factors needed.
When blood clots it becomes thick, so if it can’t clot, it becomes thin— enough to
start flowing out of every possible place from his body.
Proper antibiotics and anti fungal medicines were administered.
And he was discharged from the hospital with long term prescriptions of those medicines.
Having learned a lesson about self treatment, about buying sketchy things from an unknown
source online, and putting those sketchy things in his veins, he made a recovery.
Thanks so much for watching.
Take care of yourself.
And Be Well.