Wood Lover Paralysis

This article was first published in the Entheogenesis Australis Journal 5 as part of the Garden States Symposium in 2022. The topic of Wood Lover Paralysis seems to gain more ground, especially as more and more people experience symptoms and become aware of some of the potential consequences.

By Symon Beck.

A useless, garbled sound emerged from my mouth as I tried to wake my friend, asleep less than two meters away, but to no avail. We had found a good haul of fresh, beautiful Psilocybe subaeruginosa in an area we hadn’t picked before and made a tea with ascorbic acid. We’d both had several cups a couple of hours earlier. The psychoactive effects were moderate in intensity, and all had been going well. My friend had decided to go to bed, and I’d had another cup of the tea.

It was a few hours after we first drank that the weakness started in my mouth. I found I was unable to chew a corn chip more than a couple of times without my jaw and tongue getting too weak to manage. After scraping the half-chewed chips from my mouth and starting to wonder what was going on, my neck stopped supporting my head. My chin would hit my chest, I’d lift my head back up with my hand, and almost immediately, it would fall forward again and limply land on my chest once more. This started to get worrying! Next were my spinal muscles, as I involuntarily slumped forward in my chair and couldn’t right myself for some minutes. I would get the strength to straighten myself up, but rapidly I would slump again and be too weak to correct my posture for several minutes.

“I involuntarily slumped forward in my chair and couldn’t right myself for some minutes. I would get the strength to straighten myself up, but rapidly I would slump again and be too weak to correct my posture”

“Right, this isn’t good”, I thought. A quick internet search while my hands still worked yielded a hint at what might be happening – ‘wood-lovers paralysis’, described on the Shroomery forum. “Okay, at least you probably haven’t eaten the wrong mushrooms, not that you know a mushroom that would do this anyway!” I wasn’t about to present at the local hospital and expect them to have any idea what was going on when I had never heard of this before in medical training or several years of active involvement in the psychedelic mushroom community (this wasn’t the safest approach - never hesitate to go for medical help if you’re worried for your health). So, I decided that going to bed and hoping to wake up healthy the next day seemed like the best option – the person describing wood-lovers’ paralysis on the forums hadn’t died, and I hoped I wouldn’t either (again, not the safest decision - never hesitate to seek medical assistance).

*Psilocybe subaeruginosa.* *Image by Jonathan Carmichael*

I got up from my chair and started walking the ten meters to my bed. Halfway there, I fell to my hands and knees, too weak to stand, until my arms gave way moments later. So it was that I came to be flat on the floor of my living room, trying to move my mouth and tongue to make noise to wake my friend right next to me. Alas, to no avail. So, I lay still and tried to focus on my breathing, monitoring it for any signs that the weakness may be impacting my ability to inhale and exhale. I desperately hoped I would continue to be able to breath.

The story above, told to me by my friend Swim, got me interested in the phenomenon of wood-lovers’ paralysis. When I first went to research this phenomenon, information was scant. I searched through the Shroomery forum and found some personal accounts. The earliest was from 2001 in a post titled “I cannot fucking walk” (budshroomey, 2001). There were also theories, mostly related to contamination with some sort of pathogen, with some anecdotal reports claiming that antihistamines could treat the condition. These theories didn’t seem very likely to me with my basic understanding of movement from medical studies.

“...why wasn’t this sometimes happening with the consumption of other edible species growing in the same habitats as the wood-loving Psilocybe species that caused it?”

There was mention of mycologist Paul Stamets discussing the phenomenon, with one forum member saying Stamets had suggested that another chemical, perhaps baeocystin, was responsible for wood-lovers’ paralysis (notapillow, 2009). Very little was (or is) known about baeocystin (Sherwood, et al. 2020), but the idea that it might be a chemical produced by mushrooms rather than a contaminant seemed more intuitive to me. Otherwise, I thought, why wasn’t this sometimes happening with the consumption of other edible species growing in the same habitats as the wood-loving Psilocybe species that caused it?

Study commitments ended my quest for an explanation until several years later, when I started moderating for the Facebook group PMANZ in 2019. During the first Psilocybe subaeruginosa season after I joined the team, I was intrigued to see several reports of this phenomenon. Followed by replies from others saying they had experienced the same thing. It occurred to me that this may not be as uncommon as I had thought. My interest was piqued once again, and it seemed like a pressing safety issue to get some understanding of what was going on and what the risks associated with wood-lovers’ paralysis might be.

Scholarly search engines yielded only a few papers mentioning weakness or paralysis associated with psilocybin mushroom consumption. The first paper I read (Allen, et al. 1991) described several cases of brief episodes of weakness and paralysis with the consumption of some species of Psilocybe in New Zealand in the 1980s.I found it astonishing that this phenomenon, causing unexplained and unusual symptoms of sometimes dramatic weakness had been known since at least the 1980s without any further academic investigation into the cause. The paper (Allen, et al. 1991) hypothesized that the reason was likely contamination with agricultural chemicals, but I could not think of such a chemical that would cause such symptoms. Further, Swim was affected by a batch of mushrooms picked in an unmanaged area of forest, far from commercial agriculture.

I also came across two articles published on Psychedelic Science Review about hypothesised causes for wood-lovers’ paralysis. The earlier of the two (Bauer, 2018) discussed ideas that I had mostly come across on forums. The latter of the two, titled “Wood Lover Paralysis From Magic Mushrooms: The Aeruginascin Hypothesis” (2019) hypothesized that aeruginascin or a possible dephosphorylated metabolite of aeruginascin may be the cause of the paralysis. This hypothesis is based on the structural similarity of aeruginascin to bufotenidine. Both are trimethyl ammonium compounds resulting from the N-methylation of the classical psychedelic compounds psilocybin and bufotenin respectively. Bufotenidine has been found to cause a flaccid paralysis in animal and tissue studies conducted several decades ago (Ghsoal, et al. 1969; Bhattacharya & Sanyal, 1972). Bauer (2018) postulated that the structural similarity between aeruginascin and bufotenidine may mean the former has similar 5HT3 receptor activity as the latter, which they thought may explain the paralysis seen with bufotenidine.

“...we collected over 400 responses, including ~165 individuals who had experienced wood-lovers’ paralysis. Over half of these had experienced the phenomenon multiple times.”

— Beck & Barlow, 2021

I felt this theory was promising, but for a slightly different reason. The papers exploring bufotenidine’s activity suggested to me that it had an anti-nicotinic, neuromuscular junction blocking activity which led to a typical paralysis. This effect is how a number of muscle relaxing agents used during surgery work. It is also similar to the direct effect of antibodies in the autoimmune condition myasthaenia gravis, which results in a use dependent weakness of the muscles. I thought anti-nicotinic neuromuscular junction blockade was a very plausible mechanism to explain the symptoms Swim had described.

Among this background research, mycologist Caine Barlow and I designed a survey to collect information about people’s experiences with wood-lovers’ paralysis. We hoped to define the symptoms and time course of the syndrome and get some basic information about some of the possible individual, and environmental factors that we felt may be related to the syndrome, or that we thought needed to be ruled out as factors. The Australian Psychedelic Society kindly hosted the survey. Starting in June 2020, we collected over 400 responses, including ~165 individuals who had experienced wood-lovers’ paralysis. Over half of these had experienced the phenomenon multiple times (Beck & Barlow, 2021). This was far more than either of us expected, particularly given most respondents were from Australia when most of the online reports were from North America.

*Different coloured Psilocybe subaeruginosa spore prints. Image by Jonathan Carmichael.*

Once we had some results coming in, I tried to find some expert help for investigating this phenomenon. I called several university toxicology and pharmacology departments without success. One professor told me casually on the phone that wood-lovers’ paralysis cannot exist because the poisons information centre they worked for doesn’t get calls about it. A major regional society for relevant professions posted my query to their message board, but the spokesperson told me not to get my hopes up. They said even if someone were interested in exploring the syndrome, the fact that the chemicals involved were Schedule 9 drugs of abuse in Australia meant very few would want to deal with the red tape involved, or the potential professional stigma that may be attached to anything ‘drug’ related. I never got any responses. This really highlighted to me the burden the current laws around psychoactive substances place on all forms of related research, even where it is only biochemical in nature. So, we turned overseas.

“...aeruginascin may be causing wood-lovers’ paralysis through anti-nicotinic neuromuscular junction blockade.”

I reached out to Dr. Andrew Chadeayne, CEO of biotech company CAAMTech in North America. I was specifically interested in their work on aeruginascin and its postulated dephosphorylated metabolite 4-hydroxytrimethyltryptamine (N-methylated psilocin). His team had recently published the first data (Chadeayne, et al. 2020) around the synthesis, structure and serotonergic binding affinities of this substance. I wanted to find out whether they had conducted any testing of affinity for muscle type nicotinic cholinergic receptors – the receptors bufotenidine blocks to cause paralysis.

Somewhat to my surprise, given how unsuccessful my attempts to engage other experts had been, Dr. Chadeayne replied. He was interested in wood-lovers’ paralysis too. This is how I found out he and Barbara Bauer were responsible for the original “aurginascin hypothesis” (Bauer, 2019) that had led me to explore the mechanism of bufotenidine’s paralysing effect and thus hypothesise that aeruginascin may be causing wood-lovers’ paralysis through anti-nicotinic neuromuscular junction blockade. Even better, he had a working group looking into the phenomenon! Experts from a range of fields in biochemistry, with resources and skills that may be able to answer this question! And to top it off myself and Caine Barlow connected with researchers Dr Monica Barratt and Dr Liam Engel and got university ethics approval to write up the results of our survey for academic publication.

That is the path of my citizen science journey with wood-lovers’ paralysis. It has shown me that so much remains unknown. It has demonstrated that if you come across an exciting unknown that interests you, you can be a driving force behind scientific inquiry to find an answer. The unfortunate lack of interest from Australian toxicologists highlighted the stigma around exploring psychoactive substances in mainstream science. It was also a shocking example of the impeding effect the current laws around these substances have on research of all kinds. Aeruginascin isn’t even considered likely to be psychoactive but is illegal in Australia due to analogue laws. Neuromuscular junction blockers have important medical uses and are not common in nature, yet the legality and stigma mean this phenomenon and the compounds that may be responsible have gone unexplored for four decades.

I hope that this story inspires you to lean into your curiosity and seek answers to questions that interest you. Science is a collaborative effort, not something to be left only to people who call themselves ‘scientists.’ With the world’s information at our fingertips and a community with so much knowledge in various fields, we can all be citizen scientists. Even if your question is one you aren’t able to answer directly yourself, I encourage you to connect with experts, reach out and let your passion and curiosity inspire others to shed light on the unknown.

In the end, Swim was okay. He made it to bed after the wave of paralysis temporarily improved. He woke up with some weakness in his hands that improved throughout the day. The remaining tea was thrown out, but the same weakness affected everyone picking from the same area for several years running, suggesting the importance of an active approach to harm reduction.

2024 Note: Since the survey, we have heard of one case where WLP may have direcrly caused a death and another report where someone required ventilator support to avoid serious consequences. It seems likely from the other effects of WLP that it may impair breathing to a life threatening degree in some extreme cases. It can also impair muscle functioning to an extent that poses a great risk of accidents related to falls or during other activities, even after the psychoactive effects have worn off and even when it seems the paralysis is improving, as it often comes and goes in waves.

References

budshroomey. 2001. I cannot fucking walk. Mind Media: Shroomery; [accessed 2022 October 17]. https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/487246

notapillow. 2009. Mushroom paralysis: wood lovers. Mind Media: Shroomery; [accessed 2022 Oct 17]. https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/9831042#9831042

Sherwood AM. Halberstadt AL. Klein AK. McCorvy JD. Kaylo KW. Kargbo RB. Meisenheimer P. 2020. Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of Tryptamines Found in Hallucinogenic Mushrooms: Norbaeocystin, Baeocystin, Norpsilocin, and Aeruginascin. J Nat Prod. 83(2):461-467.

Allen JW. Merlin MD. Jansen KL. 1991. An Ethnomycological Review of Psychoactive Agarics in Australia and New Zealand. J Psychoact Drugs. 23(1):39-69.

Bauer B. 2018. Wood Lover Paralysis: An Unsolved Mystery. Psychedelic Science Review; [accessed 2022 Oct 17]. https://psychedelicreview.com/wood-lover-paralysis-unsolved-mystery/

Bauer B. 2019. Wood Lover Paralysis From Magic Mushrooms: The Aeruginascin Hypothesis. Psychedelic Science Review; [accessed 2022 Oct 17]. https://psychedelicreview.com/wood-lover-paralysis-from-magic-mushrooms-the-aeruginascin-hypothesis/

Ghosal S. Dutta SK. Sanyal AK. Bhattacharya SK. 1969. Arundo donax. Phytochemical and pharmacological evaluation. J Med Chem. 12(3):480-483.

Bhattacharya SK. Sanyal AK. 1972. Neuromuscular blocking activity of bufotenidine isolated from Arundo donax L. Die Naturwissenschaften. 59(12):650-651.

Beck, S. Barlow C. 2021. EGA Microdose Webcast 6: Woodlover Paralysis with Symon Beck and Caine Barlow. EntheoTV: Entheogenesis Australis; [Accessed 2022 Oct 17]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQNzJvDEKIs

Chadeayne AR. Pham DNK. Reid BG. Golen JA. Manke DR. 2020. Active Metabolite of Aeruginascin (4-Hydroxy-N,N,N-trimethyltryptamine): Synthesis, Structure, and Serotonergic Binding Affinity. ACS Omega. 5(27):16940-16943.

Additional content

Reference guide to Psilocybe subaeruginosa
Magic mushrooms, identification and harm reduction video playlist