PsychCombo, the Entheogen Matrix & drug combination displays
If you’ve been wandering down EGA’s psychoactive garden path, you’ve probably stumbled upon our Entheogen Combination Matrix.
EGA’s Entheogen Combination Matrix.
Inspired by Tripsit’s Guide to Drug Combinations chart, with the help of EGA, PRISM and IzWoz, Dr Liam Engel and the EGA team designed and released the Entheogen Combination Matrix, which lists common, natural sources of psychoactive substances along two axes of a graph. Unlike the Tripsit display, EGA’s matrix display presents substance names alongside images, scientific and common names of their environmental sources. These inclusions aim to enhance environmental awareness and thus improve conservation and sustainability.
Triplet’s Guide to Drug Combinations.
But, Liam had bigger dreams for the future of drug combination displays. There will always be new drugs to include in these displays, and consumers and researchers will always argue over the accuracy of risk ratings. The solution? As part of The Mescaline Garden project, and in collaborator with software developer mastfish, Liam created PsychCombo; browser-based (but soon to be downloadable) software that combines the most popular parts of online psychoactive information (such as Erowid, Bluelight, PsychonautWiki, etc.) in a simple, accessible, collaborative and updatable format.
PsychCombo has two main components;
1. Psychoactives. By selecting a psychoactive, you can learn its effects, and the intensities associated with different dosage weights.
Psychoactive names, effects, duration and dosage information available at PsychCombo. Note this is a generalised summary. San Pedro dosage varies widely, as does duration. A heavy San Pedro dose will likely last for 14 hours.
2. Psychoactive combinations. By selecting multiple psychoactives, you can learn the risk rating of different combinations and create your own combination chart. You can also select a combination to learn more about the risk and people’s experiences of the combination.
A psychoactive combination display made using PsychCombo.
The significance of PsychCombo is not just its content, it is format and process. PsychCombo was built as open source on GitHub, in the hopes of enabling a community of contributors. The goal is to grow this content for years to come.
In time Liam plan’s to include dosages for multiple routes of administration (currently PsychCombo only displays the most common route of administration). They also want to add individual pages for drugs currently listed as drug groups (e.g. add codeine, morphine, etc. rather than just opioids), and add links to scientific references relating to combination risk ratings. Liam is also planning to make PsychCombo downloadable and available offline.
A selection of psychoactives summarised at PsychCombo.
It's been a long journey (~1500 individually coded pages long!), but this tool is finally ready for the public. If someone wants to learn more about consuming a particular psychoactive, PsychCombo should be a fantastic addition to the Entheogen Combination Matrix.
Liam talks about making the Entheogen Combination Matrix and working towards PsychCombo.
