Apparently DMSO, an easy to obtain and low toxicity solvent, is exceptionally effective at converting ibotenic acid to muscimol. How effective is it? DMSO practically gets you a 100% yield of muscimol from your ibotenic acid overnight. At room temperature. Additionally, DMSO is effective at increasing the body’s absorption of nearly any drug, muscimol included.

here are some guidelines:
Don’t use more than 2 tsp. DMSO. It is a catalyst, so you don’t need a lot. Also, you don’t really want to ingest more than 2 tsp. of it because it does not have the best taste.

Don’t put the DMSO on the stove. If you add it to the boiling water, and you accidently let it all boil off, you potentially have an explosion on your hands. This makes for a bad trip.

Don’t try to make a resin for smoking with DMSO, as smoking could cause an explosion.
Do some research on DMSO yourself, and get to know the substance if you aren’t familiar with it. It has plenty of other useful drug related applications for you to discover.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, and these beautiful mushrooms are growing everywhere in my neighborhood! I have been enjoying them for about three years now: picking them and drying them in my oven at about 170 F with the door open and consuming them a number of ways. I have found, however, that the decarboxylation of ibotenic acid into muscimol that is supposed to happen in the oven has been rather hit or miss. When these mushrooms make you retch, it is the ibotenic acid that is the culprit.
Here is what I did:
I took 1 small, 2 inch amanita cap and boiled it in a sauce pan with about a quart of water for about 15 minutes, and then removed the cap from the water. I proceeded to let the water boil until there was only a half cup left, then transferred it to a mason jar and let it cool. (I have seen muscimol’s boiling point quoted online as being 70 C, and this is simply false. You can boil off the water without harming either the ibotenic acid or muscimol.) I then added 2 tsp DMSO to the solution, and allowed it to sit overnight. The next day, I picked it up and gave it a swirl and drank it in a quick gulp. It did not taste good, but went down quick. I recommend having a chaser nearby.

Within 10 minutes of taking it, I was feeling the effects of the mushroom, and I felt not a hint of nausea either. This was a small dose, only 1 small cap, but I was feeling significantly more kick than I normally get from that amount. Within 30 minutes I peaked, with a thick calmness in my body and a strong alcohol like buzz but with a clearer headspace. I feel the hypnotic effects and a vague distortion in my peripheral vision. The euphoria does not seem to be amplified, by the DMSO, but is about where it normally would be. The high lasts its usual duration, about 6 hours.

Ibotenic Acid Decarboxylation to Muscimol: Dramatic Solvent and Radiolytic Rate Acceleration

Filera CN, Lacya JM and CT Peng

Synthetic Communications 2005 35(7):967-70.


Both ibotenic acid (1) and muscimol (2) have been isolated from several fungal species including Amanita muscaria1 and are active CNS agents of the NMDA and GABA receptor systems respectively. It has also been demonstrated that under certain circumstances 1 can decarboxylate to 2, but the scope of the reaction was largely unexplored.2 A number of years ago colleagues in our laboratory, likely influenced by the conditions of the classic Krapcho reaction,3 first reported in a talk that simply stirring 1 in a solution of DMSO with high specific activity 3H2O(Water) overnight at ambient temperature afforded a very reasonable radiochemical yield of 3a with exclusive tritium incorporation in the amino methylene as established by tritium NMR.4 Since then we have performed this simple yet robust synthesis many times, providing valuable radioligand 3a to the neurochemical community and supporting literally hundreds of key published studies in the GABA area. A representative synthesis is described in the experimental section.

Years later, Nielsen and coworkers independently explored the nonenzymatic decarboxylation of ibotenic acid, reporting that 1 was stable in water even at 37°C overnight and only after its exposure to boiling water at pH extremes over the course of several hours was any decarboxylation to 2 noted.5 Until recently we were unaware of this surprising observation and it clearly demonstrates that our mild ambient temperature decarboxylation of 1 to 3a with DMSO/3H2O(Water) is a far more intriguing and remarkable result than first recognized. It is certainly a rare event to so markedly accelerate a reaction by a mere solvent change6 and we were prompted to further examine this interesting transformation more closely.

We first confirmed and extended the observation of the Danish workers, noting that when 1 is dissolved in D2O at ambient temperature and monitored by HPLC, it is stable for more than two weeks, showing only minimal (0.2%) conversion to 3b. We next examined the stability of 1 in DMSO-d6 and D2O (10:1), a concentration identical to the tritiation reaction. In this solvent system at ambient temperature and monitored by HPLC, approximately 90% of 1 was gradually and fairly cleanly converted to 3b over the course of a week. This result was repeated several times and interestingly shows that the addition of DMSO to water clearly facilitates the decarboxylation of 1. However, and perhaps even more important, the use of 3H2O (in lieu of water) with DMSO dramatically accelerates the decarboxylation process.

best thing to do and the most unwaistful is to boil the mushroom and then add DMSO
Also you then might want to expose the tea to UV light or leave it in the sun for a couple of hours, to make the muscazone version of muscimol(its stronger)

Quote from erowid