Poverty is expensive: the cost to make my cure

My apartment doesn’t have a stove (or oven or refrigerator), so I use these stoves for cooking, making agar, and heating the pressure cooker.

Beverage-can stoves

I made each one from aluminum beverage cans, and they burn rubbing alcohol. Because they have different designs, one burns hotter than the other.

When I tried to make the agar, because I used these stoves instead of a real stove, I had two major problems. I bought a glass jar from a professional laboratory supply and it is allegedly autoclavable. (An autoclave produces high temperature and pressure.) But when I booked the agar in the jar, it cracked: probably from heat shock. By luck, the containers I picked for substrate came with four 200ml jars that are heat shock resistant, so I should have a good replacement, but I have not tried them yet.

1L substrate container

As I was heating the pressure cooker, the stove produced flames larger than it ever has produced. The flames damaged the rubber seal so the pot could not pressurize. I bought a new seal for MXN$81.

Pressure cooker

Time is money. Each day I lose to poverty (or symptoms) costs money in rent, food, and medicine. Just as poverty broke my pressure cooker, it spoiled my fruiting bodies and contaminated my spores.

Costs

Psilocybin can cure my health problems, so I am making it. I reviewed and updated everything. I simplified the tables.

Future costs

I want to (or must) lower the cost of the equipment I still need to buy. I added a column to indicate items I intend to review and what about them I want to investigate.

[table id=14 /]

You can help by sending me equipment

There are at least three ways you can help me make this medicine that will cure me.

  1. Mail or buy the equipment I need
  2. Help me find less expensive alternatives
  3. Support me through PayPal

Past costs

[table id=13 /]

Steps to produce psilocybin

I clarified the steps.

  1. Sterilize equipment
  2. Grow mycelium in agar using fruiting bodies or spores
  3. Prepare substrate in container
  4. Add mycelium to substrate container
  5. Put substrate container into colonizing chamber
  6. When substrate is fully colonized, add sterile water
  7. Put fully colonized substrate container into fruiting chamber
  8. Preserve the best spores as spore prints
  9. Harvest and preserve fruit bodies

Twitter updates

I’m using Twitter to post short updates. Follow @HunterHoganNOW.

https://twitter.com/HunterHoganNOW/status/952123896328679424

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