Oakland’s Church of Ambrosia says mushroom potency is rising fast, and its new psilocybin calculator aims for fewer “Naked Ninja” emergencies.
The Old Eighth-of-Shrooms Rule Is Dead
It may be time to sunset the old college rule of eating 3.5 grams of mushrooms and holding on for the ride.
Folks taking magic mushrooms for depression, trauma, addiction, creativity, or just fun on a Saturday night have a new tool to help get exactly as high as they want amid an era of rising mushroom potency.
Online now, the world’s biggest mushroom church, the Church of Ambrosia in Oakland, has released a potency calculator that acts as a trip advisor of sorts.
Why? They’ve dealt with one too many people losing all touch with reality and trying to literally run naked through the streets. So they’ve pioneered large-scale potency testing of real-world mushroom strains and products. They’ve correlated dosage to trip states, and released the findings as an open-source calculator on the web and on GitHub.
You put in your weight and the type of mushroom, and it’ll tell you how much to eat to have a light microdose, or step it all the way up to having a “breakthrough” experience with interdimensional entities.
Why Mushroom Potency Is Suddenly a Harm Reduction Issue
The project addresses a persistent issue in mushroom therapy: if you have too much cannabis, you’ll just pass out. Eat too much of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, and you might meet the devil.
“You might see some shit you’re not ready for,” said Dave Hodges, church leader and former medical cannabis dispensary owner in San Jose.
Hodges relates a “terrifying experience” during a shroom overdose where he met “entities that wanted all humans to experience nuclear death outside of time.”
Burning in hellfire forever. Sounds bad, man!
“Tam,” who leads the Church’s helper program, called “Godsitters,” for people on breakthrough doses, said: “People were absolutely not in control of their faculties.”
Tam recalls the “Naked Ninja” story of a man who confronted the helpers naked, put on his shoes, then someone else’s shoes over his, “did some acrobatics, and tried to kick out a window and run screaming into the street.”
Embarking on Testing
So the Church of Ambrosia enlisted the help of Reggie Harris and Oakland Hyphae, a community drug-testing lab.
Oakland is the birthplace of cannabis lab testing, which started illegally in an apartment in neighboring Emeryville, California at Steep Hill Labs in 2009. Today, cannabis lab testing has become a fixture of most legal cannabis states.
Oakland Hyphae tapped the same Steep Hill talent and actually bought a defunct pot lab’s high-pressure liquid chromatography device. Harris and his team acquired the standards for tryptamine alkaloids, which include psilocybin, calibrated their device, and began testing mushrooms and related products for their active ingredients.
This is a sea change in psychedelic science that makes you go “duh” when you think about it: the dry weight of the mushroom is not relevant. The amount of active ingredients is the key.
“This is how people should start looking at it,” Harris said. He equated it to beer versus wine and liquor.
One Gram Is Not One Gram Anymore
Traditional research papers might survey three or four varieties. Oakland Hyphae has analyzed hundreds.
They’ve found that potency can vary by a factor of 80. One gram of a subtype of “Trinity” strain of mushroom is as strong as 70 grams of regular “Trinity,” said Hodges.
“The gram amount doesn’t mean anything to me. If I take an eighth of that [Trinity sub-type] I’m going to be running naked down the street.”
Dave Hodges, Church of Ambrosia
There are about 140 magic mushroom strains, and hundreds of sub-types within the popular Psilocybe cubensis mushroom: Golden Teacher, Penis Envy and so on. They all vary in potency.
And the same tray of the same strain will vary from the top-right corner of the tray to the bottom-left, by as much as 100%.
“It’s a literal harm reduction issue,” said Harris. “Not all mushrooms are created equally.”
Researchers in the Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology in February 2025 agreed, and called potency “extremely variable.”
What Stronger Mushrooms Mean for Microdosing
The implications are profound. Psychedelic therapy and the cultural movement around it are spreading nationally, from the streets of Oakland to the White House.
There’s generally no way to know how strong the average mushroom product is. They remain illegal at the federal and state levels. Oakland has made them a lowest enforcement priority for police. The Church of Ambrosia has enough political and legal cover to mandate testing.
“We won’t allow it into the Church unless it has testing,” Hodges said.
Between the internet, shady head shops, and gas stations, it’s extremely hard for consumers to know what they are taking. It’s akin to the early medical weed era when a brownie could destroy you. Nowadays, a standard THC dose is 10 milligrams.
“Back in the day, we just took our eighth of mushrooms and dealt with it,” said Harris.
Intense experiences can deter folks from helpful psychedelic therapies, he said. “You didn’t have a bad experience, you had an uninformed experience.”
And folks who think they are microdosing might actually just be tripping all day, said Tam.
What Psychedelic Therapy Can Learn From Cannabis
Mushrooms have gotten 10 times stronger since 2019, she said, comparing them to the potency race in cannabis from 1970 to present.
“There’s always somebody trying to make something stronger. People over the age of 30 don’t understand,” she said. “It can be a 0.1-gram difference that could tip the scale one way or another.”
With the Church’s new dosage calculator, Tam said they can target a breakthrough dose quite precisely “almost on a person’s first time.”
Years Ahead of Universities
As with medical cannabis, Oakland once again has a culture and practice that’s years ahead of where researchers and the law are. For example, it took 30 years for the federal government to agree with Oakland activists that cannabis was medical and move it to Schedule III.
Harris said “the general public is five years away from generally knowing that dry weight means nothing.”
Hodges said, “there’s still a lot of resistance” to thinking about mushroom potency. “People are used to thinking ‘a gram is a gram,’ but then saying, ‘Mushrooms are unpredictable.’”
“It’s easier said than done” to spread the news, Hodges said.
Harris said their research continues to open eyes.
“Have you ever shown a small kid a magic trick? That awe they have? That’s what explaining the science behind mushrooms is like.”
How to Dose Mushrooms in the Age of Super-Potency
Church of Ambrosia’s scale of mushroom experiences for a 180-pound person taking a “Golden Teacher” mushroom that contains 2,500 micrograms of psilocybin per gram of dried mushrooms.
The Church’s Advice: Weight, Interactions, Homogenization
Pay attention to your weight. The lower the body weight, the stronger the effects of the same dose.
Watch out for drug interactions.
- Lithium and mushrooms taken together can cause seizures.
- MAOIs can heighten mushroom trips.
- SSRIs can dampen mushroom effects.
Homogenize mushroom batches. Potency can vary by cap and stem in the same tray. Harvest, dry, grind, and mix the entire tray to homogenize potency across the batch.
This article references psilocybin, which remains illegal under federal law and in most states. The dosing information here reflects the Church of Ambrosia’s own harm-reduction guidance and is presented for informational purposes, not as medical advice.
