Over the past year, Caleb King and Christopher Pauli have compiled a growing list of chemicals in various mushroom products.

Of the 33 products The Times had tested, eight contained 4-AcO-DMT — usually instead of psilocybin but sometimes in addition to it. That percentage is in line with what scientists at commercial laboratories say they’ve typically found.

“We’re generally seeing around 10[%] to 30% of products have 4-AcO-DMT in them,” said Christopher Pauli, one of the founders of Tryptomics, the Colorado-based company that performed some testing for The Times.

Christopher Pauli, CEO at Tryptomics, a lab that specializes in analyzing plants and fungi, said psilacetin is commonly found in mushroom edible products. Both psilacetin and psilocybin are converted in the body to psilocin, the chemical that is ultimately responsible for the psychoactive effects, he said.

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Christopher Pauli is a molecular biologist who co-founded Tryptomics, a Colorado-based biotech that’s developing novel lab-testing technologies and services for plant medicines. One of the company’s focuses is to use pharmacogenomics and microbiomics to create highly personalized, bespoke psychedelic and natural medicines.

As these products continue to grow in popularity, experts like Caleb King and Christopher Pauli of Tryptomics, a company that tests psychoactive substances, have seen a disturbing trend of inconsistency and contamination. "People are throwing the kitchen sink into some of these and calling them a natural blend," King told NPR. Their findings have included everything from herbal supplements to amphetamines, with little consistency even within the same brand.

Aside from their occasional tendency to cause vomiting and dizziness, muscimol isn’t known to present any serious health risks. But according to Chris Pauli and Caleb King, both of whom own and operate an analytical chemistry lab called Tryptomics based in Boulder, Colorado, much of what is currently being sold as muscimol on the market is likely being cut with other, potentially more harmful drugs.

“Some of the muscimol that’s coming into the United States is coming from China,” King told me, [and] some of the synthetic manufacturing in China is being done correctly, but others have brought in powdered substances that look a lot like muscimol and maybe have some effects that are similar to [its] sedative effects…but we’ve seen compounds like ketamine and an unknown phenethylamine that we didn’t recognize…That kind of shocked us.” Phenethylamines are a class of psychoactive compounds which includes stimulants like methamphetamine, as well as MDMA and the 2C class of psychedelics.

The lack of regulation on the product is the biggest risk. "Somebody could slap a label on a package saying it contains four grams of mushrooms, and really, it contains a synthetic," Caleb King, one of the founders of Tryptomics, a Colorado lab that began testing mushroom chocolate bars bought at San Francisco vape shops, said to The Washington Post. "So it comes down to the consumer having to do their research before they're going to be consuming anything." Banning magic mushroom products would also not help the situation. "It's kind of like whack-a-mole, where if you prohibit psilacetin then something else might crop up," Mason Marks, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, said to NBC News. "Prohibition is not the solution, but educating people about this can be quite helpful."

21. Tryptomics – This Colorado-based mushroom testing outfit does ‘elevated natural product research’ and his increasingly garnering traction for their innovative approach to educating the myco community about the importance of analytical testing of psychoactive mushrooms. They recently conducted an analytical test of multiple infamous ‘trap chocolate’ brands (mass underground / dubious quality chocolate) and shared the tests publicly, which returned less than desirable results for the brands in question.

Pauli recently shared how his background in Cannabis research led to this work, his viewpoints on current testing standards in psychedelics, and how plant medicines may have a greater impact on gut health than brain health.

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“I’m seeing compounds that I had not seen yet, and we're rapidly trying to discover what they are,” says King.