Can I take mushrooms with lemon or orange juice?
Yes. According to some people, they mix citrus in their mushroom tea brew as it causes psilocin-citrate formation. This according to many people hits faster and harder than just eating mushrooms alone or drinking tea.
The first is the conversion of psilocybin to psilocin. Psilocybin and 4-AcO-DMT is a chemical compound known as an ester - a compound that’s made of an alcohol and an acid bound together. Now, when you expose esters to acidic or basic conditions in water, they snap open to the parent’s alcohol and acid. In our case, the lemon juice opens psilocybin to psilocin and phosphoric acid. This reaction happens in your stomach when psilocybin hits the hydrochloric acid - it’s not restricted to being done by enzymes! They just help the reaction happen under more mild conditions.
The other “half” of the tek comes from the fact that pure psilocin freebase doesn’t dissolve very well in water. It has to form a salt first, and it needs an acid to do that. Either the citric acid or the generated phosphoric acid complexes with the psilocin (and psilocybin too!) and makes it into an ionic compound that dissolves in water easily (e.g. psilocin citrate). Having psilocin or other alkaloids already dissolved in water means you don’t have to wait for them to leach out of the mushrooms sitting in your stomach - they can diffuse right across the small intestine and get to partyin’. This means a faster onset.
So in summary, while the Lemon Tek might not provide any serious potentiation, it does have a scientific basis for why people do it, and why it kicks in rapidly.1
