Pharmacokinetics is the study of a drug’s journey through the body: absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion. Its partner, pharmacodynamics, is what the drug does to the body, such as switching on a receptor.
For psilocybin, a 2025 systematic review of 14 studies, six of them clinical with 112 healthy participants, found that pharmacokinetics varied with dose, route and species, and that psilocin is broken down mainly by CYP2D6 and CYP3A4 (Meshkat et al., 2025). A 2026 review of oral psilocybin arms reports blood psilocin peaking at about 1.3 to 3.7 hours (Hampsey et al., 2026).
For DMT, a population model of 13 volunteers estimated clearance at 26 litres per minute, which its authors call a high value (Eckernäs et al., 2022). That speed is why injected DMT is short and swallowed DMT is broken down before reaching the brain (Riba et al., 2015). These are group averages with wide individual spread, and they are research values, not guidance.
Sources
- Meshkat et al., 2025, Pharmaceutics: pharmacokinetics of psilocybin
- Hampsey et al., 2026: pooled psilocybin and LSD pharmacokinetics (PMC)
- Eckernäs et al., 2022, Clinical and Translational Science: DMT population model
- Riba et al., 2015, Drug Testing and Analysis
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