AFAIK a lot of the "toxicity" warnings about gramine come from studies in sheep and other grazing animals. Sheep get nasty staggers and die from a whole bunch of alkaloids, including DMT and beta-carbolines, so the fact that they react poorly to gramine is no big surprise. I must admit that the structure of gramine, being only one sidechain carbon short of DMT, is intriguing.
One has experimented extensively with various smokeable extracts of Phalaris arundinacea var. picta, which is a commonly available tricoloured cultivar of ribbon grass. Never has anyone experienced a negative physical reaction to such smokeable extracts, although the nature of the effects is subjectively a bit different as well as longer lasting than DMT (possibly due to the complex mix of DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, beta-carbolines and other alkaloids in the plant). So vaporizing/smoking such an extract has been safe in one's experience. I am not sure why the gramine would be destroyed by the heat of freebasing? Is it a particularly fragile compound?
One has never tried an oral dose, but if one was going to do this they would start small and work up slowly. Probably would use a threshold dose of syrian rue (say 1-1.5 grams) for initial experiments, and use very small amounts of grass (3-5 grams?). Also it is worth noting that due to the beta-carboline content of the grass, Phalaris arundinacea MAY BE orally active on its own, with no additional MAOI.
There are three reports on Phalaris grass taken orally on Erowid:
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=65695This guy reports using St. Johns Wort and Russian Olive as his MAOI portions. Now AFAIK neither of these plants has been experientially proven to be an effective MAOI. The Russian Olive has been reported to contain some amounts of harmala type alkaloids, once upon a time one was going to do some experimenting with this plant but never got around to it (see here
http://www.lycaeum.org/forum/index.php/topic,18560.0.html). An aqueous extract of russian olive DID NOT glow under black light like would be expected with syrian rue or caapi. This is the only report ANYWHERE I have read using these plants as "MAOI", and like I said it is at least possible the Phalaris grass itself would be orally active without additional MAOI, so take it with a grain of salt.
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=9062http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=6611
