I’ll Have Mushrooms with That
Cannabis led the way. Mushrooms could be next. Colorado is again in the vanguard, this time pushing for a local ballot measure in Denver to “free the fungi” – meaning, of course, psychedelic ‘shrooms. The advocates are making a cognitive freedom argument (one’s right to self-experiment if not harming others).
Apart from legalities (like finding yourself with a felony conviction for possession), mushrooms can be grown at home or produced commercially, eaten fresh (“wet”) or dried for storage, with the latter bringing down harsher penalties because dried ‘shrooms are less like produce and more like product. The Colorado movement aims to start by downsizing possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Moving from basement or backyard to lab, the psychoactive ingredient in ‘shrooms is psilocybin. Illegal for any use for decades, this changed in the past 20 years because psilocybin has become acceptable in university medical research. Studies are looking at applications for afflictions ranging from depression and addiction to anxiety in the last stage of cancer.
Psilocybin is found in many species of mushrooms, though not all mushrooms have psychedelic properties -- just as not all are edible, and many are lethal. Some are deadly plus psychedelic, in which case dosage becomes a matter of tripping in life vs. tripping off to eternity.
The usual ‘shrooms are brownish and skinny. A variant is the perky looking red and white-dotted fly agaric (amanita muscaria), shown here Mary Blair’s 1951 preliminary design for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. (The original “Caterpillar Sitting on a Mushroom,” in gouache on board, is in the Hilbert Collection, and it recently caught my eye when it was on display at the Hilbert Museum. )
Well, back to the magic in magic mushrooms. Psilocybin has a research history dating to the middle of the last century, around the time of Aldous Huxley’s breakthrough book, The Doors of Perception.
Huxley famously experimented with mescaline, LSD, Morning Glory seeds, etc., and later on with psilocybin. The first three were home-style experiments, but was introduced to psilocybin in the early 1960s when he briefly participated in a study conducted by then-Harvard professor Timothy Leary.
As far as the experience itself, those who have experimented with psychedelic mushrooms often report a spiritual sense of wonder, a realization of oneness with the universe. Huxley’s experiments were a quest to induce a mystical experience, which he describes this way:
“In the final stage of egolessness there is an “obscure knowledge” that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” --Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
That was Aldous writing in 1953 (the book was published in 1954). Many books have been written about both Huxley and psychedelics since then, including my own book, Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science.
Now, two new books on psychedelics are forthcoming in May. One is Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin. The other is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I hope to take a look at these two and write about them in a future blog.
Meanwhile, here is an afterthought. When a plant with psychoactive properties grows naturally, whether a weed or a fungus springing from the soil, isn’t fungus already free? Can nature truly be contained?
