Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Though the exact biosynthetic pathways have been identified, no one knows exactly why these species produce the psychoactive alkaloids psilocybin, psilocin and baeocystin. Some of the more lurid theories

  suggest that the mushrooms altruistically synthesise them for human benefit, to kick-start a human-mushroom symbiosis, or perhaps to open our eyes to the planet's ecological needs;'0 others, that they are a gift from God. More prosaically, they may simply be by-products from some other essential metabolic process, or have some yet-to-be-determined ecological function, perhaps in deterring mycophagous flies.

  Psilocybin, its chemical relatives and the mushrooms within which they are found are formally classed as psychoactives ('activating the psyche'), psychedelics (literally 'mind-manifesting') or hallucinogens ('producing hallucinations')." The psychophysical effects of these mushrooms come on anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour after consumption, depending on how empty the stomach is, and last between four and five hours; unlike, say, LSD which lasts in the region of ten to twelve hours. Psilocybin is about a hundred times less potent than LSD, but about ten times more so than mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus.

  This much we know. When mushrooms are eaten most of the psilo­cybin is chemically converted (dephosphorylated) into the more potent psilocin by the action of stomach enzymes (though the fate of baeocystin is less well understood).11 From there, both enter the blood, are distributed very rapidly through the body and are able to cross the blood-brain barrier, the obstacle that ordinarily prevents toxic sub­stances from entering and damaging the precarious biochemistry of the brain. Psilocybin and psilocin belong to a class of chemicals called indole alkaloids, or tryptamines, which are structurally similar to the endogenous neurotransmitter serotonin. Alterations in the normal supply and uptake of serotonin are implicated in a range of physio­logical and psychological disorders, such as depression and migraine, and in the action of a variety of psychoactive drugs. For example, Ecstasy, or MDMA, works by flooding the brain with serotonin, pro­ducing intense feelings of pleasure, whereas the anti-depressant Prozac causes an even production of serotonin and a more controlled eleva­tion of mood. The close similarity of psilocybin and psilocin to sero­tonin means that they latch onto the brain's so-called 5-HT2A serotonin receptor sites (but, unlike LSD, psilocybin does not directly affect dopamine, the neurotransmitter implicated in schizophrenia). It is rather as if a new, alien but curiously compatible piece of software is thrown into the brain's computer, disrupting its normal operations in novel and unexpected ways.

  One measurable symptom of all this chemical jiggery-pokery is that alpha-wave activity in the neocortex is completely replaced by betawave activity, but quite why this should produce such profound alter­ations of consciousness, science has yet to explain: the best it can offer is that various feedback loops between different parts of the brain, perhaps the cortex and the thalamus, are disrupted by the replacement of serotonin with psilocybin, causing an opening of the 'thalamic sensory filter'.'3 Even so, it seems quite possible that the perturbations caused by psilocybin will turn out to be extremely use­ful in revealing what is ordinarily going on in the complex biochem­istry of the brain: they are the neurophysiological equivalent of turning over stones.

  As for the subjective effects of eating magic mushrooms, these depend on a number of variables: upon the species consumed; whether the mushrooms are eaten fresh or dried, or with food; the person's body weight, psychological make-up and expectations; and the envi­ronment in which the mushrooms are taken. In addition to desirable transformations of mood and perception, mushrooms can cause omi­nous disturbances to the digestive system stomach aches and nausea and make physical movement difficult: walking can take the most intense act of will. (One British mushroom seller cautioned users not to operate any equipment more technically demanding than a spoon.) The old 1960s adage of correct set (mental preparation) and setting (a safe and supportive environment) still holds true.

  At low to moderate doses, the most immediate effect is that colours seem brighter, more saturated and better defined. By contrast, at very high doses all sense of reality and one's connection to it may be sev­ered, as the universe and one's identity dissolve into a maelstrom of colour and form. Needless to say, this can be a terrifying experience; the effects of the moderate doses that people typically take, however, are usually more pleasant. Normal vision is disrupted by juddering fractal textures and patterns that emerge out of, and are superimposed upon, the apparent world. Everything is suddenly tattooed with light, while unbidden faces may peer out from the woodwork. The bemushroomed are famously prone to hysterical fits of the giggles, for ordi­nary and mundane aspects of life are seen in a new, childlike and very often comic light. One habitue told me how she was once overcome with gales of laughter when the moles and freckles on her arm got up and danced away.

  The epithet 'magic' appears apposite and well earned, for mush­rooms create an overall ambience of earthy, Tolkienesque enchant­ment. The world, and especially the natural world, appears in a new light, as if some ordinarily obscured and secret aspect of it has been suddenly revealed. The smallest details leaves, bark, cobwebs, grains of sand appear exquisitely beautiful and heavy with meaning. Consciousness appears less bounded than it is ordinarily, for trees, plants and even rocks seem to be, in some peculiar sense, aware. However strange and unsettling this transformation, the bemushroomed may report a feeling of familiarity, of deja vu, of having always known about this particular nook in the architecture of expe­rience. Some say it is as if they have stepped into an archetypal space where they are actors in some ancient drama played out by fools, lovers, kings and queens. This is more than an enchanted escapade: enthusiasts report that great noetic insights and philosophical connec­tions flash unexpectedly into the mind, so that the experience is intel­lectually and ontologically rewarding.

  It is with eyes closed, however, that the most dramatic alterations of consciousness become apparent. Here the phantasmagoria of psychedel­ic patterns and visuals are most powerfully encountered, arching unbid­den across the inner screen of the mind's eye; the phantasmagoria that, whether triggered by opium, LSD, hashish or mescaline, writers and poets have struggled to describe from the time of the Romantics onwards.

  Aficionados say it is as if one is gazing upon the surface of an everchanging sea, brightly coloured and turbulent, that throws up ever more dazzling combinations of pattern and colour, texture and form, with its constant boiling and seething; or perhaps upon an infinitely elastic rubber sheet, that stretches and oozes like some play-putty rolled between the fingers, luminously and languidly bulging and rip­pling in three dimensions, folding itself into endlessly delightful new arrangements. Here, a tessellating pattern of mushrooms glides across the inner screen like a fan of cards. There, ladders of colour and light, encrusted with millions of bejewelled eyes, spring up and away. Some users report hearing a soundtrack to complete the inner son et lumiere, a mysterious timbre of undulating squelches and whoops like those created by the Radiophonic Workshop, or the early Acid House pio­neers, on their creaking analogue synthesisers. While the action of the

  mushrooms lasts there is no end to it, and users are adamant that the lightshow feels as if it is originating from somewhere else, as if some­how this is the mushroom revealing itself.

  Nevertheless, serious mushroom users 'myconauts', if you will, travellers in the realm of the mushroom distinguish between these sorts of Visuals', which they regard as pretty but trivial, and a sec­ondary class of Visions' obtained at much higher doses. With these heroic quantities, the tempest of inner visuals condenses into coherent scenarios: visions of ancient civilisations or future space colonies; of elves or angels, spirits or demons. One gets the sense of being pulled deeper into trance by the mushrooms (though with great effort one can open one's eyes and momentarily escape), to a place where things of great importance will be revealed. These are the shamanic realms, myconauts claim, where autonomous,
discarnate beings, the spirits of shamanism, impart information and reveal gnostic truths. Some report hearing the 'mushroom' talking to them, as clear as day. Clearly, from a scientific point of view there is much more to be dis­covered than is currently understood about the action of mushrooms and about how they induce such peculiar sensations: reducing all this to an increase in beta-wave activity or to a broken cortical feedback loop does not quite cut the ontological mustard.

  Interestingly, users report that different psilocybin species produce quite distinctive subjective effects. For example, some say that with Liberty Caps visuals are more organic and earthy, whereas with cubensis they are more alien and architectural. The parsimonious explanation is that every hallucinogenic species contains its own unique composition of alkaloids which, though they may be only weakly active, synergise with the heavyweight ingredients, psilocybin and psilocin, and influence the way in which they work. Monocular science, having settled upon these two as the responsible agents, has yet to set about investigating the unique pharmacological dynamics of each and every species.

  From a physiological point of view, the health risks from magic mush­rooms are minimal (though no drug can be said to be entirely risk free). In mice the LD50, that is the dose at which 50 per cent of the experimental subjects die, is 280 mg/kg of body weight,'4 but a high dose in humans is only 0.5 mg/kg.'5 With such a low toxicity it has been estimated that you would have to eat your own body weight in mushrooms to take a lethal dose,'6 and indeed there are no reported cases of fatalities from psilocybin mushrooms, though children may be more at risk of physical harm.'7 One foolhardy individual made him­self dangerously ill by taking his mushrooms intravenously.'8

  From clinical trials we know that taking psilocybin is a literally hairraising experience (it causes piloerection), which leaves subjects wideeyed (it famously triggers mydriasis, a marked dilation of the pupils). Psilocybin's tendency to increase heart rate and lower blood pressure at high doses suggests that people with heart or blood pressure prob­lems might be at risk.'9 Mushrooms are not addictive in any way, and indeed a tolerance to the active ingredients quickly builds up so that they have diminishing effects the more often they are taken. As a sign of its low toxicity, psilocybin is very quickly excreted from the body, with two-thirds of any dose removed after three hours."

  It is in the psychological domain that magic mushrooms become more problematic. Even experienced users know that mushroom trips can turn nasty: the visions can become hellish, the gnostic insights can be too much to take in, the fear of dying or going mad or of perma­nently losing one's identity can become overbearing. Quiet reassur­ance is usually enough to turn the trip around, for its peak is over relatively quickly, but in extreme cases sedation may be necessary. It has fortunately been appreciated by the medical community that the old-fashioned rush for the stomach pump (gastric lavage) merely makes a bad situation worse.

  In only a small minority of cases do any of these symptoms persist beyond the immediate course of the trip, and there may be other aggravating circumstances: in one published British example, the man in question had taken mushrooms every day for a week while fasting and avoiding sleep, so had clearly been overdoing things." There is no evidence that mushrooms can make a healthy subject psy­chotic," but any latent psychosis could be triggered, for even alcohol can bring latent mental illness to the fore. PET scans of the brain have shown that most psilocin activity occurs in the areas of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate and the temporomedial cortex.'3 Interestingly, these same areas are implicated in certain types of schizophrenia, especially the type of psychosis known as hallucinatory ego disintegration, though an exact equivalence between tripping on mushrooms and schizophrenia is far from proven. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that anyone with a personal or family history of mental illness, or who is depressed or feeling psy­chologically unstable in any way, should assiduously avoid mush­rooms, or any other psychoactive drugs for that matter.

  Although there has been an absolute moratorium on research into psychedelics since the moral panic about LSD in the 1960s, a recent softening of attitudes has opened the door to clinical trials with psilo­cybin. The days are long gone, however, when white-coated scientists would, say, spike individual monkeys with psilocybin to see how the other, straight members of the experimental colony would react to having a tripper in their midst (the answer was, usually, badly).M The political and social overtones of such experiments should be obvious: scientists wanted to 'prove' that psychoactive drugs derailed society by turning good middle-class kids into zombie-like dropouts. The fact that 'dropping out', as certain alternative lifestyle choices were labelled in the 1960s, might have been determined by cultural or soci­ological factors and not by deterministic psychological ones seems to have passed these scientists by.

  These days most research is psychological, in the broadest sense of being to do with the mind. For example, one study showed how sub­jects under the influence of psilocybin were more likely to make indi­rect semantic associations; that is in tests they were more likely to make 'poetic' or 'creative' connections between unrelated words.15 Anecdotal reports suggest that psilocybin may be effective in treating cluster headaches,16 while a preliminary study has found hints that, when taken in conjunction with a course of therapy, it might be suc­cessful in curing certain obsessive-compulsive disorders.17 If magic mushrooms do indeed make you temporarily mad, then it may be that a bit of madness is good for you.18

  Perhaps the biggest danger surrounding magic mushrooms is the danger of picking the wrong sort. A death in Australia from renal fail­ure was almost certainly caused by the poor unfortunate picking the wrong mushroom.19 This danger is most acute with that other class of psychoactive fungi, the amanitas, which are closely related to the two aforementioned deadly species, Amanita virosa and Amanita phalloides. In Britain, once one is familiar with the Liberty Cap, it is diffi­cult to confuse it with anything else (though inexperienced pickers may do so). In America, however, one psychoactive species, Psilocybe stuntzii, is easily confused with the deadly poisonous Galerina aututnnalis, with which it can happily grow side by side. Wherever they are picked, accuracy of identification is essential and the slightest doubt should lead any would-be experimenter to err on the side of caution.*0 If harm reduction is the principal concern, then there is surely a per­suasive argument for the legal sale of cultivated mushrooms to prevent people from making potentially lethal mistakes.

  In the general scheme of things, then, the greatest risk to health, lib­erty and well-being comes from magic mushrooms' proscribed status and the fact that using them carries the stiffest legal penalties: in law, psilocybin is typically listed alongside heroin as the most dangerous of illicit drugs. In 1971, the United Nations, under considerable American pressure, introduced its Convention on Psychotropic Substances as an adjunct to its earlier Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961). Though at the time illicit use of magic mushrooms in Europe and America was minimal, had not gone overground and was probably lit­tle known to the policy makers, psilocybin and psilocin were included in the Convention because of their structural similarity to the great drugs menace of the time, LSD. Signatories agreed to prohibit these synthetics but, following appeals by the Mexican government, not the plants that contained them: the Mexicans were understandably wor­ried by the prospect of having to prevent indigenous mushroom use. As we shall see, it was this distinction that opened the legal loophole that exists in Holland, and that existed in Britain until 2005, allowing the sale of fresh mushrooms.

  This legal situation is the predominant cultural force about which contemporary mushroom enthusiasts must orientate themselves, rather like iron filings in a magnetic field. One of the reasons that invented histories, supposed lineages of mushroom use stretching back to the dawn of time, are so readily believed and so trenchantly defend­ed by aficionados is that they serve to legitimate this illicit hobby. For if great cultures, religions and philosophies we
re founded on bemushroomed gnosticism, then contemporary use is very far from the selfabusive, criminal, infantile or escapist act that mainstream society still deems it to be. This climate means that taking mushrooms remains a distinctly countercultural act which, for many, forms the kernel of an identity founded on a sense of alterity, or opposition to the main­stream. Clearly the contention of this book that Western mushroom use dates only to the 1950s will meet with considerable resistance from some quarters.

  Aficionados claim that magic mushrooms are not just another drug hut are psycho-spiritual tools that bring a greater understanding of the self, of our place in the world and of some essential 'truth'. Mainstream society, they maintain, is blinkered by the 'war on drugs' and is unfairly prejudiced against this most benign and illuminating of naturally occurring hallucinogens. In my scrutiny and revision of the story of the magic mushroom, it is fair to say that I have a certain amount of sympathy with these claims. Nevertheless, I would suggest that enthusiasts' time would be better spent arguing the case for mush­rooms in terms of the culturally sanctioned criteria of our time, that is on health and medical grounds, than on the grounds of some fantasti­cal history, dreamed up on a basis of wishful thinking and overworked evidence. In other words, enthusiasts must convincingly persuade the law makers that any risks to mental and physical health are ones that society can reasonably tolerate (as has indeed happened in Holland).

  If mushrooms really are safe, if they really do deliver meaningful insights, then the fact that the practice is a modern one is neither here nor there. Indeed, I would argue that placing the history of the mush­room on a sound footing, and excising the more excessive claims made on its behalf, can only strengthen the enthusiasts' case, for it will afford them a little more credibility. As it is, the recent popularity of the magic mushroom rather suggests that popular culture has already ruled in its favour, a situation that official policy now lags breath­lessly behind.