Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  Without wishing in any sense to undermine the enormity and pro­fundity of anyone's psychedelic experiences, this view is problematic. There is nothing intrinsic to an Acid or mushroom trip that makes someone, say, decide to grow their hair, wear beads and kaftans, experiment with non-nuclear living arrangements, or listen to The Grateful Dead. These are cultural choices, matters of lifestyle and identity, determined through the interplay of peer pressure and per­sonal choice. There are countless examples of Leary's contemporaries who, having 'turned on', most certainly did not 'drop out'. Gordon Wasson provides an obvious example, but take also the troubled author Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), who found Leary's solipsistic musings so offensive that he actually walked out of his psilocybin ses­sion. 'Chemically induced raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying,' he later wrote in an article for the Sunday Telegraph, but 'in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system."6 No sudden change there.

  But the best example of all must be Leary himself, who possessed an indelible rebellious streak bound up with his somewhat self-fulfilling identity as a downtrodden Irish-American that surfaced time and again throughout his life.17 In spite of his many hundreds of trips, the Timothy Leary 'game' stayed remarkably constant. Contrary to the myth, he was not turned instantly and magically from a stuffy aca­demic into a laid-back hippy messiah by a single touch of the Mexican mushrooms. Rather, his transformation was a gradual process of mes­sianic drift, occurring across a period of years (during which time he continued to perform scientific research), which was also the product of social and cultural forces. His was a conscious choice, in other words, and psychedelics simply provided him with a platform upon which this rebellious side could find expression. The trouble was that, having dropped out, it was very difficult for him to do anything else, and having chosen the 'outlaw game' he was forced to play it for the rest of his life without respite, even as the world moved on, tuned out and eventually turned off. No wonder he invested so much energy in promoting his own personal mythology.

  The gradual way in which Leary let go of the 'academic game* in favour of the 'guru game' is illustrated by the fact that, in spite of his supposed rejection of the 'psychology game', he continued to under­take some statistical research. The results are widely cited by mush­room enthusiasts as evidence for the transformational power of psychedelics, and hence form an important episode in the history of the magic mushroom. But tellingly, with a stake in both games, Leary did not conduct the research well.

  Leary's Concord Prison experiment, which ran from 1961 to 1963, had its genesis in the profound and supposedly life-changing experi­ences of volunteers in the Psilocybin Project. Why not offer psilocybin to prison inmates due for parole, for surely a peak psilocybin experi­ence would reduce their likelihood of re-offending? Leary worked hard to overcome the initial mistrust of the prison authorities, which is perhaps why he actually used quantitative methods here it was more or less the last time that he did but, as ever, he and the other psychologists took psilocybin along with the volunteer prisoners. The very first session started badly, as Leary experienced anxiety about tripping behind bars and in the company of convicted criminals. He admitted this, and an inmate confessed that he was equally afraid of the mad scientist who was about to meddle with his mind! Formalities over, the session thereafter ran smoothly.'8

  The results of the Concord experiment have been cited, time and again, as proof of the transformative power of psilocybin in particular, and psychedelics in general: ten months following release, recidivism rates amongst those that had taken psilocybin were roughly half those of a similar control group. After twenty-six months the rates had crept up again, but Leary maintained that this was because of the excessive scrutiny to which the experimental group were being subjected: thev were being pulled in on minor parole infractions that would ordinari­ly pass unnoticed.

  The prison volunteers seemed almost universally enthusiastic about the drug and their experiences. One was overcome with remorse when he was confronted with the stark reality of a life of crime, i saw what a life of crime was, hated it, fought it... I saw that crime was foolish, a coward's way out, a ridiculous flaunt in a child's game."9 This was promising stuff.

  In a brilliant long-term follow-up study conducted by Dr Rick Doblin and his team from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), however, in which Leary's original data was painstakingly recovered and revisited, it was found that Leary had used some unorthodox statistical methods/0 When the rather glaring distortions were properly ironed out, Doblin and his team found that psilocybin had had no statistically significant effect upon recidivism rates, and that Leary had wittingly or unwittingly steered his results in a direction that would endorse his belief in psilocybin as a magic cureall. Just like Wasson, Leary was too eager to fit the facts to his theory, rather than vice versa. The failure of the Concord Prison experiment,' concluded Doblin, 'should finally put to rest the myth of psychedelic drugs as magic bullets, the ingestion of which will automatically confer wisdom and create lasting change after just one or even a few experiences.

  Another experiment with which Leary was tangentially involved, however, proved less ambiguous: Walter Pahnke's 'Good Friday Experiment'. Walter Pahnke was both a physician and a minister, and he devised his experiment as the major part of his PhD in Religion and Society at Harvard, under Leary's supervision. The idea was simple: he wanted to find out whether psilocybin would enhance the experience of attending a religious ceremony, or perhaps even induce mystical experiences, for religious believers. Matched pairs of volunteers, all theology graduate students, were randomly given either psilocybin or a placebo, in a double-blind (the placebo contained nicotinic acid, which produces a tingling sensation in the skin, so that controls would be fooled into thinking that they had been given psilocybin). The vol­unteers spent the session in Boston University's Marsh Chapel, into which a Good Friday service, taking place upstairs, was relayed. Good Friday was chosen as being the most important or emotionally signif­icant moment of the Christian calendar, the festival most likely to induce mystical feelings.

  Measuring the results through a series of questionnaires after the event, Pahnke found that volunteers were statistically more likely to have had mystical experiences (such as feelings of unity, or of tran­scending time and space) if they had taken psilocybin. Again, the experiment has been endlessly cited as proof of the inherent sacra­mental quality of psychedelics and the experiences they occasion, which is why Doblin and his team chose to investigate the phe­nomenon through another long-term follow-up." This time, however, while they found significant flaws with the experimental design, the results held, and thirty years after the experiment, when Pahnke's orig­inal questionnaires were given to as many of the volunteers as could be found, time had done little to alter the statistics.

  Even so, the experiment was at times chaotic. One volunteer had something of a psychotic reaction and forced his way out of the build­ing, where his erratic behaviour proved problematic. He apparently felt that he had been told by God to go forth and proclaim the dawn­ing messianic age, and was intent on doing just that beginning by confronting the Dean of the University. He had to be restrained and injected with thorazine to sedate him, a fact that Pahnke curiously omitted to include in his thesis.

  Another problem was that it very quickly became clear to all pre­sent exactly who had received the psilocybin and who hadn't, for one half of the congregation were enraptured and muttering mysti­cal pronouncements, while the other half, understandably feeling left out, were bored, frustrated, and somewhat disruptive. One vol­unteer, Huston Smith, now a respected scholar of religion, recalls that as the psilocybin began to work he turned to his companion and ominously declared that 'it was all true'. His companion, sober and left out, later admitted that he had had no idea what Smith was talk­ing about/3

  Doblin concluded that, despite these flaws, the experiment strongly supported
the hypothesis that psychedelics can help facilitate mystical experiences when used by religiously inclined people in a religious set­ting. In follow-up interviews, many of the experimental subjects recalled that, in spite of occasional difficult moments, the experiences were by and large extremely positive. For Huston Smith, it was 'the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced'/4 And while the majority of the volunteers never tried psychedelics again, many went into the priesthood where their participation in the exper­iment remained a lasting influence on their outlook and pastoral

  approach. 'We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin,' said one, 'and yet it connected me to infinity.'AS

  Though Leary was wrong about the power of psychedelics to change personality, LSD nevertheless gave birth to a cultural movement. The great swirling outpouring of fashion, art and especially music that characterised the era all attempted in some way to reflect the psychedelic LSD experience and, of course, to advertise membership of that elect club. Interestingly, however, the number of people actual­ly using psychedelics in the 1960s was a fraction of those doing so today.

  Psychedelia was as much a fashion or a craze as it was a direct response to personal drug experiences. 'You didn't have to take the drug to pick up what would have been termed "the vibes",' reminisced the writer Jonathan Green, 'and the LSD culture spread far wider and faster than the drug itself.'26 But what psychedelia, the cultural phe­nomenon, did was open up and broadcast a new and favourable way of understanding the strange effects produced by magic mushrooms, and so it was only a matter of time before the freaks and hippies start­ed seeking out the strange hallucinogenic fungi for themselves.

  Ripples and Waves

  'Mushrooming sounds to me like a risky proposition.'

  'A bit like life itself,' said Amanda.

  Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

  What is this madness, I thought. Why are those people dragging themselves through this ungodly drizzle?

  Timothy Egan, University of Washington Daily; 29 October 1973

  How does a new idea come to prominence? How do fashions, crazes, urban myths, conspiracy theories or even new illicit pleasures spread and take hold? The millions invested in marketing and advertising by political parties and corporations alike suggest that the process is not a straightforward one of top-down product placement, for the popu­lace is notoriously fickle. Nor can it be said that new ideas rise effort­lessly from the bottom up, for there are often conservative forces working against the spread of novelty and innovation.J Then again, those conservative forces are often quite unable to stop the spread of a forbidden or frowned-upon practice, such as a new-found drug plea­sure. There is no simple formula or calculation, no easy way to predict whether an idea, product, policy initiative or practice will catch on or take hold. We do at least have a name for that elusive moment when it does, for when a critical mass has been reached and universality is assured. We call it 'the tipping point', a snappy phrase that rather nice­ly crossed its own tipping point thanks to the best-selling book of the same name.4

  The magic mushroom 'tipped' on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1970s, having arrived in the wake of LSD. Psychedelia meant that for the first time in Western history the effects of magic mushrooms the colours and hallucinations, the bodily perturbations, the emotional excitation had become desirable. Consequently, as the news spread out in waves, mushrooms very quickly went from shunned poison, to academic curiosity, to popular bohemian drug choice. And just as Acid before it, the first reverberations of this newly discovered delight, sprouting everywhere with impunity, were to be felt in America.

  The headlong expansion of what, at the time, was called 'psilocybian consciousness'* in the States can be attributed to several factors. It was passed on as a form of 'folk knowledge' by intrepid experi­menters who had returned from the Mexican mushroom pilgrimage and discovered hallucinogenic species at home. Hostile press attention surrounding this newfound habit which largely bemoaned the unwelcome influx of mushroom pickers onto farmers' land succeed­ed in bringing it to even wider attention (as moral panics are so often wont to do6). But mainly, continued academic interest in the matter of mushrooms ensured that the latest information concerning taxonomy, identification, pharmacology and dosage filtered down into, and cir­culated freely within, popular culture.

  This last point should, at the very least, raise an eyebrow, for it reveals that, although clinical psychedelic research had become impos­sible after the Leary debacle, other disciplines were able to carry on investigating these drugs quietly and away from view. There was noth­ing to stop mycologists, for example, describing and identifying new psilocybin-containing species as and when they were discovered. Nor was there an injunction preventing anthropologists, ethnobotanists and pharmacologists from studying the indigenous use of plant hallu­cinogens in others distant cultures. And what relevance could the situ­ation at home possibly have if local convention required the scholar in the field to sup upon psychoactive brews? Remarkably, though papers published in serious-minded journals like the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, the Journal of Altered States of Consciousness and the Journal of Ethnopharmacology at the time read like extended global drugs jaunts, this type of research flourished without censure. Consequently, the 1960s and 1970s saw a series of academic conferences and publi­cations on the matter of indigenous drug use, which worked to keep the latest discoveries about plant hallucinogens very much in the pub­lic domain.

  The first of these conferences took place in San Francisco in January j967, was organised by the National Institute of Mental Health, and was attended principally by ethnobotanists, pharmacologists, chemists and psychiatrists. The proceedings were published in a large and rather dry academic tome, Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, which included chapters on the history of the discipline, together with pharmacological analyses of drugs as varied as nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), Kava (Piper methysticum), ayahuasca and the fly­agaric (Gordon Wasson was, needless to say, a contributor). The tone of the book was rigorous, if not severe. Just two weeks prior to the conference, twenty thousand hippies, or 'freaks' as they preferred, had attended the 'Human Be-In' in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a great, free LSD festival, attended by Leary, Ginsberg and the other important figures of the Acid underground. No wonder, then, that a chapter was included in the book about the modern problems of psychedelic consumption: it distanced the work from the illicit psychedelic cultures that were blossoming all around it.

  A public lecture series about indigenous hallucinogens, given three years later at the University of California, was attended by hippies and gave rise to a more popular book, Flesh of the Gods, edited by the young anthropologist Peter Furst. This included accessible chapters on a similar range of indigenous plants and compounds tobacco, ayahuasca, iboga, peyote and the fly-agaric as well as an overview of New World psychoactives written by Richard Evans Schultes. This last chapter helpfully provided photos of the Mexican mushrooms, and was one of the first accurate, accessible and readily available books to do so. Nevertheless, Furst was well aware of the potential political dif­ficulties surrounding this kind of research, and his introduction included a passionate argument for the importance of stringent ethnobotanical inquiry. The tone was sober throughout, the target audi­ence academic.

  In 1973, however, a more provocative volume was edited by anoth­er young anthropologist, Michael Harner, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, published by Oxford University Press. If this had a dis­tinctly countercultural attitude then that was because Harner was fresh from the jungles of Ecuador, with the taste of ayahuasca still upon his lips.

  The book was typical of those written by young, brilliant, up-andcoming academics who are keen to show off their mastery of the sub­ject while, at the same time, wanting to shake up the discipline with new and radical ideas. Harner berated an older generation of anthro­pologists for failing to apprehend the importance of psychoactive plants within their studied cultures.
More controversially, he argued strongly that Western scholars would never grasp the nuts and bolts 0 indigenous world views without partaking of these drugs themselves.

  The implication was that all the young contributors to his book had done so. A lengthy, elliptical and often rambling chapter by Henry Munn on the use of the 'mushrooms of language' in Mexico, for exam­ple, gave the distinct impression of actually having been written under their influence. Another contributor, Marlene Dobkin de Rios, admit­ted to having used both LSD and ayahuasca. Given the political climate of the times, this was potentially explosive stuff, but it was held some­what in check because the book was still a serious anthropological text.

  Harner not only edited the book but contributed several chapters, including his influential if erroneous piece on the supposed use of psy­choactive flying ointments by European 'witches'. Successful as the book was, however, it was to be Harner's farewell to academic life, for during his fieldwork amongst the Shuar Indians of Ecuador he had drunk ayahuasca, 'gone native'7 and begun training as a shaman." His visionary experiences were so bizarre and overwhelming* that, after returning to the States and finishing his PhD, he felt an academic career was untenable.

  For example, the first time he drank ayahuasca he felt his soul being transported away in a ship crewed by bird-headed deities.10 Then he was shown the secrets of life on earth by great black whale-like enti­ties with pterodactyl wings, who were, they said, refugees from anoth­er planet in distant outer space. They brutally informed him that he was only being given these secrets because he was dying. Afraid that he really was standing on the precipice, Harner called for an antidote, which his shaman guides hurriedly gave him, and thereafter the men­acing black creatures disappeared, to be replaced by steadily dimin­ishing coruscating visions.