Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  As drug pandemics go, then, the Liberty Cap made an unimpressive start. By the mid 1970s, its use was confined to small numbers of hip­pies, mainly in London and southern England, who were already turned on to Acid or part of the underground. Cooper's guide was helpful, but the news seems to have been passed on slowly as a form of folk knowledge, by word of mouth. All this was to change in the spring of 1976, however, for the magic mushroom suddenly made

  national news, and overnight it burst into popular consciousness.

  *

  Throughout the 1970s, there was an increasing sense of moral panic within mainstream culture about escalating drug use in Britain.51 This growing sense of unease was optimistically accompanied by a feeling that the problem could be solved by simply tightening the prohibition noose. To this end Britain, already a signatory to the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, endorsed the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971. Championed aggressively by the United States, both agreements defined drug use as a criminal, not a social or medical, problem. It was widely held that the combined efforts of police and customs officers would eradicate it if they were given sufficient time and resources.

  In this tough climate, the British Drugs Squad made many high pro­file 'swoops' upon dealers and users alike that were hungrily reported by the media. Rock stars felt the brunt of this new hard-line policy: David Bowie was arrested for possessing cannabis in 1976; Keith Richards for heroin in 1977; Sid Vicious for amphetamines in 1978; and Paul McCartney for cannabis in 1980. But hardly a week went by without some horror story of heroin addiction amongst the upper classes, solvent abuse amongst the working classes, or LSD-triggered psychosis amongst the middle classes, splashed across the pages of the newspapers. Such was the climate that when a man and a woman appeared in court charged with possessing a new, hitherto unknown, drug hallucinogenic mushrooms the case was absolutely guaran­teed to generate national media interest.

  In April 1976, a young couple from Reading Michael Garland, a civil servant, aged nineteen, and his landlady, Mrs Lois Wilkinson, twenty-one became the first people ever to appear in a British court charged with possessing hallucinogenic fungi.53 Their house had been raided by the Drugs Squad the previous October as part of a crack­down on cannabis use, for which Garland was successfully prosecuted and fined. However, the police had not expected to find magic mush rooms, and they were left scratching their heads over the legality of the dried fungi they discovered neatly wrapped in tissue and stashed awa> in jars. The defendants maintained that they had collected the mush rooms, along with leaves and nuts, as part of a nature study, and that they were ignorant of any hallucinogenic properties. That they M stored the dried mushrooms with their cannabis supply rather under mined this line of defence, and the trial eventually hinged on a point 0 law.

  Both psilocybin and psilocin had been made illegal under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act in a move that, following the wording of the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, had outlawed all the syn­thetic psychedelics known at the time. The thorny question was whether the mushrooms themselves were prohibited for, following pressure from the Mexican government (who did not want to have to waste time and resources preventing indigenous mushroom use), the Convention had listed only the mushrooms' active ingredients, and not the species themselves. After two days of deliberation, the Judge, Peregrine Blomefield, directed the jury to find the pair not guilty. 'It may or may not be that you can get psilocin out of the mushroom,' he concluded. 'But psilocin is a chemical and mushrooms are not. You cannot find this man guilty of possessing psilocin in these circum­stances.''4 The decision opened the first chink of the legal loophole that would eventually allow magic mushrooms to be sold openly and legally in Britain.

  Lurid headlines in the press such as The Times's 'Hallucinatory fungi not illegal, judge rules'" would have been sufficient to ensure that the news about the mushroom was broadcast far and wide. But, almost as if to make sure, Britain's biggest selling popular science week­ly, New Scientist, chose to repeat the story in an article published in September, just at the start of the mushroom season.5* The piece includ­ed a detailed description and a black-and-white sketch of the Liberty Cap, and helpfully repeated Peter Mantle's portentous line about how many mushrooms one would have to consume for them to have an effect: twenty-five to thirty, it advised. The year 1976 was famously one of drought in Britain and beyond, so mushrooms of all kinds would have been scarce everywhere. But the following year reports of a new drugs craze began springing up in the north of England, Scotland, Norway, Finland, Germany and Holland, spreading out like a fan.57 The magic mushroom had finally gone overground.

  Whether or not this had been the magazine's intention is uncertain, but with a readership spread across Britain and Europe, the New Scientist must take its share of responsibility for popularising this new-found high. Two other events that took place in 1977, however, gave the mushroom additional momentum. The first was the publica­tion of a new underground magazine, Home Grown, a British dope magazine modelled on the success of America's High Times. Appearing just at that transitional time when hippy 'love and peace' was being shattered and overturned by punk's 'anarchy in the UK', the magazine attempted to cater for both by appealing to their shared love of a good spliff. Articles by up-and-coming punk writers like the one by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons endorsing amphetamines rubbed shoul­ders with more hippy-flavoured pieces about mysticism and LSD. In issue two, the poet George Andrews finally got his chance to tell the world about psilocybin mushrooms, which he did in a colourful arti­cle complete with taxonomic descriptions, dosages and trip reports.'1 The Glasgow Herald, bemoaning the arrival of the magic mushroom, wrote a piece deploring this article, to which it attributed at least some of the ensuing mushroom pandemic.59

  The second, coincidental, event turned out to be one of the most famous drug busts of the decade: Operation Julie. In March 1977, no fewer than eight hundred police officers took part in simultaneous dawn raids on an Acid-manufacturing enterprise spread between London and Wales. The ensuing trial at Bristol Crown court captivat­ed both the media and the chattering classes, for those arrested were neither gangsters nor junkies, but white, educated, middle-class pro­fessionals. The conspirators were motivated as much by a Utopian belief in the transformative powers of LSD as by financial gain. One of the accused a doctor, Christine Bott told the court that LSD had had nothing but a beneficial influence upon the world, and that she wished everyone could take it.60 The incredulous judge, handing out stiff sentences, thought otherwise, and so just as punk was savaging hippy idealism from below, the establishment delivered what it hoped would be its death-blow from above.*'

  The police, however, basking in the glory of a successful undercov­er operation, had rather overstated their case when they claimed to have removed Europe's biggest Acid manufacturer. Operation Julie had little impact upon supply because other illicit manufacturers sim­ply stepped in to fill the gap created in the market. What the bust did succeed in doing was to add significantly to the growing sense of para noia amongst drug users, punk and hippy alike. The fear of being stopped and searched, or of having one's door kicked down in the early hours, became a serious impediment to a good trip, and a major disincentive against psychedelic experimentation. Fears about 4baJ Acid' Acid supposedly cut with strychnine or other unpleasant adul­terants were rife. The news, therefore, that there was a powerful hal­lucinogenic mushroom that was plentiful, free, unadulterated an

  legal suddenly took on a much greater urgency than it had had seven years earlier. Condescending attitudes towards mushrooms as some­how lesser than LSD were blown away.

  The autumn months of 1977 I97% apparently produced a bumper crop of Liberty Caps. Correspondingly, in large towns and cities where access to upland pastures was easy as is the case in Manchester, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Cardiff and Dundee hospital doctors noticed a strange new phenomenon: the admission of people having bad mush­room trips. Over the next five or six years,
a flurry of papers in the medical and mycological literature traced this new curiosity.6* Most of those admitted were young males, usually teenagers but occasionally school children. Most had eaten in the region of twenty to thirty mushrooms some, hundreds but all were having a terrible time. Some were coherent enough to admit themselves to hospital, others were brought in by police or concerned parents: one young man was apparently found wandering naked along a railway track.

  Just as with their predecessors 150 years previously, medical staff were somewhat baffled by this phenomenon. All agreed that it was new, unheard of before 1977, and that what they were witnessing was the tip of a large iceberg, for they were only dealing with the casual­ties. But what to do with the afflicted, they were less certain. Sedating some, pumping the stomachs of others, it took a number of years before they realised that quiet reassurance was generally all that was required.6' Troubling anecdotal reports suggest that 'gastric lavage' was sometimes used as a form of punishment for wasting precious hospital time.

  Clearly, some of the patients' symptoms were highly distressing. One hapless individual managed to trigger a psychosis by taking mushrooms every day for a week, at the same time fasting and avoid­ing sleep: he was admitted in a clouded and distressed state, and took a further week to recover. Other cases were less grave. One man, hav­ing been put to bed, made a bid for freedom, but neglecting to put on his clothes ran off semi-naked into the night: he was never seen again. And others, the doctors wearily reported, eroded bedside patience with their sexual frivolity and 'fatuous comments'.64

  From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, then, there was a substantial youth-centred magic mushroom craze in Britain, with knowledge passed on largely by word of mouth, and the mushrooms themselves passed around in pubs or sold on the black market. The number of mushroom-related enquiries to the National Poisons Information Service at London's Guy's Hospital increased steadily from 33 in 1978, to 47 in 1979, 96 in 1980, and 142 in 1981/' A troubling survey, undertaken in Scotland in 1981 at the peak of the craze, found that 66 per cent of school children in Tayside had at least heard about mush­rooms, if not actually tried them.66 There was a minor moral panic in the national press, fuelled by the unfortunate death of a sixteen-yearold London student, Byron Upton, in 1982. Under the influence of mushrooms, Upton had decided to walk home along the tunnels of the London Underground, where he was knocked down and killed by a train.67 He was, thankfully, the only mushroom casualty.

  It is no coincidence, I think, that this mushroom craze peaked dur­ing the early Thatcher years. Within a few short years of the Iron Lady's rise to power, the country was in recession, manufacturing industry was being dismantled, and the disgruntled unions were being tackled head-on. The result was that unemployment in the inner cities skyrocketed, while hope and good prospects became suddenly in short supply. For an increasingly disaffected youth, magic mushrooms were a convenient, illicit and exciting way of making life under Tory rule more tolerable, no better or worse than sniffing glue, the other great drugs craze of the era. But for another, possibly more middle-class sec­tion of society, the advent of the magic mushroom proved rather more promising. Contrary to what the punks were saying, hippiedom was not yet dead, and every summer it found expression at a number of occasionally uproarious free music festivals, where mushrooms were

  eagerly consumed.

  •

  The 'hippy festival' emerged as a cultural phenomenon in Britain dur­ing the 1970s, from its origins in the jazz and blues festivals of the pre­vious decade.68 Self-conscious attempts to emulate the success of Woodstock ('three days of love and peace') led to a calendar of com­mercial and free festivals in Britain, most famously the Isle of Wight. Windsor Free, Watchfield, Glastonbury Fayre, the Albion Fayres, and of course Stonehenge. Stonehenge was truly the mother of all festivals, running as it did for ten years from 1974 to 1984, before being famously and violently shut down by the Thatcher government Lasting a month each year in a squatted field adjacent to the Neolithic monument, it attracted some thirty thousand people at its peak, and

  culminated with a mass invasion of the Stones, the symbolic heart of the festival, to mark the summer solstice.

  Stonehenge was very much an experiment in alternative living. Bands and theatre groups performed on impromptu stages with Acidfuelled sets lasting through the night. Druids and other assorted mys­tics, adherents of the same psychedelic spiritual bricolage as Darnton and the Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, performed rituals, weddings and blessings. Strange new diets were catered for, while every type of alternative dwelling from tepees and benders to converted live-in buses was in evidence. Drugs of all kinds could be openly bought and sold, though heroin dealers were often forcibly removed, trigger­ing some of the occasional outbreaks of violence that marred the superficial harmony. The authorities, meanwhile, could do little but stand on the sidelines and watch. A vision of Utopia for some, a run­ning sore for others, Stonehenge became the symbolic centrepiece of a whole free-festival movement, the hub around which the rainbow cal­endar of festivals revolved.69 Many people made it their lifestyle to travel from one festival to another in converted buses and trucks, and thus was born the new-age traveller, a curious mixture of hippy ideal­ism, spiritual yearning and, later, punk attitude.

  As early as September 1977, the very first free magic mushroom fes­tival was held, in Wales. The Psilly Fair, as it was called, took place in a secluded valley near the village of Pontrhydygroes, outside Aberystwyth.70 Only about fifty people attended this first event, but by 1980 it was attracting eight hundred or so who brought with them all the trappings expected of a free festival: cafes, generators, a stage, bands, live-in buses and monumental quantities of hash cake. Its daily news sheet, the Psilly Times, kept people up to speed with the festival gossip: how the harvest was proceeding, levels of police activity, and where to find sympathetic locals.71 The festival was organised (in as much as any free festival could be said to have been organised) by a group called The Tibetan Ukrainian Mountain Troupe, who were 'the creative, surreal, prankster circus of the travelling scene'.7* Together with their offshoot band, The Wystic Mankers, they entertained pun­ters with a not entirely serious mix of burlesque circus skills and improvised bemushroomed noise confusion.

  Thereafter mushrooms, and mushroom-inspired bands, became inseparable from the free-festival scene. At Stonehenge in 1979, for example, one observer recorded that 'many folk were spaced out on mushrooms' Mushroom truffles joined hash cake as a festival staple, and festival-goers could munch them and groove to the mycelial space-rock of bands like The Ozric Tentacles, Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika, and the unambiguously named Magic Mushroom Band.

  Of course, the government did everything it could to stop the tree festivals and the emerging traveller lifestyle. Local opposition to the Psilly Fairs, for example, was intense, and succeeded in preventing the festival from happening in 1981 and again in 1982. The Stonehenge festival came to an abrupt halt in 1985 when the police, fresh from a year's clashes with striking miners, violently smashed the convoy <* buses and trucks attempting to reach the Stones: the 'Battle of the Beanfield'. The law was tightened with the Public Order Act of and then the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which effectively gave police the power to prevent illicit gatherings from happening. Since that time, free festivals have been few and far between.

  All this struggle, however, gave festival-goers a strength of purpose and identity getting to the festival became a goal in itself and they came to see themselves as some ancient pagan tribe, pitted against a brutal and oppressive fascistic regime. The magic mushroom slotted neatly into this romantic mythology, for hadn't the witches, the Druids, the stone-circle builders all used it, and hadn't they all been oppressed in turn by Roman invaders and then Christian missionar­ies? If the free festivals were the latest expression of this Utopian,

  pagan impulse, then the magic mushroom was one of the principal tools by which the old pagan consciousness would be restored.74 The key to fa
iryland, stated George Andrews, was now within anyone's reach,75 and so no wonder the government wanted the door slammed shut.

  The rediscovery of the mushroom in Britain, therefore, went hand in hand with a supposed history that placed its use in an unbroken countercultural tradition stretching back to the dawn of time. To anv bemushroomed festival-goer watching the rays of the solstice sun slip past the lintels of Stonehenge, it was a history that made perfect sense, but of course it was a recent invention concocted by Wasson, made irresistible by Graves, and embroidered through endless retellings. It still appears in underground literature and even academic papers,7* but gained widespread popularity when it was reiterated by the American science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999) in her best-selling retelling of the Arthurian myths, The Mists of Avalon (1984).77 In a move guaranteed to appeal to festival-goers, she recast the enduring story of King Arthur as a spiritual battle between an ancient matriarchal, Druidic, goddess-worshipping paganism, and a militant, newly arrived Christianity. Arthur's nemesis, Morgaine, is reinvented as the high priestess of this supposed pagan religion, an expert in herbal medicine, magic and Machiavellian political manipu­lation. Naturally wise to the local plant hallucinogens, she employs magic mushrooms as a means to gain 'the Sight' and so foretell the future.