Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  The Dutch authorities have so far tolerated this, although van den Huerk was arrested and prosecuted in 1997 for supplying dried mush­rooms, which, the authorities argued, constituted an illegal prepara­tion. A protracted legal battle ensued, which van den Huerk eventually lost: in Holland, fresh mushrooms can be bought and sold with impunity, but dried ones remain illegal.

  There is, of course, an economic pressure for smaller growers, who do not have the luxury of computer forecasting, to dry their mush­rooms. Mushrooms, however well kept and refrigerated, have a shelflife of only a few days, after which time they must be discarded or dried. When I visited Amsterdam in the spring of 2005, dried mush­rooms were being sold along with other illicit synthetics under rh counter at various smart shops (not Conscious Dreams, I hasten ro add). The game of cat and mouse continues.

  In Britain, it took budding entrepreneurs a little longer to catch on tc the idea of retailing mushrooms, though the law was no less ambiguous. You will recall that at the conclusion of the very first court case in the judge, Peregrine Blomefield, ruled that possession of mush­rooms and the prohibited substance psilocybin were not the same thing. This ruling was reinforced by an analogous case involving cannabis, the so-called Regina v. Goodchild case of 1978.M Goodchild had been arrested for possession of immature cannabis plants that lacked the buds and flowering tops proscribed by law. The police, eager to see the case come to court, charged Goodchild with possess­ing THC, the active chemical ingredient of the plant. Possession of pure THC was then a Class A offence, whereas cannabis was Class B, so somewhat unfairly Goodchild stood to have a stiffer sentence than if his plants had been in bud and usable. On appeal, the law lords eventually ruled that the police were in error, and that possessing the plant was not the same as possessing THC (the law on cannabis was subsequently changed to prohibit all parts of the plant, though more recently cannabis has been downgraded to a Class C drug by the Labour government: it has effectively been decriminalised).

  The upshot of the Goodchild case was that, by analogy, possession of a magic mushroom and of its proscribed chemical ingredients could not be regarded as the same thing. A test case in 1983 settled the mat­ter. Kelvin Curtis, aged thirty-one, was acquitted after being tried for growing Psilocybe cubensis at home.1* Thereafter, fresh magic mush­rooms were technically legal, with only the act of preparation render­ing them otherwise.

  The Camden Mushroom Company, formed in 2002, were the first to exploit this loophole by selling mushrooms cultivated at home from Dutch grow-kits (grow-kits are ready-prepared trays of mycelia and growth medium, requiring little but warmth and water for mush­rooms to sprout: one kit may produce a few kilos of mushrooms).16 They sold their wares to head shops (shops selling cannabis-related paraphernalia), and then openly themselves from barrow stalls at Camden Market and Portobello: a move that generated a certain amount of press interest, especially amongst the more streetwise broadsheets.'7 The company eventually realised that mushrooms could be bought wholesale from the Dutch who, with a keen eye on the eco­nomic ball, had been looking to expand the market beyond their borders. Other companies sprung up, and virtually overnight, it *cms, mushrooms were being sold in around four hundred shops and Market stalls across Britain, with kilo-loads of mushrooms arriving

  from Holland every week. Demand was such that some British com­panies began growing mushrooms themselves. By 2004, the Camden Mushroom Company alone were selling on average 100 kg a week, with an estimated five times that amount being sold nationwide. As an average street dose of Psilocybe cubensis is 20 grams, this works out at roughly 25,000 mushroom trips per week. The second great British magic mushroom boom was underway, and inevitably it caught the attention of police and politicians alike.

  One difference between the Dutch and British approaches to the magic mushroom trade is that in Holland far more negotiation has taken place between the authorities and the smart-shop owners. Tfcs is not to say that arrests never take place, or that the smart shops never get their knuckles publicly rapped. But Dutch pragmatism still con­cludes that it is better for mushrooms to be sold openly and trans­parently, so that sales can be monitored and levels of harm more casi > assessed.

  In Britain, negotiation has been less in evidence, partly because mushroom sellers organised themselves less well than did their counterparts the Dutch smart-shop owners very quickly established a trade organisation to give them more lobbying power and partly because of a very different and entrenched prohibitionist stance on the behalf of the British government.

  It was apparent from the beginnings of mushroom-trading in Britain, however, that the legal situation was one of disarray. The Camden Mushroom Company received a letter from the Home Office to the effect that they would not be prosecuted for selling fresh magic mush­rooms, a move that effectively gave them the go-ahead to begin trading. Then in August 2004, a Customs and Excise ruling decreed that magic mushrooms were not a food but a drug, and therefore subject to VAT sales tax.'8 Officials estimated that they would be looking to collect arrears in the region of £1 million from traders. At almost the same time, the Home Office performed a volte-face and sought to deter trad­ing by warning sellers that they were breaking the law. Thus, the gov­ernment foolishly appeared to be demanding tax on a product that it deemed illegal, the left hand unaware of quite what the right was doing.

  In the same year, a small number of shops were raided by the police and charged with illegally selling hallucinogenic fungi, a Class A drug. The first of these cases concerning Dennis Mardle and Colin Evans, who ran the head-shop Collector's Choice in Gloucester came to trial in December, when it was promptly thrown out by the Crown court recorder, Ms Claire Miskin." The law was so ambiguous, she ruled, that it would be an abuse of process for the two men to stand trial. In a carefully aimed rebuke, she chided the government for expecting the judiciary to sort out a legal mess of Parliament's making. Suitably admonished, the Home Office moved quickly to add a clause about mushrooms to their Drugs Bill (now Act) 2005, though not without some lively debate in the House of Commons. In a speech that may yet come back to haunt him, the Labour MP for Newport West, Paul Flynn, attacked the bill as illogical and poorly thought through. 'We cannot make nature illegal,' he told the House. 'Magic mush­rooms are part of the natural world. Some might describe them as a gift from God.'10

  Flynn's remonstrations had little impact. Specifically, the Act has now made possession or sale of 'all fungi containing psilocybin' a criminal offence, so the loophole has been firmly closed. The speed with which the bill achieved royal assent, however^ has left many dis­gruntled parties not least the police, unhappy at having to enforce a law regarded as an unnecessary burden on overstretched resources who feel, correctly, that the matter was never properly debated in the upper and lower chambers. The imminence of the May 2005 general election meant that the bill was hurried through Parliament lest New Labour appeared to be weak on crime, weak on the causes of crime: being seen to tolerate brazen mushroom-dealing on the streets would have been an electoral liability too far:

  The new Act came into force in July 2005, with the effect that open mushroom-trading in Britain has ceased. As I write, the mushroom sea­son has not yet begun, so the extent to which police will try to stop peo­ple harvesting naturally occurring Liberty Caps is unclear. It is also too early to tell whether dried mushrooms will appear on the black market, as one Dutch wholesaler predicted. Certainly, the Dutch were loath to see the market closed, and smart shops are already hunting for other legal plant hallucinogens that might be substituted for mushrooms. At the same time, they have been looking to open new markets in other European countries where the law is sufficiently vague Germany per­haps, or Spain. Spores may still be traded legally in Britain (they con­tain no psilocybin), and special legal, idiot-proof grow-kits, containing spores and substrate, are being developed for export from Holland. The Camden Mushroom Company intends to sell spores and the rest of the accoutrements needed for home growing, but concedes tha
t the market will be small. Whatever scams and schemes people come up with to try to get past the law, however, by the time you are reading this, the British magic mushroom boom will almost certainly be over.

  To what extent were the government's actions justified? Statistics from Holland suggest that, however visible magic mushrooms are in the marketplace, the numbers of people actually using them remain comparatively small. In Amsterdam (where drug use of all kinds is arypically high compared to the rest of the Netherlands), the percent­age of the city's population that had ever tried mushrooms stood at -.6 per cent in 2001, a rise from 6.6 per cent in 1997/' (This compares with 1.3 per cent for heroin, 8.7 per cent for Ecstasy, 10 per cent for cocaine, and 38.1 per cent for cannabis: 2001 figures.) Most users were in their twenties. The percentage of people who had taken mush­rooms during the previous thirty days, however, stood at a mere 0.3 per cent. This implies that though increasing numbers of people are trying mushrooms, obtained from the city's smart shops, very few take them more than once or twice in a lifetime. Of those 7.6 per cent of lifetime users, only 8.4 per cent had taken mushrooms more than twenty-five times and so counted as 'experienced users'. Terence McKenna was right: psychedelic shamanism was a calling, and most people found that it was not for them.

  There is not yet any equivalent British data for comparison, but there is no reason to think that the situation would be different. Had mushrooms remained legal, numbers of one-time users would have steadily crept up, but the proportion of regular users would almost certainly have remained small. Twenty-five thousand trips a week sounds rather alarming, but it is proportionally insignificant and would, in any case, have levelled off. Without underplaying the possi­bility of bad trips, of lingering psychiatric complications resulting from mushroom use, or of injury sustained under their influence, the current boom has not produced the corresponding increase in hospital admissions that was seen during the early 1980s. Though this may be a t,me"lag effect, medics having yet to publish their data, it rather sug­gests that people have learnt how to take mushrooms safely. The aver­se street dose is a tolerably low fifteen grams of Psilocybe cubensis, less a quarter of that preferred by McKenna-type psychonauts.

  The risks, in Dutch terminology, would seem to be acceptable, and in that light the British response appears heavy-handed, motivated more by political concerns than by any sensible assessment of the evidence.

  Indeed, prohibition may prove to be a retrograde step in terms of harm reduction. The likelihood of novices picking the wrong mush­rooms, or of spurious mushrooms finding their way onto the black market, will undoubtedly be increased, while a whole new cross-sec­tion of society will have to face up to the legal consequences of their actions, consequences that far outstrip any health repercussions. Given that, by any measure, prohibition has been an abject failure in preventing the escalation of drug use the illegal drugs trade in Britain alone is worth $4 billion a year1 perhaps the time has come for a more sober and rational debate modelled on the pragmatic approach of the Dutch. In the current climate, where any call for decriminalisation is met with a barrage of invective from the tabloid press, and an unseemly political tussle to occupy the moral high ground, such a move would still seem a very long way off.

  This, then, pretty well concludes the story of the magic mushroom, of how it went from being an obscure poison to being the drug of choice, hawked on street corners in Britain and Holland, and grown in cellars the length and breadth of America. A long correspondence between an English poet and an American banker led the latter, obsessed as he was with rewriting religious history, to go to Mexico. There, he found the magic mushroom, which had been in use since the time of the Aztecs, and the curandera Maria Sabina, and he broadcast his discovery to the world. He located the best minds in the field to identify the mush­rooms and reveal their chemical secrets. The social and cultural revo­lutions promulgated by LSD in the 1960s, and Ecstasy in the 1980s and 1990s, turned on successive generations to drugs in general, and psychedelics in particular, and opened up a radical new way of under­standing the hitherto shunned effects of the mushroom. In an effort to meet this new-found demand, techniques for cultivating them devel­oped, and industrial-scale production was perfected. In a compare tively short period of time, mushrooms were remoulded and transformed by the cold hand of capitalism from a revered sacramento that most pliable of artefacts, a commodity.

  This is how it happened, but the question that remains is 4Why. Why have we found value in those peculiar bemushroomed visions*when all those in the West that came before us discarded them as worthless? What is so distinctive about contemporary Western culture that it has embraced the magic mushroom? Why us, and why now?

  Epilogue: Love on a Puffball

  Though some poems, melodies, works of art, love-affairs and fever dreams may give glimpses of a lost magical reality, their spell is short lasting... The hard, dirty, loveless synthetic world reasserts itself as the sole factual truth

  Robert Graves, 'The Universal Paradise"

  And as the mushroom told its tale she screamed 'My God!

  My body is made of sunlight There can be no other way My body is made of love!'

  Circulus, 'My Body is Made of Sunlight'1

  Towards the end of his acutely observed radio play Under Milk Wood (1954), the poet Dylan Thomas briefly introduces the character Mac Rose-Cottage, 'seventeen and never been sweet in the grass'. Lying back in a field, and dreaming of forbidden pleasures to come, 'she blows love on a puffballV In this arresting image, which skilfully con­jures memories of awakening desire, Thomas is drawing upon a rich cultural fund of earthy and enchanted fungal associations that stretch­es back through Shakespeare and beyond. But the darker, opposing side of fungi has never been far away, and in the uncertain post-war days in which Thomas briefly flourished it was another, altogether less comfortable mushroomic image that was uppermost in most people s minds.

  On 16 July 1945, at Los Alamos in New Mexico, the world's first nuclear bomb was successfully exploded. As the deadly symmetry of the first mushroom cloud rose above the desert to be followed a month later by two more over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a new symbol for the dark and terrifying power of human scientific ingenuity was thrust upon the world. At the same time, it was as if the baleful side of mushrooms, so long known about and feared, had finally risen triumphant, a conquest written large upon the sky.

  The oft-recycled image of the mushroom cloud was a constant reminder, throughout the Cold War, of what was at stake in the ongo­ing political games and manoeuvres played out between East and West. That particular danger has passed the Cold War is an increas­ingly distant memory, seemingly as incomprehensible as a bad dream -but the twenty-first century has brought with it a new raft of anxi­eties. Terrorism and climate change, not the threat of all-out nuclear war; are what cause sleepless nights now. But interestingly, just as the nightmarish fear of the mushroom cloud has receded, so, it seems, has the magic mushroom made an unstoppable rise. It has brought with it a steady drift back towards the other cultural view of fungi as carnivalesque eruptions, enchanted sentinels of the weird, benign and gnomic things upon which to blow love.

  Mushroom enthusiasts today typically portray humanity as being at a crossroads, our choice of direction framed in exactly these terms: modernity, the mushroom cloud and annihilation, or an archaic revival, the magic mushroom and salvation. Daniel Pinchbeck, New York journalist and latest pretender to the throne of psychonaut-inchief, puts it like this: The destruction of the World Trade Center may turn out to be a prelude or birth pang, first in a series of convul­sions, before modern civilisation is expunged from the planet and for­gotten forever, unless there is a quick and unlikely reversal of trends.' His prescription for change? A rebirth of psychedelic shamanism that will 'suck the spiritual poison from our social body'.4 Though I do not share Pinchbeck's confident belief in the power of the magic mushroom or any other psychedelic, for that matter to act as magic eco-pill or societal pan
acea, I do nevertheless think that this stark dialectic contains within it a clue to the magic mushroom's unexpected popularity, and why the West has taken to it with such enthusiasm.

  The reasons that people take the drugs they do are complex, and not easily broached in a short concluding chapter such as this. As we have seen, attitudes towards psychoactive substances and their effects are not fixed or stable, but shift according to the interplay of power and knowledge. Changing constructions of what constitutes pleasure, desire, intoxication, addiction and transgression work to legitimate different substances and the sanctioned ways of using them at dif­ferent times. An appetite suppressant like MDMA can suddenly become a party drug. An addictive stimulant like cocaine can, at once, be the scourge of the inner cities and yet the fashionable choicc of celebrities. A harmful and addictive drug like alcohol can be construed as an essential cornerstone of adult, civilised life. A poisonous mush­room can be reinvented as a portal to other worlds.

  As we have seen, statistics from Holland suggest that, with regard to contemporary mushroom use, a large number of one-time or occa­sional users surround a small but dedicated hub of enthusiasts or habitues. This pattern a European trend that is not mirrored in the US, where stricter laws have kept mushroom use firmly underground has arisen very much on the tail end of Ecstasy and Rave, a move­ment that, for better or worse, made illicit drug use an acceptable pan of life for the under forties. If caffeine is the drug that pumps the working week, then mushrooms have joined Ecstasy, Acid, amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol as the means of venting pressure at the weekend. Tolerably weird, the effects of mushrooms (at least, at moderate street doses) are interesting enough to last the length of an all-night party, but not so overwhelming as to prevent one from returning to work on Monday morning. (By con­trast, the effects of, say, the legal plant hallucinogen Salvia divtnorum, or of DMT, appear to be too disturbing and bizarre for these drugs ever to become co-opted by the mainstream.) Nevertheless, the open sale of mushrooms in Europe has given them an unintended legitima­cy and apparent societal seal of approval, such that people who might not otherwise buy illicit drugs, or who have no leanings towards psychedelia or Rave, have been tempted to try them. The mushroom craze has been driven by sheer availability as much as by socio-cultural factors or accidents of pharmacology.