The Benefits of Magic Mushrooms

Ever come across psilocybin cubensis? Anyone who knows a little about psychedelics has probably run into the nickname instead: magic mushrooms. The scientific label roughly translates to "bald head," and the brown-and-white fungus earned that description because of how unremarkable it looks sitting there. Eat it, though, and the experience can rearrange how you see things, sometimes nudging a person toward a longer stretch of conscious self-development.

A bit of background first. What people call magic mushrooms is really just one member of a group numbering in the hundreds, all of them carrying psilocin and psilocybin. These are not plants. They are fungi, sprouting from decaying plant matter or growing out of a spore in the soil. LSD came out of a laboratory in the 1930s. Mushrooms go back much further than that: rock paintings found in Egypt and Africa have been dated to roughly 9,000 BC, and traces of what might have been mushrooms turned up among Aztec and Mayan ruins across what we now call Central America. Some researchers suspect those tribes used them alongside peyote and morning glory seeds to call up visions, drop into a trance, or feel closer to their gods.

Most mushroom species never get near any of that. People know them for flavor, piling them onto pizza and folding them into Italian cooking. They turn up everywhere in nature and grow easily, which keeps them cheap. On the street in the United States, the psychedelic kind sells in eighths of an ounce, about 3.5 grams, and that eighth runs around $20.

Then there is the variety people take to trip, the ones called "shrooms." Euphoria, hallucinations, and other strange sensations tend to follow. Compared to something like LSD, the trips run shorter and gentler. And rather than conjuring things out of nowhere, the drug tends to warp objects already in front of you. Emotions sharpen during a trip. Colors and patterns surface. Time can feel like it has slowed, raced ahead, or stalled out altogether.

Legally it sits in a hard spot. The Controlled Substance Act, passed around 1970, files it as a Schedule 1 drug, illegal across most of the country. Florida is the exception for wild picking, the only state where these mushrooms grow on their own. Because someone could stumble onto them without meaning to, authorities in the Sunshine State let you hold a small amount without pressing charges.

So you know where to find them and roughly what they cost. How do you actually take them? Since they are an herb, people often brew them into a tea or steep them in rum or some other alcohol. A gram is a sensible starting point the first time. The taste tends toward floury, and most users dislike it enough that they blend it into a smoothie or cook it into something like chili. Watch the heat, though. Cook it too long and you burn off the psychedelic effect.

No two trips land the same way. Outcome depends on your emotional state going in, the particular mushroom, and the dose. Walk in carrying bad feelings and you are likely to meet bad side effects. If the trip turns ugly, there is no shortcut: you ride it out. Stomach trouble is common enough that plenty of users smoke weed on the side just to settle the cramps.

One last warning, and the most serious one. If you forage your own, you have to actually know which mushrooms are toxic and which are safe. Pressing the cap gill-side down to release the spores is part of how that gets sorted out. Eat a toxic one and you risk organ failure and death. Even people with real experience identifying them get it wrong sometimes and swallow something poisonous by mistake.

- Erwin Bishop