of Psilocybe - Mycophilia

Trout Fishing in America, vomiting at“Mushroom Springs” was a sly referenceto the ingestion of Psilocybe, which turnedup yet again as an herb to be smokedin Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings ofDon Juan. Michael McClure’s essay on“The Mushroom” in Meat Science Essaysappears alongside his triptych on peyote,heroin, and cocaine. McClure believedPsilocybe “opens you up so that you feelinternally deep inside, and all around you,the utterly human and humane.” Just asWolfe penetrated the intersubjectivityof shared psychedelic experience in TheElectric Kool-Aid Acid Test, McClureemphasized that with the mushroom,people are primary: “The strangest, mostgrotesque, and most glorious people onearth are selected and paraded in front ofyou. it’s one of the most elevated cosmicdramas ever seen.” 18After the Sixties, interest in Psilocybescuttled underground and spread intostreams of psychedelia worlds apartfrom amateur mycology, even thoughsome cross-over of interests occurred.There were strong pockets of interestin the northwest coast and in the SanFrancisco Mycological Association,aided with reliable information frommycologists such as D. H. Mitchell,co-author of Toxic and HallucinogenicMushroom Poisoning. terrence McKennalit out for the territory and plungedfearlessly into an extended experimentwith Psilocybe and psychoactive plantsthat lasted a lifetime. McKenna assumedthe pseudonym “O. t. oss” in one ofthe first cultivation guides, Psilocybin:Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide by“O. t. oss and o. N. oeric.” 19 The lawsbanning Psilocybe, however, usuallydivided the interests of psychonautsfrom the clubland of amateur mycology.In 1974, Harry Knighton, founder of theNorth American Mycological Association(NAMA), wrote to the Charleston,SC police department in defense of astudent member of NAMA for collectingPsilocybe. Knighton’s complaint came tonaught, and the student was charged withpossession of Schedule i contraband. in anote entitled “Contrasts in the Carolinas”in The Mycophile, Knighton discussedthe legal predicament of the student.The young man, who had been collectingmushrooms near a stable, was “accostedby a detective who confiscated hiscollection and his NAMA membershipcard.” After analysis of the mushrooms,the student was arrested and charged with“possession of psilocybin for distribution.”Knighton stated that “this is our firstexperience with students or collectorsbeing equated with the modern drugcult.”in an appeal to members to notifyNAMA of similar incidents, Knightonmade it plainly clear that NAMA wasmore concerned about the bureaucratic“red tape” of obtaining collection permitsfor foray sites than with the injusticeof seeing an innocent collector thrustbehind bars for the suspicious contentsof his collecting basket. That Psilocybemycophileswere dismissed as membersof a “drug cult” and were therefore not“serious” collectors was one root ofNAMA’s reluctance to take an activiststance on the politics of Psilocybe. NAMAthereafter remained aloof from the issueentirely. Knighton had contemptuouslydismissed the book entitled A Key to theAmerican Psilocybin Mushroom (1972)as “drivel,” and while the book containsboth serious inaccuracies and trippedouthosannas in praise of hallucinationsunlikely to appeal to traditionalists,he complained, “the whole thing iswrapped in a plastic cover, no doubtto protect the user from the dung-hillhabitat favored by the author.” Psilocybethus came tainted with the (political)shit that it grows on, Knighton had noinclination to understand the motivationbehind getting high, and NAMA’s journalMcIlvainea never published an articleon the subject save for minor asides intoxicology columns and Andrew Weil’s“The Psilocybin Mushroom Rituals ofMaine,” an interesting but inconsequentialhistorical piece. NAMA’s perspective onthe agarics banished the genus Psilocybeto a Neverland a propos its positionin political taxonomy as The outlawMushroom. 20Psilocybe-mycophiles were hungry forknowledge, but knowledge is dangerous,and the case of a little Golden Guidebook on psychoactive plants providesan instructive example of how a whiffof knowledge is quashed. Golden Guidebooks were familiar to most everyonewho grew up in the last fifty yearsinterested in nature and science. Thebooks were ubiquitous, simplistic, butfairly reliable guides to a host of subjects,directed to a younger audience. in1976, the publisher, Western PublishingCompany, released Hallucinogenic Plants,a Golden Guide written by Richard EvansSchultes, the pre-eminent ethno-botanistof the Americas. in it, Schultes coveredeverything from Amanita muscaria toyage, identifying over a dozen speciesof Psilocybe and allies, and discussingthe chemistry of psilocybin andethnomycology. Morning glories, Datura,Cannabis, peyote cactus, and Amanitamuscaria are depicted conspicuouslyon the cover. The price was $1.95 for acompact guide by a foremost expert onpsychoactive plants and fungi, whichslipped handily into one’s back pocket.Knowledge of Psilocybe isdangerous: this Golden Guide wassuppressed; 1976.Both the hardcover and paperbackeditions of Hallucinogenic Plantssold with such rapidity that WesternPublishing refused to re-publish it, eventhough its market was assured. Here wasa book, not with recipes for psilocybinsynthesis, but rather simple, accurateinformation about the mushrooms. 21 Yetit was deemed entirely too dangerousfor re-release and remains out-of-print.Soon after, Psilocybe Mushrooms andtheir Allies by Paul Stamets was publishedin 1978, providing the first authoritativeguide to the genus apart from professionalmonographs. Stamets revisited thesubject with Psilocybin Mushrooms of theWorld in 1996, which is a masterpiece ofthe fully realized potential of a field guidegrounded in practical science and a deepappreciation of ethnohistory.The hard-shell empiricism of theHopkins study seems impeccable, butwho needs empiricism when, as Goetheclaimed, the highest wisdom is to realizethat every fact is already a theory. Thepolitical subjectivity infiltrating Dr.Griffiths’s use of language distances hisexperiment from the history of previousstudy. two of his terms, “anecdotal”and “drug abuse,” deserve comment.“Anecdotal” is a catch-all dismissal ofthe truth or validity of any subjectiveexperience or cultural phenomenon.Thus, the experiences of those who passedthe acid tests, Mazatec shamanism,the ceremony of the Native AmericanChurch, and the personal testimony ofthe Harvard Mushroom Professor are allbaseless in the Johns Hopkins schema.Such dismissive spin on “the anecdotal”reconfigures the epistemology ofmystical experience, blessing the clinicalregime as superior in the hierarchy oflegitimacy. Reference to the “epidemicof hallucinogen abuse that occurred inthe 1960s” thus aligns the study with thestate and legal sources of legitimation.Who defines drug abuse? “Drug abuse”is a concept shared by psychiatry withthe police. Dr. Griffiths also appropriatedthe terms “set” and “setting” in implicitdenial of Leary’s earlier use of these veryterms. An examination of the selectionbias in the study based on social class,education, and ethnicity of its participantsmight topple Dr. Griffiths’s stack ofquestionnaires, but the musical programused to guide his Psilocybe trippersreveals subjective bias quite vividly.Reclining on sofas and protected fromvisual distractions, the subjects listenedto the Brahms Second Symphony, Bach’sMass in B Minor, and Samuel Barber’sAdagio. 22 Was there a control grouplistening to old Pat Boone records? orplaying football in the street with a loaf ofrye bread? The Brahms offers stimulatingdynamics, but why not the GratefulDead’s Dark Star of february 18, 1971at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester,New York? if anything, subjecting one’ssubjects to Bach’s Mass contaminates thestudy with the Christian imagery of theKyrie: Christ have mercy! Why not KyrieEleison by the Electric Prunes? Betterstill, John Lennon’s Gimme Some Truth. ifthe protocol calls for Samuel Barber, tryMusic for a Scene from Shelley.The Johns Hopkins psilocybinstudy seems to represent a sort ofbreakthrough, an indication of attitudesin transformation, a tiny flake fromthe fortress of intransigence. Butsomehow its claim to relevance shrinksto insignificance before the evidencethat the whole thing has been so strictlypoliced. until Psilocybe mushroomsare freely available, and marketedfreely, without restraint of law andfear from intimidation, violence, andterror intrinsic to America’s druginquisition, the study holds promisesolely for psychiatric career-making andpharmaceutical profits. it will continueto be cited as exemplary for all thewrong reasons as “further studies” pilehigher and deeper to create a psilocybinbureaucracy to match the NIDA’smarijuana bureaucracy. in actuality, theexperiment smothered the revelatorymystique of psilocybin in a bloatedexcess of methodology. That its batteryof prepared questionnaires legitimatedTimothy Leary’s quest remains itscrowning irony, but its overseers willveer away from this implication as thediscourse of “neurochemical systems” and“counterbalanced methods” continuesto shroud outlaw mushrooms in thefogbank of science for a single purpose:to perpetuate control. Dr. HerbertKleber bemoans the fate of scientificresearch forestalled by the “street use ofthese agents,” knowing full well that it iscriminalization and not street use, thathas foreclosed scientific inquiry for nearlyfive decades. 23 Satisfied that psychedelicshave not reached “the same penetration”of popularity as in the Sixties, Dr. Kleberseems blissfully unaware of the breadthof recent 420 observances in celebrationof another Schedule i substance. Thecontradiction inherent in Kleber’spolitical justification thrusts the legacyof the Johns Hopkins study into theabyss of paranoia attended so efficientlyby the watchdogs of the NIDA. insteadof illumination, we are given a pifflingreminder that the “legal” use of psilocybinis securely in the hands of bureaucrats.Meanwhile, in mason jars and Petridishes, from Berkeley to tallahassee,thousands of fruiting bodies of Psilocybecubensis are nosing their way upward intothe light of day.March 13, 2011 saw the death ofOwsley Stanley, whose role as archchemistof the psychedelic revolutionwas legendary in the counterculturalexuberance to cleanse the doors ofperception. in his private labs owsleymanufactured millions of doses of pureLSD that energized the acid tests of 1965.Deservedly lionized as the sound engineerfor the Grateful Dead in their glory days,he proved for all time that chemistrytrumps politics. to paraphrase Swift,Owsley did more essential service for hiscountry than the whole race of politiciansput together. The fugs, in their albumTenderness Junction, rendered timothyLeary’s famous slogan into an electrifiedexhortation for “middle-age, middle-brow,middle-class whiskey drinkers” to TURNON / TUNE IN / DROP OUT! The fugs’Tuli Kupferberg, who died July 2010, wasmemorialized in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl asthe person who jumped off the BrooklynBridge. tuli was a mordant wit, poeticradical, and unrepentant street anarchist,and late in life he had this to say about theyouth culture that embraced psychedelicsin the flower of Sixties dissidence:We haven’t retreated from 1968. Almosteverything we believed in is correct. We’rebiding our time, and still keeping in shape.The world is going to hell in a computer;we need radical changes. The problem isno one knows quite what to do, since theold theories of Marxism and anarchism arerather inadequate. So we need a lot of newideas and ways of putting them into reality.And everybody who is reading this betterget to work. That’s my message. 24The incredible String Band posed acidpolitics as a pair of half-remarkable,never-realized questions: What is itthat we are part of? What is it thatwe are? Science and Dr. Griffiths willhave a tough time trying to weigh inon existential imponderables. “With allyour science can you tell how it is, andwhence it is, that light comes into thesoul?” So asked Henry David Thoreauin his magnificent journal. The divineHenry David had no experience withshrooms (presumably), but he hadquite the knack for provoking neverrealizedquestions. Neuroscience andpsychiatry, on the other hand, considerthe soul either an epiphenomenonof mind or a mere will-o’-the-wisp, aquaint and outmoded figment to beexplained away. The flash in the soulbrought on by shrooms doesn’t needto be privileged by neuroscientists andpsychiatrists. Psilocybin is chemical28 FUNGI Volume 4:3 Summer 2011 FUNGI Volume 4:3 Summer 2011 29