Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom

by Alex Letcher

  would have had the brilliant idea of naming the machine creatures 'elves'?4*

  For those struggling to find a way through the existentially barren

  and disenchanted secular world, he painted a remarkable vision of hope and redemption, science and magic, accessible to all through five dried grams. He once wrote that 'we have the peculiar good fortune of fulfilling the wish conveyed in the Irish toast "may you be alive at the end of the world'".41 The great tragedy is that he won't be: he so dear­ly wanted to know if he was right.

  But if the jury is still out on the question of whether McKenna real­ly was an unsung Newton, or was just plain nuts, there is one of his achievements, made with his brother, that we have yet to mention and that most definitely can be said to have changed the world. Foe, tin­kering around in the shed at the bottom of his garden, the brothers McKenna hit on their equivalent of alchemical gold: they cracked the problem of how to grow unlimited supplies of magic mushrooms. Within twenty years of their discovery, cultivated hallucinogenic mushrooms were being openly sold in Holland and the UK, and to the horror of politicians and, one hopes, Terence's eternal satisfaction, the second magic mushroom boom was underway.

  Muck and Brass

  It's sort of an odd fact about mushrooms that the qualities you need to take them are precisely the qualities that you will inculcate into yourself if you leam how to grow them: punctuality, cleanliness, attention to detail, so forth and so on.

  Terence McKenna'

  We grow our mushrooms on a mixture of shit and straw — Our turnover in 2004 was a million pounds.

  British magic mushroom grower

  In July of 1971, while he was still in the preternatural state of excite­ment caused by the 'experiment' at La Chorrera, Terence McKenna returned to the remote village hidden in the depths of the Colombian jungle. The original trip had been rather dramatically cut short when the rest of McKenna's party, unnerved by the brothers' apparently deteriorating mental health, arranged to have them all airlifted to safe­ty. But this left unfinished business. Whatever bizarre psychic process had been initiated by the experiment, it had yet to be resolved, hence Terence's pressing desire to return.

  He sojourned there with his then girlfriend, Ev, for five months, dur­ing which time his excitement eventually bore fruit in the form of the timewave theory, apparently revealed under the aegis of the cosmic mushroom overseer. The actual, physical mushrooms were, however, in much shorter supply than they had been six months previously, a fact that possibly contributed to his general psychic cooling down, but definitely prompted him to collect spore samples. Back home, the news about the American Psilocybe species had yet to become public knowledge, and synthetic psilocybin was unavailable (at least, to those less well-connected than Gordon Wasson), so finding a sustainable supply of his treasured cubensis mushrooms was a top priority. On his return, he hoped to discover a way to cultivate them. The timewave, and McKenna's reversion to a state of relative normality, complete, the couple returned from their Edenic existence in the jungle. The pressures of modern life, however, disrupted their hor­ticultural plans, and the carefully collected spores sat neglected in a freezer for a number of years. Eventually, together with his brother Dennis, Terence began tinkering in the greenhouse at the bottom of his Berkeley garden, but with disappointing results. They succeeded in growing a few mushrooms, but yields fell far short of the amounts deemed sufficient for their psychedelic needs. Then, by chance, Terence stumbled across a new technique for growing commercial field mushrooms on sterilised rye grains, of all things/ and, stumped for any other ideas, adapted the technique for his cubensis spores.

  Halfway through his experiments, however he split up with Ev, and their messy break-up left him depressed, downcast and beset with migraines. All thought of mushrooms was put on hold that is, until the day he decided to go and clear out the greenhouse, which he thought would be overrun with detritus and mould. Imagine his sur­prise when he pulled open the door to discover row upon row of cubensis mushrooms sprouting merrily from the abandoned trays. His troubles were very quickly cast aside. 'I was neck deep in alchemical gold!' he wrote. The elf legions of hyperspace had ridden to my res­cue again. I was saved! As I knelt to examine specimen after perfect specimen, tears of joy rolled down my face. Then I knew that the com­pact was still unbroken, the greatest adventure still lay ahead.'' He had cracked the secret of how to grow magic mushrooms.

  At first it might seem curious that it took anyone so long to work out how to cultivate hallucinogenic fungi, but mushrooms of all kinds are surprisingly difficult to grow. Agriculture has been with us for many thousands of years, mycoculture for just a few hundred, beginning in the West only during the late seventeenth century. It was then that French gardeners worked out a rudimentary method of growing but­ton mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) in the cool, damp quarries and tunnels that percolate the foundations of Paris. Spawn was taken from existing mushroom colonies and mixed with a well-watered compos of straw and rotted manure, after which the gardeners sat back and hoped for the best. Similar techniques were used in Japan up to the early twentieth century to grow shiitake mushrooms on rotted wood, and are still used in South East Asia where cow dung is collected and watered to encourage cubensis mushrooms to sprout, for the lucrative

  tourist trade. Such hit-and-miss methods were the only ones available unril the early twentieth century when the mysterious lifecycles of the various fungi were finally unravelled, and sterile techniques for culturing them in the lab perfected.

  Several difficulties lie in the way of the would-be mushroom culti­vator. First, and most importantly, spores have to be collected, germi­nated and cultured without contamination by any of the other microscopic organisms viruses, moulds and bacteria that routinely fill the air, and that will hungrily colonise a freshly prepared dish of agar, or a jar full of rye grains, intended for the fungus. A sterile labo­ratory is required, ideally replete with antiseptic wipes and bleaches, special air-conditioning filters, and some means of autoclaving the necessary jars, dishes, scalpels and inoculating loops of the trade. Second, it must be possible to fool the species into producing mush­rooms by imitating the correct, usually stressful, environmental cues that would ordinarily trigger reproduction. This is far from given, and so while some species may be easily fooled by, say, their mycelia being refrigerated to simulate frost, others refuse to cooperate: no one has found a way to persuade the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria, to yield mushrooms in the lab. And finally, for this to be more than a labour of love, the process must generate a high yield of mushrooms.

  As luck would have it, the species that Terence McKenna stumbled upon growing so abundantly in La Chorrera was Psilocybe cubensis, the one that has proved the most compliant with human needs. It is the easiest magic mushroom to grow, and produces the most bountiful harvests. Whether this discovery was fluky, serendipitous or porten­tous depends entirely upon your point of view.

  The first person to cultivate magic mushrooms in the lab was Roger Heim, who grew carpophores of Psilocybe mexicana from specimens collected with Gordon Wasson in Mexico:4 thirty-two of these, you will recall, caused Albert Hofmann to see his physician transformed into an Aztec priest. Laboratory cultivation is, of course, the mycologist’s stock in trade Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms were also grown by Rolf Singer's rival team in America5 but both teams' yields were '°w, and their methods necessarily complicated. An underground handbook appeared in the United States in 1968 summarising Heim's procedures and ostensibly making them publicly available: The Psychedelic Guide to Preparation of the Eucharist.6 It is all very well having a recipe book, but not much use if you need all the accou­trements of a scientific laboratory, and a university training, to use it. The book went pretty much ignored.

  What was so revolutionary about the McKennas' method was that it could be easily followed by the non-specialist at home and, unlike the lab techniques, it was pretty well guaranteed to produce a high yield of mushrooms. It was, the brothers c
laimed, only marginally more complicated than making jam, the hardest part being obtaining a supply of spores to begin with.

  Their method had three stages. First, spores were collected from a mushroom specimen, and then germinated in Petri dishes of sterilised agar jelly. When, after a few weeks the jelly was suitably infused with healthy and uncontaminated mycelium, pieces were transplanted to jars filled with sterilised rye grains. (Though it may seem like quite a lateral step to grow a dung-loving species on rye, many fungi species from diverse habitats will thrive quite happily on grain in the labora­tory. For example, spores of the Liberty Cap, naturally a grassland species, can be germinated on cool, damp corrugated cardboard and then transferred successfully to a substrate of wood chips.) Finallyand this was the masterstroke the grain was 'cased' with a layer of sterilised soil. Casing is one of those techniques used to fool a fungus into producing mushrooms. By depriving the mycelium of light and oxygen while, at the same time keeping it moist, the McKennas quadrupled the yield of mushrooms from a single jar of spawn. No wonder Terence was delighted.

  The brothers published their method together with illustrations by Terence's then wife, Kat Harrison, and detailed photographs by Jeremy Bigwood as Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, in 1976, under the pseudonyms O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric. Since then it has been reprinted eight times, and by 1981 had sold over a hundred thousand copies. The brothers estimated that there must be five thou­sand people worldwide following the method and growing magic mushrooms at home. It is hard to be accurate with these sorts of fig­ures, but certainly interest in home cultivation became sufficient!large for the American corporate reflex to spring into action. By the autumn of 1976, spores and growing kits were being advertised b) several companies in the dope mag High Times.

  The McKenna book was followed by others, including one on a similar method put forward by Stephen Pollock in 1977* anc* *n exhaustive guide to growing mushrooms of all kinds commerce

  The Mushroom Cultivator, by the impresarios Paul Stamets and Jeff Chilton in 1983-* This, I am reliably informed, remains the bible for today's magic mushroom farmer. Needless to say, while spores could be traded legally in America, growing magic mushrooms, particularly with intent to supply, remained a felony. Like the secret stills supply­ing moonshine in the days of prohibition, magic mushroom cultiva­tion became celebrated as an illicit folk art. In that spirit, anyone who defied the law to perfect growing techniques and develop best-quality moonshine mushrooms stood to become an underground hero. That is exactly what happened to Robert McPherson.

  Robert McPherson (1947-) is better known on the Internet as PF, or Psylocybe Fanaticus, famed for his so called PF-Tek growing tech­nique.9 A jazz-blues guitarist, he was a hippy living in the HaightAshbury during the height of the psychedelic sixties, and discovered magic mushrooms sometime during the 1970s. He obtained Pollock's book and succeeded in growing a handful of mushrooms, more by luck than judgement. Realising that the problem with the cased-rye method was the likelihood of contamination when the rye was inocu­lated, he wondered whether it might not be possible to germinate spores directly onto the grain. He found that it was, provided that you carefully injected a solution of spores down into the medium, and then covered the rye with a layer of dry vermiculite to protect it from con­tamination. Vermiculite is an inert substance, most commonly used as cat litter. It possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb water and does not shrink on drying, and so makes an ideal admixture for mush­room compost. It keeps the substrate moist and aerated, and it more faithfully mimics the natural environment by forcing the mycelium to stretch across its inert particles in search of more nutriment.

  The upshot was that the PF-Tek proved a great success. Growing times were shortened, every jar produced a high yield, and the method was so easy that McPherson claimed that the mushrooms would grow virtually by themselves. It was also financially successful. McPherson was a canny businessman, for while he copyrighted the method, he distributed it freely, ensuring that there was a huge demand for the spore syringes produced by his company. At one point he was earning an alleged $30,000 a month. The bubble could not last and, following a tip-off from concerned parents, the Seattle-based company was busted by a large police operation in 1993. Though the spores were technically legal, he was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, distribution and manufacture of psilocybin, an offence with a maximum of twenty years in prison. In the end, he received six months' home detention and three years' probation, since which time he has melted away from the public gaze.

  His infamy and the PF-Tek live on, however. The method is widely available in book form and on the Internet, feted amongst a dedicated if anorak-bound community of (probably) teenage, male, mushroom hobbyists, for whom PF is a folk hero. Putting a figure on the numbers of Tekies is hard, but Internet chat rooms and message boards groan under the weight of discussion about the merits of this or that mush­room strain, autoclave efficiency and the other finer points of Teking. Any concerted attempt to crack down on hobbyists would be a Herculean task.

  It is fair to say that home cultivation has so far been more popular in America than in Europe, where proximity to naturally occurring species makes it much easier to meet demand. That was until the 1990s, when enterprising enthusiasts in Holland spotted a loophole in the law, and hit upon the novel idea of growing magic mushrooms commercially. It proved successful beyond their wildest dreams.

  The Dutch are famous for their pragmatism, and this is nowhere more evident than in their approach to the matter of illicit drugs. Recognising that a drug-free society, though perhaps desirable, was an unobtainable ideal, the Dutch government acted in the 1970s to sepa­rate 'drugs with acceptable risks' from 'drugs with unacceptable risks', both in law and in the marketplace.10 Putting cannabis in the former category led most famously to the opening of the Dutch 'coffee-shops', cafes where small amounts of cannabis could be bought and sold openly without fear of prosecution. Their hands tied by the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961), the Dutch authorities were unable to legalise cannabis, but the half-measure of decriminalisation freed them to maximise their efforts in preventing 'unacceptable' druuse: of heroin, cocaine, LSD, and later Ecstasy.

  It was within this liberal climate that a young entrepreneur, H*ns van den Huerk, opened Holland's very first 'smart shop', Conscious Dreams, in Amsterdam in 1993." A disillusioned IT worker, volunteer drugs charity worker, and Rave enthusiast, van den Huerk envision^ a shop that would sell a mixture of vitamins and supplements toget er with the legal synthetic 'designer' drugs that were creeping onto market (created as underground chemists worked their way through Alexander Shulgin's two enormous recipe books'1).

  For during the early 1990s, at just the time when McKenna was arguing for a return to the natural, there was a concomitant Ecstasyinspired rush of excitement about the possibilities of synthetic, or 'smart*, drugs. This sci-fi, cyber-cultural vision of the future saw, not a world of archaic revivalists, but one of neuromancers armed with both laptops and the pharmacological power to adjust brain chemistry in any manner of their choosing, just as a computer programmer might tinker with a piece of software. There would be drugs to help us sleep, dream, wake up again and concentrate, to enhance and prolong sex, to improve our memory and intelligence. Drugs would enable us to fulfil our limitless potential by giving us mastery and absolute control over that most unruly of subjects, the self.15

  Thus, the Dutch smart shops were born, selling everything from vitamin pills, natural plant stimulants such as guarana and ephedra and plant hallucinogens like Salvia divinorum and the San Pedro cac­tus, to synthetic drugs with arcane names such as 2C-B and 2C-T-2. A game of cat and mouse ensued, in which new drugs would come onto the market only to be criminalised a few months later by the everwatchful authorities: the hunt was always on to find legal loopholes and drugs that might slip through them. Not long after opening, van den Huerk was approached by a home-growing magic mushroom enthusiast with an offer to supply magic mush
rooms. After legal concitation, van den Huerk concluded that the law was sufficiently grey for him to put mushrooms on the market (following the 1971 UN invention on Psychotropic Substances, the Dutch Opium Act only Proscribes psilocyb in and psilocin, and not the mushrooms them­selves). They very quickly became a best-seller, at one point account­ing for 60 per cent of the shop's sales.

  As the market grew, Conscious Dreams opened two further shops in Amsterdam and expanded into the wholesale mushroom trade. It was quickly followed by other competitors, such as De Sjamaan (based in Arnhem). Most mushrooms sold were strains of Psilocybe cubensis. occasionally with the harder-to-grow but very strong Hawaiian species Copelandia cyanescens, and also 'truffles', that is sclerotia, of Psilocybe mexicana and Psilocybe tampanensis. Dried Liberty Caps, Psilocybe semilanceata, which are rare in Holland and problematic to grow, were imported in huge quantities from the UK.

  At the same time, there was a crash in the price of ordinary, hum­drum supermarket mushrooms. Dutch mushroom farmers could only get the equivalent of about €1 per kilo for button mushrooms, while cultivated magic mushrooms were selling for fifty or sixty times that amount. With such a price differential, it is not hard to see why some made the switch to growing hallucinogenic mushrooms: with the expertise and the infrastructure already in place, they could grow them on an industrial scale. The biggest growers now produce hun­dreds of kilos a week from large environmentally controlled sheds, with supply tailored to demand through computer forecasting. In Holland, the magic mushroom is big business.