On one level, a mushroom medallion made perfect sense: the molecule
that Griffiths and his colleagues have been working with for the last
fifteen years does, after all, come from a fungus. Both the mushroom and
its psychoactive compound were unknown to science until the 1950s,
when the psilocybin mushroom was discovered in southern Mexico,
where Mazatec Indians had been using “the flesh of the gods,” in secret,
for healing and divination since before the Spanish conquest. Yet, apart
from the decorative ceramic mushroom on the shelf in the session room,
there are few if any reminders of “magic mushrooms” in the lab. No one I
spoke to at Hopkins ever mentioned the rather astonishing fact that the
life-changing experiences their volunteers were reporting owed to the
action of a chemical compound found in nature—in a mushroom.
In the laboratory context, it can be easy to lose sight of this
astonishment. All of the scientists doing psychedelic research today work
exclusively with a synthetic version of the psilocybin molecule. (The
mushroom’s psychoactive compound was first identified, synthesized,
and named in the late 1950s by Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who
discovered LSD.) So the volunteers ingest a little white pill made in a lab,
rather than a handful of gnarly and acrid-tasting mushrooms. Their
journeys unfold in a landscape of medical suites populated, figuratively
speaking, by men and women in white coats. I suppose this is the usual
distancing effect of modern science at work, but here it is compounded by
a specific desire to distance psilocybin from its tangled roots (or I should
say, mycelia) in the worlds of 1960s counterculture, Native American
shamanism, and, perhaps, nature itself. For it is there—in nature—that
we bump up against the mystery of a little brown mushroom with the
power to change the consciousness of the animals that eat it. LSD too, it
is easy to forget, was derived from a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, or
ergot. Somehow, for some reason, these remarkable mushrooms produce,
in addition to spores, meanings in human minds.
In the course of my days spent hanging around the Hopkins lab and
hours spent interviewing people about their psilocybin journeys, I
became increasingly curious to explore this other territory—that is, the
natural history of these mushrooms and their strange powers. Where did
these mushrooms grow, and how? Why did they evolve the ability to
produce a chemical compound so closely related to serotonin, the
neurotransmitter, that it can slip across the blood-brain barrier and
frankie
(Frankie)
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