organisms can navigate mazes in search of food—sensing its location and
then growing in that direction. The mycelia in a forest do link the trees in
it, root to root, not only supplying them with nutrients, but serving as a
medium that conveys information about environmental threats and
allows trees to selectively send nutrients to other trees in the forest.* A
forest is a far more complex, sociable, and intelligent entity than we
knew, and it is fungi that organize the arboreal society.
Stamets’s ideas and theories have turned out to be far more durable,
and practicable, than I ever would have guessed. This was the other
reason I became eager to spend some time with Stamets: I was curious to
find out how his own experience with psilocybin had colored his thinking
and lifework. Yet I wasn’t at all certain he would be willing to talk on the
record about psilocybin, much less take me ’shroom hunting, now that he
had a successful business, had eight or nine patents to his name, and was
collaborating with institutions like DARPA and NIH and the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. In the more recent interviews and
lectures I could find online, he seldom talked about psilocybin and often
omitted mention of the field guide from his list of publications. What’s
more, he had just received prestigious honors from the Mycological
Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS). Paul Stamets, it seemed, had gone legit. Bad timing for
me.
• • •
THANKFULLY, I WAS WRONG. When I reached Stamets at his home in
Kamilche, Washington, and told him what I was up to, he couldn’t have
been more forthcoming or cooperative. We talked for a long time about
psilocybin mushrooms, and it soon became clear they remained a subject
of keen interest to him. He knew all about the work going on at Hopkins
—in fact had consulted with the Hopkins team when they were first
looking for a source of psilocybin. My impression was that the revival of
legitimate university research had made Stamets more comfortable
reopening this particular chapter in his life. He mentioned he was in the
process of updating the 1996 psilocybin field guide. The only discordant
note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang