How to Change Your Mind

But while Stamets urges extreme circumspection in amateurs hoping
to identify Psilocybes, he also equips the mushroom hunter who hasn’t
been completely discouraged with something he calls “The Stametsian
Rule”: a three-pronged test that, he (sort of) assures us, can head off
death and disaster.
“How do I know if a mushroom is a psilocybin producing species or
not?”
“If a gilled mushroom has purplish brown to black spores, and the
flesh bruises bluish, the mushroom in question is very likely a psilocybin-
producing species.” This is definitely a big help, though I wouldn’t mind
something more categorical than “very likely.” He then offers a sobering
caveat. “I know of no exceptions to this rule,” he adds, “but that does not
mean there are none!”
After committing to memory the Stametsian Rule, I began picking
promising-looking gilled LBMs—in my neighbors’ yards, on my walk to
work, in the parking lot of the bank—and then roughing them up a bit to
see if they would turn black and blue. The blue pigment is in fact evidence
of oxidized psilocin, one of the two main psychoactive compounds in a
Psilocybe. (The other is psilocybin, which breaks down into psilocin in
the body.) To determine if the mushroom in question had purplish-brown
or black spores, I began making spore prints. This involves cutting the
cap off a mushroom and placing it, gill side down, on a piece of white
paper. (Or black paper if you have reason to believe the mushroom has
white spores.) Within hours, the mushroom cap releases its microscopic
spores, which will form a pretty, shadowy pattern on the paper
(reminiscent of a lipstick kiss) that you can then try to decide is purplish
brown or black—or rust colored, in which case you might have a deadly
Galerina on your hands.
Certain things are perhaps best learned in person, rather than from a
book. I decided I should probably wait before making any irreversible
decisions until I had spent some time in the company of my mycological
Virgil.

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