I hoped that getting to know the psychoactive LBMs (mycologist
shorthand for “little brown mushrooms”) at the bottom of this paradox
might clarify the matter or, perhaps, somehow dissolve it. I was already
something of a mushroom hunter, secure in my ability to identify a
handful of edible woodland species (chanterelles, morels, black trumpets,
and porcini) with a high enough degree of confidence to eat what I found.
However, I had been told by all my teachers that the world of LBMs was
far more daunting in its complexity and peril; many if not most of the
species that can kill you are LBMs. But perhaps with some expert
guidance, I could add a Psilocybe or two to my mushroom hunting
repertoire and in the process begin to unpack the mystery of their
existence and spooky powers.
• • •
THERE WAS NEVER any doubt who could best help me on this quest,
assuming he was willing. Paul Stamets, a mycologist from Washington
State who literally wrote the book on the genus Psilocybe, in the form of
the authoritative 1996 field guide Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World.
Stamets has himself “published”—that is, identified and described in a
peer-reviewed journal—four new species of Psilocybe, including
azurescens, named for his son Azureus and the most potent species yet
known. But while Stamets is one of the country’s most respected
mycologists, he works entirely outside the academy, has no graduate
degree, funds most of his own research,* and holds views of the role of
fungi in nature that are well outside the scientific mainstream and that,
he will gladly tell you, owe to insights granted to him by the mushrooms
themselves, in the course of both close study and regular ingestion.
I’ve known Stamets for years, though not very well and always from
what I confess has been a somewhat skeptical distance. His extravagant
claims for the powers of mushrooms and eyebrow-elevating boasts about
his mushroom work with institutions like DARPA (the Pentagon’s
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NIH (the National
Institutes of Health) are bound to set off a journalist’s bullshit detector,
rightly or—as often happens in his case—wrongly.