the most to spread their genes and, as Stamets now saw as his calling,
their planetary gospel.
Stamets got his mycological education not at Kenyon, which he left
after one year, but at the Evergreen State College, which in the mid-1970s
was a new experimental college in Olympia, Washington, where students
could design their own course of independent study. A young professor
named Michael Beug, who had a degree in environmental chemistry,
agreed to take under his wing Stamets and two other equally promising
mycologically obsessed students: Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott.
Beug was not himself a mycologist by training, but the four of them
mastered the subject together, with the help of an electron microscope
and a DEA license that Beug had somehow secured. Thus armed, the four
trained their attention on a genus that the rest of the field generally chose
to pass over in uncomfortable silence.
Illegal since 1970, psilocybin mushrooms were at the time chiefly of
interest to the counterculture, as a gentler, more natural alternative to
LSD, but very little was known about their habitat, distribution, life cycle,
or potency. It was believed that psychedelic mushrooms were native to
southern Mexico, where R. Gordon Wasson had “discovered” them in
- By the 1970s, most of the psilocybin in circulation in America was
being imported from Latin America or grown domestically from spores of
Latin American species, mainly cubensis.
The Evergreen group chalked up several notable accomplishments:
they identified and published three new psilocybin species, perfected
methods for growing them indoors, and developed techniques for
measuring levels of psilocin and psilocybin in mushrooms. But perhaps
the group’s most important contribution was to shift the focus of
attention among people who cared about Psilocybes from southern
Mexico to the Pacific Northwest. Stamets and his colleagues were finding
new species of psilocybin mushrooms all around them and publishing
their findings. “You could almost feel the earth’s axis tilting to this corner
of the world.” Anywhere you went in the Pacific Northwest, Stamets
recalls, you could see people tracing peculiar patterns through farm fields
and lawns, bent over in what he calls “the psilocybin stoop.”
During this period, the Pacific Northwest emerged as a new center of
gravity in American psychedelic culture, with the Evergreen State College
serving as its de facto intellectual hub and R&D facility. Beginning in