How I accidentally got magic mushrooms banned – and why I’ll never forgive myself.
In 2003, magic mushrooms began appearing at markets all over the UK courtesy of a previously unnoticed loophole in the Drugs Act. Then I wrote about it and everything changed.
In a lengthy career as a journalist, there are many stories I wished I’d never written but my biggest regret by far is an article I wrote about magic mushrooms more than twenty years ago.
It began with a trip to my favourite delicatessen, Garcia’s in Portobello Road. Garcia’s has been supplying Spanish cheeses and Iberian ham to west Londoners since 1957 and its outlet in the Portobello Road was just a 20-minute cycle ride from my home.
After filling my shopping bag, I wandered over to the market beneath the Westway in search of lunch. To my surprise, among the stalls selling falafels and curries, were several offering fresh magic mushrooms.
Under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, it had long been illegal in the UK to sell magic mushrooms that had been dried or frozen and/or packaged for sale. But the Home Office had recently confirmed that the restrictions did not apply to fresh mushrooms or to grow kits imported from Amsterdam.
In my student days, I’d learned to recognise the domestic British variety, Psilocybe semilanceata - known as Liberty caps due to their conical to bell-shaped caps - that grow wild on unmown fields and pastures. But the varieties on display on Portobello Road were nothing like the ones I’d foraged for in my youth. Those had been bluish-grey and so tiny you had to get down on your hands and knees to spot them. By contrast, these had thick white stems topped by proud brown caps and measured in excess of four inches. Some even came with helpful tasting notes – “giggly and sociable, with colourful visuals” read the one for the “Mexican”.
I felt as if I’d stepped into a Fungal Wonderland. Opening my Garcia’s shopping bag, I scooped up several of the Mexicans, plus a Hawaiian and something called “Philosopher’s Stone”. This turned out to be a truffle rather than a toadstool, containing roughly equal amounts of psilocybin and psilocyin (psilocybin is associated with the colourful visuals; psilocyin produces a more physical, euphoric buzz, similar to Ecstasy).
Alas, if only that had been the end of the story. Instead, I made the mistake of telling my news editor at The Guardian. The next thing I knew my article was splashed all over the front page under the headline: “High times in magic mushroom business – and it’s perfectly legal”. Worse, the story was picked up by BBC Newsnight guaranteeing it would be national news (“how can the government possibly permit this?” asked Jeremy Paxman wearing his trademark frown).
Eighteen months later, the then Labour government passed an amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act, forcing it through during the Parliamentary wash-up ahead of the May 2005 general election. Henceforth, the possession or sale of all magic mushrooms, whether fresh or dried, would be punishable by a life sentence, effectively outlawing sales via market stalls, head shops and the internet.
The only exception would be for wild mushrooms, growing on uncultivated land, effectively shielding Prince Charles from prosecution in case anyone was found foraging for Liberty Caps on his Duchy Estate. On July 18, 2005, the new law came into effect, marking the end of what the New Musical Express had dubbed “the third summer of love”.
For weeks and months afterwards, friends and colleagues – paticularly the closet shroomers - would cast me mock-sympathetic looks, as if to say, “good job Mark - you fool.”
However, my biggest regret was for a small group of patients who would never have considered ingesting psilocybin, or any other psychedelic substance, except for an excruciating condition known as a cluster headache.
Cluster headaches affect 1 in 1000 people, come in cycles lasting anywhere from a few days to several months, and are so painful that some sufferers have been driven to suicide (the pain is said to be worse than passing a kidney stone or giving birth).
For years, sufferers have tried treating these headaches with conventional medicines, such as ergotamine and sumatriptan, or with oxygen therapy, but the drugs at best provide only temporary relief and within hours their headaches usually return.
Then in the late 1990s, in their desperation, some sufferers began experimenting with LSD and other psychedelics. Incredibly, they reported that magic mushrooms provided instant relief and, in some cases, lengthy remissions. No one could explain how the shrooms interrupted the headache cycles but the effect appeared to be down to their psilocybin content. Moreover, you didn’t need to undergo a full-blown trip to enjoy the benefits; repeated low-level doses of psilocybin often proved sufficient.
By the time my article appeared, sufferers had formed a support group, ClusterBusters, and had begun sharing information on patient forums about how to forage and prepare the mushrooms and in what doses to ensure a moderate, pain-free trip.
But following the amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act, they now faced a seven-year prison sentence if they were caught picking magic mushrooms or growing them at home (the pre-2005 loophole had made it easy to import grow-kits seeded with Psilocybe spores from Holland, meaning that all patients needed to do when they felt an attack coming on was pluck a toadstool from a Tupperware container).
As one sufferer put it, “magic mushrooms have changed my life." Now, thanks to me, he faced an impossible choice: “Either I break the law or forgo the most effective treatment I have found in nearly six years."
I was reminded of these stories by a new book Psychedelic Outlaws, by Joanna Kempner. A sociologist at Rutgers University, Kempner has spent more than a decade documenting the trials and tribulations of cluster headache patients as they seek to persuade mainstream medics of psilocybin’s analgesic potential. The first hurdle was passed in 2006 when they published a series of case studies in Neurology describing the experiences of 53 cluster headache patients who had used psilocybin or LSD to treat their condition (22 of 26 psilocybin users reported that psilocybin aborted attacks). Since then, however, progress has been painfully slow.
To understand why you need to read Kempner’s book. But one reason is that while it is estimated there are 300,000 cluster headache sufferers in the US, that is too few to interest Big Pharma and too many for the FDA to designate cluster headaches an “orphan disease” - a designation that would unlock tax breaks for clinical trials.
As Kempner puts it: “Too few individuals to grab the attention of medicine and pharmaceutical companies. Too big to qualify for government- funded incentives.”
The good news is that, following the FDA’s decision in 2018 to award psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” status, that may finally be changing. Indeed, in April the Yale School of Medicine published the results of the first randomised control study of psilocybin for pain relief. Although Yale enrolled just 10 cluster headache sufferers, the study demonstrated a 50 percent reduction in attacks in those who had received psilocybin as opposed to a placebo.
All 10 participants received the same regimen of three 10mg/70kg doses of psilocybin – more than enough for an intense trip. However, in a previous study, researchers had found that the degree of symptom and pain relief was not directly related to the strength or intensity of the psychedelic experience.
According to Dr Emmanuelle Schindler, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Yale School of Medicine, and the lead author of the studies, this suggests that “the mechanism [of cluster headache] is probably not directly related to the psychedelic experience itself.”
How exactly psilocybin interrupts the cycle of headaches is an open question. Brain scans suggest it may help reset the neural pathways involved in the pain cycle. Another theory is that it has something to do with psilocybin’s indole ring, which is similar in shape to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Lysergic acid amide (LSA), which can be derived from morning glory seeds, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also have indole rings and cluster headache sufferers have also reported similar relief after dosing themselves with these substances.
Indeed, “Flash”, a cluster headache sufferer I spoke to in 2005, told me it was the relief he experienced after taking LSD that had first prompted him to type “migraine and LSD” into a search engine and which led him to reports of the benefits of psilocybin.
Today, Flash is in remission and no longer needs to risk jail by harvesting wild magic mushrooms. However, that is not the case for other patients, such as Ainslie Course, the vice-president of Cluster Busters.
Course, who used to work as a nurse, experienced her first attack when she was 19 and has suffered from cluster headaches most of her adult life. The attacks can last anywhere from eight weeks to eight months and are so debilitating she is unable to hold down a full-time job.
Now aged 57, she spends her time advising novices on how to forage for fresh mushrooms and the best dosing regimens. Like many members of Cluster Busters, Course had no experience of taking illegal drugs before turning to the group for support. As she told me when I spoke to her last week at her home in North Lanarckshire:
“My first trip, I thought I was a spider ballet dancer with eight legs - it was horrible.”
Course says she’s never got used to the psychedelic aspects. Nonetheless, to control her symptoms, she continues to dose herself with 1 to 1.5 grammes of magic mushrooms four times a year.
“I don’t like the feeling of losing control but for me it’s a short sacrifice to go through a six-hour trip in order to control my cluster headaches.
“We all hate that we have to go underground in order to medicate ourselves but the law gives us no choice.”
If only I hadn’t drawn attention to that loophole…