No, hardly anyone used them in America - most people thought they only grew in South America. All of the the people who first tried them in America like Ginsberg etc were using "psilocybin pills" from Sandoz that Leary purchased. Once acid came in it was a lot cheaper than buying psilocybin pills so it died out. It wasn't until 1976 that the mushroom growing methods were discovered.
yep, this is correct. it wasn't until the later 60s (generally the 70s and even 80s) that public knowledge of psilocybe mushrooms spread to local areas. it was widely known that these mushrooms were used traditionally in south and central america by indigenous populations, but it wasn't until many years later that the widespread distribution of psilocybe mushrooms (in their various localised forms) became known to populations of drug users.
various fungi fruiting bodies are notoriously difficult to identify, particularly in pre-internet days.
there are naturally occurring 'magic mushrooms' in a lot of different places around the world, including urban areas - but for many budding psychedelic communities, there was little knowledge of what was or wasn't growing right under their noses, outside of academic circles.
in cases where there was little cross-over between psychedelic and mycology folks, this knowledge did not become widely disseminated until the 60s had long since passed.
for example, in my part of the world (western australia) there is but a small patch of
psilocybe subaeruginosa known to grow in a particular patch of forest a few hundred kilometres south of the largest city in the region. it may have been known locally by a small hippie population earlier, but common knowledge of this only spread in the mid 1980s (as is my understanding).
it should be noted, however, that this is not a naturally occurring species, but one that may have been transported by industry/agriculture from the eastern coast of the continent - which may account for why it took west aussie heads so long to find out about them.
iROLL22 said:
well its all about the potency. mushrooms is the least potent by weight, lsd is the most potent. it was easy to pass around and transport cuz it only took one drop for things to become radically different. i would love the share mescaline with everyone but needing 300mg to dose is not as "monetarily" beneficial as something that takes 100mcg to dose.
this logic may be true when taking the general practicalities of drug economics into account (for example comparing the smuggling traffic of opium to heroin) but until the later part of the 1960s most psychedelics were still legal.
psilocybin/psilocin and the mushrooms they naturally occurred in were not considered a drug in much of the world until the united states added them to the list of scheduled drugs, along with others such as LSD - so before this time, bulk or detectability of material was not a huge concern.
much of leary's famed psychedelic research at harvard (and beyond) was conducted with psilocybin - but rather than mushrooms, he was dealing with synthesised product from sandoz - in pill form.
the culture and widespread use of psychedelic mushrooms in the developed western world is a fairly recent development - one that is continuing to grow, but it was still very much in its infancy in the 1960s; an exotic and fairly unknown doorway.
thanks to the perseverance and commitment of people such as terrence mckenna, and the enormous amount of information about them spread on the internet, magic mushrooms have become an ever-expanding part western consciousness.
