Magic species (Types of magic mushrooms/psilocybin)
Most mushrooms available on the street or grown by recreational users are of the species Psilocybe cubensis, mainly because they are potent enough and grow fast, but there are other species and they can vary quite a bit in potency. Psilocybe cyanescens and Psilocybe semilanceata are about twice as strong as cubensis. Other species of Psilocybe may contain very little active ingredient. Because of the variability in potency, caution should be considered at all times.
Much valuable, detailed and nonjudgmental information on psilocybin mushrooms and other psychoactive substances is available from the fine folks at Erowid. Their website is at www.erowid.org.
Getting to mushrooms
Buying mushrooms on the street is a bad idea for several reasons. There is no consumer protection agency for the black market, and there are reports of other kinds of mushrooms being treated with other chemicals – some quite nasty – and passed off as psilocybin mushrooms. They may be perfectly healthy to eat but not contain any active psilocybin. Please don’t buy shrooms on the street.
Picking mushrooms in the wild is dangerous. Eating the wrong mushroom can be fatal, and that is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. Many toxic species attack the liver in an insidious way – they will make a person sick, but the symptoms will seem to subside in a day or two. Three or four days later, however, the liver starts to fail and the only option for survival is a transplant. Poison mushrooms really are quite poisonous, and unless one is an expert in identification, avoid mushrooms found in the wild. In some areas, there are species of highly toxic mushrooms that look a lot like psilocybin mushrooms. Trust no one to properly tell the difference between toxic and the nontoxic wild mushrooms, unless they are recognized, certified experts.
The third way to procure shrooms is simply to grow them yourself. This avoids any questions of toxicity, adulteration, rip-offs or organized crime. It provides a more reliable, consistent dosage of psilocybin, and it’s relatively inexpensive. Growing magic mushrooms has a reputation for being difficult, but there are methods designed to make it easy. The biggest challenge is getting one kind of fungus to grow while preventing other kinds of fungus from contaminating and destroying your crop.
It takes a couple months to grow a crop of psilocybin mushrooms, and it can be done in a closet or other secure place out of the sight of casual visitors or curious kids. The equipment required is not extensive. Once a crop is grown and harvested, second and third crops of mushrooms will grow from the same mycelium (the “roots” of the mushroom organism).