From Magic Mushroom to Forbidden Fungus (and Back)

IN 1968, JUST 11 years after the international banker and amateur mycologist R. Gordon Wasson introduced Americans to “magic mushrooms” in a landmark Life magazine story, the federal government banned them. That was how long it took for this object of anthropological fascination, source of visions, and tool of self-treatment-resistant Discovery to become an intolerable threat to the nation’s youth.

Two years later, when Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, it listed psilocybin and psilocin, the psychoactive components of the “divine” fungi that Wasson ate, under Schedule I, a category supposedly reserved for exceptionally dangerous drugs with no accepted medical use. Half a century would pass before any jurisdiction in the United States reconsidered that classification.

When Oregon voters approved Measure 109, a.k.a. the Psilocybin Services Act, by a 12-point margin in November, they repudiated decades of anti-drug propaganda that depicted psychedelics as a ticket to the mental hospital. To the contrary, the initiative said, “studies conducted by nationally