The Mushroom Moment Manifesto

The saturday after voters in Washington, D.C., and Oregon voted to loosen legal restrictions on magic mushrooms, my girlfriend and I celebrated in the most appropriate way possible.

- By Nick Gillespie

We each ate almost 5 grams of the stuff, ground up and stuffed into capsules. This was a Venti-sized, mind-blowing “heroic dose” in the parlance of the late Terence McKenna, the Johnny Appleseed of hallucinogenic fungi, and we tripped for a good chunk of the afternoon and early evening.

Journeying to the center of our minds via vision-inducing drugs (variously called hallucinogens, psychedelics, and entheogens) is perfectly suited to a world that is hyper-polarized, literally and figuratively locked down, and increasingly a little too close to an Edvard Munch painting for comfort. Mushrooms and similar substances are known to produce quasireligious feelings of universal love, connection, empathy, and hope. They work on an intensely individual level but help you get along better with your family, neighbors, and coworkers. Far from an escape from reality, they can provide an entry point to deeper engagement with your limitations, your fears, and your aspirations.

What’s not to celebrate?

The mushroom votes—not to mention the passage of promarijuana initiatives in states as traditionally straight-laced as Arizona, Mississippi, and South Dakota—are undeniable confirmation that we’re in the middle of a pharmacological revolution whose implicitly libertarian goal is nothing less than giving us all more and better control over our very moods and minds. As a popular meme puts it, the drug war is over and the drugs won.