Psilocybin history

Many unknown conscious and unconscious factors operate in the mystical experience. Much investigation is needed in this area, and drugs like psilocybin can be a powerful tool. Experimental facilitation of mystical experiences under controlled conditions can be an important method of approach to a better understanding of mysticism. Better understanding can lead to appreciation of the role and place of such experiences in the history and practice of religion. 

Ingesting Psilocybe mushrooms has been known to precipitate long-term mental illness including paranoia, depression, and psychosis. It is uncertain as to whether the user would have eventually developed these conditions in the absence of psilocybin. However, there does appear to be an increased risk of developing chronic mental problems after the use of psilocybin if the user has a family history of mental illness. 

Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford offers the most thorough history to date of the modern-day use of psychedelic drugs. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, cannabis, and a host of lesser-known and exotic psychotropic agents are discussed in this entertaining survey."... 

He was able to locate records for twenty-one of the original thirty-two subjects and interviewed two of them as well as three of the researchers. The criminal histories he located recorded activity for the 2.5 years following release from the incarceration in which the inmates participated in the psilocybin project, as well as up to thirty-four years later when the follow-up study was conducted. The figures closely approximated those given by Leary et al., so Doblin assumed that the lost folders were likely a random subset of the entire cohort. 

The first U.S. government-approved scientific investigation in thirty years of the therapeutic potential of psilocybin was concluded in the fall of 2003. At the University of Arizona at Tucson, Dr. Francisco Moreno, with the assistance of Dr. Chris Wiegand, administered psilocybin as a potential therapeutic treatment to ten subjects with treatment-resistant chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The Tucson study is funded by the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS. This study was initiated after the publication in the medical literature of several case histories in which patients with OCD self-administered psilocybin mushrooms in a nonmedical, recreational context. They reported that their OCD symptoms were reduced or eliminated for varying periods of time after their mushroom experience. 

For the most part it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assemble complete and accurate details on many aspects of magic mushroom history Ifom source materials available today. Thus, it is an instance of rare good fortune and a boon to mushroom historians that E. Brande s description of a typical psilocybin syndrome was augmented by J. Sowerby, author of "Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms" (London, 1803). Sowerby s book included a rendition and description of the... 

By 1959, interest in the human potential of these new (to us) substances was expanding rapidly in scientific, intellectual and artistic circles. The psychedelic rocket of the sixties had been conceived and built the countdown to launch time silently ticked off another whole year, as if history was forced to wait for the new decade to actually begin. Then, in the summer of 1960, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, while on vacation in Mexico, had his first psychedelic experience - on psilocybin mushrooms. 

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