My Hand Modeling Debut

I’m back with a new cover story for Mountain Gazette, and for the first time, I’m actually on the cover—or, my hand is.

Last summer, I went to the Telluride Mushroom Festival to write what my editor called “everything you want to know about psychedelic mushroom use… and probably a lot of things you didn’t want to know.” It’s one of my longest features yet, clocking in at over 14,000 words, with film photography by the incredibly talented Peter Fisher. I cover everything from Rabbinic references to mushrooms in the Talmud to the science behind psychedelic treatment for depression. I knew absolutely nothing about mushrooms prior to last year, so my goal was to take the reader along with me as I attempted to learn everything I could.

Below is a very short preview.

The photographer for this story asked me what my favorite mushroom is. I said the ones that come on tacos. It’s a bad answer, I know. But I, unlike most of the people I’m writing about here, have never given fungi much thought. I’m indifferent about them on my dinner plate. I’ve also never done magic mushrooms. Not that I’m anti-drug. They’ve just never interested me. Which is why my editor, who loves to send me on unexpected adventures, insisted last summer that I go to the 45th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, joining thousands of mycophiles from around the world in a tiny mountain town in southwest Colorado. He made it clear that he wasn’t telling me to do mushrooms there. But—maybe I would? And wouldn’t that be cliché, I thought, like I’m some twenty-teens Vice writer on an ayahuasca vision quest, or another Hunter S. Thompson wannabe.

There’s been a lot of recent hype around magic mushrooms, which naturally produce a psychedelic drug called psilocybin. If you stop a man on the street in a place like Denver—which in 2019 became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin—and ask him what he has heard about magic mushrooms, there’s a good chance he’ll tell you that they can treat PTSD, depression, and addiction, and improve intelligence, creativity, and mood. Some non-psychedelic species of mushrooms are purported to have great health benefits too. These claims spread widely on podcasts and social media, where science is often conflated with pseudoscience, doubt is sown about lifesaving vaccines, and all sorts of untested, unregulated, and unproven supplements are sold with promises that they’ll “detoxify” your body and boost your immunity.

It’s difficult in this era of wellness influencers and paywalled scientific journals for a layperson to know what medicine is real and what’s snake oil. There’s so much medical misinformation out there, exacerbated by dishonest uses of scientific-sounding language in marketing materials and conspiracy theories. A 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that “participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not.” The researchers concluded that trusting science, while a good thing, can actually make people more vulnerable to pseudoscience, suggesting that our current wellness infodemic may be less the result of skepticism about the work of scientists than a lack of critical-examination skills. Science, after all, is the antithesis of a belief system; it’s not something someone can choose to believe in or not. But not everything thought to be scientifically proven actually is. So, I wanted to know: Were mushroom advocates really onto a wonder drug? Or were they drawn in by theories that may be too magical to be true?

Before the festival, before I knew the first thing about fungi, I went to a black brick building with boarded-up windows in an industrial complex behind the train tracks in south Denver. A giant inflatable mushroom sat in the parking lot. It was a Saturday afternoon, August 9, and I was at Mushroom Classroom, a mycology supply store that offers instruction on growing psilocybin mushrooms at home. I’d signed up for a class to learn just how to do that…

(Read the rest in Mountain Gazette 205.)