What’s Lost When Psychedelic Mushrooms Become Synthetic Psilocybin

By Miro Tomoski for DoubleBlind Magazine

In 1957, when Wall Street banker R. Gordon Wasson wrote in Life Magazine about his and photographer Allan Richardson’s experience as “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushroom,” he likely didn’t anticipate the counterculture they would create and the debate they would spark within it.

After being introduced to sacred mushrooms by Mazatec curandera (healer) María Sabina, Wasson arranged to have a sample sent to Albert Hofmann—the famed father of LSD—who isolated its active molecule: psilocybin.

“We explained to María Sabina that we had isolated the spirit of the mushrooms and that it was now in these little pills,” Hofmann said in an unpublished interview. “When we left, María Sabina told us that these tablets really contained the spirit of the mushrooms.”

Continue reading the original article here:

https://doubleblindmag.com/synthetic-psilocybin-sabina-wasson/

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