The Netherlands used to be the only place in the world you could legally buy marijuana and hallucinogenic psilocybin magic mushrooms.
The first time I used magic mushrooms was in a beautiful wildlands park on the North Sea near Amsterdam, alone, on a cloudy day.
The mushrooms’ taste made me nauseous, even though they were dipped in honey. Nausea and dizziness lasted about an hour, then receded.
I entered a profoundly introspective trance, accompanied by enhanced sensation and distortion of visuals, sounds, and tactile inputs.
I fell asleep tripping and woke up five hours later feeling physically and emotionally purged and empty.
Magic mushrooms do NOT typically give you a “recreational” drug experience. Not for going to a concert, theater, or even a rave.
Instead, it is a revealing, healing experience. All my failures, regrets, nostalgia, yearnings, worries, hopes, losses and wins paraded themselves on my mind’s inner screen, then moved on.
The word a lot of mushroom trippers use to describe the high is “cathartic.”
Science has verified what many of us already know: some plants and fungi (psilocybin mushrooms are fungi) are powerful tools for healing and insight.
It’s not like this should be a big surprise. For thousands of years, “folk medicine” has used fungi to boost the immune system, fight disease and infection, cure cancer and mitigate psychological problems.
Recent studies of psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) show it helps people with PTSD, addictions including alcoholism and nicotine, stress disorders, abuse trauma, depression, OCD, ADHD, medical side-effects related to cancer treatment, and many other disorders.
Demonstrating how clinically validated psilocybin has become, the FDA in the past five years has approved “breakthrough therapy” status to psilocybin treatments for treatment-resistant and major depressive disorders. The Canadian government is now allowing physicians to use psilocybin to treat psychiatric disorders.
As with marijuana, magic mushrooms are available on the black market worldwide. They’re also available on the white market in a few places.
Oregon decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms in 2020. Denver decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms a year earlier. Santa Cruz, Arcata, and Oakland, California have decriminalized magic mushrooms. Ann Arbor, Detroit, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Detroit and a few other American cities have decriminalized.
Although psilocybin mushrooms used to be legally sold at “smart shops” in The Netherlands, they’re now technically illegal.
But this hasn’t stopped several popular Dutch smart shops from providing magical “somethings,” often labeled as “truffles.” If you know how to finesse the shop people, the truffles they sell you are under the counter potent psilocybin mushrooms.
Magic mushrooms are usually sold whole or powdered. In most cases there’ll be no lab test or other quality assurance label. So unless you personally know the provider and are sure of their integrity and professionalism, you won’t know for sure if you have actual pure psilocybin.
Of course everyone wants to know how much to take. I have no idea of what quality of material you actually have, or your personal characteristics that influence how magic mushrooms impact you.
These characteristics include:
* Height, weight, general mental and physical health.
* Whether you have physical or psychological conditions that could be impacted by psilocybin.
* Prior experience or inexperience with hallucinogens.
* The set and setting in which you’ll ingest the material. Set is your mood, energy, attitude. Setting is the place where you’ll be while high on mushrooms.
One useful strategy, especially for first-time users or for experienced users who get hold of a new batch of alleged psilocybin from a new seller, is to prepare yourself for the experience by having an empty stomach, peace, quiet, privacy, fresh water and fruit juices, safety and security.
Take a quarter gram; keep track in writing how much you take and when you take it.
Wait at least a half hour if not an hour. Get up and walk around. Look at different objects. Evaluate the workings of your senses, body, and mind to detect even the slightest psilocybin effects.
If you feel safe and happy and you’re ready for a more intense experience, take another quarter gram or half a gram. Again, wait at least half an hour if not an hour. Monitor the effects.
Using this incremental dosing method, you’ll arrive at a comfortable total dosage amount you can use as a starting point for your next magic mushroom session.
Note that some magic mushroom users always use this tiny dose approach: they call it microdosing. Instead of microdosing every few minutes to build up a cumulative dose for a powerful hallucinogenic high, they take tiny amounts every few hours.
This produces a below-the-radar subliminal effect some people find very helpful for calming psychological uplift, similar to what anti-depressants are supposed to give you, but does not give you a full-on trip experience.
If you’re feeling courageous and want to take a substantial dose right away, start with 1-1.5 grams of dried magic mushrooms or powder. You’ll feel the high, but it won’t be overwhelming or even very intense. Experienced users of potent marijuana have no problems with this level of being high.
Take 1.5-3.5 grams to get visual hallucinations, abstract thoughts, relaxing body effects.
Above 3.5 grams you’re in trip-out territory. This is for experienced trippers only. And yes, you can overdose on shrooms and end up on a bad trip, so be cautious.
If you’ve taken enough magic mushrooms to get this profound high, you’ll be absurdly tripping for 4-7 hours. There’s often mild burnout afterwards.
Here are other tips for getting the most fun from your fungi:
- This is not a social experience. It is a personal, spiritual, psychological experience best done alone, with a mushroom trip guide person, or with a caring person who is very close to you and with whom you have a beautiful relationship with zero hidden issues.
- Be sure you have no business, unpleasant companions, hassles, intrusions, noise, sickness, obligations for at least ten hours from the time you ingest mushrooms.
- Make a playlist of healing music, activities such as yoga, hypnosis, sauna, self-analysis, float tanks, light exercise, and hallucinogen seminars to occupy your time during the mushroom trip.
- Have some electrolytes such as are used for athletic replenishment, fruit, and fresh water. Ingesting a vitamin B booster is also helpful.
- Consult with a physician before using magic mushrooms.
- Visit tripper experience websites such as erowid and shroomery.
- Read this manual for psychedelic use.
Final note: Magic mushrooms aren’t fun fungi for everybody. Some people always have bad trips on them. Others can’t get past the yucky taste. If you try psilocybin a couple of times and it’s unpleasant, you should avoid shrooms.
Using Magic Mushrooms & Marijuana Together
Magic mushrooms are most often dosed orally via liquid or chewing. They taste foul.
Cannabis can be orally ingested via brownies, capsules and other methods, giving you a much different high than you get from combustion or vaporization.
No matter how you ingest marijuana, the cannabis high does NOT resemble psilocybin mushroom effects, and vice versa.
However, the intelligent use of cannabis with magic mushrooms can provide synergistic benefits if you do it right.
The first step is to assay the quality, purity, baseline dosage and effects of your magic mushrooms. Carefully recall your mushroom experiences in detail. Ask yourself if there were any rough edges to the experience, such as a nausea, yawning, extreme tiredness, headache, scary or negative thoughts.
Then ask yourself if you have cannabis buds with psychoactive and medical effects that could reduce negative effects from the mushrooms.
In my experience using magic mushrooms and marijuana, and talking to many others who do the same, the usage falls into two main categories:
- Using marijuana to mitigate negative magic mushroom effects. This use tends to be Indica-dominant, mostly to get rid of nausea, anxiety, stomach problems.
- Using marijuana to enhance pleasurable effects and add cannabis euphoria to the mushroom experience. This tends to be Sativa-dominant.
Using marijuana and psilocybin magic mushrooms will likely be fun, symbiotic, and helpful as long as you are using marijuana and mushrooms that make you feel good by themselves.
For example, when I was on a mushroom trip that was hitting my body hard with heaviness, grief, and pain, lack of energy, I vaped some Kali Mist, a near-pure Sativa, that lifted me out of lethargy.
On another occasion, the mushrooms made me feel worried, scared, agitated. I used a Mimosa-derived Indica-dominant strain called Seriosa to bring me into a more chill space.
Note also that marijuana itself has deep therapeutic potential when used as an entheogen. Read here about how to do that.
Growing Your Own Magic Mushrooms
Most of our readers are familiar with growing at least one hallucinogen: marijuana.
However, growing marijuana plants and growing psilocybin magic mushrooms have little in common. You won’t be growing psilocybin and marijuana in the same grow room using the same equipment.
It’s relatively easy to find everything you need to grow mushrooms: here, for example.
It’s cheaper to grow magic mushrooms than it is to grow marijuana, but it isn’t easier. Regardless, if you love being a gardener and are good at paying attention to horticultural details, you’ll be a mushroom growing pro after a few tries.
Magic mushrooms are a window into your soul, spirit and heart. Our culture encourages us to be asleep ethically and spiritually so we avoid being aware of the “negative” aspects of reality such as pandemics, wars, aging, relationship problems, regrets, crimes, environmental destruction, violence, and other sad things.
Psilocybin magic mushrooms break down the inner barriers and deliberate spiritual coma most people are sleepwalking in, exposing you all at once to things you’ve been trying not to see.
It’s startling and even shocking to suddenly have the veil lifted from your eyes so you confront what you’re scared of, the wrong you’ve done (and wrongs done to you), life failures, grief and loss, anthropogenic mass extinction, the possibility that Putin will start a nuclear war, etc.
The good news is that by finally confronting reality, you learn better how to deal with it successfully. This is exactly how medical doctors are using psilocybin and therapy to heal people suffering from a diverse range of psychological and/or physical trauma.
Be sure to look at all the links and videos we’ve included here, so you’re prepared for the deep inner journey produced by psilocybin.
Let’s be grateful that Nature gives us entheogenic plants like psilocybin and marijuana to help us go beyond our limitations to become more conscious, authentic, stable humans.
Growing Marijuana Perfectly! 