It’s a long strange trip from trees that communicate with each other to mushrooms living inside nuclear reactors – and following those threads has been, as I said, like going down a rabbit hole. It seems like coming up for air to contemplate the little white button mushrooms on a dinner plate which is where my early awareness of them began, and the word fungi never entered into it. Even then, in my middle-class, white, Canadian childhood in the 1950’s and 1960’s mushrooms as food barely registered.

As our culture expanded to incorporate the culinary offerings from around the world, eating mushrooms became a whole new thing. Nowadays the chanterelles, the oysters, the morels, the shitake are much more common. A mushroom grower and woodland picker has a booth at our local Saturday farmer’s market and sells jars of dried mushrooms of all kinds of species, as well as a few fresh types that are quickly snatched up. Where once wild mushrooms were looked upon with great suspicion, (because after all, can’t they kill you?), now they are in great demand. Although the market mushroom man still cautions, “if I think I spot a familiar mushroom as I walk through the woods I’ll walk by. I only pick it if I know what it is”.

Mushrooms have been used as medicine in other cultures for a very long time but In recent years mushrooms have also been studied by Western medicine for their potential medicinal benefits for humans and as promising-sounding results seep out of the lab (lion’s mane for dementia, turkey tail for cancer and so on), health food store shelves are expanding the expensive mushroom supplement offerings. Why cook dinner when you can swallow a pill or seep a $2.49 teabag? The research may still be in discovery stage, with clinical trials still to come, as is the way in western science, but why wait, some may say. There’s money to be made in mushroom “health” supplements.

But mushrooms as a food source or even early indications that they might have medicinal effects on disease are not the most interesting part of the human-mushroom interaction. Not by a long shot. The really long strange trip is yet to come.

MAGIC MUSHROOMS

Psilocybin is a naturally occurring compound present in several hundred species of mushrooms that when ingested by humans has a psychoactive affect – a psychedelic that can cause an altered state of consciousness for several hours, a “trip”. During this time, the effects are highly variable and, depending on things like dosage, the mindset of the individual and the setting, can result in feelings of euphoria, mental and visual hallucinations, time distortion, perception changes and spiritual experiences.

It’s been known for a long time that psilocybin (as well as LSD, also derived from another type of fungus) can have very positive effects on some of the most intractable mental health conditions and in recent years, after a long pause of over 30 years, there’s been a resurgence in clinical research in its use in the treatment of PTSD, alcohol abuse, treatment-resistant depression, and the anxiety, distress and depression experienced by people with cancer and facing terminal illness. These treatments are not requiring multiple doses over long periods of time as in other conventional modalities. What they are finding is that even a single dose guided session can have profoundly positive results in these patients that last a very long time, sometimes years. Furthermore, they characterize what is happening as not about the drug per se, but rather about the experience itself, which is not the typical pharmaceutical intervention model. In one study of end-stage cancer patients, they found that a large majority had a significant reduction in depression and anxiety, completely resetting their attitudes towards death, an improvement in well being and life satisfaction. This was described by the researchers as “one of the most effective psychiatric interventions these psychiatrists had ever seen”.

Now psilocybin mushrooms have been known to be used by various indigenous peoples over thousands of years for healing and spiritual insight. They only became known to Western culture in the 1950’s (LSD had been previously synthesized in the 1930’s) when an American banker and amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, who with his physician wife Valentina Wasson studied their ritual use by an indigenous people in a village in Mexico and tried it themselves. He went on to publish an in-depth article of their experiences in the widely popular Life magazine, which generated huge interest and marked the beginning of experimentation with psychedelics both in and out of the lab.

Through the 1950’s and 1960’s there was a lot of research being done to see how this newly “discovered” substance could yield insights and treatment options for mental health conditions and the findings were very positive. Over 1000 clinical papers were published in the professional literature discussing the experiences of 40,000 patients treated with hallucinogens.

And then it stopped.

By the the mid-1960’s psychedelics had “escaped the lab” and both LSD and psilocybin along with other drugs became widely available for experimenting by many young people who were also questioning the attitudes of the previous generation during a period of rebellion against authority, characterized as the “generation gap”. This was the age of the “counterculture” and there was a lot to rebel against. In the U.S. thousands of young men were being drafted and sent to the other side of the world to fight a losing war in the jungles of Viet Nam, and anti-war protests along with anti-racism demonstrations against an unjust society spread across the country. Richard Nixon called drugs “public enemy number one” and in a sense he was right. If you want people to shut up about a war and keep sending young people overseas to kill and be killed, the last thing you want is for someone like Timothy Leary to be advocating that they take a drug that would open their eyes to what was really going on – “to tune in, turn on and drop out”. Thus began the invention and launch in 1971 of the “War on Drugs”. The inclusion of marijuana and the hallucinogens LSD and psilocybin on a list of banned drugs that also included the more problematic, addictive cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines was a political act designed to dampen anti-war and anti-race discrimination protest and the drug propaganda machine was rolled out in full force.

Insight into how drug use and addiction changed from being a medical issue to a criminal one can be found in a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, Domestic Affairs Advisor in the Nixon White House who described what they did with the “War on Drugs” in the following way:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and [B]lack people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or [B]lack, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and [B]lacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The U.S. government, when LSD and psilocybin were placed on the list of restricted drugs declared that these were dangerous drugs, highly addictive and had no medical use. None of that was true. Researchers were having tremendous results treating mental health issues but why let the truth get in the way of political propaganda. Canada and other countries followed the U.S. lead. That’s how psilocybin became illegal and all legitimate medical research on the substance came to a screeching halt.

So how do you ban a magic mushroom? Well like any prohibition you can’t. It just goes underground (so to speak). Mushrooms that contain psilocybin grow in the wild and are easy to cultivate. They are still deemed illegal substances but as more and more positive medical research results come to the light of day, the more the constraints are very slowly loosening. Last year Health Canada began granting legal exemptions for psilocybin, mainly to people with a terminal illness or treatment-resistant depression, a cumbersome process. Selected doctors and therapists have also been given permission to use it under certain conditions. In the U.S. over the past few years, psilocybin has been decriminalized in a number of cities and in 2020 Oregon became the first state to both decriminalize psilocybin and also legalize it for therapeutic use, although like cannabis, it is still illegal under federal law.

Meanwhile, some people aren’t waiting. You can buy magic mushrooms online, as dried product, in capsules or edibles, you can buy mushroom growing kits if you want to grow your own, and in Vancouver and Toronto storefront dispensaries are selling them openly. Shades of the pre-legalized cannabis situation.

The majority of patients in the psilocybin clinical trials have characterized the experience as one of, if not the most, significant and meaningful experiences of their lives. When I hear, in their own words, how dying cancer patients have experienced through magic mushrooms such profound and lasting mystical experiences of unity – a strong sense of the interconnectedness of all people and things; sacredness – feelings of awe, humility, holiness, wonder; a deeply felt positive mood and feeling of transcendence; of gratitude, compassion, equanimity and appreciation for being alive in this very moment; loss of fear of death and realization that everything is love, I can’t help but ask the question – using the magic in mushrooms or not, why would I want to wait until I’m dying to experience this?

As well as their primary roles in the creation and growth of plants, and thus life on earth, fungi have also been key in destroying plant material, acting as the decomposers of dead and dying organisms, transforming them to move nutrients back into the cycle of life. Without them the build-up of dead plant and animal matter would choke the earth.

You can see the evidence of this in my little patch of forest at the end of the road. As I look at the forest floor, I see that nowhere is it flat, it is entirely built on this process of decomposition. The ground is uneven and bumpy, and everywhere there are fallen trees and limbs littering the floor, decomposing and shrinking back down to become, over time, the soil that then is the base for new growth. Look closely and you see large trees growing out of the remains of long-fallen ancestors. Fungi plays a key role in this and on a broader scale throughout time have been responsible for literally shaping the surface of the planet.

MYCOREMEDIATION

Fungi break down organic material through enzymatic reactions – as mycelium speads it secretes enzymes that can transform even the toughest of materials. Not only that, they have proven their adaptability over hundreds of millions of years, responding to all kinds of different environments. They have survived previous mass extinctions to emerge as a force that remains to rejuvenate and transform changed environments over time.

Scientists have turned their attention to seeing how this process can be encouraged in other ways, perhaps in cleaning up the messes made by human industrial life. They call it mycoremediation which refers to using fungi to deliberately remove waste from the environment – capitalizing on their natural role as the earth’s original recyclers. The scientific imagination looks towards seeing how certain fungi decomposers will react when put in contact with some of the more intractable pollutants resulting from our industrial societies – oil spills, toxic mining byproducts, soil and water pollution and plastic waste. They ask if and how the fungi’s natural roles in breaking the hydrocarbon bonds in matter can be harnessed to deal with the real gnarly stuff.

Here are just some of the examples of experiments testing how fungi may be used in these ways:

• Removing contaminants from water sources – lab based studies have successfully shown the capacity of fungi mycelium to remove e. coli from polluted water from the Chicago River. Mycelium has been tested to restore habitat by filtering contaminated water run-off from farms, while releasing enzymes that degrade toxic contaminants. Experiments on toxic ash residue from California wildfires used hay bales full of oyster mushroom mycelium to clear heavy metals and other toxins from water sources in the damaged land before it could reach further downstream water collection.

• Other experiments have identified fungal species that may be able to decontaminate soil containing PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons), a by-product of plastics production which is a carcinogenic that can harm human health. Researchers have also been experimenting with fungi that have shown the ability to degrade certain kinds of plastic products, leaving behind a bio-matter that can be more safely disposed of.

• Experiments have been done to see how fungi might be used in cleaning up things like oil spills and found them to be faster and more successful than more conventional clean-up methods. In an experiment on a pile of diesel contaminated debris the fungi succeeded in breaking down the hydrocarbons, absorbing it and rendering it harmless, sprouting mushrooms which produced spores, attracting insects, then the birds which came bringing seeds, and in a short period of time a healthy ecosystem began to develop on what had once been a toxic mess.

• Experiments in using fungi’s enzymes to break down industrial waste from bitumen (a semi-solid form of petroleum) mines, now stored in toxic tailing ponds, and have had encouraging results on a small scale. A biodegradable mat called MycoMat was inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium and then rolled onto tailing ponds or surrounding soil. The mycelium release enzymes that tests showed can digest and eliminate the hydrocarbons in contaminated soil in only 21 days. The problem these tests are looking to solve is huge. Every barrel of bitumen extracted from the oil sands result in 1.5 barrels of tailings waste that requires indefinite containment from the risk of leaching into surrounding soils and contaminating ground water. Managing tailings waste is one of the most difficult environmental challenges facing the oil sands industry to put it mildly. The containment ponds are leaking.

So far, these are limited small scale experiments with intriguing results but this is where the human imagination can go nuts on future possibilities to help clean up the overwhelming pollution we have produced on this planet. I applaud all the brilliant minds turning their attention to novel solutions. That’s on a good day. On another day I despair that it’s all too late. Hmmm. Best to choose it to be a good day.

Nonetheless, as intriguing as these early days experiments are, we may still be pretty far away from anything close to being scalable in nature to deal with this mess. I too have an imagination when I think about unintended consequences – and humans have been notorious for mucking about using one species of something or other to solve a problem caused by another species that turns out to be the makings of an even bigger problem. Perhaps it’s wise to pay attention to the quirky little 1967 tune from Dr. West’s Medicine Show & Junk Band, The Eggplant That Ate Chicago paraphrased:

You’d better watch out for The Eggplant (Mushroom) that ate Chicago

For he may eat your city soon

You’d better watch out for The Eggplant (Mushroom) that ate Chicago

If he’s still hungry the whole country’s doomed

Then there’s the Big Daddy of human industrial waste production – nuclear. After 80 years, over 250,000 tons of nuclear waste sits stored at power plants around the world, piling up with no immediate global solutions in sight. (Exception – Finland is soon to complete the world’s first permanent disposal site for high-level nuclear waste, a project that will bury it 430 meters (1400 feet) into the Earth’s bedrock where it needs to remain undisturbed for 100,000 years.)

In Chernobyl, five years after the 1986 nuclear disaster, robots sent inside the toxic radioactive reactor showed that a jet-black fungus was growing on the inside walls, already doing its thing, attracted on its own to the radioactive material inside (yummy), using it as an energy source and growing.

Around the site, in the contaminated soil, significant amounts of radioactive particles have already been decomposed by soil fungi and over the years new trees and vegetation have grown and birds and wildlife have returned. But they’re not out of the woods (ha) yet, it’s a long term process. Measured radioactive levels have shown recent elevations due to soil disturbance by the Russian army’s invasion and capture of the area (they’ve left as of now).

The research and inventive applications of mycoremediation are really interesting, and could provide some good solutions to various problems. It’s in its infancy and so far, not yet scalable to make much of an immediate dent on some of the pressing environmental problems we face. Still, we absolutely need small scale, local imaginative solutions as well, and lot’s of them.

The fungi timeframe is not the human timeframe. We humans don’t have much time left to solve the problems we have created. Fungi have been around for a billion years and survived 5 previous extinctions on this earth, adapting and laying the groundwork (literally) for other life forms to emerge and populate a new earth. This gives a hint how the mess we’ve made will eventually get cleaned up, long after humans are gone. Fungi will “eat” it.

Next: Speaking of mind blowing – magic in the mushrooms