I suffer from a few odd mental blind spots occasionally, and one of them is straight-up forgetting that because I’ve been doing this for a few years now I’ve absorbed a fair bit of knowledge, and not everyone’s had that amount of time with the hobby so there’s a few bits they might not know yet. I’m a voracious reader, and that, coupled with the ADHD, means that when I get into something I really get into it. Full-on "cannot-help-myself-I-am-going-to-read-everything-about-this" kicks in and that’ll usually be within the first few days of finding out about something new that for some reason has interested me.

And so it was with mushrooms, and magic mushrooms in particular. I was fascinated by so much of this odd little niche: the fact there’s a growing subculture surrounding it all, and the way it used to legal to possess them in the UK so you could pick them (and you could buy them fresh all over the country), but then the Government decided that they’d be legal up till Monday 17th June 2005, but on the 18th of June all of a sudden they’re a Class A drug. How fucking weird, I thought.

Pretty sure that says 40g=£10 which is certainly value for money

The long and short of it is this part of the snappily-titled “EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM TO THE MISUSE OF DRUGS (AMENDMENT) (NO. 2) REGULATIONS 2005 NO.1653“:

The United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances 1971 places psilocin in Schedule 1, the highest level of control. It has long been designated as having no recognised medicinal use. The Order extends the designation as there is no recognised medicinal use for magic mushrooms.

So what’s happened here is that typical post-1960’s “all drugs are bad” dogma meant that someone over at the United Nations decided that there was zero medicinal use (which I don’t think many people would agree with these days given that they're actually fucking trialling it medicinally now), and psilocin would be placed up there with your heroin and your crack and all the other things it’s got fuck-all in common with. All countries who were part of the UN had to make this part of the law. Whoooooo, okay. Sure hope that party in the sixties was worth it because the comedown guilt seems to have them hard.

The UK government then did what it does best and fucked it all up by being super unclear on their definitions, so magic mushrooms were still fine as long as you didn’t prepare them in any way, and nobody ever did, I’m sure. Sterling work. Eventually they decide that because there are around 400 registered businesses selling magic mushrooms in shops throughout the UK they should put a stop to this and so they amend the law to say that now any mushroom that contains psilocin or psilocybin is also a drug itself, not just the psilocin or psilocybin. 

I’ve had a good look through that Explanatory Memorandum, and it does explain something that I’d previously missed. If you’ve got magic mushrooms growing on your land, you’re okay to pick them as long as you’re going to destroy them or hand them over to a cop. Makes sense, as otherwise most of the farmers down where I live would be spending less time tonguing Clarkson’s asshole and more time making Super Noodles in a prison kettle. But also, and this is the typical “here comes the government oops they’ve tripped and their pants have fallen off” kind of caveat I’ve come to expect: anyone’s allowed to pick them for destroying or wasting on a cop, and they’re also allowed to give them to whoever they like to do the same, and you’re okay to change your mind about whether you want to destroy them or give them to a cop. So really, you’re doing what is essentially post-festival cleanup work by removing those dangerous magic mushrooms from those fields in order to destroy them in a safe place. Your “Civic Duty” scout badge is in the post.

Cosplayed as a farmer to avoid inheritance tax, ruined it for all of them by being so blatant about it, and yet they love him still because he's the apex gammon

So: (and I hope this is obvious at this point) I sell the spores of mushrooms that you can’t grow here in the UK. Obviously, because of that, I don’t grow them here. Neither should you. The spores though, are totally legal, as the law is very specific (hahahahaha) now that the factor that makes a mushroom into a lump of heroin is the presence of psilocin or psilocybin, which spores do not and cannot have in them. This makes spores a handy way of retaining that genetic information from a lifeform that I think is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.

This genetic info can be stored in a few ways, as spores are resilient little fuckers. However, the way you collect the spores can be different sometimes depending on the mushroom you gather them from – this is why I don’t have spore syringes available for, say, Jack Frost. The more “out there” presentations of the fruiting bodies tend to not drop a lot in the way of spores, because they’ve never had to evolve that way. You wouldn’t get a print off them. There’s still more than enough there to gather on a sterile swab though, so we can preserve the phenotype.

This is Enigma if you're wondering. Get a spore print from that, eh?

You can obviously produce pretty gnarly spore prints from your standard Psilocybe Cubensis as (mutations notwithstanding) they’ve got very standard looking caps and they drop millions upon millions of spores. Lovely. The prints can be made into syringes for the sake of ease in getting the spores onto your microscope slides (or if you live in a legal country, your inoculation media) if needed, or you could store the print for years and years.

And then you’ve got the naughty Norman Price of the spore syringe world, the liquid culture syringe. These are fucking great, because they’re easy to make from spores (but ideally agar), very quick to colonise, and you can check if your entire liquid culture jar is clean before you use it. But, and here’s the rub, you can only do this with gourmet varieties in this country, because like I wrote up there, once the mycelium starts growing it’s a fungus, and it’s got a tiny amount of psilocin in, and that makes it naughty. This is why I don’t sell liquid culture just in case you are one of the many people that have emailed about it – it’s not because I don’t know what it is and I’m missing a trick, it’s because I do know what it is, and everything I sell is very strictly legal.

So that, in short, is why I sell the different types of spores in the various ways that I do. Hope it helps, all the best!

OTC