Even though visitors from all over the world come to Mexico to trip on magic mushrooms, the use of psychedelic mushrooms is officially prohibited. That has to change, according to enthusiasts – but now also politicians.
The petite Braulia Velásquez (56) cuts a coconut into flakes. Two logs are smoldering under a steaming black pot. She herself is depicted on a wall of her cottage: grooves in her painted face, seven magical mushrooms in her hands, purple, rising auras around her head. Not long ago, she claims, her magic mushrooms cured an old woman of cancer.
Deep in the southern mountains of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the magic mushroom actually magic. if curandera – healer or healer – Velásquez has been accompanying people for years on their mind-blowing journeys in the village of San Mateo Rio Hondo. She herself ate her first “holy children” when she was 7. The hallucinogenic mushrooms pointed her to a place where many fish swam, suddenly her poor family had something to eat. Since then, the mushrooms have been her guides.
She developed her own ritual, with a candle, a white and a red flower, parsley, basil and spearmint, ‘against negative energy’. The magic mushroom is good for body and mind, she believes, and it is also effective for fear and mourning. She herself finds comfort in the mushrooms when she is sad. The silent mountains form its mystical backdrop. Cumulus clouds stick to the green tops like cotton wool at an altitude of 2500 meters, sunlight between shadows makes colors sparkle.
San Mateo Rio Hondo, like the nearby village of San José del Pacifico, known as mushroom community, is a place that attracts visitors from all over the world for roughly three reasons: a desire for a spiritual experience, a trip for fun or healing from ailments . For the first reason, the mushroom is (a little) tolerated in Mexico, for the second it is banned and for the latter scientists hope that the ban will disappear.
Because although research has never shown that the fungi of the genus Psilocybe can cure a disease such as cancer, Velásquez’s magic mushrooms do have healing properties. The hallucinatory substances psilocybin and psilocin can help fight addiction and depression, according to research from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA.
That realization has also (or actually: again) penetrated Mexico, where the magic mushroom is experiencing a slow but certain reappraisal. The ruling party Morena submitted a proposal last year to remove the Psilocybe from the criminal law. “The challenge is to break through Western thinking,” parliamentarian Armando Contreras said on the phone. “The magic mushroom still has the same status as cocaine and heroin.”
The delegate from Oaxaca is awaiting a response from the Mexican health care authority. ‘I’m lobbying a lot there. Scientists and indigenous communities should have free access to the magic mushroom.’ If the government gives the green light, the mushroom could already become legal in Mexico this year. A parliamentary majority supports the proposal, Contreras said. He even dreams of a handful of indigenous mushroom centers in the capital Mexico City. ‘Just like you have cannabis shops in the Netherlands.’
Place of pilgrimage for hippies
Until then, healer Velásquez is a criminal under the law who could face up to 25 years in prison. Her life spans the modern history of the magic mushroom, in which the fungus transformed from a much-loved natural variant of LSD and a promising object of study to a strictly banned substance. Mexico plays a leading role in that story. In another mountain village about 300 kilometers north of San Mateo, the indigenous shaman María Sabina first shared the secret of the “holy children” with a Westerner in 1955.
American banker Robert Gordon Wasson spent his free time searching for native mushroom rituals. In a remote village of the Mazatec people he had a bite that summer. Shaman Sabina took him on the journey of a lifetime, an experience ‘no anthropologist had ever experienced before’. In the dark, accompanied by her hypnotic voice, a hatch in his brain opened.
Two years later he reported in the magazine life† He was ‘awestruck‘ he wrote, completely taken aback. “It was as if the walls dissolved and my mind took flight. Suspended in the air I looked out over endless mountains over which camel caravans moved slowly.’ The words ‘bad trip’ did not appear in that piece yet. Within a few years, the village of Huautla de Jiménez became a place of pilgrimage for (mainly) American hippies. Rumors that musicians such as Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and John Lennon would find inspiration from Sabina contributed to her worldwide fame. She died in 1985.
In 1970, Republican Richard Nixon – in the midst of the Cold War – drew a line through all means that turned young Americans into ‘love and peace’ propagating thugs. The following year, the United Nations also labeled the magic mushroom an addictive and dangerous drug, says Mexican mycologist (fungal) Laura Guzmán, of the University of Guadalajara. “Mexico finally banned the mushroom in 1984, after all the trouble the hippies brought with them.” The law only provides an exception for indigenous ritual use.
Scientist Guzmán is still struggling with the consequences: ‘It happens that during field research we are stopped by the military and have to hand in our mushrooms.’ Recently, the Mexican judiciary called on its expertise: whether the mushrooms that two arrested young people were carrying were of the prohibited type. “That’s right,” she wrote reluctantly in her report. “And it’s time for the ban to be lifted,” she added. The boys spent several days in jail.
That battle for the magic mushroom also continues in the mountain village of San Mateo Rio Hondo. The type of tourist that shaman Sabina nearly perished also defies the peace of mind of healer Velásquez. ‘Braulia’, they tell her, ‘we want to go crazy.’ How she would like to keep those young people out of her village and only receive people like the 94-year-old woman with cancer who visited her in August. ‘I put her in my bed. The mushrooms did their job.’ The woman got up the next day without pain. “She said, I’m hungry, I want a taco.”
Magic mushrooms against depression and anxiety
In San José, a noisy string of small hotels and restaurants that sits right on the winding highway halfway between Oaxaca City and the Pacific coast, the backpacker looking for a trip has already won the battle. The slightly more remote San Mateo seems to meet the same fate. Next to the church, psychedelic murals advertise the magic mushroom. In the wet season, from June onwards, seven species of hallucinogenic fungi grow in the area. The government has so far tolerated the lively mushroom trade that has developed in the villages.
curandera Braulia Velásquez sees herself as the true guardian of the magic mushroom and looks with horror at the hippie newcomers who manage a kind of youth center next to her house. There is on the wall a painting of a smoking skull. The bearded Bernardo Flores (34) from the Mexican state of Puebla has been coming to San Mateo since 2002. It took him two years to get the powerful Psilocybe zapotecorum to find, he says. It was worth it: ‘A trip that lasted twelve hours, wooow† His eyes sparkle. “I had two foxes on either side. If I looked at one, the other grew. Suddenly I heard hiss, I was surrounded by snakes.’
Like Wasson at the time, Flores fell in love with the magic mushrooms. His quest goes beyond the mushroom trip, he arrived in the village with a book by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, a pioneer in the research into tripping agents. Flores now shares his knowledge with kindred spirits, such as the tourists who take part in his ‘multi-art jam’ this afternoon. A young Mexican woman tattoos the leg of a Costa Rican tourist. Forties Laura from Italy cuddles with a Mexican hairless dog. For those who want, there is clay and paint – and cookies with and without cannabis.
Researcher Guzmán hopes that more than half a century after Woodstock and Nixon, magic mushrooms can finally break free from those two extreme images, of a life-threatening drug on the one hand and a hippie symbol on the other. She would like to research the microdoses of the dried powdered mushroom that are sold clandestinely on the internet. ‘There are indications that small doses of psilocybin also help against depression and anxiety. But the law forbids us to test this.’
Her colleagues abroad are more fortunate. They have been leading the way in new curiosity about the magic mushroom for several years now. In 2019, Imperial College London and the American John Hopkins University opened dedicated research centers. “Two doses of psilocybin relieve major depression for a month,” the latter stated in 2020. The Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi last year showed an audience of millions a new side of (magic) mushrooms.
Almost fifty years ago, Velásquez came to the same insights when she took her first bite of mushroom as a girl. If she’s feeling bad, she says, she’ll take a “family” of mushrooms. ‘Before my eyes they turn into persons and give advice.’ She runs her knife through the coconut, bits of white flesh fall into the tub on her lap. All knowledge about the mushroom is in the mushroom, she says. “They are our masters, our therapists, our doctors.”