Original subtitles

[ Thunder rumbling ]

Morris: The Zapotec Indians believed that fungi would emerge

as a response to lightning striking the Earth.

Now we understand that mushrooms exist to release spores

into the environment, but why some produce psilocybin

has yet to be explained.

[ Thunder rumbling ]

I've been fascinated by psychoactive drugs

my whole life.

I love to study their chemistry and impact on society.

And my work has allowed me to investigate

extraordinary substances around the world.

Yet there are still mysteries that remain.

They grew in hiding for hundreds of years.

Now their fruits are ready to be seen.

This is the story of psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

**

I'd been hoping to interview a clandestine mushroom grower

for months but expected them to be a secretive

and untrusting bunch.

I knew I'd have to use advanced investigatory tactics

to infiltrate their inner circle.

So it was on Instagram that I found a mushroom syndicate

named Myco Mob who I knew possessed

the skills and experience to tell me about

the inner workings of the underground mushroom trade.

A few P.M.s and emojis later, I was on my way

to meet them eye to eye.

Driving to this undisclosed location

that I will not name on camera because it houses

one of the largest clandestine mushroom grow rooms

in North America.

This grow room is capable of producing tens of pounds

of mushrooms every week.

Oh, wow. Very nice.

Do you want to tell me about all these tubs

or what's going on right now? What am I looking at?

Well, these are all mono tubs.

Just the one strain, Golden Teacher,

going on right now.

Why Golden Teacher?

It's a good strain that people

will enjoy and stuff like that.

And you rarely have bad trips on them.

What is the demand?

Very high.

How high?

Well, we can sell them as fast as we grow them.

Since the beginning of clandestine mushroom

cultivation, virtually all growers

have favored the same species -- psilocybe cubensis.

It's not the largest or the most potent,

but it's highly adaptable to the needs of humans

who control its artificial propagation.

After decades of genetic manipulation,

these strains won't survive in nature without the human hand,

and humans couldn't have bred them

without the guiding hand of nature.

How does one learn to do this?

Doing lots of research, lots of trial and error.

It seems very friendly to me.

But I guess this is also a somewhat sketchy thing.

It's definitely still illegal.

That's why we're wearing masks.

Like a room where a surgical procedure

is performed, a mushroom grow chamber must be almost

completely sterile, as sterile as possible,

because any contamination that enters these bins

could destroy the entire crop, and this crop represents

months of work, years of research,

and thousands of dollars.

Oh, wow.

Some pretty decent-sized pins.

It'll be full-sized mushrooms within a day, maybe two days.

Just the fact that you have to disguise your identity

says a lot about this sort of work.

What do you think about the laws surrounding mushrooms.

Well, I think they're created by people who had no idea

about anything about mushrooms.

Most people who do make those laws --

They've never tried these things.

They're probably the worst person to ask,

the least informed.

Can you tell me a little bit about how this sort of work

differs from other realms in the drug-dealing world?

Well, I'd say it's a lot safer. That's for sure.

Being a meth dealer and a heroin dealer,

you'd definitely be [chuckles] susceptible to a lot

of the dangers of the street, right?

Like, mushrooms are a pretty calm market.

People don't really have, like, battles or wars or...

It's not really as contested over

as a lot of other drug markets.

It's more peaceful. Oh, for sure, yeah.

Have you heard anything about the way people

use these mushrooms in Mexico?

Ritualistic ceremonies?

What do you know about them?

I don't know much at all.

Have you heard about Maria Sabina?

No. No. What is that?

She was an important mushroom shamanist who was considered

responsible for introducing mushrooms to the world

outside Mexico.

Morris: With the international abundance of

psilocybin-containing fungi, it's hard to imagine

that a mere 60 years ago, their existence was only known

to a small number of indigenous healers.

But that was changed by the work of a Mazatec shaman

Maria Sabina.

Hola.

Ah, sí.

Gracias. Uh-huh.

Morris: Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in Mexico,

and these indigenous regions are especially poor.

They are high in the mountains, and it's certainly

not convenient in terms of accessing

the rest of the world.

So it's an unlikely place to be as developed as it is.

They have Internet here.

There's hot water and electricity.

And most of that is thanks to Maria Sabina.

Maria Sabina was a locally renowned shaman

who used mushrooms ceremonially

for spiritual and diagnostic purposes.

But she became world-famous when she introduced her mushrooms

to a banker named Gordon Wasson, who wrote a widely-read article

about the mushrooms in 1957.

This led to the Western world's first exposure

to the concept of magic mushrooms.

Countercultural celebrities like John Lennon, Bob Dylan,

Janis Joplin, and to a lesser extent, Pelé

are reported to have made pilgrimages to Huautla

to experience one of Maria Sabina's

famous mushroom ceremonies.

As a result, Huautla de Jiménez became the most populous

and prosperous town in the Sierra Mazateca.

At the home of Maria Sabina, I met with her grandson

Filogonio Garcia, who studied under her as a child

and became a mushroom shaman himself.

But now I understand that no one in Huautla

is collecting their own mushrooms.

How does that work?

I left Filogonio with the hopes of observing

a mushroom ceremony, but at the height

of the dry season, the crucial ingredient was missing.

Huautla is an unusual city. It's famous for mushrooms.

People come here to undergo traditional mushroom ceremonies.

They come here to buy mushrooms.

But it's not a place people go to hunt for mushrooms.

The spots where the mushrooms grow are very secret.

They're places that the shamans

don't necessarily even know about themselves.

There's a small number of people in this community

that go out into the mountains and they collect mushrooms

and they don't tell anyone where they find them

because that's their source of income.

There are three species of mushroom

recognized by the Mazatec shaman.

San Isidro, or psilocybe cubensis,

pajaritos, or psilocybe Mexicana,

and the derrumbe, which can be either

psilocybe caerulescens or psilocybe zapotecorum.

But finding them in the wild has proven to be difficult.

I met with a local mushroom enthusiast

outside my hotel who told me he didn't know where they grew

but suggested I talk to an artist who uses mushrooms

to inspire his paintings.

The artist showed me his work but also didn't know

where they grew and told me to talk to his friend Jose,

who composes mushroom-inspired music.

Jose played me a few of his songs...

[ Chanting in Spanish ]

...but said he hadn't seen fresh mushrooms for months

and mentioned a friend named Charlie who had.

Great. Okay, thanks.

Charlie had been indulging in cane spirits...

...but assured me I wouldn't have trouble

finding mushrooms for a ceremony.

And offered me the phone number of a local named Gerardo.

When I texted Gerardo, he responded with a photo

depicting caerulescens of unspeakable enormity.

And so the hunt began.

Morris: The next day, I met with Gerardo

to discuss his tantalizing caerulescens photo,

and he told me of a private mountaintop garden

where the mushrooms grow.

Maria Sabina's great-grandson was as interested as I was,

so he tagged along.

Hola, Señor.

At the top of the mountain, we arrived at the home

of a man named Imalfo, who is cultivating mushrooms

in a fenced-off garden fertilized with sugar-cane pulp.

Oh, wow, there's actually hundreds

of psilocybe caerulescens.

They're the largest I've ever seen.

They're just enormous.

Textbook psilocybe caerulescens.

Look at the hygrophanous cap.

You can see that the margin is two

different colors from moisture.

And they are absolutely amazing. They're very potent by weight.

They contain high levels of psilocin and psilocybin.

[ Chuckles ]

I've never seen so many of this type of mushroom before.

It's amazing.

This mushroom is very rare where I come from.

Why are these mushrooms so large?

The whole thing? Sí.

Mmm.

That's nice. Gracias.

Ah. [ Chuckles ]

Gracias.

[ Chuckles ]

Oh, wow.

That's a lot of dried mushrooms.

So you are -- you are able to dry these mushrooms.

10 ounces of dried psilocybe caerulescens up here.

This really is a magical garden that you have. Unbelievable.

Are these all from this season?

So, I think this is where the cane processing goes on,

and I can already see probably 100 drying mushrooms

over here on this altar with a depiction of Jesus.

And here there are thousands more.

Wow.

**

Your friend who brought me here was encouraging me

to eat the mushrooms outside of a medical

or ceremonial context.

What do you think of that?

Hmm. And that's an internal thing?

I do that silently in my head?

So I'm starting to trip from the mushrooms

that your friend gave me.

What do you think I should do?

All right.

It's very beautiful.

Far from the city center of Huautla,

Imalfo lived in relative isolation.

He spoke no Spanish and truly believed mushrooms

are a sacrament that should never be exchanged for money.

All these mushrooms were just picked from the garden,

and they're amazing-looking.

As a parting gift, he insisted I take a bag

of fresh psilocybe caerulescens from his garden

for ceremonial use.

**

People that love mushrooms -- mycophiles --

have their own rituals and traditions

when they hunt for mushrooms.

One of them is taking spore prints,

which aids identification but also allows someone

to save the spores of the mushroom,

which is the entire biological purpose

that the mushroom exists.

It allows you to propagate the mushroom.

It allows you to verify the identity of the species.

And it's one of the only ways of preserving something

that otherwise begins to deteriorate very quickly.

Spore prints have been used to identify mushrooms

for almost 200 years.

But not everyone is using spores for taxonomic analysis.

Morris: Fungi reproduce by releasing spores

into the environment.

Like seeds, the spores germinate

once they've found a suitable substrate.

But unlike seeds, they're haploid

and require the genetic material from another spore

to produce a dykariotic fungus capable of sexual reproduction.

A single mushroom can release tens of thousands of them

into the environment.

What I'm doing here is putting some spores

onto a couple of sterilized agar dishes that I've got here.

Morris: Agar is a gelatinous growth substrate obtained from seaweed.

It's widely used for isolating pure cultures.

Cyanescens spores. Lighter.

And my little craft knife/scalpel thing.

Morris: In nature, fungi can live in harmony with other organisms,

but when isolated from their natural environment

and placed on high-nutrient media,

the presence of competing microorganisms

creates a fierce battle between the desired fungus

and a diverse ecology of contaminants.

Eyeball #1: Most of the stuff that I've learned is just

general information on the Internet

that I've just done experiments with other things

and different variables and came up

with a method that works.

You're gonna want to scrape up some of this print.

Several prints. It's a ton of prints.

Whenever anyone collects mushroom spores in the wild,

they can be used for this sort of a process --

to inoculate either agar or even grain,

and then you can select the strain and transfer it

into a suitable growth substrate.

These are from nature, so it's pretty hard to tell

how clean they're gonna be or any of that.

All right, the craft knife down.

Screw the tops on.

After an agar wedge is removed

and has been used to inoculate a jar of sterilized grain,

the jar is ready to spend the next month in the dark room,

where it begins to culminize.

The mycelium is a dense web of microscopic fibers

that can be seen by the naked eye

as it engulfs and consumes its substrate.

Welcome to our abode. [ Chuckles ]

Oh, wow, this is huge.

This is where the magic before the magic happens.

The mycelium is growing from one grain to another.

It's taken over the whole jar.

It looks beautiful.

You know, it just looks...flawless.

How many jars are here?

Down here they have enough to make about eight more totes.

So, totes.

After we clone them jar-to-jar

or we put some spores in there,

they'll come into here so that they can inoculate.

[ Chuckles ] It takes a lot of work --

cleaning stuff, shaking up these jars, fanning them.

So why do it?

Growing shit -- Everybody loves growing shit.

People like watching babies grow and shit.

I like watching these babies grow. [ Chuckles ]

But...that

and the money, you know?

There's another type of mycophile

who cares not for cultivation but for the thrill

of discovering new species in the wild.

Rockefeller: Here's a little marasmius.

Oh, wow, look at that. Auriscalpium vulgare.

This is an amanita from section vaginatae.

Oh, wow. That is psilocybe Mexicana.

Amazing. This is the first time I've ever seen this.

Morris: Alan Rockefeller has been studying

the distribution of psilocybe in Mexico

for more than a decade.

Rockefeller: Here's a really cool xylaria.

Another amanita from section Lepidella.

Some of these are deadly and others are edible.

Morris: Is that amanita muscaria?

Ha. It is.

A new species of Mexican bioluminescent Mycena.

Yep. Psathyrella.

Psathyrella.

This is something I've never seen before.

Holy moly.

That's insane.

Is that part of the fungus?

Yeah. What?!

What is this? I don't know.

Uh, does somebody have a bag for this giant

dangling cluster of pseudofistulina.

Morris: Alan travels each year from his home in Oakland

to Mexico, where he spends months

photographing and discovering new species of fungi.

Rockefeller: It's a very unique habitat in that the clouds

come in about 3:00 p.m. every day

and the whole place fills up with fog.

And it makes it a really interesting and diverse place

for plants and mushrooms, too.

How did you find this location?

I spent a long time looking for it

and driving around the different cloud forests of Mexico.

And whenever you see a landslide,

you check the bottom of the landslides near the river.

The place we're going in is over here.

When did the interest or the obsession

with mushrooms begin?

Rockefeller: I was walking in the forests.

I took a hike,

and there was mushrooms everywhere.

And I wanted to learn which ones were poisonous,

which ones were edible, which ones were rare,

which ones were psychoactive.

And so I just started taking pictures of them

and bringing them home, doing spore prints,

and studying.

We'll have to cross to get in there

'cause you can't really pass there.

I've written a lot of Wikipedia articles

and edited a lot of Wikipedia articles,

and I like to take really nice pictures of mushrooms

and put them into Wikipedia.

Morris: Were you interested in the psychedelic mushrooms

before any of this?

Rockefeller: I was interested in the psychedelic ones,

but it's not really my favorite thing.

And the edibles are not really my focus.

My focus is really cool, rare stuff --

species that people have never discovered before.

These really interesting, unusual,

beautiful-looking mushrooms.

You know, I'll be here in Mexico for about four months,

pretty much camping out every night

and hunting mushrooms all day

and doing microscope work in the evenings

around the campfire.

Morris: They're just glorious.

Rockefeller: They really are.

It's probably the most beautiful psilocybe in the world.

And this is the best spot I've found in all of Mexico.

Flocko stem is really distinct in zapotecorum

and the veil remnants around the pilus margin --

dark-purple-brown spore prints.

They're all over the caps that are adjacent.

And here's a cool spore print on the stem.

You can see blue bruising right there.

You can see zapotecorum is almost

the only mushroom that grows here.

And it's not a coincidence.

Um, they really like these landslide areas,

but not a very fresh landslide.

They like landslides that are a few years old.

Morris: It's one of the largest, one of the most beautiful,

one of the most potent psilocybin-contained

mushroom species, and I've never seen it in nature before.

It's truly a glorious thing to behold.

This is one of the original ones that was used

by the Aztecs, right?

Yeah, and the Zapotecas.

It's named after the Zapotecas.

And it's pretty hard to find.

In Mexico, the use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms

can be traced back to ancient civilizations

like the Aztec empire, where they were consumed

in conjunction with ritualistic suicide and human sacrifice.

Guzmán: Ah, this is gymnopilus purpuatus.

This is a special house psilocybin.

At the University of Guadalajara's Fungarium,

I met with mycologist Laura Guzmán,

daughter of the legendary Gastón Guzmán,

the leading expert on the taxonomy

of the genus psilocybe.

And this also is a hallucinogenic

house psilocybin, that.

And this was described in -- many years ago.

1909. 1909.

Wow. Yeah.

The discovery that psilocybe Cubensis

in the United States produced the same effect

as the San Isidro of Mexico sent a new generation

of mycophiles onto private cow pastures.

Man: We've got two pastures next to each other right there.

A friend of mine's got the other one.

And I was going down through there

and looked out in Bill's pasture.

This guy's walking around out there with a bag.

I let him get about from here to that fence from me

right there and I said, "What are you doing?"

I had that rifle.

That poor boy -- It scared him so bad.

Oh, my gosh. And I said, "How'd you get in here?"

And he said, "I walked across

from those apartments over there."

And I said, "Well, get back across that road,

and don't come over here again."

Morris: Conservative farm owners

were dismayed to find the dung of their cattle

was the preferred substrate

for a mind-altering drug.

Why don't you want people on your land picking mushrooms?

Because it's a liability.

They get on there and get hurt and turn around and sue you.

And I think it's a stupid thing to do.

I don't use drugs, and I don't think anybody else should.

I think it's a drag on society.

And you get these people that are addicted,

then all they want to do is lay around and do damn drugs

and don't go to work and collect welfare. So...

From mushrooms? I don't know what it is.

Maybe you start on mushrooms and then you go to marijuana

and next thing you're on crack or -- I don't know.

It's a -- Maybe it's an entry drug, you know.

[ Clears throat ] Do something.

Don't be on --

getting out here and making mushroom milkshakes

or whatever they do with it

instead of going to work, you know?

I'm -- [Clears throat] There's too many good things

to do in life besides that.

Without a history of shamanism or training in identification,

the mushroom pickers of Florida have still forged

a relationship with the fungus.

Riley: Uh, In the state of Florida,

I mean, it could go all year round.

It really depends on our rain season and our winter.

If our winter doesn't come in harsh,

you pick all the way around from January to January.

How'd you become interested in mushrooms?

Um, I guess you could say I kind of one day --

I don't really know exactly how to put it,

but I just felt like it was time

to go pick some mushrooms,

try -- try to see what the whole --

I guess you could say the trip was about.

After that, more -- more of my friends

started talking to me about mushroom picking

and stuff like that, so got me hooked on it

after a little while.

After that, it was more spiritual

than it was of a medicinal use.

You know, I wasn't using it just to get high from mushrooms,

but instead, using it to seek more knowledge --

energy fields, I guess you'd call them.

Psilocybin is definitely something

a lot of people seek -- inner connection.

I wouldn't be proud of it, but I started selling them a lot, too.

Most of my things with mushrooms that I've come to knowledge

is all off -- based off theory and experience

and small amounts of research.

I'm not too -- too good in a school

and do good -- do good in school.

Glad I didn't drop out.

Exciting. Exciting.

[ Sighs ]

**

Morris: [ Sighs ] I'm sweating up a storm.

Sweatily walking through this cow pasture,

inspecting cow dung for the presence of psilocybe cubensis.

Riley: And there's those white ones.

And here's a nice golden-topped one right there -- beautiful.

This is a really gorgeous one.

That's a nice, elegant, fully opened cap.

May have been another mushroom growing above it.

There's almost a ring of purple around the margin.

This is a classic textbook psilocybe cubensis.

I always look at...

This is a field of nothing but psilocybe cubensis.

Florida -- psilocybe cubensis land.

Man: I never understood how people have bad trips on mushrooms

'cause of the overwhelming joy that I feel

every time I do them.

It's weird 'cause it's not like ecstasy,

where it just, like, pumps you full of happiness

and then you come down and you're sad.

It's like -- It's like a lasting peace.

There's a vehicle coming down this trail.

[ Engine rumbling ]

That thing sounds like an excavator.

[ Horn honks ]

Morris: I recovered my non-psychoactive

panaeolus antillarum and returned to the hunt.

Do any of you use mushrooms with your family?

Would you like to do that?

Yes, definitely.

Definitely. That would be awesome.

It would be an awesome experience just to take it

all in, see how they'd react on them,

see how they maybe inform me while --

while under the influence of psilocybin.

Or maybe some words of wisdom that they could possibly give me.

It would be pretty cool to see what they would --

You know what I mean? They might be more philosophical.

Exactly.

While most Americans wouldn't consider

the psychedelic experience something to be shared

with family, amongst the shamans of Huautla,

it would be unnatural to do it any other way.

**

[ Speaks Spanish ]

Thank you, Maria Sabina, for allowing

Gordon Wasson into your home.

I think that hundreds of thousands,

or millions of people have benefited

because of your generosity and the way that you shared

information with outsiders, which is a good thing.

31 years after Maria Sabina's death,

the use of psilocybin is being recognized

by the medical establishment for treatment of depression,

cluster headache, OCD, and addiction.

And as I head to a ceremony with Filogonio,

I remember that medicinal use in his family

is where it all began.

[ Insects buzzing ]

[ Rain falling ]

Morris: At the top of the hill overlooking Huautla de Jiménez,

Filogonio is preparing a ceremony for his son,

who's struggling with alcoholism, his wife,

who's losing her eyesight, and me.

I have mild psoriasis.

[ Speaking Spanish ]

This ceremony begins with Filogonio

cleansing the mushrooms I gathered

from the sugarcane garden with smoke from copal incense

that's been used as an offering to the gods

since the Aztec and Mayan empire.

Garcia: [ Speaking Spanish ]

[ Speaking Spanish continues ]

[ Speaking Spanish ]

[ Rain falling ]

[ Thunder rumbling ]

[ Speaking Spanish ]

[ Thunder rumbling ]

Woman: [ Chanting in Spanish ]

Man: [ Whistling ]

[ Thunder crashes ]

[ Speaking Spanish ]

[ Thunder rumbles ]

[ Speaking Spanish ]

[ Spits ]

[ Retching ]

[ Speaking Spanish ]

Gracias. [ Speaks Spanish ]

[ Laughs ]

Sí.

Hmm.

I thought it was nice that sort of psychedelic use

could bring many families together.

I'm sure there's families all over the planet

that would benefit from this sort of ritual

sitting in a nice shack in the rain, burning incense

and candlelight and sitting together

and talking about health problems and eating mushrooms

and feeling better.

By tracing the history of psilocybin-containing mushrooms,

I've seen the way Maria Sabina's greatest contribution

has changed our culture, and in turn,

the way our culture has changed the mushroom.

It's very clear that Myco Mob and their tubs and jars,

Riley and his cow pastures,

Filogonio and his family,

Alan Rockefeller and his taxonomical quest...

Oh, wow. Look at that. Auriscalpium vulgare.

...have all furthered the human-mushroom partnership

in their own way.

And when we become a society that can embrace the mushroom,

then and only then...

can we embrace each other.

Gracias.

**