Liam Gwynn

Psychedelic Renaissance in Humboldt County

By Liam Gwynn

The psychedelic community is blossoming and expanding in new and innovative ways after a resolution was passed in Arcata, Calif. In October of last year, the Arcata city council voted unanimously to decriminalize psychedelic entheogens in Arcata. This decision lessened the police eff ort spent on controlling these substances and in turn allowed those knowledgeable in psilocybin mushrooms to start their own legal gray-area brands through Instagram.

e di erence between one of these Instagram organizations and your typical drug dealer is the presence of branding and intention behind the product being sold. e product is stored in o cial packaging with ingredients and nutritional facts on the back. ey look like products from a wellness store, despite the fact that selling them is still legally dangerous. Decriminalization is not the same thing as legalization, and selling psychoactive substances for the purpose of consumption is still illegal. Even so, several passionate mycologists have taken the fi rst step outside of the black market and created branded products that are easily accessible and open to the public. This legal precarity makes it a dangerous game, yet there isn’t a rush toward full legalization. Instead, there is concern about the possibility of legalization because of the potential over-commercialization and taxation that could follow.

Concerns of the future aside, decriminalization has brought the psychedelic community into the light. From semi-legal Instagram brands to new organizations hosting community events, people are now much less scared of sharing their beliefs and experiences without the fear of legal retribution.

“Psilocybin mushrooms are awesome at creating new neurological pathways in your brain,” said the founder of the Humboldt Mycology profi le. For them, the benefi ts are profound, serving as a creative boost and helping with mental health in a spiritual and physical sense.

Humboldt Mycology @humboldtmycology

Humboldt_Mycology is one of the forerunners in this burgeoning fi eld. They off er a variety of products including exfoliating soaps made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybin microdose pills, the Magic Carpet Truffl e, and the Magic Carpet Bar.

The founder graduated from Cal Poly Humboldt with a degree in Biochemistry and was previously involved with the marijuana industry before switching gears to mycology. They asked not to be named due to legal concerns so we will refer to them as HM here.

“It’s very common right now for a lot of cannabis people in the industry to move towards this psychedelic groove and medicinal mushrooms,” HM said.

These projects aren’t just involving psychedelics. HM mentions how one of their associates is currently working on a form of mycoremediation that allows mycelium to absorb cigarette butts, and another who is developing planters formed out of mycelium.

“It’s kind of turned into like a family in a sense,” said HM referring to the mycology community. “I have a lot of diff erent friends in this community and industry that are just doing so many diff erent projects.” To HM, mushrooms of all types are an overlooked medicine that are often overshadowed by the pharmaceutical industry.

“A big thing with mushrooms, medicinal and psychoactive, is using these mushrooms as medicine and alternatives to our basic lifestyle that we’re kind of brought up in,” HM said.

HM believes that the occasional strong dose of psilocybin can have serious benefi ts for people, but they understand that there is a stigma that keeps people from trying it out. The solution to HM is to start people out with small microdoses to help break down their preconceived notions of what the experience is like.

“You ease people into it and then they see like ‘oh wow, this actually has a benefi t to my life, and my whole life I’ve been taught that all that shits bad for me,’” HM said.

Humboldt Fungi @humboldtfungi

Humboldt Fungi is another Instagram brand off ering psilocybin mushrooms. Their goal is to educate people about mycology and provide a safe and pure way to access psilocybin mushrooms. We’ll refer to the founder as HF here. Humboldt Fungi started off as a profi le through the app iNaturalist. They transitioned into their current platform after decriminalization passed in Arcata.

“What I’m trying to do is use the psychedelics to get people interested in all the other mushrooms,” said HF.

They hope to draw people in who are interested in psychedelics and provide them with a jumping-off point by providing information about a multitude of mushrooms along with the psychoactive ones.

Humboldt Fungi posts pictures of a variety of mushrooms they fi nd foraging in the area and gives information on them. On top of that, they grow psilocybin mushrooms and package them in small jars with branding that they distribute online.

“The cubensis and the psychedelics I grow, I’m growing on a small scale, I’m making sure everything is super clean, and I’m focused on genetics,” HF said. “So I’m focused on all different genetics, I wanna see diff erent morphologies and shapes and sizes of shrooms.”

HF is working at mixing the genetics of diff erent mushrooms in order to create diff erent strains of psychoactive mushrooms.

“The eff ects of these mushrooms with each strain is going to be diff erent, and now we’re getting into that with the testing of these cubensis’,”said HF.

HF isn’t concerned with the safety of this experimentation since psilocybin cannot be overdosed on regardless of the strain.

“You’re not going to overdose on mushrooms(psilocybin mushrooms). It might be mentally overwhelming for a few hours, but if it’s a cubensis mushroom, you’re not going to overdose on that,” said HF.

HF was also originally in the cannabis industry before switching over to mushrooms.

“In that world, it was like super intense, high stress, like always looking over your back,” HF said. “So after like years and years of living that way, the stress starts to build up, and so I

found going out in the forest to be like a therapy.”

In the forest HF started to become more and more interested in mushrooms and through foraging would fi nd an escape from the stress of the cannabis industry. From there they began to research and transition their focus to mushrooms.

HF was originally skeptical of psychedelic mushrooms until they got into a serious car accident and started to look for an alternative solution to western medicine.

“After the car wreck I could tell my brain wasn’t functioning like it used to, so I kinda got into the psychedelics as like a last resort,” said HF.

They didn’t think it would necessarily work at fi rst because of the stigma they once had towards psychoactive mushrooms.

“Once I started taking lion’s mane with a microdose of psilocybin, my brain started to come back and I started to think quicker and things were connecting. I could physically tell a diff erence, and I didn’t believe it would work. I thought it sounded like hokey or was like, you know, bullshit,” said HF.

Despite HF’s enthusiasm around the benefi ts of psychoactive mushrooms, they also have concerns about full legalization and commercialization.

“There’s this rush I think of people that think mushrooms are going to be the next big money maker, and I think that’s pretty sad and I don’t think it’s really realistic,” said HF. They believe that mushrooms should be kept in the decriminalized state despite the legal trouble this could cause for them.

Community

Camryn Hanf is a Cal Poly Humboldt student who runs the social media for the Humboldt Psychedelic Society and Decriminalize Nature Humboldt. She has similar concerns regarding legalization and believes that psychedelics should remain in a decriminalized state.

“In Humboldt County, we can see kind of what went wrong with the cannabis industry, in terms of the access barriers for small farmers and the big corporations swooping in and taking hold of the whole industry, and that’s what we don’t want with psychedelics,” said Hanf.

The Humboldt Psychedelic Society is an organization founded after decriminalization was fi nalized in Arcata last October. They hold integration circles where like-minded psychonauts can unpack their experiences together and equinox socials where they have live music and trivia. They are also advocating to get psychoactive entheogens decriminalized in Humboldt County as a whole.

For Hanf and others in the Humboldt Psychedelic Society, the threat of pharmaceutical companies and government entities intervening is more detrimental than the benefi ts that would come from full legalization.

“There’s plenty of people, especially indigenous cultures that have been using them (psychoactive entheogens) for millennia, who are really the knowledge keepers of these medicines, so we believe that they should not be barred access to them with legalization,” said Hanf.

Decriminalization has expanded the psychedelic community in Arcata and allowed for new groups to form and for people to be more open about their experiences. Problems remain, however: anyone distributing faces a cloud of legal threats, and without federal restrictions, people must place all their trust in a person they likely know very little about. To hopeful community members, decriminalization is still the best outcome. There’s no easy answer to the problem. Legalization brings its own host of issues and many in the community would prefer the risk of facing the law over the threat of psilocybin falling down the path of cannabis.

“Once it goes legal like Cannabis it turns it into something with no love basically,” said HF.

Key Terms

Entheogen: A chemical generally derived from diff erent plant species, that when ingested produces an altered state of consciousness for a religious or sacred context.

Psilocybin: An alkaloid with hallucinogenic aff ects found in some species of fungi.

Mycromediation: The practice of utilizing fungi as a way to purify a contanimated environment.

Mycelium: The root-like structure of a fungus made up of white fi laments called hphae.