Peter Attia· MD
okay let's talk about its cousin psilocybin yes psilocybin of course has been around a lot longer sort of cybin is a present in mushrooms there are about 200 species of magic mushrooms different ones in different parts of the world uh it was it was really the beginnings of the psychedelic revolution where lsd and hoffman and um gordon watson the american mycologist who discovered a a tribe in mexico that were using mushrooms for psychedelic experiences and and actually went and exposed them and actually rather destroyed their culture by making it a target for for tourism so psychedelic mushrooms have been around forever because mushrooms have been around away before humans one of the interesting theories about hinduism you often often wonder you know why the hindu gods have so many arms probably because the first people that became hindus have been using this this cocktail called soma which of course was the term was adopted by aldous huxley and bravely word but but the real soma was a powerful mixture probably of magic mushrooms of ephedra and cannabis you mix that a lot together it's not surprising your elephants have five heads and four arms so so magic mushrooms have been around in many cultures for for millennia the cytosine has been the active ingredient was also discovered by hoffman because watson went in and said why is this causing hallucinations like lsd and he said oh well because it looks a bit like serotonin a bit like lsd and um and we've been working now with psylocybin um for a number of reasons the the the main one is that um it doesn't have the stigma lsd you say lsd to a politician and they immediately turn off you know they lsd is a bad thing whereas cytosimin they don't know how to say it they don't have to spell it they don't know what you're talking about and who's how can you be worried about magic that's only a mushroom the second reason we started using cytosim was because we didn't have safety really good safety data on any of these but we did know that in britain magic mushrooms were legal until 2005 and we knew about a million young people a year were using mushrooms and we persuaded our regulators they could let us use mushrooms because that body of evidence of safety was adequate and they said okay what led to the scheduling only 15 years ago i mean what what was happening that in 2005 they said we've got to ban this thing it's complicated so the active ingredient psilocybin was banned in 71 alongside lsd dmt but the mushrooms weren't banned why would you ban the mushrooms they don't have much of it and who cares if people are going to go and lie on the side of the mountain and you know see pretty pictures in the sky but what happened was that a couple of uh head shops in camden town north london started selling freeze-dried mushrooms so they would concentrate the dose like you could take more of it or was it just the fact that it was being sold commercially in the headshot it could be sold in london and so no one really cares if people go and you know line up you know on a hillside in devon that's quite fun but if someone's selling a dangerous psychedelic drug to our young people in london the right-wing press just went ape and we had these are probably the same shops that sold doc martens by the way because i know those head shops