This is a review of the audio version of "Psilocybin Mushrooms: A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide, Tips and Tricks to Grow Magic Mushrooms and Advanced methods to cultivate high quality psychedelic magic mushrooms"1 by Edward Lewis, which was published on Everand.com on August 2, 2023. Please note that there are two text versions23 of a book also called "Psilocybin Mushrooms" by Edward Lewis but with unique subtitles, both published on Everand on the same date as the audiobook.
The third sentence of the author's introduction to this book begins as follows:
"Psilocybin mushrooms are surprisingly easy to grow."
What?! Readers will find this statement increasingly hilarious as they make their way through this book of highly detailed steps, any one of which could spoil the growing process if mishandled or ignored. The PF Tek technique alone has 10 "sterilization steps," four "inoculation steps," a list of supplementary equipment requirements for creating an inoculation box, and then an imposing 7-step guide to the fruiting process. Here is step two of that latter septad:
"Use some of your rubbing alcohol to clean a fork. When the alcohol has evaporated, you can use the fork to gently scrape at the dry vermiculite layer. Please note that you're not scraping it off. You're simply trying to scrape to the bottom to make sure all the mycelium gets everywhere."
This is no-doubt accurate and extremely useful stuff, but Lewis surely flatters stumblebum readers like myself when he says that the mushroom growing process is easy!
This is nitpicking, of course. I am sure that Lewis made the book as easy as possible given the subject matter. It's just that self-doubters like myself are going to have to take a deep breath and resolve to follow his instructions methodically and without whining, lest our tendency to despair mid-project should scuttle our efforts - for, alas, there are apparently many things that can go wrong in growing mushrooms: bacterial contamination, fungal destruction of mycelium, excess humidity, insufficient humidity, excess light, insufficient light, lights illuminating the wrong parts of the shroom, etc. -- and, of course, excess police officers showing up on your property and ordering you to get down on the ground with your hands in the air.
Technically speaking, however, the mushroom growing process might be called complex rather than complicated. Perhaps that's what Lewis meant when he said it was easy.
Be that as it may, my substantive criticism of such authors as Lewis concerns their philosophical assumptions, not their practical advice. Lewis joins authors like Michael Pollan4 and Julie Holland5 in giving a very generous spin to Richard Nixon's outlawing of psychedelics. To hear these authors tell it, Nixon was truly interested in public health. And so Lewis writes the following about the 1970s era in America:
"Psilocybin's popularity wasn't slowing down, largely due to the hippie movement. This left the government no choice but to completely ban the use of psilocybin."
No choice, Edward? No choice?
Had "the government" read books about other cultures, they might have known that psychoactive drugs have been used for millennia and that there is statuary dedicated to such use in Mesoamerica dating back to prehistoric times6. True, pharmacologically clueless politicians promoted a Chicken Little narrative designed to make parents fear for the safety of their kids, but we know from long and sad experience that the government has never been interested in the health of Americans per se7. There is always a more sinister reason for the promotion of drug laws: namely, to crack down on minorities in the only politically acceptable way. That's why Nixon8 called Timothy Leary "The Most Dangerous Man in America," rather than "The Most Risk-Taking Man in America." Nixon did not care about the health of Timothy Leary or of any other hippie. He wanted those people to rot in jail where they would not be able to protest the Vietnam War or to vote Drug Warriors like Nixon himself out of office.
No choice, Edward?
Why did the government assume that a plant medicine would destroy the brain in the first place? That would not have been the first guess of any nature-friendly indigenous culture, all of which, as ethnobotanist Richard Schultes told us, have used psychoactive drugs for a variety of sociocultural and medical reasons9. A government could just as well have looked at psychedelics and said:
"We have to spread the use of these love-promoting drugs insofar as our world is on the brink of nuclear annihilation!"
No choice?
Why did the government choose to arrest people rather than to educate them?
No choice?
This is a very naïve conclusion on Lewis's part, one that shows that he has been bamboozled by the full-court press of Drug War propaganda that he has been subjected to since childhood, like every other American. The fact that even a proponent of magic mushrooms like Lewis has adopted these views shows how insidious a lifetime of brainwashing can be.
In his book on Nazi Germany, William Shirer10 warned of "the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda." We live in the age of just such propaganda, manifested in the government and media's demonization of psychoactive medicine and their refusal to recognize any positive uses for drugs (in the past, present or future). The dread consequences of this propaganda campaign, which does not stint at indoctrinating children, can already be seen in the fact that our public officials now openly call for the assassination of "drug users"11 - after previously being happy with merely jailing them for decades and confiscating their houses and property.
Conclusion? I give Lewis' book 5 stars for its practical suggestions and 1 star for its philosophical assumptions.
Book Reviews
Most authors today reckon without the Drug War -- unless they are writing specifically about "drugs" -- and even then they tend to approach the subject in a way that clearly demonstrates that they have been brainwashed by Drug War orthodoxy, even if they do not realize it themselves. That's why I write my philosophical book reviews, to point out this hypocrisy which no other philosopher in the world is pointing out.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
Like when Laura Sanders tells us in Science News that depression is an intractable problem, she should rather tell us: "Depression is an intractable problem... that is, in a world wherein we refuse to consider the benefits of 'drugs,' let alone to fight for their beneficial use."
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
Of course, prohibitionists will immediately remind me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.
Many in the psychedelic renaissance fail to recognize that prohibition is the problem. They praise psychedelics but want to demonize others substances. That's ignorant however. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason.
People groan about "profiling," but why is profiling even a "thing"? There would be little or no profiling of blacks if the Drug War did not exist.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.