The Politics of Cubensis

Having just bought 100g of prime psilocybe mushrooms off of e-bay for a bargain price (it's my birthday soon!) I noticed that the sudden proliferation of freely available magic mushrooms on the internet has brought with it a curious snobbery; several sites have messages from people suggesting that internet sellers (at least those sites are not endowed with the magical words 'shaman', 'ethnobotanical' or 'ally') are somehow despoiling the idea of magic mushrooms, as if by opening up this source to a wider public the message will be lost. 'The ally is not to be mistreated' they say 'these portals are not for anyone' etc etc. This strikes me as somehow akin to the age-old Religion Game; we know how to get to heaven, you don't; let's keep it that way.... Warnings, I can understand but this seems to go much deeper, almost Mayan in it's refusal to allow knowledge to pass beyond what used to be a relatively small circle. Let the masses eat crack, it seems to imply; let them scoff marijuana even; let them dose themselves up to the eyeballs in opiates and speedballs but, please, please, don't give them access to our ally...

Or we'll take our ball away.



Drugs snobbery has always been rife, I guess. Us Yeovil Acid kids scorned the speedfreaks for focusing on the body rather than the mind; we laughed at the E-kids because they had bright red faces and danced like Nazis, we absolutely lost the plot when it came to the Rich-kid new age travellers soon to be sucked dry on Scrumpy, Heroin and e-coli infections (the lucky ones got Hepatitus B and came home to Ma and Pa) but this, somehow seemed more absolute in it's fury. People are really angry out there. All these awful townies scoffing McKennas special brew?

Maybe the people are all my age, bitching about the kids stealing their drugs when they should be quoffing their own (they told us after all that by 2000 there'd be all manner of life-affirming new psychedelics around; stuff to stew the gills off a Gaye Biker, stuff to make you cleverer, wittier, sharper, stronger, more cybernetic, more in tune with the intangible other). Or maybe this is stemming from a dull feeling in the pit of their stomach that these kids are scoffing mushrooms by the ton as mere entertainment, rather than transcendentalism (which require a skim read of The Politics of Ecstacy before consumption).

Me? I read all the books - Huxley, Leary, Kesey, Alpert,McKenna, Castaneda - and I still just took mushrooms to fuck around with my mates ("look there's a self-transforming machine elf!") and to make music sound freakier.

I'm putting together some CDs to play while we take the mushrooms (hereafter apparently known only as 'shrooms - damn that working class grammar!) because I know all about scene and setting so I guess for a real sad Dad up and downer it's gonna have to be loads of Whitehouse, a smattering of TG, a little Merzbow to sharpen the senses... and then I'll get over that childish nonsense, put on my old Shamen records (especially that 10" with the 2001 samples and the bit that seems to say 'Watch those squirrels'), light some candles and start delving into all those ambient MP3s I downloaded ages ago and never listen to because they're no good for dinner parties and washing up:

The Silverman - Silvermandala 1
The Silverman - Silvermandala 2