)Thats the copy/paste from where i bought it. Publisher is - Psychedelic PressPsilocybe Pickers: A Short History of Bemushroomed Britons (2025) by Robert Dickins | Paperback ISBN: 9781068422331
From obscure origins, Psilocybe mushrooms quickly and quietly established themselves in local and countercultural Britain. They became a staple rite of passage, folkloric emblem, and mischievous companion in the festival calendar. For over fifty years, these tricksters danced around the law, difficult to capture.Now, twenty years after possession of fresh magic mushrooms was made illegal, Psilocybe Pickers tells the story of how these psychedelic fungi entered British consciousness in the twentieth century, the bemushroomed Britons who took them on as part of their culture, and how the authorities tried to police them.
The broad consensus is actually as recent as the 1970's in a post-60's UK when LSD became illegal. The author did find mention of Mushrooms earlier but that may have been more the classic fairytale Fly Agaric muchrooms rather than Psilocybe varieties. 1959 for Andrija Puharich (An interesting character in his own right with connections to Remote Viewing / ESP experiments in Faraday Cages with Amanita Muscaria etc)Would love to read it as history of magic mushroom foraging is quite interesting topic for me.
When it started in UK?


Yeah, some do get that knowledge is power. AIs will be free as long as these algorithms keep learning from us. Many are fully hooked on this evil tech already.And now we have the Techno-knowledge-hunt hoovering up all information and destroying originals.
Thinking is now farmed out to computers and databases.
I know theres not much evidence for it, but i find it kind of hard to beleive that ancient cultures wouldn't have known about the effects of something so abundant in the british isles.The broad consensus is actually as recent as the 1970's in a post-60's UK when LSD became illegal. The author did find mention of Mushrooms earlier but that may have been more the classic fairytale Fly Agaric muchrooms rather than Psilocybe varieties. 1959 for Andrija Puharich (An interesting character in his own right with connections to Remote Viewing / ESP experiments in Faraday Cages with Amanita Muscaria etc)
It boils down to a bunch of traveling Hippies in search of Liberty Caps, then Unemployed people wanting a release, and a kids rite of passage. Nothing that this author turned up took us any further back in history unfortunately, it would have been nice if someone had found evidence in archeological digs, but sadly no. All very recent history stuff with kind of post-truth mythology mixed into it by people in the 70's etc.