How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

by Michael Pollan

There was never any doubt who could best help me on this quest, assuming he was willing. Paul Stamets, a mycologist from Washington State who literally wrote the book on the genus Psilocybe,fn2 in the form of the authoritative 1996 field guide Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Stamets has himself “published”—that is, identified and described in a peer-reviewed journal—four new species of Psilocybe, including azurescens, named for his son Azureusfn3 and the most potent species yet known. But while Stamets is one of the country’s most respected mycologists, he works entirely outside the academy, has no graduate degree, funds most of his own research,fn4 and holds views of the role of fungi in nature that are well outside the scientific mainstream and that, he will gladly tell you, owe to insights granted to him by the mushrooms themselves, in the course of both close study and regular ingestion.

First discovrer of mushrooms