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'For Every Problem, There Is A Mushroom With An Answer': Overcoming Our British Fear Of Fungi

The scene couldn't be more British. There are picnic blankets, dogs and hungover-looking men shouting at their children. Thanks to recent rain, mushrooms shaped like huge white breasts have sprouted from the tussocks. Naturally, everyone ignores them, except for an inquisitive toddler, who reaches out a pudgy hand, before it is quickly snatched away. "Don't touch," an adult hisses. "Those things kill."

In the UK, mushrooms are the vegetable we love to hate. But in recent years, they've been hard to avoid. They've sprouted from our bookshelves (Merlin Sheldrake's bestselling Entangled Life) and have popped from our screens (Fantastic Fungi; The Last of Us); it seems no hip restaurant is complete without an in-house mushroom lab (Fallow; The Pig); and in September they even had their very own festival, All Things Fungi, the first of its kind.

For every problem on this planet, there is a mushroom with an answer

Here in this Sussex park, however, it's only the deer that seem interested in the fungi – the deer, and me. With the toddler safely out of the way, I creep through the grass towards the supposedly deadly mushroom. It stands tall and proud on its snakeskin-patterned stem, beautiful and strange – dangerous, too? I tug at its root and it comes free from the earth with a satisfying crunch of snapping rhizomorphs. Its gills are yellowy-white, a hue my own cautious parents once taught me to believe means death. I toy with its annulus and it slides up and down the stem like a runner on a parasol. I'm not a pervert: this is a key identification feature. It is, in fact, a giant parasol – Macrolepiota procura – an exquisite delicacy that hundreds must have passed by.

Why are so many of us still fearful of fungi? It's true what the man said: some of them kill, and in terrible ways. If you were to dine on a death cap – like the recent tragic lunch party in Australia – then you would probably remark on the flavour: it is, according to those who have tasted it and survived, delicious, until multiple organ failure sets in. Even some of the edible species are tricksy. The false morel – a prized delicacy in Finland – is deadly raw and, when boiled, emits a toxic cloud of monomethylhydrazine, aka rocket fuel, while the blusher, with its delicate flesh, flaky and tender as fish, will liquefy your red blood cells if cooked incorrectly. But these are a few dodgy apples. According to Greg Marley's book Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares, of the 10,000 known mushrooms, only 3% are toxic and just a handful of these are responsible for the majority of poisonings.

I take my mushroom home, along with a few of its friends, and fry them up for my family. My wife and her sister, both born in Ukraine, dig in; but my sister-in-law's boyfriend, as English as they come, demurs. We all survive, but only some of us get lunch.

"Fungophobia," wrote British naturalist William Delisle Hay in 1887, "is very curious. If it were human – that is, universal – one would be inclined to set it down as an instinct and to reverence it accordingly. But it is not human – it is merely British." Seemingly, we've been this way for hundreds of years. To the Victorians, fungi were "vegetable vermin, only made to be destroyed"; to the Elizabethans they were "earthie excrescences" which "suffocate and strangle the eater"; and medieval folk seasoned their distaste with antisemitism, scorning mushrooms as "Jew's meat". Is it that Brits prefer their food tame? We are Europe's biggest consumers of ready meals, after all. Or do fungi, with their upstart habits and rude forms, offend British decency? Famously, Henrietta Darwin, Charles's eldest, used to gather the most phallic of the forest fungi and burn them behind closed doors.

Magic of mushrooms: some varieties can break down disposable nappies and eat cigarette butts. Photograph: Phyllis Ma

"One theory," says Dr Andy Letcher, ecologist and author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, "is that the roots of mycophobia are to be found in an ancient magic mushroom cult. Only the priests were allowed to use them. For ordinary people they were taboo and that taboo ended up becoming mycophobia." It's a seductive theory and no concrete evidence exists to prove it wrong – or right. The truth, says Letcher, is that people simply had little reliable information to work with and so, fatally, they turned to classical scholars for advice. According to Pliny, all red mushrooms could be eaten, while Nicander said that only those growing on fig trees were safe. Dioscorides, conversely, suggested all mushrooms were edible, unless they had grown above rusty iron or near a serpent's den.

Disasters were inevitable. Letcher's favourite mushroom mishap occurred in 1830, when an out-of-work labourer called Frederick Bickerton picked a large quantity of unknown mushrooms in London's Hyde Park, which he ended up feeding to his family. They began to giggle and dance, symptoms we now know as magic mushroom intoxication, but believing themselves poisoned they rushed to the doctor, who applied emetics, a stomach pump and leeches to the forehead. Little wonder people avoided them. "There's another side to the story," says Letcher. "We were the first to industrialise and there was a mass movement to the cities. You take people off the land and they lose what oral knowledge they have. All it takes is one break in the link."

Today, that link remains broken. One-third of people in England cannot access green spaces and even where they can, mushrooms are often off-limits. In the New Forest, picking fungi is officially discouraged, while in Epping Forest and the Royal Parks, it's been banned. "The parks are here for the public to enjoy," the Met sniffed. "They are not anyone's personal larder."

"What I want to do," says Max Mudie, 38, co-organiser of the All Things Fungi festival, "is to get people to see what's beneath their feet. You can't go a day without crossing paths with fungi. We need to get people inspired to look. Then they'll want to protect." Mudie, a photographer who lives in East Sussex, became obsessed with fungi in his early 30s and began using macro-photography to document his finds. His images – showing the minuscule cities of mushrooms that might grow from a single rotting leaf – often attract hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of likes on TikTok. The weekend-long festival brought together all facets of the mushroom world: foragers, mycologists, ecologists and citizen scientists. There were workshops on home cultivation and DNA sequencing, and nocturnal mushroom safaris, using special UV torches that cause wild fungi to glow in the dark.

"The best thing about the festival," Mudie says, "is being able to connect. Mushroom people are solitary creatures." In spite of their solitary nature, mushroom people are multiplying. On iNaturalist, the grassroots biodiversity map, the number of people in the UK making records of fungal finds has increased tenfold since 2018. In the past year, there were more than 100,000 individual observations. And there has been an upswing of interest in the once geeky territory of mushroom cultivation, too.

Forage feast: Charlie Gilmour with the spoils of a day gathering wild musrooms. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Elliot Webb, 29, never imagined mushrooms would be his bread and butter. "My profession was fish," he says. "I ran the freshwater arm of one of the oldest fish farms in Scotland, then travelled around Asia and Australia working in the industry." In 2019, he returned to the UK to found a fishery business of his own. "But then lockdown happened and I realised we had to look for something else." That something else was mushroom cultivation. Webb's company, Urban Farm-It, provides ready-to-fruit kits suitable for total beginners, as well as the bags of grain spawn used by professional growers, who can choose from hundreds of varieties, from the humble button mushroom to more exotic species, such as reishi, the so-called mushroom of immortality. "Interest is growing faster than businesses can supply," he says. "From year one to year two we grew by 400%." That could, he says, have been due to the natural growth that comes when a business is born and a more reliable marker might be the fact that many of the customers who began by buying one of his beginner kits are now professional growers, selling at markets every weekend.

"It's all about food sovereignty," says Webb. "That's how we reduce our impact on the planet and secure our own personal wellbeing. People are learning to value the simple things again: being able to grow food, being self-sufficient."

Nappies were what led to my personal obsession with fungi. I had just become a father for the first time and was wading through our own mini-landfill, when I came across an experiment conducted by scientists in Mexico, who discovered that the Pleurotus ostreatus fungus – the oyster mushroom – would colonise used nappies, reducing their mass by 80%. Even better, the mushrooms that grew from them were safe to eat. I had a vision: we would feed the baby; the baby would feed us. It was a perfect closed system. I was very tired, but I read more.

For every problem on this planet, it seems there is a mushroom with an answer. Nasty old cigarette butts? A fungus will eat those. Bees suffering from colony collapse disorder? Mushroom medicines boost bee immunity, helping hive health. Land poisoned by chemical weapons? Fungi can be trained to consume even the infamous VX nerve agent; also petrochemicals; also nuclear contamination. Fungi have survived the last five mass-extinction events. They grow at the centre of Chornobyl and on the inside of fuel tanks. If we wish to survive on this planet, there is much they can teach us.

If our fear of fungi comes from having been locked out of the land, then perhaps fungi can be the key that lets us back in. Fergus Drennan, 51, is a mushroom evangelist. He is the author of a book about mushrooms, created using mushroom ink and mushroom paper – currently limited to a single edition – and, as a former chef, he uses his skills to turn mushrooms into Marmite, "mangos" and meringues for those who attend his foraging courses. "Fungi," he says, "give you a reason to go to the woods, and they open the door to all the magical things happening there. If you're looking for mushrooms, you're observing the natural world. Lying on moss. Looking up at the tree canopy."

The false morel – a prized delicacy in Finland – is deadly raw

The first time Drennan saw people foraging for mushrooms he was 17 and he reacted with instinctive horror. The first time he ate a wild mushroom, he felt very ill. "It was a Boletus edulis – porcini – and I got this horrific stomachache." It was, he says, a case of "psychosomatic poisoning". Despite the cramps, which stayed with him for several years, he persisted, and now pushes against the mycophobia that he believes made him ill.

"There's so much we're missing out on," he says. One example is the fly agaric, instantly recognisable with its red cap and white spots as the archetypal poisonous mushroom. Drennan has used it to make hummus, sushi rolls and risotto. He's whipped them into ice-cream and baked them in wild pear syrup. And nobody he has fed them to has died. The fly agaric is, it turns out, quite safe to consume, when prepared in a specific way, with a history of culinary use in Japan, Siberia and southern France. "It is," says Drennan, "delicious."

I never quite got around to growing mushrooms from my daughter's nappies, but I did start growing them. Winecap mushrooms from pots filled with shredded cardboard and straw; shiitakes from a tree surgeon's trimmings; oysters from spent coffee grounds. Watching the silent white threads of mycelium advance, branching and fusing to form a dense, sweet-smelling network, transforming waste into food, was like watching alchemy.

And when my daughter's nursery asked if any parents wanted to come and talk to the children about food, my daughter volunteered me. In the classroom, the toddlers gathered round a table heaped with living mushrooms, and a bold little boy reached out a hand: "Can I touch?"

Never eat a wild mushroom unless you are certain it's safe. Always consult a reliable field guide, such as Geoff Dann's Edible Mushrooms.

Featherhood by Charlie Gilmore is published by Orion. Buy it for £8.69 at guardianbookshop.Com

How A Deadly Fungus Is So Good At Sticking To Skin And Other Surfaces

Candida auris, a fungus that causes sometimes deadly infections, can stick to almost any surface.

In hospitals, "it's very tenacious, very difficult to get rid of and ends up on all the surfaces around patients," where it can fuel outbreaks, says Darian Santana, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. The fungus has been spreading rapidly since cases first emerged in several locations around the world in 2012 (SN: 3/20/23).

Santana and colleagues have discovered how the fungi stick to a wide variety of surfaces. Most fungi make adhesive proteins that rely on hydrophobic interactions to glom onto surfaces. Think oil and water, says Teresa O'Meara, a microbiologist and geneticist in whose lab Santana works. Oil droplets congregate with other oil droplets, while water is attracted to water. Similarly, hydrophobic fungal proteins attach themselves to hydrophobic, or water-repellent, surfaces.

C. Auris has hydrophobic adhesion proteins too, but it mainly pastes itself to surfaces using electrical charges, the researchers report in the Sept. 29 Science. The fungus makes protein called SCF1, which contains many positively charged amino acids. The positive charge creates attraction with negative charges on surfaces, including skin and medical devices. It's similar to the way barnacles stick to boats, Santana says.

The protein allowed the fungus to infect skin samples and colonize catheters in the lab, the team found. Without SCF1, the fungus was unable to spread in infected mice.

The finding may eventually lead to new ways to prevent or treat C. Auris infections, O'Meara says. For instance, treatments may turn off production of the protein to prevent the fungus from spreading more widely in infected people, or a vaccine or antibody might stop the fungus from binding to surfaces and head off illness.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.OrgReprints FAQ

Tina Hesman Saey is the senior staff writer and reports on molecular biology. She has a Ph.D. In molecular genetics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science journalism from Boston University.

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Why Serious Players Are Dosing Psychedelics Like Mushrooms And Ayahuasca

D.J. TRAHAN IS WEEPING THROUGHthe phone, overcome with so much joy that the tears are pouring out, and he doesn't resist. The two-time PGA Tour winner, once known as a golfer who could run hot, has never been more at peace. Golf no longer defines who he is, a refrain among pros who have gone through every up and down and have decided to accept the fact that the party is winding down. Trahan, 42, credits plant medicine for his improved mental health, especially ayahuasca. This is normally the point when conventional people tune out and assume he's crazy.

"Plant medicine gets an unfortunate reputation because people look at it as drugs," Trahan says. "They're not honoring it for what it is."

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic made by boiling the caapi vine and the leaves of the chacruna shrub, both found in South America. The active chemical is DMT, or dimethyltryptamine. For centuries, ayahuasca has been used by people of the Amazon and Orinoco basins for spiritual and religious purposes. Now modern golfers are exploring the benefits. Christopher Smith, a Golf Digest top teacher from Oregon, has organized retreats in Mexico for students billed as "traditional medicines and therapies for your golf." One PGA Tour player, a former winner who had a streak of top finishes this year, credits microdosing psilocybin, the active ingredient in the Schedule 1 controlled substance "magic mushrooms," with his resurgence. "Psilocybin allows me to get a deep breath on the course that I haven't been able to get in years," he says. Juniper Preserve, a 36-hole resort in Oregon, is applying for permission to conduct research on the performance effects of psilocybin on golfers, which is all to say, the term golf trip could be on the verge of acquiring new meaning.

When the tears are over, Trahan speaks more about the long-term mental health benefits of plant medicine as opposed to on-course benefits. He tried ayahuasca in 2019 at the recommendation of a friend named Taylor Massey, a four-time club champion at both La Costa Country Club and The Country Club of Virginia who helped a company called Medterra CBD launch its golf division. "It was amazing how the conversation unfolded," Trahan says. "I was like, 'You know, Taylor, I've been struggling for a long time. My golf had been struggling, and I felt completely lost. I never understood that the answers were within me."

Massey says he serves as "pyschedelic advisor" to dozens of pro golfers at various levels of the game, as well as veterans on the Coming Home Project. In addition to cannabidiol (CBD), the compound found in marijuana, Massey makes microdoses of psilocybin mixed with several other legal ingredients. They include lion's mane, a fungus that according to WebMD might improve nerve development and function and help protect the lining in the stomach, though Massey's followers are more concerned with the mental and physical hurdles that come with playing professional golf.

"It's a way to manage stress and the grind of golf without taking Zoloft or Wellbutrin or any pharmaceutical drugs," Massey says. "This is just a natural remedy in tiny doses."

FIVE DAYS AFTER WINNING FORthe second time in as many weeks in 2023, Lucas Glover tweeted a photo of two supplements made by the natural herbal brand HANAH, whose products are legal and non-psychedelic. "Appreciate the care package," Glover wrote, tagging the brand and Jimmy Chin, a filmmaker best known for the documentaries "Free Solo" and "Meru." Chin is an investor in HANAH and credits the products for his vitality, focus and immunity throughout the three years of filming and production process of "Free Solo."

The man who runs HANAH is Joel Einhorn, who founded the company after experiencing the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine after a near-death cycling accident. Ayurvedic medicine, also known as Ayurveda, is an alternative that's heavily practiced in India and Nepal. Einhorn was introduced to it by an Indian doctor at a health-food Indian restaurant he frequented during his recovery, and he says it brought him back to life. He saw increased cognition, enhanced creativity, more access to memory, words and different languages, and, above all, improved athletic performance. The herbs were so beneficial that he had to ask the doctor where they were coming from, leading to an ahamoment.

"The doctor was like 'Look, you can't just order these things online because you don't know where they are coming from," says Einhorn, who started spending a lot of time in India sourcing ingredients and creating supply chains and products. An avid cyclist, snowboarder and golfer, Einhorn also made connections in the sporting world. Chin, professional surfer Ian Walsh, professional snowboarder Travis Rice and skier Kit DesLauriers are among his biggest brand ambassadors. Glover, Kevin Chappell, Sean Foley and Mac Barnhardt (Glover's agent) are among those in golf who use the HANAH products. To be clear, these products are completely legal. As a side project, Einhorn is working on a microdose of psilocybin in pill form used by a group of golfers he prefers to keep anonymous.

RESEARCHERS AT UNIVERSITIESsuch as Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Stanford and Harvard are working on expanding the available scientific literature for psilocybin and psychedelics at large. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor at UC San Francisco, studies psychedelic drugs and how they work in the brain and mind and how they might be useful for treating mental illness. Two key misconceptions about psychedelics, he believes, are that they are addictive and a "one-way ticket to insanity." Both theories have lingered since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, Carhart-Harris says. He argues that they have the potential to enhance mental clarity, which is why military veterans dealing with PTSD and depression have become some of the most effective lobbyists in a campaign to legalize the therapeutic use of psychedelics.

As Carhart-Harris warns, though, they still need to be taken in a structured way. "If it's not done the right way, it can agitate people and set them back," he says. Carhart-Harris recommends microdosing. Taking small doses, anywhere from five to 10 percent of what might make a person hallucinate, on a semi-frequent basis, he says, can potentially improve one's mood and focus, boost creativity and make the world seem, generally, brighter—all things that, theoretically, could be beneficial for a golfer. Although it was by no means a career year for the PGA Tour winner mentioned earlier, this player had his best strokes-gained/ approach output since the 2017-'18 season and his best strokes-gained/around-the-green output since the 2016-'17 season. "Being able to authentically assess each and every shot without judgment or fear has created a freedom like no other," he says.

PATRICK GRIMES, A FORMER Stanford University golfer whose team included several future PGA Tour pros, tried ayahuasca in 2012. Then a sophomore, he had heard about ayahuasca from a friend on the Cardinal baseball team who had watched a documentary. Grimes was nervous before his fi rst ayahuasca ceremony in Chicago. It was a quiet space with only a handful of people, each going through his or her own experience with a shaman facilitating. Some people were listening to music, others were chanting or "holding the space" in a specific way. There was no interaction with others. After the physical purging, what followed for Grimes was a connection between his mind and body like never before. He began thinking about the people in his life, about close relationships that had negatively impacted him. He saw faces of the different people who were looking at him and judging him. It felt critical. That feeling of being "watched," Grimes realized, was his trigger. "It felt like all that was coming up, and then all of it was like physically coming out, too," he says. "That's where this medicine has such a profound transformative eff ect. It has this way of bringing things to the surface, and then you physically purge it."

Grimes has since experienced a dozen ceremonies. "It has been a huge part of my life," he says. "All through my 20s, it was about self-discovery and feeling like it was a powerful tool when I would get stuck or confused or trying to find my way with my game and my career and myself."

Ayahuasca, Grimes thought, was going to unlock his golfing potential. It did for a while, until Grimes realized it was unlocking something else—clarity about what he really wanted to do in life, which was not to play golf full time. After stints on PGA Tour Latinoamerica, PGA Tour Canada, other mini tours and Monday qualifiers, last year Grimes attended an ayahuasca retreat with Q school looming. His game was not in a good place, and he knew he should have been practicing. Instead of discovering a swing fix or a new mental approach, he came to the realization he was done. "I'm not going to play," Grimes told himself.

"Golf was so much at the forefront of my identity. I'm not proud of being that wrapped up in my golf journey, but, as any pro can relate, it just takes over your whole life. You don't get a break from it."

Grimes decided he wanted to help other golfers integrate plant medicine into their lives, to figure out a way to blend it into their personal development. He pulled out of Q school and signed up for grad school at Stanford. Now 30, he's studying counseling psychology with the hope of getting his license to be a therapist, which he wants to combine with coaching golf. He's already doing full-swing instruction with golfers and hopes to one day work with high-level players on their golf swing and ways to integrate plant medicine into their lives as a way to unlock their potential. "It's been perceived as a drug to escape from life," Grimes says, "when really, it's the complete opposite."

OREGON HAS DECRIMINALIZED psychedelics cs such as psilocybin, but they are still classified as a Schedule 1 controlled olled substance. Per a PGA Tour spokesman, the tour's anti-doping program follows lows the WADAA (World Anti-Doping Agency) prohibited list, which indicates what substances and methods are prohibited in sport and when. Since psilocybin is not a specified substance on the WADA prohibited list, a player could not test positive because WADA accredited laboratories do not test for it. Even if they did, psilocybin gets out of one's system in a very short period of time, making it possible for a player to take it on a Tuesday and have it not show up in a drug test on a Thursday, according to Golf Digest Professional Adviser Dr. Ara Suppiah. Ayahuasca takes longer to get out of one's system,stem, "up to 300 hours," according to Suppiah. A tour pro could theoretically plan two weeks off after a ceremony to be safe.

In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that consuming ayahuasca is legal when used for religious purposes. When quarterback Aaron Rodgers openly admitted he had taken the plant medicine on multiple occasions before the 2022 NFL season, it was still a surprise. Ultimately, Rodgers faced no discipline, with the NFL and the NFL Players Association saying that ayahuasca counts as neither a prohibited compound under the substance-abuse policy nor a PED. Rodgers, who first took ayahuasca in Peru during the 2019 offseason, won consecutive NFL MVP Awards in the 2020 and 2021 seasons.

In psychedelic circles, Rodgers is admired for speaking so openly about his experiences. Two-time Stanley Cup champion Daniel Carcillo, a longtime NHL "enforcer," believes psilocybin was the only thing that helped his brain trauma after retirement. He even started a psychedelics company called Wesana Health. Jake Plummer, an NFL Pro Bowl quarterback who played for the Arizona Cardinals and the Denver Broncos, co-founded a non-psychedelic mushroom farm in Colorado that has been selling locally grown medicinal and culinary mushrooms and mushroom extracts since 2021. PGA Tour golfer Morgan Hoff mann told Golf Digest in 2022 that he believed ayahuasca, among other plant medicines, is curing his muscular dystrophy.

However, most active athletes are less inclined to speak about ayahuasca or psilocybin for fear of drawing attention. "The Drug Enforcement Administration could still come down on you," Suppiah says. "Unless you are using it in a controlled situation, most mushrooms are illegal."

FORMERLY THE PRONGHORN RESORT, the Juniper Preserve has two golf courses designed by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Fazio, and it was originally an exclusively private club. The Nicklaus course is open to the public, and the Fazio course remains privately accessed by members. Melissa Sanchez, the wellness director at the Juniper Preserve, is leading the psilocybin initiative, working with Dr. Robin Carhart- Harris on conducting a study on the efficacy of psilocybin use for golf performance. Jeff Ritter, Golf Digest's No. 1-ranked teacher in the state of Oregon for 2022-'23, will be participating in the study and helping its roll out. Ritter and his wife, Cate, have experience with psychedelics and have seen many of the positive benefits.

For the study to begin, though, several things still need to happen. First, the resort needs to obtain a service-center license that allows guests and members access to microdose psilocybin on property. Under the Oregon model, individuals can ingest psilocybin only at designated licensed premises and must remain on the premises under statelicensed supervision for the duration of their experience.

"I believe that access to natural medicines and their wide range of mentalhealth benefits is worth all the eff ort," Sanchez says. "Our nation is in a mental- health crisis, and we as a society are not in a position to reject powerful treatment alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs based on outdated stigmas. The fact that we can be the first destination resort to legally have access to psilocybin would send a message that we should no longer be afraid of psilocybin- containing mushrooms. It would be huge for the movement."

Carhart-Harris was interested in contributing in any way he could, not only for the psychedelic aspect but for the golf aspect. His brother, Adrian Harris, is a golf coach, and the two grew up in England as big golf fans. Carhart-Harris believes there will be two key findings in the study—an improvement in wellbeing and performance.

"It's probably going to be relatively well functioning healthy people who are going to receive small doses, and those dosing sessions will be supervised," he says. "The hypothesis is that those dosing sessions will help people relax and open up a little bit and become more sensitive to the coaching that'll be done afterward. It's like increasing their ability to learn and perhaps unlearn some unhealthy habits that have formed, either in their swings or in their heads.

"The idea is to get them more into their body, less out of that kind of cerebral churn," he adds. "That rumination that we can all get in sometimes can be really fierce on a golf course if you're not playing well. It's not so much that people are gonna be high on the course.

It's more that they have a controlled experience that leaves the kind of afterglow they take onto the driving range or onto the course."

Carhart-Harris says that if different jurisdictions are going to legalize psychedelics, it needs to be thought through and done properly. "You still have risks," Carhart-Harris says. "You'd want to have proper screening to make sure you have someone who can tolerate this, where the risk isn't excessive. You would exclude people with vulnerability to psychotic disorders, either through personal history or family history. You'd want to regulate dosage so that it's in the right range. You might have an age cut off of 21-plus, for example, and you'd want professionals delivering the treatment that are trained and prepared for the experience. Supervision of the experience is key so that people don't put themselves in harm's way. Then aftercare can help people come back down to Earth and reintegrate."

FOR THOSE THINKING THIS IS AN immediate path to better golf, Suppiah warns that you shouldn't dive in headfirst. "Amateur players interested should see a psychiatrist who is familiar with using psychedelics for treatment. Get evaluated and find out if you are the right person for it," Suppiah says. "If you just experiment with it, it can precipitate a severe mental illness.

"It can control everything from appetite to sex drive to how you perceive music, all sorts of stuff ," he adds. "When you use it, you are using it to alter your state. If you've had a traumatic brain injury, or a family history of schizophrenia or suicide, you want to be careful about using this drug. Unless you are using it as a therapeutic drug, it's still illegal. If you are using it in mushroom form, you are going to get in trouble with that."

Suppiah says he can't recommend any amateur golfer use it. "I do think a psychedelic like psilocybin can be used as a therapeutic drug to treat severe depression," he says. "There's very strong evidence from Stanford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins to support this. They all show that this is actually better than antidepressants, long-term."

Where the psychedelic movement goes from here regarding golf and sports at large isn't clear, but the movement has begun.

(Correction: A previous version of this story said Taylor Massey helped found MedTerra CBD. Massey helped them launched their golf division.) 

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