By Olivia Pym

The darkest, loneliest experience I’ve had on mushrooms was the time they didn’t work. It was Halloween in Los Angeles. In the spirit of the pagan holiday we drove out of the city to the lush botanical gardens surrounding The Huntington Library. We were going to perform feng shui inside our addled brains in the Chinese garden. We were going to stop to smell all 1,300 varieties of roses in the rose garden, arranged like perfect blocks of watercolour paint. We were going to blow our tiny minds when we entered the similarly named California garden, because how can you enter the California garden when this whole garden was in California? And doesn’t that make you think? We were going to eat dried mushrooms from a ziplock bag until we found enlightenment, LA-style.

As it transpired, my psychedelic journey remained in black and white. My friends described bamboo shoots turning into the creatures of Avatar. The leaves of an oak tree above their heads grew faces and giggled at them splayed on the ground beneath. The ground gave way as though the grass was astroturf draped across a tray of jelly. I sat waiting patiently for the world to shift on its axis, but… nothing. Instead, I faced the possibility I had perhaps eaten a stale supermarket shiitake. I badly wanted the joy that seemed to have been pumped into my friends’ veins rather than chewed and swallowed in the car park an hour earlier. I wanted to see the natural world with their dumb fascination and to laugh so deliriously it bordered on a health hazard. But beyond a few suspiciously vibey tree branches, nothing. When they finally floated back down to earth, eyes wild, they described their experience as somewhere between skimming death and discovering a hidden level to life. It was as though the reality we had shared before no longer fitted for them. They had landed in another country; looking at me was like looking down at their watches, only to find them showing the time from the place they had left behind.

My second, more successful, attempt with mushrooms was in the English countryside in spring 2020, when it seemed genuinely possible that the sunshine would last forever and the coronavirus would fade from memory by Christmas. That afternoon, in a post first wave haze, the trunk of a tree became a chute into the centre of the earth. The flame of a cigarette, a fragment of stardust (that was quite clearly actually my grandfather), and my whole being vaporised into nothing. As reality melted around me like candlewax dripping onto a table, it seemed laughably obvious that mushrooms were the drug for a moment where everyone was craving an escape hatch; one we all dove into together, and after so long apart. Having been a period in which death and loneliness tightened their grip on the world, here was a collective experience, and the chance to see the world anew at a time when it felt stuck on repeat.

My friend Lucia* first took magic mushrooms several years ago, in upstate New York. "The house that we were staying in overlooked this little forest, and as the moon was going down, the whole forest lit up with lightning bugs [fireflies]," she tells me. "On mushrooms it looked like the whole thing was made of glitter and I remember it absolutely blowing my mind."

She returned to London ahead of the pandemic, and the trend she had watched unfold of friends sipping mushroom tea at Manhattan loft parties, or nibbling on dried mushrooms in friends’ living rooms after drawn-out dinners, slowly followed her home. As lockdowns lifted, mushroom-laced chocolate bars started showing up at picnics in the park when socialising was no longer forbidden. "Everyone had a mass existential crisis at the same time, being at home with nothing to do and trying to grapple with what was going on in the world," she says. "Mushrooms were kind of the perfect antidote to that and helped people understand how they felt."

Shrooms’ image has been sweetened by dealers packaging their wares to resemble the chocolate bars you find in a corner shop, or rolling them into muddy, round truffles. Ground-up psilocybin powder mixed into tempered chocolate is spun into gourmet party favours, with packaging bearing the same terminology used by artisan chocolatiers. Just as wellness warriors have embraced weed – often in the form of edibles and gummies – mushrooms have become the narcotic of choice for a certain class of start-up founder and yoga enthusiasts. The boom in chocolates has given the psychedelic a laid-back, approachable vibe. Even though magic mushrooms remain a class-A drug in the UK, cultural perception of the drug is markedly different from other hard substances. In 2018, Michael Pollan’s best-selling book How To Change Your Mind bridged the gap between mushroom fanatics and curious intellectuals, while even media outlets that have taken a hard line on drugs are increasingly reporting on a slew of medical research demonstrating psilocybin’s potential medicinal benefits. Everywhere, it seems, a reappraisal of magic mushrooms is slowly blooming, as people open their minds to what these mysterious fungi can do.

Jack* is 32, works in tech and lives in London, where he grows and sells magic mushrooms. He also sells entirely legal mushrooms, though he isn’t seeing much demand for those (he only has one customer so far). Meanwhile, the appetite for their psychedelic counterparts has grown so much in the last three years that Jack can now only meet a fraction of the demand. He learned to grow them himself after being ripped off by his previous dealer. In 2019 he attended a mushroom growing course (and although the teachers stressed the techniques should not actually be used to grow psilocybin, the techniques are broadly similar). It’s a slow, laborious process; several students hoping for a get-rich-quick scheme dropped out when they realised the amount of work involved.

Over the last year, Jack has seen many new growers and dealers trading spores via encrypted messaging apps. "The renaissance of growing magic mushrooms domestically feels like the early internet of the late ’90s, with the forums and knowledge sharing going on," he tells me when we meet for ice cream one Friday afternoon in South London. The shroom boom has as much to do with supply as demand, he says, with growers having had the time to double down on investing in a new hobby during the pandemic and to care for their new petri-dish project.

The enquiries growers like Jack get can be surprising. The most common request he receives is for mushroom drops in a tincture – more easily dosed on a dance floor – but as he can’t find a way to make them without degrading the psilocybin, he rolls them in chocolate truffles instead. Not all of the people he supplies mushrooms to – visitors to the zoo, festival-goers, a couple on their first Grindr date, his mum, his mum’s friends – are looking to cross over into a higher plane of existence. Most seem to be hopeful of being moved in some small way. "Many of the people I’m selling to haven’t had that many profound experiences on mushrooms, but are using them as a party drug. I think they can’t believe this is available because it’s such a clean high. A lot of the time they’re nibbling the chocolate, so not going to that next state where you might get into deep water," he says. Most are interested in stopping short of a full-blown hallucinatory encounter, instead looking for a wavy afternoon and a dose of induced laughter. "My friend was at Glastonbury this year and said there had been a sea change and mushrooms were suddenly everywhere."

The sprawling music festival has always been a home of psychedelics. But in the last few years magic mushrooms have started to spring up in increasingly earthier situations: picnics in the park, dinner parties, long lunches sat outside small plate restaurants. One friend told me their dentist takes them (though not on the job); another that she and her friends (hedge fund managers, business school kids) all dabble, picking up the mantle of psychedelic hobbyism from the high-functioning spiritual capitalists of Silicon Valley.

Popular drug use reflects the times we live in, and the ways we want to escape them. Cocaine was the perfect partner to ride the frazzled, money-obsessed bullet train of the ’80s, while ecstasy’s blissed-out boom in the ’90s reflected the spirit pulsing through Cool Britannia. In the decades since, recreational drug trends have splintered, with the rise of sleeping pills such as Xanax and Valium, and huge demand for medical substances such as ketamine and GHB for recreational use. One common thread between these newer party drugs is the promise – however twisted or problematic – to slip away from the world or dissociate from it. The new shroom renaissance – post-pandemic, mid-climate crisis – speaks to a spiritually malnourished generation in need of a bump of euphoria.

Government figures on drug misuse suggest that magic mushroom use in the UK has broadly remained flat over the past 10 years. In that same period use of powdered cocaine has quadrupled, and new drugs have begun being monitored: ketamine since 2006, mephedrone since 2010, the canisters of nitrous oxide known as laughing gas since 2012. But while no recent statistical jump in shrooms has shown up in the data, there does seem to be a correlation between their current cultural cachet and the desires of the psychedelics boom of the ’60s. New-age spiritualism is on the rise. There is a collective longing to reconnect with nature. Shrooms suggest a softness, even if a superficial facade, conjuring the image of the dancing red toadstools in Disney’s Fantasia. Some assume a sense of safety with a drug that is naturally occurring – an attitude that can blind people to the potential psilocybin has for nightmarish trips, as well as long-term damage to mental health and trip flashbacks.

The rise of mushrooms as a party drug has coincided with the publication of a raft of new research showing psilocybin’s remarkable promise in treating mental health issues, including depression, OCD and anxiety. Researchers are exploring whether psilocybin therapy – talking therapy under the influence of mushrooms – might help to treat conditions such as anorexia and PTSD. And unlike other drugs, which breed cycles of addiction and can act as gateways to harder substances, psychedelics may in fact break the chain. A 2019 research paper by Johns Hopkins University in the US found that after a psychedelic experience with LSD or psilocybin, alcohol consumption dropped so significantly that 83 per cent of trial participants no longer met the criteria for alcohol use disorder.

Additionally, while addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine often fuels cycles of crime and violence, the opposite may be true of taking mushrooms. One study published earlier this year by researchers at Harvard University found that individuals with a lifetime history of psilocybin use reported significantly reduced odds of arrest for criminal activity.

Many of the people I talked to about shrooms see them as a soothing antidote to our algorithm-led lives. "I was always looking for escapism or a way of using drugs to numb my brain," Lucia says. "What mushrooms do is kind of the opposite." The after-effects, too, feel more suited to the moment. "I hear people talking about the fact that with mushrooms you’re relatively unscathed afterwards," she adds. Mushrooms’ popularity comes at a time when people can’t emotionally afford the brutal lows that follow using cocaine or ecstasy, or even the hangovers of heavy drinking. Mushrooms aren’t always a picnic, as anyone who has encountered the nightmare spiral of a bad trip will tell you, but those willing to swallow the attendant risks see the potential to commune with yourself and others in a kinder, often more profound way. Or, as my friend Alex puts it, people want drugs that are "smiley, not snidey."

Recalling a trip on mushrooms can feel like trying to summon an especially delirious dream: you understand the laws of space and time have been bent, and yet there is still a sense of inevitability and clarity to what happened. The fragments of the past that lie dormant inside our brains (the biology room at your primary school, an especially venomous former colleague) have a strange way of floating back up. The people I spoke to in the psychedelic community were evangelical about the power of these drugs to help with confronting demons and releasing us from the past. I wanted some of that – to take a pair of bolt cutters to the chain of petty jealousies and vain hang-ups that encircled my own brain.

So with the spiritual ancestry of psilocybin front and centre of my third eye, I set about arranging an encounter with a shaman and mystic healer known as Bear. My life-changing trip would happen – I surmised from photos on his Facebook page embossed with a personal logo – in a woodland somewhere south of the M25. But after my many (profoundly unchill) attempts to lure Bear in on the encrypted messaging app Signal (at first he couldn’t give me his full energy on returning from work, then he kept getting waylaid on his way home), I accepted that the universe was sending me a more powerful signal: that it wasn’t going to happen.

So I call Sam*, who trained as a chef and lives in Cornwall. On a smallholding at the edge of a forest, he forages for mushrooms and cooks for group get-togethers where people embark on intense trips, drinking the reality-crumbling, Amazonian liquid hallucinogenic ayahuasca. "Cocaine pushes you into yourself and increases the feeling of separateness, whereas psychedelics are boundary dissolvers," Sam tells me. "The most common theme within the psychedelic experience is the feeling of unity."

Sam first took mushrooms in the fields around where he grew up when he was a teenager. He saw visions which were both spectacular and maddeningly frightening. "I had some deep experiences which caused a big upheaval in what I wanted from my life," he says. "Having been a person who was very analytical and scientific, I became less and less sure."

Sometimes people don’t want to dissolve the boundaries of reality; sometimes you take shrooms just to laugh. Once I took mushrooms with friends and we laughed until we cried about thinking the hob was on (it wasn’t). "I find ayahuasca and LSD to be less funny," Sam says. "Mushrooms have a darkness to them but also a profound humour." Psychedelic purists believe the drug’s best expression comes from totally leaving your body behind in hallucinatory trips, but Sam doesn’t think that the rise of recreational users dipping their toe in diminishes the mystic powers of mushrooms. "There can be huge depths and great healing in facing your darkest truths," he says, "and still you can get great benefit from having a good laugh with your friends."

Facing death, or even welcoming it as part of understanding the bigger picture, can be a common element of tripping on psilocybin. Pollan’s encounter with mushrooms left him feeling as though his "sense of self was gone" and feeling "reconciled to death in a way that I never had". Believers see the role the fungi play in breaking down decaying matter in the soil – turning death back into life – as useful for helping us understand and accept our own mortality.

When Sam’s mother died several years ago, the family granted her her last wish to be buried in a field on their farm. Not long afterwards, Sam had a profound trip in which she appeared to him. "I had a vision of my mum floating above her grave with flowers, fungi, butterflies, bees, all erupting around her in this beautiful dye image," he said. "It actually gave me real comfort. There are many mysteries about what the experience of death will be, but I know that at the absolute least nothing is wasted. To know that she is feeding the soil, which is feeding herbs and flowers, which will feed livestock and then eventually feed me made me see death is only real at a level of perception."

Taking shrooms can feel like rolling the dice on all of the memories you didn’t know were gathering dust in the filing cabinet of your mind, with no idea what might be pulled off the shelf. But as I read the reports of rising seas and nuclear missile tests that go on day after day, as the world gets hotter and angrier and more at war with itself, that gamble in the hope of receiving a burst of pure joy feels increasingly worth it.

Last summer, I took mushrooms on the edge of Snowdonia National Park. We were in a house which overlooked a field of wheat which glowed gold as the sun sank behind the trees, and birdsong vibrated through the air so crisply it sounded like a ringtone. Then the plug was pulled out of the sky. A storm broke and everything went dark. As a group of us sat in a circle around the fire, our laughter slowly began to sound strange; my friend’s faces twisting into strangers and villains in the glow of the fire. Fear itself had come for me, and I teetered on the edge of a black hole, with specks of mushroom-chocolate ground between my teeth and my palms turned clammy. I felt small and stupid, humbled by the force of the world and ready to beg forgiveness.

Then the music playing on the speaker changed and so did everything else. My friend stroked my hair with the curious love of a child feeling a dog’s fur for the first time, and looking into my eyes, she pulled me out of the dark. Our laughter seemed to heave the sun back out from behind the clouds. For a moment, it felt something like magic.

*Names have been changed.