There’s nothing magic about magic mushrooms

For about six straight hours after taking magic mushrooms – psilocybin – I had visions of a vast, skeletal shark coming at me out of the watery gloom, mouth open, teeth inches from my face. It wasn’t a hallucination – I only saw the shark when my eyes were shut – but even with my eyes stretched wide I felt dread, the same blank terror I had felt the year before when in the spirit of happy enquiry I’d taken acid.

I deserved the shark, I suppose. What sort of a dolt has at the psychedelics again when LSD has already given them the abdabs? The trouble was, I’d bought the psilocybin PR: mushrooms are different because they’re organic; all you need is the right dose in the right environment; just surround yourself with friends. I hoped, I think, that the mushrooms might put right that bad trip, because the fear it summoned was still haunting me – it still does.

More than 25 years later, psilocybin PR is back. It’s strange to see it spread across the press: don’t worry, it’s a natural high. It’ll change your life. Just get the right dose and the right environment. This time, the right environment is said to be a clinic, under the care of men in white coats. Several of the nicest, cleverest millennials I know are keen to give it a try. I can see why. What else in their lives offers them enlightenment? Even the church has collapsed into politics.

But it makes me feel like Martin Brody, the police chief in Jaws,watching the happy souls of Amity Island skip towards the water: ‘Get out! It’s not safe. There’s a shark in there!’ No one listened to Brody.