🚫 The Absurd Mushroom Crackdown

👋 Welcome

Hey friends!

This week feels like a snapshot of where the psychedelic conversation is right now: strange, serious, cultural, and increasingly impossible to keep boxed into one category.

You’ve got people experimenting with altered states through artificial intelligence. You’ve got researchers revisiting childhood imagination as something more than just play. You’ve got markets quietly scaling into the billions while lawmakers scramble to decide how all of this fits into existing systems.

And threading through it all is the same tension we see every week: curiosity moving faster than regulation.

Let’s get into it.

🔝 Weekly Highlights

• 🤖 People are paying to get chatbots high.
  Users are prompting AI into simulated “trip states”—visionary talk, ego-ish spirals, cosmic frameworks, and that familiar “everything is connected” cadence. It’s a strange mirror: humans building digital sandboxes to recreate altered-state meaning. Read more
  

• 🧸 Childhood play can look a lot like a psychedelic mindset in disguise.
  This piece asks whether imagination-heavy games share traits people report on psychedelics: flexible reality, symbolic logic, deep absorption, and a willingness to believe in the invisible for a while. Read more
  

• 🍄 Medicinal mushrooms are headed toward $14.88B, and that’s a real lane now.
  The functional, non-psychedelic ones. The projection puts the global market at $14.88B by 2035, driven by immune support, cognitive health, and routine wellness adoption. Learn more

• 🏛️ Cannabis is officially moving closer to Schedule III, and the dominoes start falling from there.
  The executive order moves cannabis is on its way from Schedule I to Schedule III—huge implications for medical legitimacy, research access, institutions, and industry realities. Nationwide legality remains a separate fight, but the federal posture just changed. Read more

🧬 Quick Hits

RESEARCH 🔬

• 🧠 Psychedelics for OCD research is getting more specific, and psilocybin sits in the middle of the conversation.
  This paper looks at psychedelics and obsessive-compulsive disorder through the lens of rigid loops and cognitive “stuckness,” pointing toward why compounds like psilocybin keep attracting clinical interest in this area. Read the study
  

• 🙂 Microdosing shows a temporary mood lift in a new report, with psilocybin-style framing.
  This write-up covers findings suggesting short-term mood improvement from microdosing. The key is the word temporary—measurable lift, brief window, realistic expectations. Read more
  

• 👃 5-MeO-DMT is being tested as a nasal spray for alcohol use disorder.
  AtaiBeckley is exploring a 5-MeO-DMT nasal spray approach. Controlled delivery + short-acting intensity keeps showing up as the “clinic-friendly” direction for these compounds. Read the study

POLICY 🏛️

• 🌱 Jackson, Michigan just made psychedelics the lowest law enforcement priority.
  Another city joins the growing local movement to deprioritize enforcement around entheogenic plants and fungi—policy shifting at street level while bigger systems stall and debate. Read more
  

• 🌿 Jackson, Mississippi could be next to deprioritize psychedelic mushrooms and entheogenic plants.
  A similar resolution is being considered, signaling that this trend is spreading beyond the usual “expected” cities. Read more
  

• 🏛️ The cannabis Schedule III reaction wave is loud, split, and revealing.
  This roundup captures the responses from lawmakers, officials, advocates, and industry voices—useful for seeing what camps form immediately after a federal shift. Read more

CULTURE 🎭

• ⛳ A pro golfer just described a week-long ayahuasca retreat in public.
  Beau Hossler shares details of a full week in ceremony—one more example of ayahuasca entering mainstream conversation through people with public platforms. Read more
  

• 🍄 A psychedelic church is trading sacrament for toys for kids this Christmas.
  A holiday toy drive with an entheogenic twist: donate toys, receive sacrament. Charity, community-building, and a very public expression of modern psychedelic religion. Read more

⚱️ Main Feature

The UK turkey tail + cordyceps “ban” is a regulatory sledgehammer, not a safety scare.

The UK story is getting passed around as “they banned turkey tail and cordyceps,” and people assume it means a safety emergency.

That framing protects the system.

Because this feels less like public health and more like bureaucracy using a technical label to erase a category from shelves without having to argue about it in public.

Turkey tail and cordyceps are not psychedelic mushrooms. They’re functional mushrooms. People use them for everyday wellness: immune support, energy, resilience, recovery. The kind of thing that sits next to vitamin D and magnesium in someone’s cabinet.

So when they suddenly start disappearing, it raises an obvious question:

If these products were truly dangerous, why does the story look like quiet removal instead of clear public guidance?

Here’s what’s really happening in plain English:

UK regulators can classify certain foods and supplements as “novel foods.” Once that happens, companies need formal pre-market authorization to legally sell them for human consumption. In theory, that sounds like a safety process.

In practice, it functions like a financial gate.

The authorization pathway is expensive, slow, and complex. Which means it doesn’t just “raise standards.” It filters out who gets to exist in the market.

• Large companies can afford the paperwork.

• Small farms and independent brands get squeezed out.

• Retailers and payment processors pull listings early to reduce risk.

• Consumers may end up thinking the product must be unsafe, even if the driver is compliance and liability.

And it’s hard to ignore the pattern here, because we’ve seen this kind of move before across psychedelics, across supplements, across anything that sits at the intersection of nature + commerce + popular demand.

The system doesn’t always say: “We’re banning this because it’s harmful.”

Sometimes it says: “Prove it qualifies to exist.”

And if the proof costs more than most players can pay, the outcome becomes the same: products disappear, small brands collapse, and the market consolidates upward.

That’s why calling this “public safety” can feel like a dodge.

Because safety frameworks should do at least three things:

1. Explain risk clearly in public language.

2. Create pathways that are realistically accessible.

3. Target actual harm, not popular categories.

When a rule wipes out legal sales through technicalities, it doesn’t look like protection. It looks like control.

And the larger consequence is bigger than turkey tail and cordyceps.

If this approach becomes normalized, any functional mushroom, or any natural product category, can be put on the same conveyor belt:

Label → paperwork → cost barrier → “voluntary” removals → quiet industry collapse.

The frustrating part is how avoidable this is.

There are ways to regulate responsibly without turning the approval process into an economic weapon. There are ways to create standards without demanding a million-dollar toll just to keep selling a mushroom that people have already been using for years.

Instead, we get the worst mix:

A system that moves slowly when people ask for access… and moves fast when it wants to shut a category down.

So yeah. Call it a ban if you want.

But the story underneath it reads like this:

A growing wellness category got too big to ignore, and the response was a paperwork-based crackdown that punishes the smallest players first… while the public gets left with vague explanations and empty shelves.

👉 Read more

🎁 Psychedelic Utility Belt

• 📚 Psychedelic Archives just launched a Substack as they near 1M followers.
  The owner of the account had an admin reveal on Instagram and announced they’re adding a Substack for more long-form content. Read more
  

• 🧭 Find vetted psychedelic resources near you.
  Our directory is a growing hub for psychedelic-friendly practitioners, brands, and services—built to help people explore responsibly and find legit options without wading through sketchy search results. Explore the directory

👋 Signoff

This week had the full spectrum: AI weirdness, childhood wonder, real policy movement, big research funding, and a regulatory mess that’s quietly reshaping the functional mushroom world.

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for staying grounded while we explore the edges.

Have a peaceful weekend!

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