This rising “It” drug looks like designer chocolate, is micro-dosed among the monied set – and is illegal.
Something strange has started happening every time I go out at night, which admittedly is not as often as it was before I had young children. For the past two or so years, whether at a 40th birthday, a gig or a weekend away with friends, someone has turned up proffering magic mushrooms. Almost always, that somebody identifies as female and tends to be a late Millennial or in early middle-age.
Hayward and others interviewed for this story take mushrooms in a markedly different way to how other users in society generally consume illicit drugs – which is to say, she takes them in small, carefully measured amounts, commonly known as microdosing. This has been famously evangelised by members of the tech community in Silicon Valley, who claim microdosing allows them to function more or less normally, with the addition of subtle shades of a psychedelic event.
Of course, nobody knows how much psilocybin is in a block of chocolate aside from those making them. As with all illegal drugs, any user is taking a lot on face value. One such product I encounter as part of my research has a “nutrition guide” stating it has 3.5 grams of mushrooms in it, alongside recommended dosages. More information than you might get with a pill cooked up in a backyard lab, perhaps, but it’s still leaving an awful lot to chance.
Pejsak also says women have stronger motivational drivers when it comes to mushrooms over other drugs: “The wellness industry is telling women that they need to be ‘in the moment’ or ‘find the joy in the everyday’, and the ‘mumfluencer’ industry emphasises the importance of being a present parent. Perhaps they see microdosing as a shortcut to actually achieving those ideals.”
As far as official tracking goes, a spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police tells me they’ve seized 105 kilograms of illicit psilocybin since 2022. “Of these seizures,” he says, “psilocybin was imported almost exclusively via international mail.”the obvious, the reason that psilocybin is being hailed as a wonder drug in therapeutic circles is also what makes it so potentially dangerous.
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