Magic Mushrooms: A guide to the UK picking season

Every year in the UK thousands of people head to fields around the UK in the hopes of finding magic mushrooms.

But they’re not actually that easy to find… and as soon as they’re picked out of the ground, in the eyes of the law, they’re a class A drug.

TNM reporter Clodagh Griffin (@clogrifff) headed into the English countryside to meet up with fungi expert and harm reduction advocate Callum (@he_grows). Callum has grown a community of over 100k people who exchange knowledge and advice across social media platforms.

They spoke about his experience in the mushroom community, along where to look for and how to correctly identify liberty caps. And of course he gave lots of harm reduction advice on key aspects like setting and dosage.

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Correspondent: Clodagh Griffin
Camera/Editor/Producer: Yasmin Rapley

Graphics: Ellie Leith
Editor-in-Chief: Rebecca Hutson

00:00 Intro
00:59 Creating a community around magic mushrooms
02:33 What to look for and how to identify the right magic mushrooms
04:25 What doses a first-timer should take + effects
05:48 Advice on the right environment to try them for the first time

100% psilocybe semena liberty caps magic mushrooms this is what everyone’s after and that’s probably if you would to dry that out quarter of a gram to half a gram if you were to eat this fresh you would definitely feel them it’s mushroom picking season in the UK every year thousands of people go out into the fields all around the UK they get their eyes busy and they’re looking for liberty cap mushrooms mostly so we’ve come to the new for us today to meet up with Callum who I’ve dubed the Mushroom Man but he’s actually just an expert at like all things fungi and nature what I think is interesting is that every year in the UK 200,000 people take mushrooms whether that’s like they’ve pissed them off the floor or they’ve gotten them off a dealer the Global Drug survey has called them the safest recreational drug which is kind of surprising cuz they’re Class A which is on the same vein as heroin crack uh but we can just find them in the ground so let’s go and see if we can find some if you want to just tell me a little bit about yourself and like maybe the first time you were introduced to mushrooms um so really it probably it probably back in college um when I was studying ha culture my lecture we we walked past I think it was some puff balls or something and he just explained explained what it was and ever since then I was I was quite fascinated by them yeah just grew from there and I started learning more and more and the more I learned the more I realized I didn’t actually know as much as I thought I did originally which makes you want to go out and and really start studying and teaching yourself everything so you have a Tik Tok page has 50,000 followers you post har production advice tell me a bit about how you started that so I started the Tik Tok maybe two or 3 years ago um I had a video that went viral and I just thought I know things and other people clearly want to know them as well you know I get a lot of questions and people generally really interested when I start talking about mushrooms a lot of people don’t really don’t have a clue um and they’re just trying to learn so I’m trying to hit a balance between like using real science and evidence and information um and making it sort of personable that people can understand what you’re actually talking about and tell me a little bit about the group that you’ve set up it’s grown to about 55 65,000 people grew by 25% just in the last just this season in the last month I just really wanted to try and have a hand in basically making sure the the correct information was getting out there to people is that like mostly in the UK and what kind of age range are they it’s mostly in the UK I think that the average age range is like between 25 and 35 obviously you got some old school heads from like back in the 60s and stuff that were that were into it so we’ve got a few of the older crowd that like come in and and share their stories and stuff about picking you know like back in the 70s and things which I thought was really cool maybe you could just take me through like your process when you go out like what you’re looking for you go through the key identification features so so siloc SCI the Liberty Cap’s got um a gelatinous pellicle which is basically like a jelly membrane layer that goes over the top of the cap and that’s like a key identification feature to separate it from other things like hyoma erum which you don’t want to eat it’s not it’s not psychoactive I don’t think it’s particularly toxic but um and that doesn’t have the jelly layer yeah exactly that doesn’t we looking out for it yeah 100% nice okay we see how many we can find cool yeah I think we are it’s these gullies I can’t remember if it’s that one uh this is one of the this is one of the lookalike species hyoma erum so you know I’m saying about the gelatinous pelico that you’re looking for so this has got pretty much all of the other key identification features it almost has like a f sort of Pilar on the top there which is what people commonly call the nipple um but if you grab the cap and you pull it off to the the side see it just disintegrates there’s nothing holding it together okay it just falls apart that’s that’s lacking the key identification feature the gelatin as pelic but if you look inside as well the gills are even the right color okay and then the stem is also very very not far off at all from what you’re looking for but it’s it’s much more brittle it just snaps apart so I had no idea there were so many types that looked so similar yeah yeah there’s a bunch oh yeah here we’ve got that’s that’s definitely oh cool but this this guy is a is a liberty capsil C SU lenata has shared in places but it’s holding together it’s really fibrous you’ve got the nipple on the top of the cap there oh yeah that’s another key identification features so things like um Proto staria they don’t have the nipple on the top pull the cap apart if you want and you can have a look at the uh the gelatinous pellicle oh my God yeah it’s so sticky yeah [Music] wow before people are going to try it for the first time can you chat a bit about like dosage and then like what the effects are of that so yeah for for new people it’s probably best to do it on a full stomach you know have a good lunch have some dinner wait a few hours for that to start digesting the sort of beginner the sort of first sort of dosage that you’re really going to be looking at 0.1 to 0.2 of a gram you’re not going to feel tooo much you’re just going to feel a little bit sort of lifted and energized and energetic then sort of the next stage up from that is about a ground where these ferns would actually be really really really good to look at on mushrooms the the insane patterns and things the way everything like melds into itself and sort of wraps around and things that that’s brilliant and then like the two G range again it’s just that but a bit more intense you’re going to get you’re going to get the giggles as well a lot of euphoria the the body feeling is going to be quite intense once you get into the sort of free G level it’s just that but but even even more so it can be quite hard for a lot of people to uh that’s the range where some people don’t really like what’s happening your thought trains end up being a little bit different as well so you don’t quite have all your faculties about you as you usually would above that you know you’re talking like five to seven gr range which is what people call the hero do and that’s when you start to see um geometric patterns coming out of nowhere people end up getting into like thought loops and things where um it’s almost like you find faults in your own logic and stuff so it can be quite mentally um powerful your tolerance builds up extremely quickly with with psilocybin um so if you were to take a gram one day and then the next day take another gram it’s probably going to not even be half as effective I kind of feel like you would want to be in the right setting to experience a lot of this absolutely especially especially what’s nice place to do it somewhere like this is is lovely if you’re if you’re confident and sort of comfortable in nature you know going out and having a walk in nature is absolutely amazing but you know for your first time you’re probably going to want to be at home with friends maybe in your bedroom or in your Lounge somewhere that you know that you’re really comfortable with and you’ve got people around you that you trust and love and you know know that they love you as well just um cuz yeah when it when it when you get to like the five G sort of level three Gs plus anything like that it gets quite intense and so it’s just really good to be in a safe environment I thought saw something there but was actually just rabbit poo so yeah rabbit rabbit poo will get [Music]