Shaboom shrooms

Who said that it's a fool who pretends to be a lawyer and have himself as a client?

I don't know, but I do know that you should not mess around with drugs - prescription or otherwise - unless you know what you're doing. And since so few of us are doctors of pharmacology or medicine, I'm going to say it's better to leave it up to those kinds of people before doing this kind of thing...

A man from Nebraska, hearing that the psilocybin in “magic mushrooms” can be effective for dealing with a variety of mental health issues, decided he would just get a mess of shrooms, boil them down, and inject them into his bloodstream.

Huge surprise. He almost died. The medicine from these mushrooms is meant to be taken orally.  

The Nebraskan is a bipolar opioid addict. He decided to stop taking his medications in order to ween himself off the pills. 

This led to a manic-depressive episode during which he read about the wonders of "magic mushrooms" and then decided to try the intravenous route. This led to organ failure within days.

The result? Nausea, diarrhea, early signs of jaundice, and the vomiting of blood. His family took him right to the ER, where doctors found his liver and kidneys near failure. He was eight days in the intensive care unit and more than three weeks on a ventilator.

As they flushed his system and began a program of antibiotics on him, doctors took a blood test and found that he tested positive for Psilocybe cubensis, which confirmed the man injected himself with mushrooms — which had begun to grow in his blood.

I'll let you read that last sentence again. Mushrooms were growing in his bloodstream.

He had injected himself with a species of psychedelic mushroom containing psilocybin and psilocin. These are what science calls "psychedelic" drugs. If you were around in the 1960s, it was then cool to be considered psychedelic. If you wore brightly colored bell bottoms and listened to The Electric Prunes while burning your library card, you were being psychedelic.

Psychedelic drugs are the ones that produce hallucinations and apparent expansion of consciousness. 

Psychedelic mushrooms in the wild

He was lucky. A team of doctors saved his life, but he was in the hospital for 22 days.

My favorite mushroom recipe involves buying fresh white mushrooms at ALDI, taking them home, and sautéing them in butter and Worcestershire sauce before crowning a nice rare steak with them. It's not psychedelic, and the only hallucination I ever get is when I top the whole deal with some zesty horseradish, which, if I add enough, can make me feel like the top of my head is coming off.

But in a good way! And I don't need to expand my consciousness when I'm grinding on a steak. In that moment, I am at one with my inner carnivore. 

Add baked potato with sour cream and butter, and a side salad, and you're talking dinner!