In his newest book, “Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats”, Paul Stamets honors A.H. Smith and his book titled “Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats” published in 1973. Here is a section from a Chapter of my book, “My Psilocybin Trip with PBN” (still not officially published), to show Dr. Smith had mentored Paul and me at different times:
#A #tribute #to #my #magic #mushroom #colleagues.
After I received my PhD degree in 1967, my Michigan work on PBN went to the back of my mind. That was until around the end of 2019, when my PBN work was reconnected with the psilocybin work in mental health done by colleagues at #Johns #Hopkins like #Roland #Griffiths and #Bob #Jesse, among others in other #universities and #institutes. Also, I began to be aware of the important work done by #Paul #Stamets, literally in the trenches. He is the one who achieved his #current #unparalleled #status by collecting mushrooms and tripping on their psychedelics from around 1970 to 2000 when university scientists started work on magic mushrooms again, this time in earnest. He and I had one mutual connection. Both of us were at one time mentored by #Alexander (#Alex) #H. #Smith. I am much older than Paul. So, a year after I arrived at Ann Arbor, Michigan, I started working with Alex on testing potential North American magic mushrooms. He collected them and I analyzed them. As he was the curator of the #University #of #Michigan’s #Herbarium, he had access to old collections of magic mushrooms as well. That was after I had worked out the TLC analytical protocol and knew where the appropriate #tryptamines (to which PBN belong) fell on the #TLC #plate (we call it #chromatogram or #fingerprint). Since I had come from a mycophobic Cantonese culture, I had never picked a single wild mushroom and eaten it before I got to Michigan and met Alex. Even after working with him, my training in mushroom picking is still limited. I don’t know much about wild edible mushrooms, though he might have taught me to pick my first morel or chanterelle. Nor, by any means, am I an expert in recognizing psychedelic species. Out of the dozens of potential psychedelic mushrooms Alex collected in Ann Arbor and elsewhere in the United States, only one species had #psilocybin and #psilocin plus some closely related unknown compounds. That mushroom is #Psilocybe #baeocystis Singer & Smith (a new species from Oregon he and his collaborator, Rolf Singer, named). And that is the species I concentrated on for my PhD research. My first paper, published in 1965, had Alex as our co-author, “#Production of #Psilocybin in #Psilocybe #baeocystis #Saprophytic #Culture” by Albert Y. Leung, A. H. Smith, and A. G. Paul, published in J. Pharm. Sci., 54 (11): 1576-1579 (1965).
Regardless, when Alex was my mycology mentor, Paul Stamets was only a teenager. From what I have gathered, Alex must have mentored Paul when Paul was a young man at the University of Washington where Alex was probably on sabbatical or on an extended stay to investigate American Northwestern fungal species. Maybe Paul can clarify that, some day. It’s because of Paul’s continuous involvement, along with a few other psychonauts in the North American magic-mushroom scene from the early 1970s through the present, the legend of psychedelic mushrooms has been kept alive. This is especially true after their serious scientific research has been picked up by Johns Hopkins scientists and has since been continuing. For all this, I want to pay tribute to Paul Stamets, Roland Griffiths, and Robert Jesse, among other colleagues. Without their work, I would never have a chance to introduce baeocystin and norbaeocystin to the world of natural therapeutics for potential treatment of mental health problems, as they would have been buried as so many findings of obscure or suppressed research, never to be found, or are rediscovered too late to be of any timely benefits to anyone.
As long as I am alive, I’ll continue to try to make this happen – to help start a new safer industry of natural PBN for mental healthcare by bypassing the current synthetic drug therapy with its toxic vicious cycle. Even if I don’t personally have a chance to work on natural PBN mycelium now, sooner or later when the field of psychedelics, especially natural psilocybin, is more widely recognized, PBN mycelia will become legitimate and be sought after by researchers in the mental healthcare field. Scientists would then proceed to produce these mycelia without having to worry about their being banned after having spent time and money in producing them.