BBC News on Magic mushrooms

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<TD width=315>The 7 O'Clock News
Legal high?

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<TD width=315>Magic mushrooms: the Aztecs called them "the flesh of the gods"; Siberian shamans used them to smooth their path to the spirit world; and by the 1960s and 70s a generation of hairy hippies established them as their hallucinogen of choice.

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<TD width=315>In recent times, more ‘clubby’ drugs have replaced the humble fungus. But now it looks as if they’re back - at the centre of a new retail boom and a legal grey area...

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<TD width=315>Rising usage
According to The Independent Drug Monitoring Unit, drug users' ratings for magic mushrooms have increased sharply in the last year. These findings are echoed in the latest British Crime Survey on drug use - which reveals that the estimated number of users jumped from 150,000 to 180,000 over the same period.

The rise has been partly attributed to the explosion in the sale of imported magic mushrooms and home-growing kits in street markets, shops and over the internet.

Of the 20 seed shops the 7 O’Clock News spoke to in the last few days, 16 said they had seen a significant increase in the sale of magic mushrooms. One of them, Amsterdam of London, sells 100kg of magic mushrooms – that’s about 10,000 trips – a week.

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<TD width=315>Legal wrangles
For years, magic mushrooms have straddled a strange legal line. If you pick them in a field there's nothing that the police can do. But prepare them in any way – such as freezing them or making them into tea - and they become a Class A drug which carries the highest penalty by law.

Yet the idea of 'preparation' remains open to interpretation – could it include packaging or refrigeration, for example? Such questions are likely to be raised in two landmark legal cases in Glasgow and Kent, where police are trying to get a prosecution against mushroom sellers

The charity Drugscope have called on the government to clarify the legal arguments over mushrooms and take a more realistic approach to their sale and use.

Spokesperson Petra Maxwell told us: "We'd like to see a re-evaluation of their class A status once they’re prepared. A lot of evidence shows they're not as dangerous as (fellow Class A drugs) crack or heroin."

She did caution that, although unlikely to have long term effects on the body – mushroom users did risk anxiety, bad trips and flashbacks.

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<TD width=315>Risky business
We spoke to John Marsden – a user who’s had bad experiences on mushrooms and adivised against using them.

He said: "I took some with some friends, we lost track, trying to out do each other. These people who were my friends, I turned on them, hated them, wanted to kill them. It was quite traumatic and a place that I don’t ever want to go again".

Legal or otherwise, moderation may be the best policy.</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>