Washington man facing prison after foraging for wild psilocybin mushrooms
psymposia.com
psymposia.com
Guidebooks are worse than useless, because you can never be sure that the slight differences between the mushroom you're looking at and your best guess in the guidebook are unimportant or a distinction that means the one you picked is fatal instead of edible.
There's no app for this. [EDIT: Ok, there are apps for this, but there's always room for improvement]
There should be. And this guy could earn a modest income helping some semi-talented ML and mobile engineers in Washington build one with his wealth of knowledge.
Take a picture of a mushroom with your phone, and it'll help you tell what you can expect from it.
Nothing helps with legal or medical problems like not having to worry about relatively tiny amounts of money.
Probably much smarter is a general ML based app that allows user-defined, crowdsourced datasets. So for example, you download the app, and you pay to train a model using datasets that other people gathered. This could be used for things such as middle school science experiments (what is ML? what are the differences between cloud and rock types?) to things like magic mushroom identification. Since the models and datasets are user-curated, you're less exposed to liability, since you merely provide the platform
You need a better guidebook, and spend time with it. As with plants or any taxonomy there are rules and things to do that can classify things. It's more than just a photo of the thing that its about.
You need to spend time to learn, as you would learn a programming language, the rules for classification. It takes time and some effort to learn how to know whats good to eat, what makes you sick and what'll get you high. Essentially it's a form of biological inquiry so treat it like a science. Almost every mycologist uses a few books and tools to identify their haul.
edits: rule of thumb for eating: The range of edible but not eatable / awful mushrooms is huge. The range of deadly mushrooms is small. The range of edible and delicious mushrooms is small too. The bad and good ranges don't overlap on the whole. Thus, like with identifying garden plants you only need to learn a few kinds to be able to hunt the lovely edible mushrooms. But you do still need to learn and spend time in the learning.
Whether someone should be jailed for picking psilocybin mushrooms is up for discussion (hint: they shouldn't), but he wasn't arrested for picking Portobellos.
"...He picked 10 specimens from the woodchip pile, and put them in a plastic bag along with 10 of the classic azurescens. “I put them together because they were clearly different, with no mistake whatsoever. They don’t look anything alike.”"
Sounds like he was picking the unidentified Psilocybe along with Psilocybe azurescens.
You never, ever, mix unidentified mushroms in the same bag. They are spongy criatures that disintegrate easily or adsorb liquids. Spores or tiny fragments of the unknown mushrom will contaminate the edible mushroms, poisoning the food and leading typically to serious consequences.
Nor does the argument "There’s no injured party involved in any of this" hold water. There are many illegal things where there is no direct injury to a person.
Taking petrified wood from the Petrified National Forest, taking trinitite from the site of the first nuclear bomb test, knocking over stone formations in Goblin Valley State Park, graffiti and littering, and many more.
He also picked 10 Psilocybe azurescens, in addition to the 10 odd mushrooms mushrooms which he thought might be a subspecies, or perhaps new Psilocybe species. It's not like he had no idea he was collecting something which contained psilocybin.
Admittedly, the article muddies this water, but it's our crazy drug laws that are to blame for his predicament, otherwise he'd just be facing a fine or perhaps a few days in jail.
Unless these mushrooms are going extinct or something he's not hurting the environment.
I disagree with you there. His argument was that it shouldn't be illegal because nobody was hurt, not that it isn't illegal. I'd agree with him, victimless crimes are bullshit
If I catch a fish on public waters but without a fishing license, is that victimless?
Yes, if you regard the fish as owned by "the public", in which case "the public" is the victim.
Fishing laws exist because there is a tiny damage which is normally below the threshold of general damage, but when magnified by a lot of people becomes meaningful. But I can't point to a specific case and point out the victim.
Doom, as you may recall, originally used the Red Cross symbol on medikits. This is illegal in many countries, due to the Geneva Convention. id software changed the symbol. Who was the victim of their use of the Red Cross symbol?
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act prohibits collecting feathers from migratory birds, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act extends that to eagles. Every once in a while someone is prosecuted for using those feathers. For example, Peg Bargon incorporated those feathers in her dreamcatchers, which she then sold.
Who is the victim in this case? (This law exists to prevent a reversion to historical circumstances which, like fishing license laws, were destroying bird populations.)
There are laws against animal cruelty. Who is the victim if I vivisect my dog on my property, away from public eyes?
So, don't try to make this a general thing. Your argument should be that some personal uses of psilocybin should not be illegal. Not the broad (and in my opinion untenable) view that "victimless crimes are bullshit."
It does not build PC anymore than walking in a "high crime area". It wouldn't stand in appellate courts. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/528/119/case.htm...
We've kind of gone off on a tangent from the original article which I am OK with. It will be a hard sell for me to agree to widening the definition of what constitutes PC. From my basic understanding being in a place or doing something is the definition of circumstantial evidence.
I also just realized that I am biased in this conversation because I believe that they should be legal. If you read the studies linked from https://clusterbusters.org/ the potential physiological medical benefits have been shrouded from study by the international agreements that were fabricated by agenda driven politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlqsdezhhk
To summarize:
1. Old guy was poaching. Nice story and all but there was a sign.
2. No I do not want to expand the definition of what constitutes PC
3. I have bias in this conversation because I think mushrooms should not be categorized as an illegal drug.
If you're going to play the safety card you should charge every single person caught foraging for edible wild mushrooms. Every year I hear reports of people dying from eating the wrong mushroom.
You should be aware that these laws do not serve as guideposts but as tools of oppression. I mean that literally and not as libertarian hyperbole. If you want citations I can do the needful for the same.
The opioid epidemic has been well documented as being created by Purdue Pharma, et al. It's also clear by now that treating a medical issue as a crime only makes things tragically worse.
But this all goes back to a central question: should the state have authority over your mind? If not, why are these laws on the books?
Preventing graffiti at a state or national park doesn't make us safe either. We still prosecute those who graffiti.
Poaching rabbits doesn't make us safer. It's also illegal.
In this case, he did break the law by picking mushrooms where it was specifically prohibited, and it would be reasonable to cite him for that fact.
But it wasn't about theft, it was about the fact that he wanted to ingest a compound which would alter his state of consciousness. That should not be a crime.
I list more examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052587 .
The U.S. Constitution might be a good place to start talking about what laws should do. It says, "...form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
The 10th amendment says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
It wasn't not written to be a general-purpose commentary about what laws should be.
Remember, it was also written to allow people to be property. It also says that there is freedom of religion, but that was at the federal level. Some states had official state churches for a few decades more.
Not a very smart move. The lawyers he fired are right.
It sounds like he wants to protect his rights. In the US system yhe prosecutors throw the book at you and offer plea deals that are a small fraction of the original charge. They then then use their resources to go heavily after anyone who doesn't take a plea deal.
That means you get to pick defending your rights or avoiding punishment, not both
Oops.