Who's Tripping?

"THE HAGUE (AFP) — The Dutch authorities agreed Friday to ban the sale of magic mushrooms, a move sure to annoy many tourists visiting the Netherlands, known for its liberal drugs policies. The Dutch health and justice ministers said Friday that they have agreed to change the drugs laws to ban the sale and cultivation of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The move comes during an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the safety of the so-called magic mushrooms after a number of incidents involving tourists who had taken them...

In March, a 17-year-old French girl on a school trip to Amsterdam ate the drug before jumping from a bridge over a canal in the city. She died, and the case resulted in a majority in the Dutch Parliament calling for a total ban on all forms of the drug. Since then, a media debate has raged over that and other cases, including that of an Icelandic tourist who broke both legs jumping from a balcony and a Danish tourist veering his car wildly through a camp site."

The Independent

"Around 500,000 "doses" of packaged mushrooms are sold here annually. According to a study published in January by Amsterdam's health services said the city's emergency services were summoned 148 times to deal with a bad reaction to mushrooms in 2004-2006. Of those 134 were foreigners, with Britons forming the largest group...

Marjan Heuving, a spokeswoman for the country's Trimbos Institute, a drug policy think-tank, said mushrooms are not toxic and themselves pose no physical risk to users. But she agreed that people's reaction to them is unpredictable, depending on factors such as weight; how much food they have eaten recently; their past drug experience; psychological health; and the setting in which they are taken.

"The main danger to the user is that he will somehow hurt himself," she said. "I should add that that's extremely rare."

Associated Press

Half a million doses sold per year in the Netherlands and an average of fifty emergency calls related to mushrooms each year. Thus, only 0.01% of doses lead to emergencies. Far lower still is the chance of accidents resulting in death. There are zero cases of overdose from psilocybin, and as opposed to alcohol or aspirin the lethal dose for psylocybin is far more than can be physically consumed. No psilocybin mushroom related deaths are even counted in the UNODC literature, and the examples hyped up by the Dutch press contain only one fatality. Compare and contrast to the number of emergency calls for alcohol related accidents, sexual abuse and deaths. Not to mention any potential benefit in psychological treatment or development that might derive from these entheogens- as showcased in the medical studies referenced below and the thousand years of indigenous use in the Americas.

No need to reiterate the case. Here is a 2000 Risk Assessment by the Dutch Government's "Coordination Centre for the Assessment and Monitoring of new drugs", (CAM).

The late and great Bill Hicks should have closed the debate fifteen years ago.

Other interesting references: The Harvard_Psilocybin_Project from the 1960's, the current DEA approved Psilocybin studies from MAPS, a BBC documentary/thought experiment on the effect of a radical liberalisation of drug policy, the informed and insightful writings of the late Terence McKenna- ethnobotanist and philosopher.