Politico Reports Washington D.C. Media Journos Are Doing Mushrooms For ‘Performance-Enhancing Brain Boost’
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
One of the more head-scratching revelations to come out of Friday’s Politico Playbook rundown is that many in the media are jumping onto the trend of taking mushrooms.
Politico’s Ryan Lizza reported that people in Washington D.C. are taking advantage of the drug being decriminalized in the city and are munching on mushrooms, especially in “media circles.”
“In Washington, you can have mushrooms delivered to your door in less than an hour without worrying about running afoul of local cops,” Lizza wrote. “And a lot of people here are availing themselves of D.C.’s unique decriminalization rules. Microdosing mushrooms as a kind of performance-enhancing brain boost — already wildly popular among the California tech set — is now fairly common in Washington, especially in media circles.”
Recreational use of mushrooms, as opposed to micro-dosing, is also popular, Lizza added.
Under the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020, growing, purchasing, and distributing psychedelic mushrooms is considered the lowest priority for police, essentially making it a non-issue in the city.
According to the report, interest in the benefits of psychedelics in the city was motivated mostly by the book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan — which was adapted into a Netflix series titled simply titled How to Change Your Mind this year — as well as the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, where comedian Joe Rogan regularly talks about psychedelics, including specifically touting the potential benefits to micro-dosing mushrooms.
Taking mushrooms is a trend outside of D.C. too. Colorado, which was an early pioneer in legalizing cannabis a decade ago, has a ballot measure voters will decide on in December that would allow state-run facilities where people could receive “psilocybin-assisted therapy.”
