that one good collection provides enough material to intoxicate 
at least a hundred people. Properly dried, Liberty Caps retain 
their potency for at least a year and may be brewed into a 
powerful tea. 
Almost all of the users of Liberty Caps whom I met were 
young people who referred to themselves as ‘‘freaks’* — 
mostly long-haired members of the Pacific Northwest counter- 
culture, many of whom lived communally in rural areas. All of 
them had extensive experience with Cannabis and hallucino- 
gens, and most preferred natural drugs to synthetic ones. In 
almost every case, they had first learned of the activity of these 
mushrooms from university students with mycological train- 
ing, usually from Oregon State University at Corvallis. I met 
two individuals who chanced upon the Liberty Cap by eating 
small brown mushrooms growing in cow fields without any 
special knowledge. There are persistent stories in western 
Oregon of older, local people who have used these mushrooms 
for more than 20 years. I have been unable to verify these tales. 
If true, they suggest an independent route to knowledge of local 
psilocybin-containing species, possibly going back to acciden- 
tal discoveries of early settlers or even to Indians. Coastal 
tribes in the Pacific Northwest gathered mushrooms as food, 
but there is no evidence that they used any psychoactive fungi, 
unless, as in Mexico, they concealed such practices from most 
of the invading Europeans. 
The next most prized species in Oregon is a much larger 
mushroom that grows throughout western Oregon and Wash- 
ington in scattered locations through the fall. It grows often in 
groups on greenhouse mulch and on lawns. In Eugene, Oregon 
it fruits regularly ona bark mulch around rhododendron bushes 
in municipal parks and is avidly collected by local residents. 
The cap is dull brown, bluntly cone-shaped when young, ex- 
panding to convex or flat with age. It may be 4 cm. wide at 
greatest expansion. The mushroom has a viscid pellicle when 
fresh and wet; on drying, the color fades leaving an area of 
copper brown in the center. It shows blueing on injury more 
consistently than the Liberty Cap. The stipe is whitish, the 
spores purple-brown. Four carpophores make up an average 
dose. 
Mycology students at Oregon State University call this mush- 
room Psilocybe baeocystis Smith, as do many users in Eugene. 
Psilocybe baeocystis has a reputation as an especially powerful 
138 
