Mushrooms — The Alkaloid

Three-panel comic: mushrooms growing on a log, the same mushrooms as products on a store shelf, and a giant mushroom-shaped cloud rising over climbing bar graphs.

Field Notes

Field Notes #8: The Other Mushroom Boom

While psychedelic mushrooms fight for legal status, their boring cousins quietly became a near-$85 billion wellness industry. What the science on lion's mane and reishi actually shows — and where the marketing gets ahead of it.

Early-90s comic strip: a spore jar labeled Natal Super Strength; a scientist startled by a phylogenetic tree; the same mushroom in an ancient grassland at dusk with grazing animals.

newsletter

The Alkaloid #19: The Strain That Was a Species

For years, home growers prized a potent magic mushroom called Natal Super Strength. Nobody had ever named it. New DNA work shows it is a separate species, and its family tree pushes the origins of the world's favorite psychedelic mushroom back more than a million years.

Two different wild mushrooms on a dark forest floor, each with a faint glowing path of light that curves up and meets at a single point between them.

Field Notes

Field Notes #6: Two Roads to the Same Molecule

Psilocybin makes a magic mushroom magic. A new study shows two unrelated mushroom groups evolved it separately, by completely different chemical routes that meet only near the finish. Which raises the question decades of human fascination still can't answer: what is psilocybin actually for?

Aerial overhead view of a large dispersed crowd walking through an open public space

newsletter

The Alkaloid #4: The Quiet Eleven Million

Eleven million American adults used psilocybin in the past year — more than the populations of Pennsylvania or Illinois. Past-year use among adults 30 and over rose 188% in four years. It happened almost entirely without legal frameworks or medical infrastructure catching up.