Robert McPherson never felt he had anything to hide.

On Halloween in 2003, at 9:30 AM, McPherson and his wife, Margaret, stood before a Seattle judge for sentencing. Robert had plead guilty to a felony charge of growing psilocybin mushrooms, Margaret to a misdemeanor charge of possessing psilocybin mushrooms. Yet, as evidenced by a court transcript posted online by Robert, his defense attorney wasn’t too concerned with the growing charges: “When Mr. McPherson was first arrested by the agents, he completely admitted his involvement in the spore distribution scheme, admitted ownership of the few mushrooms that were found in his house. He operated the business for several years and never tried to conceal it.”

This “spore distribution scheme” which caught the eye of Johnny Law was not, in 2003, and is not currently, expressly illegal in Washington. Since the early '90s, Robert McPherson had assumed the noms de guerre, alternately, “Psylocybe Fanaticus” and “Professor Fanaticus” to sell magic mushroom spores and mushroom cultivation kits through High Times and, later, through his website fanaticus.com. The professor tag is warranted, as McPherson made major innovations in the PF Tek, or Psylocybe Fanaticus technique, a simple and popular method for cultivating mushrooms at home without any equipment more specialized than some mason jars, a stock pot, and a clear storage bin. Excepting California, Georgia, and Idaho, it is perfectly legal throughout the United States to buy and sell psilocybin mushrooms spores, as they do not themselves contain the controlled substance psilocin, or the “magic” in the mushroom. It is also legal, naturally, to spread information about how to cultivate mushrooms; it just so happens that the methods for growing shiitakes work equally well for growing, say, the popular Golden Teacher strain of psilocybe cubensis.

But the Professor's folly was indiscretion, not infraction. The story goes that law enforcement agencies throughout America started fielding calls from enraged parents that their teens were receiving grow kits in the mail from this PF character. After a period when the Postmaster General's office was tracking mail to and from the McPherson residence in Amanda Park, Washington, the couple was visited by “[the] D.E.A. swat team, the FBI, the US marshals, the olympic national park rangers, Greys harbor drug task force, a road block, a battering ram, machine guns and a "black" helicopter," as written on the Professor's personal website. What law enforcement found was a small operation growing just enough mushrooms to produce spores for the Professor's business. Directly owning up to the growing operation and pleading guilty to manufacture of a controlled substance, Robert McPherson was put under two years house arrest and fined by the courts for, essentially, all he had. In 2011, he passed away from complications related to Hepatitis C.