In Marina, California a small inkling of a mushroom is casting a shadow as far and as high as the mountains of Denver. The mushroom is hardly a spore; it’d be best to call it an idea. An idea started by Kevin Saunders and his partner Kitty Merchant, that in 2018 in this town, psilocybin mushrooms might be consumed by patrons and tourists who hold out for legal consumption of psychedelic drugs to transport them to somewhere far away from the wretches of suburbia and bad ilk alike and point them toward some better heading.

In the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 a group of greedy politicians grinded the culture of the sixties to a halt and grinded down the hippies, their own Establishment, millions of dollars poured in from drugged taxpayers to lock up the now “sober” taxpayers. A great defense was raised, a wall, a partition, to reconnect the good ol American back to his good natured moral character. However in the outreaches a few noticed this idea as a glass partition separating visitors and inmates.

This idea which is an extrapolation from John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, or perhaps a tilting 90 degrees of it— straight up. Was once a road that people would speed 100 mph down chasing love peddlers toward pleasure villages, to Mill, one should be free to do whatever he or she chooses so long as it does not do harm to others; in our time this resembles a kind of wall that sorts the flaming deviants from the good ilk like a rigid and arbitrary divide that has come down like a knife on the moral landscape.

The effect if this proposition gets passed, the California Psilocybin Legalization Initiative, would be like an avalanche. From the top down it would change culture. Like it did in the 60’s. During my phone call with Kevin Saunders, he said this, “If it isn’t wasn’t for Terence Mckenna there would be no Kevin Saunders. If there wasn’t a Kevin Saunders then there won’t be some next guy…” this explanation came at me like a sudden peering into the universal nexus; vibrations of the mushrooms could be heard like a distant echo from many years ago. A kind of destiny so to speak. But informed by scientific opinion. Like that of Dr. Carl Hart who speaks to the idea that a drug free society doesn’t exist and you wouldn’t want to see a drug free society.

When I talked to Kevin he said this initiative would be a one for humanity. He sounded like Timothy Leary. But I suppose there’s a depth to people that needs exploring. While most of us are living on the surface we can hope that a small cohort of radicals might just pull off one of the crazier stunts of 2018. And that a mushroom in the town of Marina, California could cast a shadow as far as the Rocky Mountains like cannabis had and perhaps even further. It seems far in the distance but the future is coming on quick.