A Very Trippy Trip Inside the Great Shroom Boom

They're the party drug of the post-pandemic era. So why are magic mushrooms suddenly everywhere? GQ journeys into the psychedelic world of psilocybin to connect the (blurry) dots

- By Olivia Pym

The darkest, loneliest experience I've had on mushrooms was the time they didn't work. It was Halloween in Los Angeles. In the spirit of the pagan holiday we drove out of the city to the lush botanical gardens surrounding The Huntington Library. We were going to perform feng shui inside our addled brains in the Chinese garden. We were going to stop to smell all 1 300 varieties of roses in the rose garden, arranged like perfect blocks of watercolour paint. We were going to blow our tiny minds when we entered the similarly named California garden, because how can you enter the California garden when this whole garden was in California? And doesn't that make you think? We were going to eat dried mushrooms from a ziplock bag until we found enlightenment, LA-style.