[HAMILTON'S PHARMACOPEIA]
[HAMILTON MORRIS AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE PART 2 OF 3]
To better understand the prohibition of the sacred mushroom,
I go to meet criminal lawyer, Karem Canatan
who explained the nuances of Dutch drug law.
Okay. Well, first of all we have, like many countries,
we have the Class A drugs and Class B drugs.
[KAREM CANATAN CRIMINAL LAWYER, AMSTERDAM] So that's not different from any other countries.
So we have lists of drugs that are illegal.
To buy it, to use it, to bring it over the border,
it's completely illegal.
Then we have a small portion of drugs,
in Holland we call it the 'soft drugs,'
where you have weed and hashish and the joints.
Or we call it joints because we smoke joints.
I don't know if that's the correct term, but...
We have which is called like a Tolerance Policy
by the Dutch government.
And they have on paper saying that if the amount
isn't bigger than so and so much,
then it's allowed to have it, it's allowed to smoke it
and you are allowed to sell it.
So up until around 2007,
it was okay to use the magic mushrooms.
These were the salad days for mushrooms,
but a series of unfortunate incidents
where mentally ill tourists hurt themselves
turned politicians against the sacred mushroom,
and they began to legislate a ban.
It's yet another incident in which a tourist loses his mind after using mushrooms.
Though there had been scattered mushroom incidents in Amsterdam for decades,
it was not until the death of a 17-year-old French student
named Gaelle Caroff
that lawmakers began taking serious steps
[AT5 NEWS MARCH 2007] towards banning the sale
and consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.
The girl seated herself behind the organ, played some tunes,
and ran outside followed by two boys.
After fifteen minutes, they return with gaunt faces, turns out the girl killed herself.
[VOICE:NATHALIE CAROFF, MOTHER OF GAELLE] My daughter was a brilliant student with a secure future.
My daughter didn't want to die, I'm sure. It's the drug that killed her.
After the incident with Gaelle, others followed.
A Frenchman,
supposedly under the influence of mushrooms,
ritualistically sacrificed his dog with a pair of kitchen shears
in order to free the dog's mind from its corporeal shackles.
City patrol informed the police of a man, sitting in the van with his dog, covered in blood.
The man killed his dog with a knife and scissors.
He said, "Well, I was on mushrooms."
He had psychosis and it had nothing to do with mushrooms.
He wasn't even close to a mushroom.
Since these products are legal in this country,
it's very easy to hide yourself behind it.
[SECOND REPORTED MUSHROOM INCIDENT]
With prohibition looming on the horizon,
protestors swarmed the parliament building,
[MUSHROOM BAN PROTEST AMSTERDAM, 2008] armed with Super Soakers
filled with psychedelic mushroom spores,
which they used to spray the surrounding parks and lawns.
They demanded their right to consume mushrooms,
but parliament ruled in favor of the ban.
-So in 2008, they banned all of these different genus and species.
Yeah, well part of them were already on it,
but especially this list from here, the magic mushroom list.
And it says here that magic mushrooms are,
"Mushrooms who have, by nature, these and these active ingredients."
And then all these species are on the list.
The law changed in 2008, first of December, 2008.
Sad day. Saddest day of my life.
-How much time did they give you after the ban
to get rid of your stock of mushrooms?
Ten days.
Ten days to clear 16 growing houses, all the equipment and so on.
-And you were saying all these other different bans
have been given enormous amounts of time, years before they have to...
Mink farms, for instance, they got ten years to change the plans.
-Ten years. - Ten years.
-And you got ten days. -Ten days.
Look at that!
-How did you get rid of the mushrooms?
That was the easiest part because people were lined up here.
I'm like, "The last mushrooms! The last mushrooms!"
Despite the chemical and biological similarity to the mushroom,
parliament decided not to ban the magic truffle.
When the law changed in 2008,
we just continued with the truffles that we were already growing in that time.
-So what is a truffle and how is it different from a mushroom?
Let's call it the parking lot for nutrients and moisture.
Like all organisms, a fungus seeks to reproduce,
but environmental conditions are not always ideal to do so.
If the substrate is too dry, cold, hot or poor in nutrients,
the Mycelium will grow inwards,
forming a tangled clump of globular fungus, called the Sclerotium.
These hard structures are able to survive in harsh environmental conditions
until the time is right to send forth mushrooms.
Murat offered to give me a guided tour of their innovative Sclerotium cultivation facilities.
We'll start where it all begins.
That's the dirty side, where all raw materials come in.
First, the ryegrass seed's substrate is sterilized
in an industrial sized autoclave
to kill opportunistic bacteria and fungi,
which are equally eager to consume the bags of warm, moist nutrients.
Then the bags are inoculated with a liquid culture of Mycelium.
This is a Class 100 cleanroom.
It means that only a hundred particles of 0.00096 micron may be present in one cubic feet of air.
Normally in an operating room it's Class 10,000,
so 10,000 particles may appear in a cubic foot of air.
Impressive.
If you do everything like, your laboratory work
and you're growing under one roof,
you get a cross contamination somewhere, somehow.
And the risk was so big that we looked for a proper building
with at least two separate departments.
Then the bags are transported to an incubation chamber,
where a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius is maintained to accelerate the colonization of the substrate.
-How do you prevent the growth of mushrooms?
By controlling the temperature and the microclimate of the bag.
The microclimate in the bag is not suitable for fortification, for formation of mushrooms.
The final stage is the nursery,
where the bags are kept in darkness for as many as five months
before the Sclerotia are mature.
-And what is the capacity of this plant at the moment?
Full capacity...
if you work 24 hours a day with three shifts.
18,000 tons per year.
Yeah, something like that.
-18,000 tons. -Yes.
I think that Sclerotia took over the mushroom market, one on one by now.
By now it's one on one, yeah.
Upon maturity, the bags are opened,
the Sclerotia are plucked from their substrate,
cleaned with a soft bristled brush,
and packaged for distribution.
-It seems your brand is the only brand, except for one other that I saw
that you can get at the Smart Shops in Amsterdam.
Yeah, that might be correct.
There are some home-growers, but as far as commercially grown
with Sclerotia, I think we're the largest.
-Do you have any competitors?
Everyone who grows a truffle is a competitor.
Each package contains a single serving of fresh psilocybin containing Sclerotia.
We deliver them to the shop in boxes of 24.
We give the shops 24 booklets so that people get the proper information.
Good.
[VICE CONCLUDED IN PART 3]