“Fly agaric, unlike other mushroom or plant-based psychedelics, immerses you so deeply that you can’t tell what you’re seeing from the real world,” he explained. “With psilocybin you see things too, but you understand that you’re in a room. There’s the microwave, it might look funny but it’s still there. Fly agaric turns the world away from you completely and replaces it with something else entirely. You can be sitting at the table in this room and around you there’ll be a forest, and a path you must follow. So your experience is far stranger than you’d have from other plants or mushrooms. For you, this new world seems real, and this can be very scary for first-timers.”
With its iconic bright red cap dotted with white spots, Amanita muscaria, is probably the most recognizable fungi in the world: the default mushroom emoji on WhatsApp, and a power-up for Mario on his quest to rescue Princess Peach. With his books and lectures, Vishnevsky almost single-handedly started a massively popular trend of Russians microdosing or trying to invoke lucid dreams and mystical experiences with fly agaric. He's the closest Russia has to a Rick Doblin, Paul Stamets, Michael Pollan or Terence McKenna — some of the patriarchs of the so-called psychedelic renaissance.
But it’s catching on stateside, too. Between 2022 and 2023, Google searches for the mushroom surged 114%. Unlike psilocybin, this mushroom hasn’t been widely banned yet. It’s still legal in 49 states (the lone exception being Louisiana), and online retailers offering fly agaric-based gummies, smoking blends and tinctures can sleep soundly knowing their front doors won’t be kicked down by SWAT teams with machine guns in the middle of the night.
However, in December the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that A. muscaria products do not meet health-and-safety standards. The mushrooms can be poisonous with unpleasant side effects including coma, convulsions and death, though these outcomes are incredibly rare, but not unheard of. Psilocybin mushrooms, on the other hand, are considered safer than alcohol. So what’s inside the fly agaric that makes it so risky — but people still seek it out?
“Amanita muscaria tends not to be a highly visual substance, as one might be used to with tryptamines and other kind of classic psychedelics,” Kevin Feeney, a lecturer at Central Washington University and editor of a compendium on fly agaric, told Salon. “At high doses people become less coordinated and they may also experience blackouts, similar to alcohol, and often enter into either a dissociative state or a state of delirium. And these things are quite distinct from what one experiences with more traditional psychedelics.”
Fly agarics contain no psilocybin, but two other chemicals: muscimol and ibotenic acid. Muscimol is responsible for a soothing, Valium-like sensation and, in heroic doses, hallucinations, while ibotenic acid is not inherently psychoactive but can be converted into muscimol in the body. In small doses, muscimol can help treat sleeplessness and anxiety. Ibotenic acid can be dangerous, as it’s linked to brain lesions akin to Alzheimer’s and may explain some of the more negative side effects of these fungi.
Vishnevsky became fascinated by fly agaric through the accounts of explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries witnessing mushroom rituals and shamanism in Siberia. Before the Russians and Finns introduced them to vodka, A muscaria was not only a sacrament but the inebriant of choice for the native tribes of Siberia and Lapland, in northern Scandinavia, eaten in a soup or fermented into a brew. Sometimes the natives fed the mushrooms to reindeers first before drinking their urine, or each other’s (after metabolizing in someone’s body, it’s more potent and less toxic.)
“Where there wasn’t enough fly agaric, they wouldn’t let pee go to waste,” said Vishnevsky. “If you had to pee, they’d pass you a cup. And this cycle can happen three to four times. Someone eats, pees in a cup for the next person, they drink it, and so on, until the fifth man along. But since the fly agaric is a sacred mushroom, it was more prestigious to be the one eating it, than the one drinking the pee, although the pee is stronger.”
According to Vishnevsky, the psychedelic golden showers would take the shamans to the spirit realm, where they would ask where to herd their reindeer next week, where’s the tastiest grass for them to chew, and so on. The spirits appear and tell them to head north, take a left, and everything will be peachy.
But the mycologist believes our relationship with fly agaric goes back further still, all the way to the ancient roots of religion itself.
“Now there is evidence that all the Abrahamic faiths – namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as their later incarnations such as Mormonism – descend from a ten to twelve thousand-year-old cult centered around red fly agaric,” Vishnevsky explained. “Experts tracing how language has evolved from ancient times to the present have concluded there is a taboo on the fly agaric – everyone talks about the apple but that’s a new-fangled innovation that only appeared in the 18th century. There wasn’t an apple in the Bible originally, it was just the forbidden fruit. Perhaps it was more comfortable to think of them as apples.”
He’s referring to a controversial theory proposed by equally controversial British scholar John Allegro in his 1970 book “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,” in which he argued that Christ never existed and the Bible is just an allegory for a mushroom-crazed sex cult. Needless to say, this was not well-received by the faithful. Less scandalously, the shrooms have been suggested as the secret ingredient in soma-haoma, the trippy concoction from ancient Indo-Aryan scriptures forming the basis of modern Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.
“Even me, a 100% militant atheist, one of my first trips on red fly agaric, I had an experience that can’t be described as anything other than religious,” Vishnevsky recalled. “I witnessed how the universe was born, how the gods fought one another on a cosmic level, how one of them created the Sun, our world and everything in it, the purpose of humanity. I understood how to found a new religion, the Church of the Shroom, where I would be the Pope. I knew exactly what to do with the priests and how the energy would flow through me to honor the gods, for which I’d be granted eternal life. The whole Fly Agaric Gospel was in my head. When I came to, for the next three weeks I felt like I was the prophet; I had to tell everyone what I’d seen. But I knew on a certain level this is just a trick on the mind played by the mushroom, and it faded away.”
Sadly, Russian conquest and Soviet repression have diminished Indigenous shamanism, but thanks to Vishnevsky and his wife, as well as celebrities such as actor and self-admitted psychonaut Vladimir Epifantsev, microdosing has made its way into Russian popular culture. Microdosing entails ingesting small red fly agaric capsules throughout the day for a mildly sedative sensation for a good nights’ sleep, as well as vivid, lucid dreaming. And then there’s macrodosing for a new outlook on life.
“Afterwards, you don’t think, ‘I’m going to travel to a different country or try a new job’ like you might after psilocybin,” Vishnevsky said. “You think, ‘shit, I’m grateful I even have a job in the first place.’ You think, ‘I have childhood trauma… I had a childhood! How cool is that?’ This is what fly agaric points you to: it shows you all these problems you thought were problems aren’t problems at all. You can just enjoy life. Everything that’s troubling you is so insignificant, you should be grateful you even have it. After this realization, people start walking with a little skip. Even your vision seems to improve. This lasts approximately two weeks.”
But, he cautions that fly agaric is not, under any circumstances, “just for fun.” The effects can be so strong, Vishnevsky advises against using them without supervision.
“I think probably one of the bigger dangers though is that at certain dose levels, people become unaware of their surroundings, and they do become kind of impervious to pain and discomfort,” Feeney warned, pointing to a case where a camper froze to death because he didn’t have enough awareness to get inside warm clothes or a sleeping bag. “At some point, it really is necessary to have a sober individual present who can watch out for the individual if they're going to be taking high doses of the mushroom.”
Indeed, trips can be very nerve-wracking and intense.
“There is another effect – looping visions,” Vishnevsky warned. “You appear in this new world, live in it, and very often your life ends in death. And when you die, you think you die for real. Then the cycles begins again, and again. You can die three, five, seven times in a row, and you don’t know if you’re dying in the real world or not. When the trip is finally over, eight or twelve hours later, the first emotion you see on their faces is absolute terror. It’s very rare that your first trip will be a positive experience.”
Although scientific inquiry into the matter is scarce, Vishnevsky touts the benefits of fly agaric for treating sleeplessness, depression and anxiety, and as a remedy for alcoholism.
“Obviously this is something that requires actual research above and beyond the anecdotal reports, but there are a significant number of people reporting that using this mushroom in small quantities has helped them — with their sobriety and getting off substances like alcohol and benzodiazepines, which work on the same area of the brain as muscimol,” Feeney explained. “So it shouldn't be surprising that there is a connection there. And of course, muscimol is not a dependence-producing substance. So you have something that activates the same areas of the brain as these addictive substances like alcohol and benzodiazepines without triggering or activating that sort of dependence response.”
Others are skeptical. Fellow mycologists have questioned Vishnevsky's motives, pointing to his microdosing business empire, and dismiss his brand of fungotherapy as both dangerous and ineffective.
“Unfortunately our Russian specialists are falling behind other scientists,” Vishnevsky fired back. “And what’s more, they don’t know anything about fly agaric. They consider it a scary, poisonous mushroom, a narcotic. Listening to them is just funny, as if they finished their education in the ‘70s or ‘80s and never learnt anything new.”
Nevertheless, A. muscaria has evaded serious scrutiny so far. According to the Russian press, in 2023 export permits were issued for over half-a-tonne of dried fly agaric destined as far afield as Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines and even the U.S.
Despite the FDA’s decision in December, retailers can still operate openly, albeit in a slightly grey area of the law. But while prohibition is a bad idea, under-regulation is another.
Last year, Diamond Shruumz edibles were withdrawn from sale after dozens of emergency room visits, which the company blamed on “higher levels of muscimol than normal.” However, only six of their nineteen products tested by the FDA actually contained muscimol, and the agency admitted that muscimol “cannot explain all the symptoms reported by ill patients.”
“They're not investing money in safety protocols and understanding safety parameters,” Feeney said of the industry. “They're not interested in that — they're interested in making a quick buck, and so they're just shoving stuff in there. They don't know how the substances are going to interact with one another. They don't appear to understand the dosing, and they also don't appear to understand much about Amanita muscaria. While a handful of these products have shown some traces of muscimol in them, it seems like primarily that's absent. But a lot of these products will advertize muscarine, for example, and promote this. Muscarine is a compound that's found in amanita muscaria, but it's not psychedelic. It's not psychoactive. It's actually a poisonous compound that can be quite unpleasant.”
Symptoms of muscarine poisoning include muscle cramps, blurred vision, foaming from the mouth, vomiting and diarrhea.
“We’re in a complicated situation,” Feeney added. “There's a sizable public demand for access to psychedelic substances, and we really are at a point in time where interest in these substances has moved beyond the confines of the counterculture. So I think what we see is companies exploiting this interest in demand by taking a highly recognizable mushroom, amanita muscaria, that people generally know has some kind of psychoactive or psychedelic properties. And so they're saying, our candies contain this, and that makes it legal. The problem, of course, is that most of these companies are really pulling a bait-and-switch.”
