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Andrew's Farm: A Psad Psilocybe Pstory
by Donald Hipkiss
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The use of hallucinogenic Psilocybin mushrooms dates to
before recorded history, but the cultivation of these and
related species is a fairly recent historical development.
Roger Heim, a French Mycologist, successfully grew Psilocybe
Mexicana, the original "Magic Mushroom", in the late 1950's,
and found that, while possible, the process was a bitch.
Then, in the mid-1970's, Berkley's And/Or Press
published what would soon become a historical document--Oss
& Oeric's Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide.
Literally overnight, the world learned that one could
cultivate the popular Psilocybe Cubensis,(also known as
Stropharia Cubensis) in a simple, straightforward process
that was--literally--about a difficult as a "seventh-grade
science project".
For the first time, a natural, botanical psychedelic
drug was available on a large scale, for those who wished to
go to the trouble. Obviously, many did, and for the next ten
years, Psilocybin Mushroom growing kits were very popular
items, for sale in head shops and--mostly--by mail order.
Some of those who wanted to grow mushrooms for their
own use were also visionaries, and foresaw a way to expand
their operations into a business in which they could
honestly make a living and simultaneously, provide a safe,
clean, and potent psychedelic drug to anyone who wanted it.
This is the story of one such visionary.
As an Author, I was allowed to document the existance
of the farm in this story, and was blindfolded and taken to
its secret location in a dark van. Having fulfilled the
promise that this informationb would not be released for X
number of years after the operation ceased, I am now free to
tell the story.
The story is true, but all names and locations have
been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and any
stoned folks in between.
* * *
ANDREW
His name was Andrew, or rather, Andrejev, but it had
been americanized by his parents into Andrew when he was a
baby. Andrew's family were immigrants--actually refugees,
who escaped from Eastern Europe during the Nazi rise to
power, and the bitter conflict that clained more than 40
million lives. Andrew was a very intelligent man,
undisciplined in all ways except for one--his love of
psychedelics, and the scientific fields that were connected
to those drugs in any way. He soaked up science like a
sponge, as long as it had something to do with the biology,
chemistry, psychology, or botany of mind-altering drugs.
Andrew's real passion was Psilocybin Mushrooms, and he
became, in my opinion, one of the most knowedgable laymen
on the subject in the United States. If in other ways he was
undisciplined, in this he was nearly fanatical, soaking up
textbooks on the subject as if they were candy, and,
eventually, he formed a plan: He foresaw a way in which he
could supply himself with all the mushrooms that he could
conceivable want, finance further research toward perfecting
mushroom cultivation, and, in the bargain, make a hell of a
good living.
Over a period of 2 1/2 to 3 years, Andrew digested not
only each and every underground text on Psilocybin, but all
legitimate research material on any psychedelic drug that he
could find, from any source, world-wide--and this included
research papers in several languages. He had even been known
to pay someone to translate a foreign research paper for
him, and then digested it hungrily.
THE PLAN TAKES SHAPE
When it had to do with his Mushroom vision, Andrew was
a hard worker, and for the better part of three years, he
worked at a steady though low-paying job--driving an ice-
cream truck on several different routes, and saving each
extra penny toward The Plan. Fortunately, Southern
California is mostly sunny all year long, and in the Greater
Los Angeles Area, they never tire of ice cream. And, too, he
was paid a commission on all sales above the quota, and for
Andrew, this meant that if he drove long enough, he could
make just about as much money as he cared to. Of course, he
had expenses--rent, food, Marijuana--but every penny above
and beyond his actual needs was either saved or invested in
the myriad equipment that his vision would require.
Eventually, he needed a place to store the equipment
and materials that he was accumulating, so he scouted out a
warehouse that he could both live in and store the
equipment, as well as, eventually, build his farm.Los
Angeles and it's environs had an abundance of everything
that he needed, and slowly, his plan took shape.
Andrew would retire each night exhausted, after
something like sixteen hours of work on the ice-cream truck.
But it never stopped him from his reading and his
calculations. He would use x amount of grain, rotating x
amount of jars, and "check it out! Even if the numbers are
off by nnn, we can still expect yields like____every 28
days!"
He bent and twisted the numbers until he knew each
possible projected variation by heart, and anyone who knew
him, or who cared to listen, heard each projection a
thousand times. Those who were familiar with the process
knew with certainty that he not only knew what he was doing,
but that, when he was done, the sources that he had learned
from would have a lot of new stuff to learn, from him.
ENTER THE DRAGON
Andrew had always dealt drugs, mostly to cover his own
use, but also for a fair amount of money. During this
period, he made several deals to spur the financing of his
dream. One of them was a successful investment that may have
been both the final push that his project needed and some
think, its ultimate downfall.
Andrew collected people of talent, and most were, like
him, fueled by the burning desire to have a never-ending
supply of their favorite drug or drugs. One of these folks
was a talented biochemist whose name I have never known, but
we shall call him Tommy.
Tommy was brilliant. He was a graduate student who had
gone to work for a Top-notch Aerospace company in Ventura
county. And Tommy's passion was MDA, or more accurately,
it's Methyl Homolog, MDM (also called MDMA and, later,
Extasy or XTC). Tommy had a process to make MDM, then
relatively unknown, and nothing was going to stop him from
doing it. He even had a plan to finance the project--a high-
class, pharmaceutical formula for manufacturing
Methamphetamine. Not just speed, but pure, Dextro-
Methamphetamine...crystal meth of the highest quality, that
almost no one, including the best biker-speed chemists, had
ever even tasted.
Andrew and Tommy collaborated on the materials Tommy
needed to produce this super-speed, and it worked beyond
their wildest dreams. For over a year, they had a monopoly
on THE best central nervous system stimulant available in
the entire state; stuff that jaded users would pay $100 a
gram for--Cocaine prices, while the average speed went
unsold at bargain-basement prices.
Somewhere in this time period, Tommy went on to produce
his much-wanted MDM, and it, too, was popular. For him, the
picture gets fuzzy at this point, and here he leaves our
story. The last thing I heard was that he went to Europe,
and retired, and as far as anyone knew, never came back.
The money was no longer a problem.
THE FARM
Andrew was not rich, even at this point, but he spent
what he had like a wild man, buying the finest equipment,or,
even, commissioning someone to build certain items for him.
Some say it was the speed that he still had access to, but
his empire-building--while always bordering on obsessive,
now took a turn toward the mega-obsessive. He was still
building the Farm, and still doing outstanding,
professional-quality mycology research, but what had once
been an outstanding attention to detail now became a near-
psychotic frenzy of grandiose spending and compulsive
detailing.
An example of this was the immense amount of money he
spent on office equipment. The plan he envisioned
undoubtedly required a lot of office equipment; envelopes,
labels, paper clips, etc...
But one person who inherited a few of the office
materials Andrew eventually left behind, told me that it
took him over 8 years to use the better part of it, even
considering the fact that he gave immense amounts of it
away.
The combination of Methamphetamine and his
Dream/obsession made for a truly strange sequence of events.
Those who knew him got incredible deals on their favorite
drugs, at this time, and the first signs of his project
coming to fruition were evident, as well.
He had stockpiled a truly impressive selection of magic
mushroom spores and mycelia, of exotic varieties, from all
over the world--some of them so potent that small amounts of
the mycelia alone were guaranteed to produce the full-scale
Psilocybin experience.
He began impregnating Canning Jars (of which he had
purchased some 400 cases) with the mushroom spores and/or
mycelia, in a professional and expensive glove-box. The box
alone would have cost some 1-$3000 in the legitimate world
of scientific equipment. His plan, after carrying out some
basic yield/temperature/environment/nutrient experiments,
was to rotate 1500 jars, in three stages, so that 1500 were
inoculated, 1500 were germinating, and 1500 were harvested
every 3-6 weeks. That, my friends, is a shitload of
mushrooms.
The warehouse was huge, and I do not trust my memory or
my spacial judgement to estimate just how big it was. A loft
with a fairly large bedroom-sized area was his personal
home, and downstairs were a number of rooms--some he built
from scratch. There was the "Kitchen" with 3 enormous
stainless-steel pressure cookers, and other implements of
the trade. (He also had an enormous laboratory-quality
autoclave, for the same purpose--sterilization.)
He built a clean-room, for sterile culture work, with
positive air-pressure (anotherwords, when you open the door,
air rushes out rather than in, thus helping to prevent the
sterile environment from being infected with the myriad
possible sources of conatamination.)
The grain was mixed in one room, the nutrient gel in
another. And another example of his compulsive
perfectionism, he even bought totally separate towels,
buckets, utensils, etc for each room--and labeled them all
with the name of the room to prevent their use--and thus
cross-contamination--with any other room. When Andrew
abandoned the place, there was still over a ton (2000 lbs)
of Rye Grain, unused.
A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
I do not know precisely what transpired through much of
the following, but I do know that--at one point, Andrew was
broke. He had this enormous potential system set up, had
preliminary, research-harvests of various mushrooms, varying
from the average to the kick-fucking-ass. He had performed
important experiments, and with little doubt, sat directly
on the cutting edge of Human knowledge on the production of
Psilocybe Cubensis. He was even able to mathematically
demonstrate, based on his own work, his own notes, and his
own yields, that he was capable of producing top-quality
Psilocybin Mushrooms for the astonishing retail price of
$1.00 or less per dose!!! And, indeed, this was borne out by
the fact that he did sell a small harvest--one of his less
successful experiments, but fairly good quality--for $25
dollars an ounce, dried weight!
(Much of the following is conjecture, but it is based
on interviews with several people who knew quite well the
basics of what had occurred.)
Andrew still lacked the Large Amount of materials that
he needed to continue the farm in a big way. He began to
sell off percentages of the farm to many people, and to
promise others percentages in return for money and other
kinds of support. He became evasive, and in retrospect, it
is clear that every one who knew him had heard a different
story. It became quite a job to keep those stories
straight.
Somewhere in this time frame, he borrowed money--some
say money to the tune of $100,000 dollars--from some people
who didn't give a diddly-shit about the Farm, or Andrew's
dream. A short term solution that created long term
problems--a uniquely American bad habit.
Still on the super-speed, he again spent money like a
demon, at one point ordering a $200 order of books from a
well-known underground book company, and huge amounts of
money on details, details, details...
Andrew couldn't see the trees for the forest, and The
Farm was in deep trouble...
THE DEVIL'S TIME IS DUE
The best guess as to the time frame before the borrowed
money became due, is six months. Either way, One fine
morning, Andrew was gone. A frantic phone call several days
later, from an employee of his at the Farm established that
Andrew had not breathed a word of his departure, and,
indeed, took nothing of value (except, possibly, cash),
including his beloved research notes.
Little by little, people arrived at the farm, demanding
money, making vague threats. Then they began to take things
to sell, to cover Andrew's debts. I was finally contacted,
as an afterthought by one person involved, and asked to be
taken to the Farm, or what was left of it. They agreed,
following the same protocol that Andrew had, in the
beginning--I was blindfolded, and taken there in a dark van.
The place was a shambles, the dream was history. All
that was left of the Farm was the sad legacy of Andrew's
strange purchases--several hundred cases of canning jars,
zillions of towels, stenciled with the name of one room or
another; thousands of dollars in office supplies, and--
sadly--over a ton of rye grain, that had never seen the
promised mushroom spores.
Andrew is alive--almost a dozen people, over the years,
have seen him driving another ice-cream truck, several
counties distant from before, but no word, no explanation,
and sadly, no more mushrooms ever came of the magnificent
project called The Farm.
I like to think that Andrew's work on the ice-cream
truck means that he was planning anew, and, hopefully,
wiser, this time. I'd like to think that he is happily
growing away, in some quiet new version of The Farm.
THE END???
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