SUMMER OF SHROOMS

Tracking the psilocybin party zeitgeist

When Shanté Cosme, the new editor-in-chief of Mic.com, hit me in June with a prediction—“this will be the summer of shrooms”—I was skeptical. Last summer was the real summer of shrooms, I thought, thinking about all the solitary shroom explorations people were doing in quarantine. I was in New York at the time, chronicling the roaring return of nightlife for this newsletter. This summer feels more like a druggie free-for-all.

But then I started digging around, talking to my network of drug dealers, Hollywood “it” girls, NYC club kids, and hippies selling shrooms at LA ambient parties. I realized that the shroom zeitgeist had reached an interesting inflection point, which can be summed up with this question:

The media often focuses on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin within a medicalized/professionalized context, but I wanted to take stock of how it’s changing the way we socialize recreationally—especially as we emerge out of lockdowns into this weird new pandemic era. As usual, I found that the underground is miles ahead of lawmakers and legislation; despite still being a Schedule 1 substance, shrooms are quickly becoming socially chic—passed around on silver platters at corporate dinner parties and infused into cocktails at loft raves.

So here’s my report on the underground shroom zeitgeist, which begins with a description of my shroom rave (lol) and takes you through various psilocybin party scenes in New York and LA this past summer. You can read it on the newly-rebranded Mic.com, which launched today. According to the New York Times, Mic is shedding its previous identity as a politics site and now posing itself as the earnest alternative to snarky Gawker (both are owned by Bustle Media Group).

“The ‘millennial political news website’ is a very outmoded concept for lots of different reasons,” said Bustle’s Joshua Topolsky, who oversaw the relaunch with Shante. I thought that was a very funny/telling quote.

Idk about these endless media rebrands (it’s giving Halloween zombie…) but I wish my homies at Mic the very best, and just think it’s funny to talk about shroom raves in the mainstream media. So go pull up the piece on your browser and check out the rest of the Mic site because it’s actually pretty cute!

xoxo

Your shroom party kween

PS: The Rave New World is starting our microdosing journey—aka MICROCTOBER— this Sunday on our private Discord and I would love you to join! Subscribe for access to the community, along with a Q&A that I did yesterday with our microdosing guide (an ex-music photographer who started a shroom brand) about how to prepare, what to expect, etc.