Andrew's Farm: A Psad Psilocybe Pstory

by Donald Hipkiss

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Then, in the mid-1970's, Berkley's And/Or Press published what would soon become a historical document--Oss & Oeric's Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Growers Guide.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???