The poster child for psychedelic mushrooms is named after a country that doesn't use it

In 1906, a U.S. plant pathologist named Franklin Sumner Earle collected a small brown mushroom in Cuba and shipped it to the New York Botanical Garden. He called it Stropharia cubensis — later reclassified as Psilocybe cubensis — and never mentioned it again in any of his letters. Whitney Bauck went to the NYBG archives to see if Earle had any clue what he'd found. He didn't.

Cuba, it turns out, has no tradition of psychedelic mushroom use. "Although this species is present in Cuba, the majority of the population is unaware of its potential as a psychedelic mushroom," mycologist Lázaro Castro Hernández told Bauck. "Cuba is generally considered a mycophobic country," added Milay Cabarroi Hernández, who said a colleague even declined to publish research on dung-growing fungi because of "possible legal implications."

The species most likely spread globally not through ancient sacred use but through the 1970s counterculture — the McKennas published the first English-language growing guide for P. cubensis in 1976, and it was easy to cultivate.

Previously:

• Tobacco plants now produce psilocybin and DMT — on purpose
• The psilocybin in magic mushrooms is an insect repellant