The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7467 p236
1 September 2007

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Magic and mushrooms

Hair never an issue

Do you feel lucky?

Yes, we do have bananas (and oranges)

Magic and mushrooms

Psilocybin gets its name from Psilocybe semilancenta, or Liberty cap toadstool (the latter name deriving from its resemblance to the round cap favoured by the Jacobins in the French Revolution). This is its principal source in Britain — though not worldwide; Stropharia and Conocybes species are used in other countries.

Its use as a hallucinogen is documented throughout history; indeed, there are those who contend that its use is as old as human history itself, principally Terence McKenna in his book ‘Food for the Gods’. He goes so far as to suggest that it was the ingestion of psilocybin from Stropharia cubensis on the African savannah that facilitated the emergence of Homo sapiens.

McKenna’s hypothesis is that the known effects of psilocybin-enhanced eyesight, improved sexual enjoyment, increased language facility and a general raising of consciousness are exactly what separate man from the other primates.

Whatever the merits and demerits of this theory, there is no questioning psilocybin’s role in the 1960s drug culture; Timothy Leary experimented with it when he was still a respectable professor of psychiatry at Harvard (before his sacking for “conducting orgies”).

He introduced it in turn to the poet Allen Ginsberg, who is supposed to have immediately stripped naked and proclaimed himself the Messiah come to preach love to the world and thereby inventing hippies. Both men soon dropped psilocybin however, in favour of the new kid on the block — LSD.

Today, psilocybin is Class A under the Misuse of Drugs Act, making such experiments inadvisable. As to McKenna’s theory — well, who needs what they have already got?

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Hair never an issue

I suffered my share of verbal abuse at school; I was routinely derided for being fat, left handed and having a name that was impossible to spell. And that was just the teachers. As for my contemporaries, as soon as they discovered my middle name was Rupert, that was it. I don't blame my mother; I blame the epidural.

Throughout all this, however, I never recall the colour of my hair (fair to sandy) being an issue; which is surprising in light of a recent survey that suggests the only acceptable prejudice left today is against “gingers”.

What can be the origin of this (obviously deeply ingrained) prejudice? Is it a case of the descendants of the Picts, one of the earliest inhabitants of these islands getting it from the various subsequent interlopers, like the Australian aborigines? Does it arise from the Act of Union, when countless Scots (among whom red hair is common) ventured south of the border in search of their fortunes?

Whatever the reason, it needs to be said in no uncertain terms that no one should have to face being judged for intrinsic characteristics that they cannot be expected to remedy and consequently, there are no acceptable prejudices. As the great George Orwell nearly said (paraphrasing in order to sidestep the laws of copyright), racism is not a creed for grown men.

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Do you feel lucky?

I have not smoked a cigarette since I tried one of my brother's when I was eight years old. I could not see how anyone would shell out for something so nauseating. So I have problems understanding why people smoke in the first place; and I am happy to help them quit.

I could rattle off the statistics; smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, which is responsible for the biggest share of male cancer deaths. Due to more women smoking it may now also be the leading cause of female cancer deaths, edging breast cancer into second place.

So if you see a woman wearing a pink ribbon and smoking, she has got her priorities wrong. Then there are the other cancers — mouth, throat, oesophagus, cervix — and we have not even started on the cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

But what it all boils down to is 50:50 — half of all smokers will die of a smoking related disease (and half of them before they are 60). Extreme sports are all the rage but it is hard to think of one with those sort of odds: Mountaineering backwards? Or maybe Russian roulette with three rounds in the chamber. In short, smoking is like tossing a coin and pocketing it without seeing which way it landed — with your life the stakes.

So the question you should ask any smoker is this — do you feel lucky? That lucky?

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Yes, we do have bananas (and oranges)

According to the legal profession, you traduce the vitamins industry at your peril. I hold certain opinions on the utility of vitamin supplements, so I will choose my words carefully.

I do not question the fact that vitamins are essential to health. One of the first things I learned while taking my pharmacy degree were the diseases associated with vitamin deficiency: A is for xerophthalmia; B1 is for beri-beri and so on. However, a reasonable diet is usually sufficient proof against any such deficiency. Why, then, do vitamin supplements play such a significant role in our lives?

Invariably, the first thing people consider when they feel “under the weather” (that singularly unhelpful expression) is some kind of vitamin supplement. The idea that large doses of vitamin C is a useful prophylaxis for the common cold comes and goes over the years (as I write this, I read a study of 11,000 people by a team at Helsinki university over a 20-year period, comparing a 200mg daily dose of vitamin C against none at all, with a similar incidence of colds in each group). So what is it all about?

My guess is that it is a hangover from the 1939–45 war, when the U-boats cut off our supply of bananas and oranges. This caused considerable concern at the newly instituted Ministry of Food in 1940 — children afflicted with rickets were a recent memory among many MPs’ constituents (although this may have been due to decreased levels of sunlight arising from industrial air pollution, rather than vitamin deficiency).

So their scientific adviser — a youngish Magnus Pyke, a long way from his latter role as the BBC’s favourite mad scientist — came up with the idea of supplying vitamin pills. This was adopted enthusiastically and remained in force throughout the years of rationing and for some time beyond. I well remember as a child of the sixties being given a daily Haliborange tablet by my mother at a time when oranges were cheap and plentiful.

Does it matter? As I already said, vitamins are essential to health and toxicity is rare (except in the case of vitamin A, which has teratogenic effects). So why should people not get the vitamins they need from supplements, rather than fruit and vegetables?

Because fruit and vegetables are more than vitamins. They are the roughage you need for a regular bowel habit, which is still reckoned to be the best defence against bowel cancer; they are the fibre that reduces the absorption of fat from the intestine; they are the bulk that keeps hunger at bay; they are fructose, which does not drive the body’s insulin levels haywire, like sucrose; most of all, they are the taste.

Show me a vitamin supplement that gives you all that for the same money.