France and the specter of the evil mushroom

October 1966 : a spectacular police raid disrupts the Mushroom Fair, which is held, like every autumn, at the Natural History Museum. Director of the establishment between 1951 and 1965, and now head of the cryptogamy laboratory, the mycologist Roger Heim has made it a popular meeting place for Parisians. The police ordered him to remove the display on psilocybes, most of which are hallucinogenic. In France, since 1^er June 1966, psilocybin, a molecule extracted from these mushrooms, joined the list of narcotics, alongside other so-called “psychedelic” substances, such as LSD (diethyllysergamide).

The director of the Museum reluctantly complies with the request of the authorities. In his laboratories adjoining the Jardin des Plantes, he identified, in 1957, a then unknown species, the Psilocybe mexicana, allowing the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann to isolate the active ingredient the following year – psilocybin, therefore. Roger Heim discovered this mushroom in Mexico, in the summer of 1956, alongside his dearest friend, New York banker Robert Gordon Wasson. “I certainly do not need to stress that the press every day publishes absolutely false information with regard to natural drugs, writes the mycologist to Commissioner Jacques Arnal. The hallucinogenic mushrooms from Mexico, used for centuries by the Indians, have not caused any serious trouble. They are certainly less deleterious than the tequila alcohol extracted from agave which replaced them.. » In this exchange lies the whole French paradox: although at the forefront of research on psilocybin, a molecule which today feeds the hopes of the scientific community, France very early focused on its dangers, real or imagined.

A French passion

His pioneering role, our country owes in part to the francophilia of Robert Gordon Wasson, the man without whom Roger Heim would not have got his hands on the Psilocybe mexicana. Born in 1898, this New Yorker discovered Europe at the age of 16, during a long journey, alone, on both sides of the Pyrenees. In 1917, he joined the American Expeditionary Force: he served fourteen months in France as a radio operator. Precocious, this French passion will not leave him. In 1926, it was certainly to a Russian that he married, the pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, whose family was exiled to New York after the Bolshevik revolution. But it is in France that the couple will spend most of their holidays, with a predilection for Provence, Normandy and the Basque Country. Especially since, once appointed vice-president of public relations at JP Morgan in 1943, the banker multiplied business trips to Paris.

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