Have A Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience by Eugenia Bone interrogates and investigates many minute aspects of the increasingly complicated world of magic mushrooms. Her expertise is apparent when clarifying the dense reading material available to people about the psilocybin mushroom experience. While describing the scientific terminology, Bone often illustrates the science with a humorous or poignant anecdote. This helped me as a reader to find the humanity among the science, even if it was a quote warning one user who thought they’d consumed a pastry spiked with psychedelics: “Don’t eat anymore shady Danishes.”

Eugenia Bone

Whether Bone is introducing the reader to a group of noccers, short for inoculators, operating out of the Northwest and slyly spreading mycelia across public areas like modern day Johnny Appleseeds, or giving guidance about growing mushrooms at home, the information is relevant today as legislators around the country debate whether to legalize psilocybin in their home states. It was a pleasure to read about the multiple ways noccers spread mushrooms across various spaces and I found myself laughing a couple of times at some of the names people give themselves to identify as fans of the ‘shroom, like mycohooligans or psychonauts.

In the therapeutic section of Have a Good Trip, Bone exhausts all possibilities or target groups for the therapeutic use of psilocybin and explains the lack of funding for proper scientific study of psilocybin’s efficacy. Her explanation transforms into a plea for more medical research and loosening of strict regulation. Bone refrains from naming the places or states that have decriminalized or lowered the drug class, yet reinforces the idea that more science on the matter might glean more data and greater understanding of how to help people with chronic pain, PTSD or depression. Therapeutic uses for palliative and end of life care are explored through the countries able to utilize this research, but are specifically limited in the United States to Oregon and Colorado, states that have decriminalized use of psilocybin. (Some municipalities in other states like California have decriminalized as well.)

I had just submitted this review to the editors when the new year rolled around releasing the potential floodgates for Colorado Springs to accept applications for “healing centers” allowed to use psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. The AP headline from the 1st of January reads, “Psychedelic therapy begins in Colorado, causing tension between conservatives and veterans.” The article delves into the battle between local leaders in Colorado Springs attempting to preemptively restrict the boundaries of facilities dedicated to the use of psychedelics for treatment of PTSD and depression. Citizens voted to allow the treatment centers in 2022 and progress has languished in the glacially paced rulemaking process ever since. Now the city is contending with, “ objections from some of the city’s 90,000 veterans, who’ve become flagbearers for psychedelic therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.” (AP) No doubt Eugenia Bone would be interested in the synchronicity of her book release touching the pulse of current political clashes with the potential therapeutic use of mushrooms.

After a great chapter on mitigating the risk of a bad trip, Bone takes the reader on a tour of the many phases of the trip, from onset to peaking, even synesthesia, to time warps and ego dissolution, and finally to the insights and revelations before coming down. I am not really a fan of hearing about other people’s trips and even though I can appreciate their insights or revelations, I fail to see how they pertain to me. But Bone has a wonderful wrap-up to the book where she espouses, “The only thing I can confidently do is share information. What you do with it is up to you. … Because at the end of the day, what constitutes a good trip is all about what happens in your mind.” I did not read this as a warning label or a legal disclaimer, but rather one tripper encouraging another potential tripper, honestly caring about the person reading her book, an encyclopedic exploration of a complicated subject.

In the last section of Have A Good Trip, Bone relates how her experience researching mushrooms has affected her over the course of years. She relates a story of how her annual Colorado family get-together ends up changing for the better, showing some emotional growth and more tolerance than in previous years. It is a wonderful conclusion to a book spent exploring, inspiring and warning about all things mycology related.

Eugenia Bone is a food and nature writer, as well as a chef and amateur mycologist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, Saveur and the BBC’s Science Focus. She is the author of numerous books on food and mushrooms, including a predecessor to this book, Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms. Bone has taught and lectured at the New York Botanical Garden, Denver Botanical Garden and the New York Public Library. She divides her time between Colorado and New York City.