Created September29, 2008.
Copyright 2008 by John W. Allen
MAGIC MUSHROOM FARMS IN THE NEDERLANDS
Page 3 of 4
CULTIVATION MUSHROOM FARMS (Cont.)A Quest and Journey into the Cultivation and Legal use of Entheogenic Mushrooms in the Netherlands. IT was here in Amsterdam of 1998 that I was robbed ofmy backpack, photo albumns, Two cameras, hundreds of sporeprints, my passport, money and dignity. So there are some photos here int his section from 1998 which I gladly share on this page, including two from my colleague, Dr. Tjakko Stijve, an amateur mycologist and chemist for Nestles chocolates for several decades. Since 1995, the sale of "magic mushrooms and other psychoactive plants have flourished in the Netherlands. These plant substances, both fresh and dried, are now commonly sold throughout the Netherlands. In fact, they are sold openly available to all public individuals who are 18-years of age and older in what are referred to by the Dutch as "Smart Shops;" and are also legally distributed and sold in head shops throughout the country. However, Dutch Law decided to enact a provision that the mushrooms and plant materials offered to the public must be in their fresh stage and never sold as a dried or prepared offering. From September 29, 1998 through October 6, 1998, I visited Amsterdam during this "Psychoactivity" conference held at the Tropen Museum Koninklijk Instituut voor de tropen The Royal Tropical Institute). Although this conference was devoted to the use of many different species of natural occurring psychoactive plants, several lectures of a multi-disciplinary nature on plants, shamanism and other various altered states of consciousness were also presented, including those of a mycological nature The conference was organized by Dutch author Arno Adelaars (Alles over Paddos, Alles over Ecstasy), Claudia Mueller-Ebeling and the "Conscious Dreams Smart Shop" co-founder Hans van den Hurk. One of the presenters, Paul Stamets, author of Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, presented a lecture on the various species of mushrooms known to contain the psychoactive alkaloids psilocine and psilocybine. Stamets also discussed the futility of the existing drug laws and their relationship to naturally occurring plants such as the entheogenic mushrooms and publicly noted that I had probably collected more specimens of the neurotropic fungi than any individual he had ever known in his lifetime. Thus, this conference led me to travel throughout the city of Amsterdam to visit the many coffee houses, head shops, smart shops and sex shops located throughout the "red light district" and outlaying areas from the Central Station in the Tourist section of the city. While there, on the opening day of registration for the symposium, I met briefly with the owner and master cultivator of what was to eventually become known as Fresh Mushrooms. His name was Hans and he was kind enough to present me with a photograph of one tier from a cell of his large-scaled cultivation of Copelandia cyanescens, which I posted on the Mushroom John Shroom World Web-Site. At that time I had been totally unaware of the somewhat legal sales of magic mushroom and their popularity in the Nederlands. Thus, this gift of a photograph from Hans of the largest magic mushroom cultivation operation I had ever seen in my life, from a total stranger to me, was the highlight of being there amongst many people of a similar mind, the mind of the mushrooms. However, during this visit, I was robbed in a restaurant of my backpack and all its possessions. That included several cameras, four photo albums of entheogenic drug/plant pioneers, sheets of spore prints, passport, irreplaceable 8 x 11 colored mushroom photographs and money. To show my appreciation for what happened next, I said a prayer for all of those who suddenly supported my loss. I must confess that I was very surprised and felt very humbled by the generosity of the people of Holland and Europe who heard of my plight and shared with me their love for the shrooms through a most generous donation and for that I gave my thanks to all of those fellow psychonauts who contributed to my relief over my loss of memories and personal items used in my trade by sharing with me in my loss, their charity which I know came from their symbiosis with me the mushrooms we all love so much. Although, because of this theft, I unfortunately missed a whole day and a half of the conference, due to police reports, travelers aid assistance (which only fed me and provided me with free train tickets and bus passes to and from Amsterdam to the airport and the U.S. Embassy, to replace my stolen airline ticket and to obtain a new passport, I later learned that Paul Stamets had made a public announcement to the attendees of the conference that I had been robbed, so they passed a magic bowl around and took up quite a large collection of donated funds for my loss. To sum up that account, in all, the people of Holland and Europe attending this conference had donated more than a $1000,00 to me, and one mushroom lover from Christiana, Denmark, introduced to me by Rob Montgomery of the BPC (Botanical Preservation Corps), personally loaned me over $700.00 dollars in advance for one hundred of my mushroom books to sell in his store in Denmark. This kindness was far much more money than I was robbed of, but then I also remembered the terrible loss of all of the rare photographs in my backpack that were taken, so, because of this kindness of the Dutch and European people, I had a very good reason for wanting to again, visit this beautiful country again. And so, this first tale is about my first recent with my colleague Rich Gee and our visit to the Nederlands in the spring of 2006 at the Fresh Mushroom Farm in Tiel and the time we shared with Hans Grootewal, his family, his Master Cultivator Eric with his son the harvester and his colleagues and friends who shared with me their time and the kindness of their hearts. So now I come to a turning point in this tale because It would take many pages to share with you, how Fresh Mushroom came to be the largest cultivators of the sacred fungi in the world. To start my tale I would have to recall a time in the past when R. Gordon Wasson and his friends first learned of these sacred mushrooms in the foothills of Sierra Mazateca, in Oaxaca, Mexico where the mushrooms first became known to the western world. Since this is a bibliography of entheogenic fungi, I must keep short this tale because I can only post 8 Images to the right side of each page of this CD-ROM. As the world public slowly became aware of the existence in México of mushrooms that caused strange visions and were also used in native healing and curing ceremonies, the scientific community began to express interest in the visionary properties of these mushrooms. And this led to the eventual cultivation of these long lost archaic children. While many scholars were aware of the common knowledge that several narcotic plants, as well as many visionary or entheogenic plants, have been and still are being cultivated for their magical and healing properties derived from their narcotic, visionary and euphoric effects, some of these plants have been known to have been cultivated for over 5,000 years. |
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