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Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. People selling psilocybin mushrooms aren't going out of their way to sell you counterfeits because the profit margin is already so low for this category and you could easily tell apart shitake mushrooms from psilocybin mushrooms.

Nobody is on the streets selling psilocybin like they sell other drugs, it would be like people trying to pass off broccoli as marijuana.

I'm sorry but you sound like Nancy Reagan right now. You are trying to warn people about something that you yourself have barely experienced or knowledgeable about by taking some other tangent item and applying it here because it is "drugs".

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What assurance do I have that some rando at a festival who claims to have "magic mushrooms" is actually selling psylocybin mushrooms? None.

They might have picked some "little brown mushrooms" in a field somewhere thinking they were psylocybin mushrooms but not gone to the effort to identify them properly, or just not known how to do it, or made a mistake. Or maybe they got it from someone who told them that's what they were, but themselves didn't know, etc.

Or they (or their supplier) might have gone the easy route and bought some mushrooms and sprinkled some "bath salts" on them.

As a consumer you just don't know -- especially if they're dried, crumbled mushrooms which could be just about anything or a mix of stuff.

It's just sad hearing people who are so adamantly determined to stick their head in the sand and trust whatever drug they're being peddled is what their dealer claims it is.

Nancy Reagan's famous line was "Just say no." I'm not saying "Just say no". I'm saying "Just say know."

Educate yourself. Test your stuff. Be smart. Don't just guzzle down whatever you're given without satisfying yourself that it actually is what your provider claims it is.

Why would someone waste their time foraging for psylocibin mushrooms to sell? They can be grown for basically free and in much larger quantities. Dried psylocibin mushrooms are still easily identifiable. If a rando drug dealer was claiming to have psylocibin capsules, for instance, sure, that would give me pause. But again - have you EVER heard of this happening? I've not. You're talking nonsense.

You seriously haven't heard of a single case where a fake or harmful substance was ingested as if it was a drug?

I heard more than one story, e.g. giving unsuspecting newbies tea under guise of weed. And that didn't even involve money, imagine how much you could earn by optimizing for finding shroom-curious laypeople. (If this is nothing to you, perhaps you are not poor.)

I'm not OP but I wouldn't want to take a gamble buying illicit substance from someone I don't know and can't vouch for.

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