'Shrooms of doom

The normalization of psychedelic drugs is really troubling to me. For nearly a decade now, "microdosing" has been suggested as something everyone should try. Live your day-to-day life on a steady mini-trip on mushrooms. It's good for you.

It would be a bad suggestion for most people, even if there was a way to get the right substances in the right doses and know what it was you were getting. But instead, there are all sorts of products floating around, produced by who knows whom out of who knows what.

Now we read that some of the stuff has recently poisoned people.

At least 48 people in 24 states said they got sick after eating Diamond Shruumz-brand products, including chocolate bars, cones and gummies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

One death is “potentially associated” with the outbreak and 27 people have been hospitalized, the agency said. People who fell ill reported severe symptoms like seizures, agitation, abnormal heart rates and loss of consciousness.... 

Diamond Shruumz products were sold nationwide in retail stores and online; at smoke or vape shops; and by retailers that sell hemp-derived products like cannabidiol, or CBD, or delta-8 THC....

Diamond Shruumz has marketed their chocolates as “trippy little squares” and calls the chocolate a “microdose,” referring to a term for a small amount of a psychedelic. But the company had claimed the bars did not contain psychedelic substances. Instead, Diamond Shruumz said its products have “nootropic and functional mushrooms,” like Lion’s Mane, Reishi and Chaga mushrooms....

“There’s not great quality control around some of these products to know exactly what’s in them,” said Dr. Chris Hoyte, medical director of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center, which is investigating illnesses linked to Diamond Shruumz.

“It really worries me from a public health standpoint: Trying to commercialize these with no regulation whatsoever means you might have all kinds of things being placed into these kinds of products,” Dr. Fischer said....

Consumers who purchased the products are being encouraged to discard them immediately. Parents and caregivers are also being instructed to check if children or teenagers possess them, as the products "may appeal" to those demographics due to packaging. 

However you may have felt about the "war on drugs" (drugs won, by the way), you've got to admit that the pendulum has swung swuftly, far in the other direction. And in my mind, way too far.