Psychedelic Mushrooms Grew in a Man’s Veins After He Injected Them

A man’s experiment with psychedelic mushrooms went disastrously wrong and nearly killed him, according to his doctors. In a new case report released this week, they detailed how the man injected a “tea” made from the mushrooms into his body and developed a life-threatening infection that had them growing in his blood. The experience left him in the hospital for close to a month. Fortunately, he survived.

According to the report, the 30-year-old man had been brought to the emergency room by his family after exhibiting confusion. He had a history of bipolar disorder as well as opioid dependence and had recently stopped taking his prescribed medications, his family told doctors. In the course of trying to self-medicate his depression and dependence, he came across research showing some benefit from using psychedelic drugs like mushrooms and LSD.

Days before the ER visit, he had decided to use mushrooms by first boiling them down into what he called “mushroom tea,” then filtering the mixture through a cotton swab and intravenously injecting it. Soon after, he developed symptoms including lethargy, jaundice, diarrhea, and nausea, along with vomiting up blood.

By the time he was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, multiple organs had started to fail, including his lungs and kidney. Tests revealed that he had both a bacterial and fungal infection in his blood, likely meaning that the mushrooms he injected were now literally feeding off him and growing, the doctors wrote (the fungus found in the man’s blood was the same species of psychedelic mushroom he had injected). Among other treatments, he was given an intense course of antibiotics and antifungal drugs.

It was my 30th birthday and I was spending it in New York City with a bunch of my friends that had moved up there after college and it was before 9/11 so the city was still really chill and fun and the grief and dust hadn’t settled all over everything and my birthday gift from my friend Josh was a hefty bag of magic mushrooms. We each picked out a good dose for ourselves and ate them but I also fished out the biggest dried mushroom of them all and slipped it into my shirt pocket for later. They started kicking in when we got to the subway stop for the Natural History Museum and whoa they hit hard and we are all giggling. Just little speedy not too much in the way of visuals just a groovy good time and I loved the city and all my friends and we tripped around looking at the dinosaurs and all the bones. I ate the big big mushroom in my shirt pocket after we had been there about a half-an-hour and look a few drags off my one-hitter in the bathroom while everyone was getting tickets for the planetarium and bloosh goes the brain when the universe begins and I’m all literally slack-jawed leaning back in the seats and the constellations rush past. And we go getting something to eat in and cafeteria and I tell my friend Rance about my plan to make an articulated skeleton from his bones after he died and keep him on display in my very own Hall of Rance and display all these holy Rance relics like his bass guitar and the filthy corduroys he wore for like two years straight and hair from that time my girlfriend gave him a haircut and the hair just went everywhere and he looked like an escaped mental patient. He yelped in the cafeteria really loudly and all these people turned and stared. And then we went to the gems exhibit and it was just too much for me the sparkles and the irl lens flares. The only bad bit was going to see the squid and the whale because I could swear the giant jellyfish was moving, moving toward me, reaching for me. But it didn’t last and we left and walked around until we all came down and then started bar hopping in the East Village and sushi and saki and beer and oblivion. Just one of my favorite days ever.

Fuck, fuck, fuck off.

You Can’t Have an Open-Carry Democracy

On Monday, the Michigan State Capitol Commission decided to prohibit open carry inside the statehouse, citing the attack on Congress. It was an acknowledgment that—beneath the conspiracy theories, the presidential cult of personality, and the craven Republican Party—the big challenge to returning to any kind of political sense of “normal” is guns.

To be sure, at the siege of the Capitol, the only shots appear to have been fired by U.S. Capitol Police (though several guns were found nearby). But this was the miraculous exception that proves the rule. Capitol Police’s relative deference to the mob should be seen not just in the context of law enforcement’s cozy relationship with Trump, the way police treat white people, or their general unpreparedness—but also in light of the expectation that the crowd could be armed.

Next time, it will be. The FBI is warning of armed protests in all 50 state capitals and in D.C., leading up to Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

I cannot stress the extent to which you should fuck off. Like a giant, veiny bladder of fuck off should sway queasily in your office and there’s an alarm that goes off every ten minutes to remind you to suck a big fat waxy blob of fuck off out of its fanged anus every ten minutes.

It is so obviously a trap, bro. Like that time you won a free cruise and the PO arrested you for unpaid child support.

 

Trigger Warning: Puppet with Teeth