Marijuana, Mushrooms & Mankind: An Interview With Dennis McKenna

As the War on Drugs kicked into hyperdrive during the 70s and 80s, two brothers decided to fight back in their own way.

If you’ve paid any attention to psychedelics and the counter-culture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, chances are, you’ve heard of the McKenna brothers. While President Richard Nixon began his ‘War on Drugs’ in June of 1971, these two brothers remained as laser-focused as ever on their exploration of psychedelic compounds — namely LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and DMT. In fact, four years after the War on Drugs had begun, both Terence and Dennis McKenna wrote a book entitled ‘Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide’ under the pseudonyms O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric.

The small, instructional book sought to democratize the use of psychedelic substances, in this case, psychedelic mushrooms, by allowing anyone and everyone to grow them themselves. Evidently, the book satiated an existing hunger, perhaps brought on by the deprivation of psychedelic drugs in…