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Washington man facing prison after foraging for wild psilocybin mushrooms
- pstuart 9y agoI challenge anybody to prove how this makes us safer.
- corndoge 9y agoit's about the safety of the mushrooms
- fgGAMI 9y agoDid you know humans are 70% mushroom?
- a-the-ist 9y agoBut think of the drug companies and drug-dealers who's living depend on the military-prison-industrial complex keeping up this phony prohibition. And the park rangers whom get to draw their guns and rough people up. Also, the for-profit prisons, they need to eat. Let's not forget the job security of the court clerks.
- eesmith 9y agoSo what? Preventing graffiti at a state or national park doesn't make us safe either. We still prosecute those who graffiti. Poaching rabbits doesn't make us safer. It's also illegal.
- pstuart 9y agoGraffiti is vandalism, i.e., a property crime. Poaching, by definition, is hunting an animal that is restricted for varying reasons, from being a protected species to herd management, etc. It's effectively taking something that doesn't belong to you. In this case, he did break the law by picking mushrooms where it was specifically prohibited, and it would be reasonable to cite him for that fact. But it wasn't about theft, it was about the fact that he wanted to ingest a compound which would alter his state of consciousness. That should not be a crime.
- eesmith 9y agoThank you for agreeing with my point that there are more ways to judge the validity of a law than its ability to protect us. I list more examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052587 .
- lsiebert 9y agoYeah. Laws don't have to make us safer, they can have other benefits. The U.S. Constitution might be a good place to start talking about what laws should do. It says, "...form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."
- eesmith 9y agoNo, it isn't. The U.S. Constitution as originally written specifically to limit federal power. The 10th amendment says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It wasn't not written to be a general-purpose commentary about what laws should be. Remember, it was also written to allow people to be property. It also says that there is freedom of religion, but that was at the federal level. Some states had official state churches for a few decades more.
- robertpelloni 9y agoHaving delusional cult leaders talking about the fractal universe and how we are all the same and how everything would be fixed if we just gave up our ego is bad for society.
- robertpelloni 9y agoIt will be good for society when there is more automation.
- bobjordan 9y agoThis man has spent his 10,000 hours to know what he's doing. I have full empathy for his plight and view. However, when anyone ignorant of the true physical risk of eating the wrong mushroom, actually eats the wrong mushroom trying to get high, they will be permanently damaged. With the wrong mushroom, vital kidney function is quickly destroyed forever. If we take a hardcore Darwinist view, well OK, they did it to themselves. But I view it as more likely a lack of wisdom. When I was a teenager and young adult, I did stupid and risky things. When you are young, you don't have proper wisdom and it is only developed over time. In my view, one thing that these laws do is to serve as a guidepost. At least as a society, we tried to protect the unwise from eating the wrong mushroom, just by having laws against it.
- pstuart 9y agoI was waiting for this one. If you're going to play the safety card you should charge every single person caught foraging for edible wild mushrooms. Every year I hear reports of people dying from eating the wrong mushroom. You should be aware that these laws do not serve as guideposts but as tools of oppression. I mean that literally and not as libertarian hyperbole. If you want citations I can do the needful for the same.
- bobjordan 9y agoWell, I can't say I really disagree with you. I own copies of Tihkal and Pihkal. It's a fascinating, underexplored, and underfunded area. It seemed like our society was moving further left on these issues, with marijuana opening up. But, with the opioid and heroin epidemic (and it is an epidemic where I am from in WV) I expect we'll soon see a hard move back to the right on all these issues.
- pstuart 9y agoHaving lost a sibling to heroin, I'm very much emotionally invested in this topic. The opioid epidemic has been well documented as being created by Purdue Pharma, et al. It's also clear by now that treating a medical issue as a crime only makes things tragically worse. But this all goes back to a central question: should the state have authority over your mind? If not, why are these laws on the books?
- StavrosK 9y agoLess clickbaity title: "Washington man facing prison for drug possession". Whether someone should be jailed for picking psilocybin mushrooms is up for discussion (hint: they shouldn't), but he wasn't arrested for picking Portobellos.
- sctb 9y agoThanks, we've updated the headline to clarify.
- gotthemwmds 9y agoActually, after reading the whole article, he was picking an unidentified mushroom that later proved to contain psilocybin. This point seems relevant.
- PeanutCurry 9y agoDefinitely relevant but it seems like this would probably be argued as a case of probable cause. If the local police are aware that people have been picking mushrooms in the region because some of them contain psilocybin then it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider foraging for mushrooms probable cause in their jurisdiction.
- gardnr 9y agoI didn't go to law school either. I definitely don't want cops patting me down because someone does something illegal sometimes in an area that I also happen to be in sometimes. It does not build PC anymore than walking in a "high crime area". It wouldn't stand in appellate courts. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/528/119/case.html https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/528/119/case.htm...
- PeanutCurry 9y agoI may have phrased that poorly, I didn't mean that you would be searchable for being in the area. I meant that you would be searchable for being witnessed picking or carrying mushrooms in the area which is very different from your example of simply walking through a high crime area.
- mchannon 9y agoAs someone who can't stand the taste of them I'm still enthralled by the prospect of collecting mushrooms for fun and their culinary value. The trouble I run into is how I have no idea what's good to eat, what'll make you sick, what'll get you high, and what'll just simply kill you. Guidebooks are worse than useless, because you can never be sure that the slight differences between the mushroom you're looking at and your best guess in the guidebook are unimportant or a distinction that means the one you picked is fatal instead of edible. There's no app for this. [EDIT: Ok, there are apps for this, but there's always room for improvement] There should be. And this guy could earn a modest income helping some semi-talented ML and mobile engineers in Washington build one with his wealth of knowledge. Take a picture of a mushroom with your phone, and it'll help you tell what you can expect from it. Nothing helps with legal or medical problems like not having to worry about relatively tiny amounts of money.
- opportune 9y agoImagine the liability concerns. Only takes a few false positives... Probably much smarter is a general ML based app that allows user-defined, crowdsourced datasets. So for example, you download the app, and you pay to train a model using datasets that other people gathered. This could be used for things such as middle school science experiments (what is ML? what are the differences between cloud and rock types?) to things like magic mushroom identification. Since the models and datasets are user-curated, you're less exposed to liability, since you merely provide the platform
- corndoge 9y agoNo possible way a smartphone camera and a classifier could identify two extremely similar mushrooms better than a human expert
- Retric 9y agoYou don't need to identify them, you need to rule out the unsafe possibility's and can reject anything that's at all risky without significant downside. However, these kind of vary narrow tests are actually fairly easy for ML.
- a-the-ist 9y agoProhibition doesn't work and will never work. End the War on Drugs now to end the attack on poor people, minorities and hippies.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI gave him some money because I do think the law is silly. He's out picking wild mushrooms. If some turn out to be psychedelics then so be it. It was in nature. Maybe if we were selling them I'd have a confern, but if the man wants to pick mushrooms, let him pick mushrooms.
- StavrosK 9y agoI tried telling the police that, they didn't go for it at all. Instead, they seized my entire blotter plantation.
- qhoc 9y agoWashington wildlife and forest protection is dead serious. I mean they invested a ton to enforce the rules and make sure people doing wrong things got punished. I, one time, got a $150 ticket just because I was a bit curious and dug into the sand for some geoduck.
- tluyben2 9y agoThat's what should've happened ; a fine.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI agree, a fine would be perfectly acceptable. Jail, however, is ridiculous.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoHis crime was admitting to the charge the state is levying against him. Oops.
- k_sze 9y agoWhich makes me wonder: do mycologists (mushroom scientists) get a legal license to pick mushrooms wherever the heck they want? Let's say this really is a completely new, unidentified species that only grows in this national park. Then what?
- pvaldes 9y agoGood point, you normally will need a license to pick anything autochthonous in a national park, even for scientific purposes.
- marcoperaza 9y ago>Corbett has been frustrated by what he considers insufficient or even counterproductive advice by his lawyers, who have urged him to plead guilty. They have refused to discuss anything relating to mushrooms or entheogens, and hope Corbett will settle for the plea deal and probation. But Corbett is determined to challenge the law and prove his innocence. He has since fired his attorneys and he hopes to hire one who will best represent him and his unique situation. Not a very smart move. The lawyers he fired are right.
- lovich 9y agoThey are right if the goal is to get the least amount of punishment. It sounds like he wants to protect his rights. In the US system yhe prosecutors throw the book at you and offer plea deals that are a small fraction of the original charge. They then then use their resources to go heavily after anyone who doesn't take a plea deal. That means you get to pick defending your rights or avoiding punishment, not both
- marcoperaza 9y agoThere's really nothing to defend when you're that guilty. There is no "right" to pick or possess magic mushrooms, which he is admitting he did.