JUN’S ALARM BELL. Cebu City Councilor Pastor Alcover Jr. said it’s called wild or magic mushrooms, “uhong,” he said, in Cebuano-Bisaya. He said it’s being used as substitute for illegal drugs: they boil it before drinking the liquid straight or mixed in tea or coffee -- and get high 20 minutes after.
He didn’t say from whom he got the information: just reports (“mga taho”) reaching his office, which led him to inquire and investigate, learning that some youths in Barangay Guba were taken ill(“nangalanag”) because of the mushroom drink. Nobody died though, he said.
Alarming, Alcover said, to the upland youths because some young people from the city go to the hills to buy or look for the magic/wild mushrooms. No Sanggunian member asked how the visit of city young folk will endanger their upland counterparts: a fight over the mushrooms perhaps, or it just went to show how much the vice from what’s to be plain table food has spread.
Councilor Alcover said he wanted people to know about the wild/magic mushrooms and its ill effects on users’ health and what the police could do about it.
Well-intentioned as he seemed, Alcover gave scant information: little about the the danger and the damage so far and much less about the drug itself.
JOY’S DOUBT.Majority Floor-leader Jocelyn Pesquera told the City Council “there is really no law punishing eating mushrooms.” She warned on confusing terms and asked for, since there are many mushrooms, the specific mushroom. “Sometimes we just like mushroom…like me yesterday (August 22), I ate mushroom soup, shall I get arrested?”
Apparently, Pesquera too didn’t know or wasn’t sure, or she would’ve readily told her colleagues, the way she shared her knowledge of the legal precept in Latin “Nullum crimen, (nulla poena) sine lege” or “there’s no crime if there’s no law punishing it.”
AND THAT MUSHROOM IS PSILOCYBIN.Councilor Alcover referred briefly to what the Bacolod City police did about wild/magic mushrooms. But the councilor gave no details. His staff could’ve looked into it and would’ve come up with this: Last July 17, 2023, Bacolod police confiscated from three suspects 3.61 kilos of “psychedelic mushrooms” valued at P361,000.
Those mushrooms had drug market value and the police seized them as contraband. That should’ve given some solid ideas to other LGUs like Cebu City facing a similar problem. Yet the City Council showed that it was clueless about the claimed drug substitute. While Alcover cited the Bacolod incident, he didn’t have enough facts to support his ringing of the alarm bell.
The story was run in the last July 19 and July 21, 2023 SunStar and also saw print in Manila Bulletin and Panay News. PNA fed a story by John Rey Saavedra to its clients. Much earlier, on November 19, 2019, (Iloilo) Daily Guardian asked in a news feature: “Wild mushrooms replacing shabu?” A December 1, 2019 news feed in the Senate website expressed senators’ concern over a DepEd report that three high school students were hospitalized for using “psychedelic or magic mushrooms.” The point here being this: the councilor raising the problem could’ve done more research and would’ve appeared less clueless as he was in the last August 23 session (“Kay ako wa man sab kasabot ini”).
The mushrooms, a group of fungi, are called Psilocybin mushrooms, commonly known as magic mushrooms. “The psilocybin in them turns into psilocin upon ingestion,” which causes the psychedelic effects.
‘BREAKTHROUGH MEDICINE’?The everyday lingo for the wild/magic/psychedelic mushrooms used to include “shrooms, Alice, tweezes, hongos, and pizza toppings” but disuse of the terms may make them obsolete, CNN reported last June 13, 2022.
The reason is that the mushrooms are no longer party drugs for young people. A leading mycologist, Paul Staments, was quoted by CNN as saying “Psilocybin mushrooms are non-addictive, life-changing substances.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration reportedly described psilocybin as breakthrough medicine, “which is phenomenal.”
TWIN PUZZLERS.They have a problem at the Cebu City Sanggunian, a twin puzzler:
[1] Is possession or use of wild/magic mushroom punishable by law? Is it in the list of the Dangerous Drugs Board, which draws and updates the list based on the law? If it’s legal, under what authority did the Bacolod police seize those magic mushrooms last July? A Wikipedia list records the Philippines status on psychedelic mushrooms as “legal (ambiguous).”
[2] What are the mushroom’s medicinal properties? If the U.S.FDA considers the mushrooms as a breakthrough medicine, has the Philippines started to benefit from the finding?
WHO THEY GONNA CALL? To resolve doubts of some members, the Sanggunian has invited to an executive session on September 6 representatives from the City Health Department, City Police, Pdea, DENR, and Department of Agriculture. As can be expected, if there’s anything the City Council doesn’t know or isn’t sure about, who they gonna call? The usual sources, to the usual executive session.
And Councilor Francis Esparis made a not-so-weird request: to get samples of the wild/magic mushrooms to see to it they are not from dog’s or frog’s urine.