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Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday September 30, 1976. Pages 1, 12.

MUSHROOMIN' FIX ON A SURBURBAN LAWN
By S. L. Sanger (P-I Eastside Bureau



Redmond - Mrs X has a little problem with magic mushrooms growing in her yard.

"What's growing in my front yard is not funny. They are loaded with acid," said the 35-year old Redmond mother, who definitely did not want her name or address published.

For two years, people of all ages and descriptions have been coming to her yard to pick and eat the mushrooms, and she doesn't like it. She considers them trespassers.

And she is worried that someone will overdose, or encourage little neighborhood kids to eat them.

No proof has been given that the mushrooms are hallucnogenic, "but the kids sure must think they are," Mrs. X said.

"Kids have been coming to my door stoned. I began to think there must be more to this than meets the eye. I checked around and found out they were eating them to get high," she said.

The mushrooms, short and buttoned-sized, are not easy to see in the short-cropped grass of the manicured lawn. But that has not stopped the mushroom fanciers.

Mrs. X said the mushroom eaters arrive in Cadillacs and sometimes Mercedes Benzes. Some of them are well dressed, some not so well-dress.

"Kids tried to tell me they were picking the mushrooms for a biology class. Them I realized school hadn't even started.

"Every morning I go out and pick the mushrooms, but two hours later we have a new crop. I am a very busy person. I don't have the time to pick mushrooms all day," she said.

Mrs. X said the problem has now spread to other parts of her neighborhood, and the next door neighbors have mushrooms even more potent than hers.

"I tell people to stop picking, but it is the same old garbage. All the time I am telling them to stop, they are picking like mad."

"We can't have a guard dog because we would be liable if it bit someone. We can't poison the mushrooms for the same reason, and we can't have a fence because there is a zoning restriction against Fences."

It is too expensive to plow up the yard, and her kids have to play someplace, she said. Mrs. X said the best thing would be a hard freeze, but that probably won't happen untill late October

Gerald Yaeger, a Redmond police detective, said some of Mrs. X's mushrooms are at a state laboratory for determination if they are hallucinogenic.

"Sometimes I think kids eat a few mushrooms and drink a fifth of Vodka, then tell other kids what a great high they got from mushrooms," Yaeger said.

The detective said his department has run 20 pounds of mushrooms through the state laboratory and so far has not found any that were hallucinogenic.

A person in possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms could be prosecutes under the controlled substance law, the detective said.

Greg Wright, 26, who operates Eastside mushroom hunts and who describes himself as an expert mushroom eater, said he ate some of Mrs. X's mushrooms.

"My mind focused on one thing at a time, very vivid sensations of sight and sound and thinking it was mostly a pleasant experience, unless I started thinking about something unpleasant," he said.

Dr. Daniel Stuntz, Unifersioty of Wshington biology professor and scientific adviser to the Puget Sound Mycological (mushroom study) Society, had this to say: "If you don't know what you are eating, don't eat it."

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