British author Simon G. Powell thinks he'd have had a slightly less eventful job had he never discovered magic mushrooms. "Fuck knows—probably working in a bookshop or something," he says when I ask him to speculate. Instead of chasing up late DVD returns, however, the 50-year-old has just released his second book about shrooms, titled Magic Mushroom Explorer: Psilocybin and the Awakening Earth. Psilocybin—if you haven't already been informed via those glow-in-the-dark velvet posters at your local record shop—is a psychedelic tryptamine compound found in around 200 types of mushrooms worldwide. Or, in layman's terms, the stuff that makes you see weird shit when you eat them.
-Vice
