Choad, the article is over a year old.  It’s a shame though.  I remember how amused I was to see dried mushrooms displayed in the windows of the head shops in Amsterdam.

He said: "It's all the fault of tourists, especially the Brits. They misuse alcohol at home and come over here to do the same with hash and the so called 'magic mushrooms'."

Those limeys. Always ruining another sure thing.

At the height of the Reagen/Bush drug war, I was in England where my friend took us mushroom picking up on Dartmoor. A local fall tradition, you could tell the pickers across the moors from miles away by their stooped silhouettes. Upon arriving at the familial manor we spread out the harvest on the kitchen table when  in walks his prim and proper mum. I wince for second out of my "just say no" American paranoia conditioning. But dear old mum just beams at the bounty we have collected. Seems the locals in those parts consider eating shrooms a rite of passage like a young man's introduction into pub culture.

What I did not fully appreciate was that British law did not consider mushrooms a crime until you dried and processed them for sale. Meaning that as long as the mushrooms were fresh you could pick, posess, use and even sell them.

Strangely not alot of other people really appreciated how exacting the letter of this law was. Not until about 8 years ago when some Dutch heads with a head for business saw the oppertunity for expansion. In the Netherlands they established large, legal, tax paying commercial grow houses. Which supplied retail sales opperations in Britain. They shipped fresh mushrooms in those little supermarket trays everyday across the channel by regular commercial refrigerated produce carrier. They even e-commerced them direct to the consumer via the brits most excellent post. Major bank cards accepted. The governing rule is that they had to be fresh, undried and not processed into anything.

Unfortunately some brit politicians looking to extend the antisocial legislation mandate turned their sites on the kiosk vendors at the large festivals. And 2 years ago got the law which had stood for 30 years changed to outlaw shrooms.

Great political pressure was then put on the Dutch to then change their laws and close down the legal commercial scale exporters. The death of the girl was just a conveniant political tool to prohibitionist's recent campaign. Not the start of any movement.