Arizona Highways Magazine Accidentally Identifies Psychedelic Mushroom as Edible

Arizona Highways magazine won't be hitting the newsstands this month, after it wrongly identified a certain mushroom as being edible.

Let's just say that while most people wouldn't consider the fly agaric mushroom to be edible, hippies at a Phish concert might.

Turns out, the mushroom has some psychoactive properties, and can cause unwanted physical effects, too.

Arizona Highways -- which is well-regarded for its photography -- posted the following note on its website:

PHOENIX (September 13, 2013) - Arizona Highways magazine today announced its October 2013 issue features an item on page 13, in which the fly agaric mushroom is identified as being edible. The fly agaric mushroom should not be consumed in its raw form because of its unpredictable psychotropic and physical effects.

"This issue will not be sold on newsstands, and we are alerting our subscribers to the mistake. We regret the error," said Win Holden, publisher of Arizona Highways magazine.

FYI, there are other mushrooms from the same genus that are considered deadly, so you might not want to utilize this new knowledge to go tripping. These aren't "magic mushrooms" in the traditional sense, as they don't contain any psilocybin.

To check out just what kind of effects one might get from consuming these mushrooms, though, we consulted Erowid, the nonprofit psychoactive drug resource.

Here's an excerpt of one account:

Arriving back into the street a dark border had appeared around my vision and it seemed to be threatening to engulf the edges of my swirling world. I realized that my kaleidoscopic wonder land was under attack and I marched forward in a positive manner focusing on the deep lush colors of the gray stones of the sidewalk, keeping the darkness at bay with three deep breaths and a single focus.

My body was trying to shut down all auxiliary and non-vital functions (like consciousness) and focus on staying alive. But I'd be dammed if I were going to miss this! All of a sudden I was aware of a huge pounding in my chest like a hundred dogs were jumping inside me and trying desperately to escape! With every third pound of the dogs, the black border was getting nearer until after 9 pounds I was winking out of existence and appearing some distance up the street.

POUND! I'm by a phone box.

POUND! I'm holding on to a traffic light.

POUND! I'm standing in the middle of the street and there's a guy who's going by in a car looking at me and he says, "Are you ok mate?" I stare at him with my mouth open and wonder why he's asking that.

POUND! I'm sitting on a bus bench and feeling like millions of fishhooks are hooked into every part of me and are pulling in all directions.

POUND! I struggle to the bathroom of the food court I'm in and look at myself in the mirror. A frightened ghost stares back at me. Drenched in sweat. Skin white and waxen. Eyes yellow, rimmed and shot with red. Pupils going huge, tiny, huge, tiny, huge, tiny. And when they would go tiny all sight would gray over.

I went to the toilet and pissed a long stream of reddish brown piss that smelt like the forest just after the rain, when the sun has come out and is shining down hot on everything. I then fell to the floor feeling so strange... it was like being encased in pine needles and a huge evil poisonous cow pat which was killing me, while my entire body had been filled with some sort of witchy brew made of poisonous toadstools and Earl Grey tea. I vomited huge amounts of lumpy witch brew into the dunny and fell to the tiles, my last thought before surrendering myself to the inky embrace of the void, being a future conversation my mother was having with someone who asked "Where's Weston?" her answer being "Oh, he died on the floor of a bathroom from an overdose of poisonous toadstools."

Um, yeah -- it sounds like you might want to consider not eating those.

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