Open-Source vs. Patents

The Psilocybe zapotecorum is a mysterious psychoactive mushroom with an ancient lineage of ceremonial use among indigenous tribes of southern Mexico.

The heavily blue bruising macromycete (fungi with visible fruiting body) has remained an enigma to science until recently, when a group of researchers from the United States and Mexico took it upon themselves to decode the chemistry and genetics of it.

The Entheogen Genome Project by Entheome is building an open-science platform for entheogenic research and has published comprehensive genome-sequencing information on numerous psychoactive fungi species to date including Panaleous cyanescens, Psilocybe cubensis, Psilocybe cyanescens, and Amanita Muscaria var. formosa among others.

The group’s research into Psilocybe zapotecorum was recently published here.

I’ve had two of the lead researchers of this project on the Mycopreneur Podcast prior to their involvement with this project, and hope to catch up to speed with the developments on this critical initiative in the near future.

Sequencing mushroom genomes and publishing peer-reviewed research into the chemistry and morphology of entheogenic fungi in an open-science initiative feels like a far cry from the ever-evolving ‘psychedelics industry’, which stubbornly continues to gate keep and patent research & development into deuterated psilocybin and the medical potential of psychedelics.

I’m sitting here now in the sprawling Mexico City airport waiting to catch my flight to Miami for my second Wonderland Conference, which will for all intents and purposes predominantly represent a very different and financially-driven approach to psychedelic research.

I’m on a panel called Notes From The Underground: The Traditional Psychedelic Marketplace and the Future Legal Industry alongside Reggie Harris, Mary Carreon and Bob Johnson.

I hope to be a bridge and a ‘fungi diplomat’ between the divergent approaches and competing worldviews that continue to polarize humanity in our collective navigation of current events - both within the psychedelic space and beyond.

There’s a marked difference between ‘sitting on the fence’ and diplomacy.

I see the psychedelic conversation as an iterative, generative discourse that’s always in flux and never fully defined. The psychedelic experience itself seems to be more a process of becoming than an ultimatum, so why should the cultural mainstreaming of psychedelics be any different?

Any way you slice it, this has been a wild ride so far and I’m taking everything that comes with it.

It’s really easy for us all to get ahead of ourselves and jump to conclusions about what reality is and how we should be stewarding our own little corners of the universe; if the parable of ‘the blind men and the elephant’ doesn’t apply to the psychedelic conversation, then I don’t know what does.

It’s time for me to jump on another flight now and evolve my own understanding of where all this is going and what the Mycopreneur platform has to do with any of it in the first place - if you have any ideas, please let me know.

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