Observing the proliferation of dope stores here in my former mill town is, by now, old hat. They’re everywhere across the Great State of Maine and their attendant foot traffic has even begun to attract pleasantly parasitic commerce, like the Casa Del Taco truck that took up residence beside one shop, the Cure Cannabis Co., before mysteriously disappearing three weeks later.

I don’t frequent these marijuana dispensaries (though I would pay to see the staff at Cure dressed up like Robert Smith). I know a dozen folks who’ve been growing their own for decades. When Maine legalized the skunk in 2009, when municipalities decriminalized possession in 2013, I got separate calls from friends familiar with my personal habits. You celebrating? they asked. No sir, I told them. My lifestyle hasn’t changed one iota.

But psilocybin? That’s another matter. After consuming my fair share of mushrooms during the 1980s, I didn’t partake for long stretches of my subsequent adulthood. There were a few one-off experiences during The Aughts, when I consumed the same 3 to 3.5 grams that folks routinely scarfed during the second Reagan administration. But I mainly left them alone — because a standard 20th-century dose of 3.5 grams could mean a 7- to 9-hour commitment. Easy to carve out, as a college student, over a weekend. Not so much when one is working 9 to 5, with a wife and small kids.

However, I’m here to report that shrooms are back, in a very different but curiously familiar way, particularly among my Gen X and late-stage Boomer cohort. Psilocybin products remain technically illegal in Maine, for now. But not in California or several other states… Ain’t federalism and the U.S. Postal Service grand?

The difference 40 years can make has proved both fascinating and nuanced. Four or five years ago, a buddy of mine revealed that he’d been procuring his mushrooms in a unique form: from a vendor who, when he wasn’t painting houses, gathered the particulate, or shake, from the bottom of a 1-gallon plastic storage bag. He’d fill and sell cute-little 1-gram capsules that, I discovered, represented the perfect microdose. Perfect for me anyway.

Nothing psychedelic, mind you. As with THC and alcohol, everyone processes these chemical compounds differently. I never got an acid-style trip out of psilocybin shrooms, no matter how many grams I gobbled. These 1-gram shake capsules produced a delightfully toned-down buzz that lasted 2-3 hours and didn’t continually lobby my brain for more, more, more. You know, like other white, powdery drugs I associate with the 1980s.

For example, I caught Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s spectacular “Remain in Light” review, early in August. They went on around 9 p.m. After parking the car and popping a gummy, I remained plenty wide awake and ready to have fun till midnight. A most pleasant stimulant. Plenty sober enough to drive home. No trouble sleeping afterward.

Today, of course, gummies are the in-vogue medium for shrooms and cannabinoid THC, and there exists an entire universe of delivery media: chocolate, root beer, oils and tinctures, salves and creams. I frankly prefer to smoke the kind bud: Its old-school results remain immediate and predictable, for me. Yet that’s precisely the noteworthy thing about these manufactured products: By paying attention to gram dosage, one can monitor and enable only the buzz one desires — no more, no less. Brands differ, but my older, wiser friends and I have found consistency within most any manufacturer’s product line.

That unknown variability had always annoyed me when it came to homemade hash brownies, or pot cookies: How strong are these? “Uh. I dunno, dude.” Not a science.

The corporatization of dope has its drawbacks, as well, but it has delivered to the marketplace consistent expectations and results on the buzz front. It’s no mistake that beer menus today routinely include the percentage of alcohol for each pint on offer. The legalization of weed and other products has influenced an entire industry in this way.

Critically, the active ingredient in shroom gummies is stronger and calibrated differently compared to the analog method. According to the National Institutes of Health, “a 25 mg psilocybin fixed dose is approximately 2.5 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. However, it is important to note, there is intra- and inter-species variability of psilocybin content.”

I’m intrigued by the way all these particulars, including our understandings of dosage, have evolved in the course and context of my own life. Back in 1985, the fall of my senior year in college, I went to visit a friend at UMass. A buddy of his had a bunch of mushrooms and asked me to move some for him, back at my own institute of higher learning. This I proceeded to do, in addition to partaking myself, chaperoning other folks on maiden voyages, and eventually microdosing — though that terminology had not yet been coined. Still, I’d pop a cap before a party. Another time, I remember downing a fat stem before the annual Nebraska-Oklahoma football game, the day after Thanksgiving. Nothing like a mild shroom buzz to watch nimble quarterbacks prosecute the triple-option wishbone.

While arguably ahead of their time, these casual microdoses eventually gave me pause. The worry: I was beginning to normalize the shrooms by microdosing them, however responsibly I may have been doing so. To my 21-year-old mind it felt immature, perhaps reckless, maybe even a slippery slope. When the supply was depleted, I didn’t seek out more. For decades, I considered shrooming only on special occasions, at the suggestion of others. A couple times I took the plunge but most of the time I demurred.

Now, on the verge of 60, all these folks around me are microdosing pretty much exactly as I had my senior year in college! What had seemed reckless back then is now prosecuted with great intention and precision, by demonstrably reasonable old people. And Talking Heads are back on tour in support of an album released in 1980. Amazing.

I’m not the least bit surprised the Maine Legislature approved last
September a commission to study the possibility of legalizing psilocybin; or that elsewhere shrooms are now being prescribed to people who struggle with depression and PTSD. Everyone’s different, and even the big doses never made the walls breathe or the trees talk — not to me. What they can do, for a time, regardless of dosage, is take one completely outside of one’s self, to a place where one might examine his/her own experiences in completely new ways.

I remember one young man in particular whom I chaperoned on his first psilocybin experience, back in the day. He was sitting on the tailgate of a gigantic ‘70s-era station wagon, calm and contemplative, but he’d clearly been laughing with great vigor. One could see it in his eyes. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” he told me, without any trace of irony, anxiety or pride. “I’m never doing it again.”

With the experience of decades, I wish I could have responded, Hey, I get it. Next time — if there is a next time — try taking one third as much.