
The Rise of Psychedelic Truffles in Amsterdam
Amsterdam's psychedelic mushroom trade collapses in 2008, when the Dutch government bans the sale of fresh psilocybin mushrooms over safety concerns. VICE travels to the city to find out what replaced them: psilocybin-containing truffles, an underground fungus that falls outside the letter of the new law and quickly becomes the legal workaround shops rely on to keep selling trips to tourists. The crew visits smart shops and talks to the people running them, along with psychonauts and drug-policy voices, about how a single legislative loophole reshaped the city's drug tourism overnight. The film treats the ban itself as the hinge of the story, asking why mushrooms were singled out while truffles, which contain the same psilocybin, were left alone, and what that says about how drug law actually gets written. Along the way it touches on the folk history of psilocybin use and the research interest in it as a treatment for depression and PTSD, without dwelling on either. It stays close to street level: shopkeepers, buyers, and the odd legal logic connecting them.