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The poster child for psychedelic mushrooms is named after a country that doesn’t use it

Ellsworth Toohey
Jun 16, 2026
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Psilocybe cubensis mushroom — CC BY-SA 3.0, Rohan523 via Wikimedia Commons

In 1906, a U.S. plant pathologist named Franklin Sumner Earle collected a small brown mushroom in Cuba and shipped it to the New York Botanical Garden. He called it Stropharia cubensis — later reclassified as Psilocybe cubensis — and never mentioned it again in any of his letters.…

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