Education

Education

Here is a small selection of recommended books on of mycology, psilocybin mushrooms, psychedelics, drug policy, and politics. Help support Decriminalize California by purchasing any of these books via the links on this page; through the Amazon Associates Program, Decriminalize California will receive a portion of the sales.

Mycology Books

All That the Rain Promises and More: A Hip Pocket Guide to Western Mushrooms

"In leafing through these pages, you may wonder what all the 'fanciful,' 'foolish,' or (shudder) 'extraneous' material is doing in a factual guide. After all, it is the practical, hands-on, how-to-identify information that makes this book useful and gives it substance. But I ask: is it any stranger or less desirable to sprinkle the facts with flakes of fancy than it is to liven up solemn, substantial fare like potatoes with something fancier and more flavorful, like wild mushrooms?" - David Arora
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The Edible Mushroom Book: The Guide to Foraging and Cooking

Explores the world of edible mushrooms from the field to kitchen. This title focuses on the best edible fungi, providing failsafe identification notes for over 50 choice varieties, and offers over 50 delicious everyday recipes using specific mushrooms and mixed mushrooms.
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Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

Contributions from Michael Pollan, Andrew Weil, Eugenia Bone, and many more expterts make Fantastic Fungi an awe-inspiring visual journey through the exotic, little-known realm of fungi and its amazing potential to positively influence our lives
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Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

After years of living in awe of the mysterious fungi known as mushrooms-chefs, health enthusiasts, and home cooks alike can't get enough of these rich, delicate morsels. With updated production techniques for home and commercial cultivation, detailed growth parameters for 31 mushroom species, a trouble-shooting guide, and handy gardening tips, this revised and updated handbook will make your mycological landscapes the envy of the neighborhood.
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Mushrooms Demystified

Simply the best and most complete mushroom field guide and reference book, MUSHROOMS DEMYSTIFIED includes descriptions and keys to more than 2,000 species of mushrooms, with more than 950 photographs. Mushroom authority David Arora provides a beginner's checklist of the 70 most distinctive and common mushrooms, plus detailed chapters on terminology, classification, habitats, mushroom cookery, mushroom toxins, and the meanings of scientific mushroom names. Beginning and experienced mushroom hunters everywhere will find MUSHROOMS DEMYSTIFIED a delightful, informative, and indispensible companion.
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Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast

A comprehensive and user-friendly field guide for identifying the many mushrooms of the northern California coast, from Monterey County to the Oregon border.
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Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.
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MycoMedicinals: An Informational Treatise on Mushrooms

By Paul Stamets. Written by a mycologist and mushroom cultivator with more than 20 years of experience in the field, this full-color resource guide describes and documents the health benefits of 17 different species of mushrooms
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Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies

"This book is far and away the best guide to the psilocybin-containing mushrooms and their relatives. It provides detailed and accurate information about the dark spored agarics, a group of gilled mushrooms difficult to identify and classify. Mycologists and mushroom fanciers, as well as those interested in the psychoactive fungi, will all find this work useful. Its taxonomic keys and excellent color photographs are valuable additions to the literature on mushrooms. I give Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies the highest recommendation." -- Andrew T. Weil, M.D., Author, The Natural Mind
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Psilocybin Mushroom Handbook - Easy Indoor and Outdoor Cultivation

Here is a practical step-by-step guide to cultivating four species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, indoors and outside. Anyone with a clean kitchen, some basic equipment, and a closet shelf or shady flowerbed will be able to grow a bumper crop. This Handbook also includes an introduction to mushroom biology, a guide for supplies, and advice on discreetly integrating psychedelic mushrooms into outdoor gardens.
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Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide

From the author of GROWING GOURMET AND MEDICINAL MUSHROOMS comes the only identification guide exclusively devoted to the world's psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Detailed descriptions and color photographs for over 100 species are provided, as well as an exploration of their long-standing (and often religious) use by ancient peoples and their continued significance to modern-day culture. Some of the species included have just been discovered in the past year or two, and still others have never before been photographed in their natural habitats.
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The Mushroom Cultivator

The Mushroom Cultivator by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton is easily the best source of information on growing mushrooms at home. The authors demystify the art of mushroom cultivation and put mastery of it within everyone's reach. If you have been searching for information on this topic, you will find it to be all that you have been looking for.
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The Mushroom Guide and Identifier

A photographic A-Z guide to edible wild mushrooms, with 300 photographs and cooking suggestions throughout.
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The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible: The Definitive Guide to Growing and Using Magic Mushrooms

Dr. Mandrake uses his doctoral studies in mycology to detail the history and botany of psilocybin mushrooms to give readers an idea of their prevalence throughout human history. The book is highly detailed and comprehensive, allowing readers to learn the entire process required to produce perfect magic mushrooms every time.
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Psychedelic Books

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond

Few events have had a more profound impact on the social and cultural upheavals of the Sixties than the psychedelic revolution spawned by the spread of LSD. This book for the first time tells the full and astounding story—part of it hidden till now in secret Government files—of the role the mind-altering drug played in our recent turbulent history and the continuing influence it has on our time.
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Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal

Through the stories of three very different men, award-winning journalist Tom Shroder covers the drugs’ roller-coaster history from their initial reception in the 1950s to the negative stereotypes that persist today. At a moment when popular opinion is rethinking the potential benefits of some illegal drugs, and with new research coming out every day, Acid Test is a fascinating and informative must-read.
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Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.
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Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna

As Terence's younger brother and only sibling, I grew up with him in a small town in western Colorado during the fifties and sixties. Traveling together in the Colombian Amazon in 1971 with a few other kindred spirits we called our band "the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss." As Terence's brother, I helped him create and develop many of "his" ideas. Terence became the spokesman for the alien dimensions accessed through psychedelics, a philosopher of the unspeakable, a beloved and sometimes reviled bard of the marvels and occasional terrors waiting in the recesses of human consciousness.
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DMT: The Spirit Molecule

From 1990 to 1995 Dr. Rick Strassman conducted U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
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Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution

In Food of the Gods, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s research on man’s ancient relationship with chemicals opens a doorway to the divine, and perhaps a solution for saving our troubled world.
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High Priest

This text from the earliest days of psychedelia chronicles the experiences on 16 acid trips taken before LSD was illegal. The trip guides or "high priests" included Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Ralph Meltzner, Huston Smith and a junkie from New York City named Willy. It tells of the goings-on and freaking out at the Millbrook mansion in New York State that became the Mecca of psychedelia during the 1960s, and of the many luminaries who made their pilgrimage there to trip with Leary and his group. Chapters include an I Ching reading and a chronicle of what happened during those "spacewalks" of the mind.
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How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world.
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LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science

This is the story of LSD told by a concerned yet hopeful father, organic chemist Albert Hofmann. He traces LSD's path from a promising psychiatric research medicine to a recreational drug sparking hysteria and prohibition. We follow Dr. Hofmann's trek across Mexico to discover sacred plants related to LSD, and listen in as he corresponds with other notable figures about his remarkable discovery. Underlying it all is Dr. Hofmann's powerful conclusion that mystical experience may be our planet's best hope for survival.
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Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved) is a unique book written by renowned psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin and his wife Ann Shulgin. This book gives details of their research and investigations into the use of psychedelic drugs for the study of the human mind, and is also a love story. The second half of the book describes in detail a wealth of phenethlyamines, their physical properties, dosages used, duration of effects observed, and commentary on effects.
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Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers

Three scientific titans join forces to completely revise the classic text on the ritual uses of psychoactive plants. They provide a fascinating testimony of these "plants of the gods," tracing their uses throughout the world and their significance in shaping culture and history. In the traditions of every culture, plants have been highly valued for their nourishing, healing, and transformative properties. The most powerful of those plants, which are known to transport the human mind into other dimensions of consciousness, have always been regarded as sacred.
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The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History

In these essays, interviews, and narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche and the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past and future.
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The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell

Among the most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychadelic drugs ever written, here are two complete classic books—The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell—in which Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. This new edition also features an additional essay, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds," which is now included for the first time.
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ushered in an era of New Journalism, "An American classic" (Newsweek) that defined a generation. "An astonishing book" (The New York Times Book Review) and an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the 1960s.
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The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching

A thoroughly revised edition of the much-sought-after early work by Terence and Dennis McKenna that looks at shamanism, altered states of consciousness, and the organic unity of the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
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The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia

It is probably the most comprehensive single volume to look at the use of mind-altering drugs, or entheogens, for ritual and shamanistic purposes throughout humanity's long story, while casting withering sidelong glances at our own times - as Paul Devereux points out, our modern mainstream culture is eccentric in its refusal to integrate the profound experiences offered by these natural substances into its own spiritual life.
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The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead

The book discusses the various phases of ego death that can occur on psychedelics and gives specific instructions on how one should regard them and act during each of these different phases. In addition to containing more general advice for the readers on how to use psychedelics, the book also includes selections of writing presented with the intent for them to be read aloud during events where groups of people take psychedelic drugs together.
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Tihkal: A Continuation

Book II: The Chemistry Continues Describes in detail a wealth of tryptamines in the same format as Book II of PIHKAL, plus appendices presenting topics such as cactus alkaloids, natural beta-carbolines, current drug law, and all known tryptamines (from the literature) that might be psychedelic.
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Drugs Without the Hot Air

From health to family to society, this informative exploration takes an evidence-based view of all the factors involved in drug use. Applying the same objective criteria to legal and illegal substances, an argument is made that legality is not a clear measure for harm. Tackling a variety of questions, such as Which is more harmful—Ecstasy or alcohol? Can addiction be cured? and Does the "War on Drugs" have serious unintended effects that can hurt children?, this analysis equips readers with the ability to make educated decisions regarding drugs both personally and in their communities. Broadening the scope of the discussion, a framework is explored for formulating national drug policies that will minimize a myriad of harms—social, medical, criminal, financial, and environmental.
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True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise

This mesmerizing, surreal account of the bizarre adventures of Terence McKenna, his brother Dennis, and a small band of their friends, is a wild ride of exotic experience and scientific inquiry.
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Albion Dreaming: A popular history of LSD in Britain

Contrary to popular belief, LSD is much more connected to Britain than it is to the US. This engaging book looks at the use of LSD in British society, from its arrival in 1952 to the present day. It provides a hidden history of a controversial drug and how it permeated British culture. The author explores LSD's use by the medical profession in treating a variety of psychological and mental problems. At the same time, The Ministry of Defense believed they were on the brink of harnessing LSD as a battlefield incapacitation drug which would enable wars to be won without loss of life. But LSD's popularity rose with its use among the British counterculture, from the 1950s beatniks through to the late 80s acid house parties. At its height, when it was legal, LSD affected the lives and philosophies of significant individuals (politicians, scientists, writers, educators, entertainers, artists, journalists) as well as ordinary people for good and bad. This book is the first to explore LSD's amazing influence on British culture and society.
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Worth The Fight

Worth The Fight is a book about hope and healing. About what is possible if we heal trauma on an individual and collective level and come together over what is shared. Worth The Fight calls for a love revolution that is fueled by forgiveness, compassion, kindness and selfless service to others: May we love more fiercely ourselves, our neighbors and the natural world! A peaceful movement that starts with you the reader, a slow march to restore what has been withheld to our times that are defined by fear, discord, and conflict. A bold book of potentially viable, progressive solutions open-sourced and gifted to a world starved of love. Generously shared, are insights and tools to overcome trauma or tools for majorly up-leveling your game, psychedelics not required.
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Political Campaign Books

The Political Campaign Desk Reference: A Guide for Campaign Managers, Professionals and Candidates Running for Office

Do builders construct buildings without a blueprint? Is it wise to go on a long road trip without mapping the route ahead of time? Campaign are no different.
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Guide To California Government League of Women Voters of California

The Guide to California Government is a thorough, nonpartisan, easy-to-read book for navigating the often complicated process for voting and engaging with our state government. This 16th edition of the guide provides essential information for every citizen or future citizen of California.
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Mycology Clubs of California​

Bay Area Mycological Society

PO Box 164
San Leandro, CA 94577
Phone: (510)430-9353
Web: www.bayareamushrooms.org

Mycological Society of San Francisco

c/o The Randall Museum
199 Museum Way
San Francisco, CA 94114
Web: www.mssf.org

Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz

PO Box 82
Santa Cruz, CA 95063
Web: http://ffsc.us

Sacramento Area Mushroomers

626 Georgetown Place
Davis, CA 95616-1822
Web: https://sacmush.com/index.html

Humboldt Bay Mycological Society

PO Box 4419
Arcata, CA 95518
Web: http://hbmycologicalsociety.org/wp/

San Diego Mycological Society

PO Box 1982
Lemon Grove, CA 91946
Web: www.sdmyco.org

Los Angeles Mycological Society

2282 S Palomares Street
Pomona, CA 91766
Web: http://lamushrooms.org/index.html

Sonoma County Mycological Association

PO Box 7147
Santa Rosa, CA 95407-0147
Web: www.somamushrooms.org

Psychedelic Clubs of California​

Aware Project: Rethinking Psychedelics

Web: https://awareproject.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awareproject/

Psychedelic Pilgrims

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PsychedelicPilgrims/

California Psychedelic Society

About: Lore, Studies and Solutions toward People and the Planet
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SymbioticCalifornia/

Sacramento Psychedelic Club

Sacramento, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/psychedelic-club-sacramento/

Costa Mesa Psychedelic Transformation Meetup

Costa Mesa, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Costa-Mesa-Psychedelic-Transformation-Meetup/

Santa Cruz Psychedelic Explorers

Santa Cruz, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Santa-Cruz-Psychedelic-Explorers/

Monterey Psychedelic Society

Monterey, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/montereypsychedelic/

SB Psychedelic Integration Circle

Santa Barbara, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/SB-Psychedelic-Integration-Circle/

Tam Integrations

Tam integration is a simple and sweet community group founded with the intention of offering psychedelic integration events and spiritual support in Marin County and the rest of the bay area.
Web: https://tamintegration.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tamintegration/

Southern California Psychedelics Research Society

About: A community network for SoCal psychedelic researchers, explorers, and enthusiasts.
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/socalpsychedelicsociety/

Psychedelia

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/PsychedelicExperienceIntegration/
Web: https://www.psychedelicintegrationcoach.com/

West Sacramento Consciousness

West Sacramento, CA
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/West-Sacramento-Consciousness-Meetup/