Eugene* sits motionless, with no will to move, speak, or even blink. No will to do anything but watch. Watch wide-eyed as the carpet fibers shoot up to the ceiling, the posters on the walls swirl and melt, and his body seems to sink down to become one with the very couch. Colors turn to sounds, sounds to rainbows, and everything he knows flips upside-down. Eugene has taken some magic mushrooms.

The new up-and-coming high school drug, psilocybin-containing mushrooms, called “shrooms” for short, have recently popped onto the Garfield radar.

“Speaking as the supplier for Garfield, except for people that pick them on their own, it’s insane,” shares a big-time mushroom dealer who asked to be known only as Coyote, ’010. “One or two ’09 kids first hit me up for psychedelics so I got them some mescaline.” (Mescaline is the active ingredient in Peyote, a hallucinogenic substance that was originally used for spiritual purposes by Native Americans.)

“They tried it and they really liked it, and then they told their friends. Then at the end of last year a few ’010 kids tried it, and then over the summer I got a ton of people hitting me up. I was shocked that they’d suddenly be interested — there were several people that have never smoked or drank before that took mushrooms. I’ve been getting several interests from ’012 this year too, so I guess it kinda spread out through the ranks.”

Hallucinogenic use has stayed pretty constant over the last couple years. The 2007 National Drug Survey on Drug Use and Health, run by the US Department of Health and Human Services, states that there are about 1.1 million people over the age of 12 that used hallucinogenics over the past year, though it’s relatively new to the Garfield scene.

“In most other schools when people stop smoking weed the more common drug is pharmaceuticals, and almost no one at Garfield does that,” says Coyote. “I think it’s cool cause they’re doing drugs that are not harmful and not addictive, and are exploratory, as opposed to just sensational and recreational.”

And mushrooms definitely are exploratory, used for thousands of years by people all over the world as a religious or spiritual experience.

“I just thought of it as a way to learn more about myself I guess, just from what other people have told me, without creating that relationship where it’s what people do to have fun, you know,?” says Evan*, an ’011 student who doesn’t normally do drugs but makes an exception for shrooms.

“The reason I didn’t smoke or drink was just because I feel people become really dependent on it, for fun and for being creative and doing interesting things. So I heard about psychedelic drugs, like it was an event at a time and you were experiencing all sorts of stuff and learning these things, but it wasn’t something that was in your lifestyle.”

As Eugene, Evan, and Coyote choke down the dried mushrooms, their brains are going haywire. The chemical structure of psilocybin is similar to that of a neurotransmitter called serotonin. After ingesting psilocybin, their bodies break it down to psilocin, which then travels to the serotonin receptors, altering their motor reflexes, behavior, and sensory perception. Hallucinations are the main sought-after effect, with altered time perception and an inability to tell reality from fantasy thrown in the mix.

Though it’s nearly impossible to overdose on psilocybin mushrooms, a different kind of magic mushroom, the Fly Agaric, can cause heart failure. The risk isn’t great, but there have also been reports of long-term effects like flashbacks, psychiatric illness, and impaired memory.

The main risk that high school students are afraid of is a bad trip.

“At the beginning, I didn’t know if I was imagining stuff that I thought I’d see when I’m tripping, or actually seeing things because I was tripping. I thought that my walls were vanilla ice cream and that they were melting on me,” ’012 Garfield student Sydney* says.

“I had a good first two hours until I went insane. I was just thinking about my life, and I was at a pretty bad place so it made me go crazy. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I basically saw my life from an outsider’s point of view, like I was looking at a storybook, and I didn’t like it at all. I couldn’t believe that was the life I was leading. I was ashamed to be myself, like I just couldn’t be myself anymore. The only thing that kept me normal was my friend who kept telling me I was okay, I was going to get through this. I didn’t even know who I was. Most of my night was just spent curled up against the wall.”

“Under unmonitored conditions, it’s easy to imagine those emotions escalating to panic and dangerous behavior,” says Professor Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Coyote, however, has a different take on the situation. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad trip. I don’t think that’s a real thing. I think there are difficult trips. It can be harder, and sometimes it’s easier, but the harder ones are the more profound ones.”

“There’s also such a thing as ‘ego loss,’ which is when you forget that you exist,” Coyote says. “The only sure thing that you know is happening is the sensation of existence. We for sure experience existence. And mushrooms potentially make that one thing unsure. You can stop experiencing existence and start experiencing… I guess you’re still experiencing existence but you forget about existence of the self and you experience only existence in its purest form.”

Calvin*, ’012, has experienced just that. “During ego loss, I woke up, from like a weird dream. I didn’t quite remember the dream, it was blurry, but I saw my two friends as these figures and I just didn’t recognize them. I mean I kinda knew who they were but I thought they were unreal and I just didn’t know what was going on.” Calvin remarks.

“Everything was just blurry and I couldn’t make out their faces and their voices were weird. It was just like they were talking to me and saying my name but I didn’t know who I was. Like, they were saying someone’s name, so I was like, “Oh, maybe that’s me.” And then I started coming back and I was just like what the f***, like fading in and out. It was a pretty bad experience, coming back from that.”

Although shrooms aren’t considered to be physically addictive, first time users often continue using, even if their initial encounter wasn’t a positive one. Neither Sydney nor Calvin have fully renounced shrooms as of yet. They are an inconstant, unpredictable friend that knocks with opportunity on the front door every so often, tempting with promises of beautiful dreams and realized fantasies.

As Eugene’s hallucinations finally start to subside, he sits down by the computer. He’s already come back into himself, and the only thing that’s still moving after six long hours of amazed staring are the letters on the monitor. As they dance off the screen, Eugene flops down in exhaustion and closes his eyes. The experience wasn’t one he would forget anytime soon.

And neither would several volunteers that offered to take psilocybin mushrooms under close laboratory monitoring as part of a 2006 study in affiliation with Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. “Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” says Griffiths.

Though psilocybin-containing mushrooms are a Schedule I substance, just as illegal as heroin, Coyote still risks the maximum penalty of an unlimited fine and a lifetime in prison for selling, or a maximum seven year sentence as well as a fine for possessing. And when he graduates, the torch will likely be passed to another.

“I’ll probably put some people in touch with the people I’m in touch with,” Coyote says. “It’s definitely not just a profit thing for me. There’s a spiritual aspect to it. It’s medicine and it’s an exploratory thing, so if I leave it in the hands of someone I’ll definitely talk to them seriously about what they’re about and make sure they’re doing it safely and not selling to people they think are abusing — selling with discretion. If I pass it on to someone I’d really have to make sure we’re on the same wavelength.”

Though it’s not about the profit for Coyote, profit he certainly is making. “I’ve transformed $100 into over two grand so far, probably two and a half. I would have had about four grand but I’ve probably donated around a total of a thousand dollars to different charities now.”

“Imagine you’ve got a piece of paper. You can use it to write on, to read off of, to memorize stuff, record stuff, and do art.” Coyote says thoughtfully.

“You can do all that with a piece of paper. But you can also take a piece of paper and do other things with it, like folding origami. Psychedelics is like folding the piece of paper that is your brain into origami. You can still write on it, but there are connections that are made differently and it can manifest itself in different ways, things that wouldn’t necessarily be connected end up next to each other due to the structure of them. I guess I just feel like psychedelics are origami,”Coyote laughs.