"This is clearly bonkers and out of touch with reality."

The Scotsman, of all newspapers, has an interesting article about the MM ban in Britain. You see, before the ban, people like my friend in the pub could buy growing kits in a shop or over the internet, costing a tenner or so, and grow the 'shrooms on their bedroom windowsill: no tramping around the countryside in cow's shit getting shot by farmers, or handing over money to scary looking guys in pubs. Useless wasters would learn all about the life cycle of fungi. People might gain new perceptions of their consciousness and the universe.

Not anymore.

These figures from the British government are interesting, showing mental or behavioural disorders by reference to the substances that caused them. As you'd guess, booze causes far and away the most problems, about 11,000 a year. Smack's next with 3000. Coke, pharmaceuticals and cannabis cause a few hundred problems; stimulants a few hundred too. Hallucinogens only 80. That's far less than 1% of the trouble caused by drink, yet nobody's seriously talking about making Bacardi Breezers a Class A drug, for possession of which they'll lock you up.

The British government say that they were closing a loophole in making fresh psilocybin mushrooms a class A drug, that previously there had been some judicial confsion surrounding the definition of 'product' in the earlier legislation, and that the new law was merely clarifying the situation.

Strange as it might seem, I think they're actually telling the truth: mushies were always an uncertain matter in UK anti-drug laws, and it would seem necessary to the legal and bureaucratically minded to tidy up the situation.
Although that appears to make sense, anyone who knows the crack will know that it's utterly fucking absurd to make possession of something which grows freely in parks and fields illegal. The same logic can be applied to Cannabis, even more so, because it's a really beneficial herb.

Why? I'm always asking myself, and others, and others ask me: Why? Some say it's social control, but that doesn't wash: booze is legal and that's a drug sure to make you misbehave and sleep in for work.

Why?