Evergreen State College was an experimental college in Olympia, Washington, whose flexible independent-study system helped make it an unlikely center of American psilocybin-mushroom research. In the mid-1970s, a small group working there turned a neglected subject into a program of field discovery and laboratory study; their findings shifted attention from southern Mexico to the Pacific Northwest and established the college as a de facto intellectual hub for the region’s psychedelic culture.

An Unconventional Mycological School

Paul Stamets’s training took shape at Evergreen State College rather than Kenyon College, which he left after a year. Evergreen’s new, experimental model allowed students to design independent courses of study. Michael Beug, a young professor with a degree in environmental chemistry but no formal mycological training, agreed to mentor Stamets and two other students with an intense interest in fungi: Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott. Instead of following a settled curriculum, the four learned the subject together, using an electron microscope and a Drug Enforcement Administration license Beug had obtained.

Their choice of subject made the college’s informal arrangement especially consequential. Psilocybin mushrooms had been illegal since 1970 and were chiefly known within the counterculture as a more natural alternative to LSD. Little was understood about their habitats, distribution, life cycles, or potency. The prevailing picture placed the mushrooms in southern Mexico, where R. Gordon Wasson had publicized them after his 1955 encounter with Mazatec mushroom ceremonies. In the United States, much of the available material came from Latin America or from domestic cultivation using spores of Latin American species, especially cubensis. The Evergreen group looked beyond that established geography, investigating fungi growing closer to home.

Research and a Shift in Geographic Focus

The group identified and published three new psilocybin species, improved methods for cultivating them indoors, and developed techniques to measure psilocin and psilocybin levels in mushrooms. These were practical advances as well as taxonomic ones: cultivation made the mushrooms more accessible to study, while chemical measurement offered a way to distinguish specimens by potency rather than relying on appearance or reputation alone.

The work also changed where people interested in the genus looked. Stamets and his colleagues found new psilocybin mushrooms throughout the Pacific Northwest and published their discoveries. The region, rather than southern Mexico, became a new center of attention. Stamets later described the sense that the world’s axis had tilted toward the corner where the group was working. Across the Pacific Northwest, people began searching fields and lawns for mushrooms, stooping to examine the ground in a posture Stamets called the psilocybin stoop. The college’s contribution thus extended beyond its own investigations: research helped redirect amateur interest and psychedelic culture toward a newly visible regional ecology.

A Hub for Researchers and Conferences

Beginning in 1976, Stamets and his Evergreen colleagues organized a series of mushroom conferences. They brought together credentialed researchers and amateurs, giving the college a role as a meeting point for a community that crossed the boundaries between formal science and countercultural practice. The conferences were part of a broader emergence of the Pacific Northwest as a center of American psychedelic culture, with Evergreen serving as its intellectual and research-and-development hub.

The gatherings’ reach is suggested by footage from the last conference in the series, held in 1999. Filmmaker Les Blank recorded the event, but the material was never edited and remained raw. In the surviving footage, attendees including Andrew Weil, psychedelic chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and his wife Ann, and mycologist Gary Lincoff arrive on a painted school bus driven by Ken Kesey. The proceedings combined lively communal spectacle with serious discussion. Jonathan Ott, for example, lectured on the history of entheogens, tracing their use from the Eleusinian mysteries through the suppression of Mesoamerican practices under Spanish rule. The scenes convey the unusual range of the gathering: research, historical inquiry, and psychedelic culture occupied the same event without being reduced to a single institutional identity.

From College Study to a Wider Network

Evergreen’s influence also traveled through personal and intellectual relationships. Years after Stamets’s student days, Beug had retired from teaching and was no longer spending much time thinking about Psilocybes. When asked whether psilocybin might serve as a mushroom defense chemical, he drew on his knowledge of fungal chemistry and prior testing. He had found psilocybin and psilocin only in minute quantities in mycelium, the part of the organism most likely to need protection, but sometimes in substantial quantities in the fruiting bodies. His response showed how the college’s early collaboration had produced expertise that could still inform later questions about the mushrooms, even after the original setting had changed.

The school’s legacy was not a permanent, formally organized institute described in the account, but a set of connected practices and relationships: students learning through independent investigation, shared technical work, publication, conferences, and knowledge carried onward by researchers and guides. Later underground psychedelic therapists could trace professional lineages to several figures from the earlier research generation, including Al Hubbard and Leo Zeff; the account also describes traffic between underground practice and university research. Evergreen’s importance lies in this combination of place and circulation. Its independent-study culture made close study possible, its findings redrew the map of American Psilocybe research, and its gatherings helped turn a local research effort into a wider network.