Wild Mushroom Series: Medicinal & Psychoactive Mushrooms

Welcome to the Wild Mushroom Education Series where we delve into the mysterious world of mushrooms.

For this first installment will focus on medicinal and psychoactive mushrooms.

Topics we will cover:

• Are they really effective? 
• The underlying biochemistry of medicinal and psychoactive mushrooms
• Current research trends
• Some local medicinal species
• Psychoactive mushrooms: rewards and risks
   

Other events in the Mushroom Education Series:
April 11: Mushroom Toxins and Poisoning
May 9: Harvesting Edibles Safely and Sustainably 
    

Our mushroom guide:

Benji Sinclair grew up in southern New York and in Rome, Italy. His first love was snakes, and he has chased, handled or studied many of them on five continents. He holds a BS in Wildlife Ecology from Utah State and an MS in Zoology from U. Mass, Amherst. He served in the Peace Corps in Niger, where he created a national park herbarium and recorded Niger’s first two orchid species. In graduate school, he studied timber rattlesnakes in western Massachusetts before moving to Jackson in 1989. He worked at Teton Science Schools for 18 years in development, field instruction, and wildlife guiding. In 2010 he moved to Bhutan, where he created Bhutan’s first natural sciences library, funded by a MacArthur grant, and then taught courses in ecotourism and conservation science at the Royal University of Bhutan.  While on a road trip, he reported the country’s first record of a Protobothrops himalayanus, the bejeweled mountain viper. He currently works as a guide in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks and teaches classes in Italian for beginners. In 2022 he took up mushrooming as a hobby and now leads a FB group on wild fungi called Teton Fungophiles. He lives with his wife Liza in Jackson and volunteers as a winter trail ambassador for the Bridger-Teton National Forest.