Are Penis Envy mushrooms actually 2-3x stronger than other strains?
These notorious mushrooms often contain large amounts of psilocybin and psilocin. But according to experts, that doesn’t necessarily mean an intense trip.
Gosh, what would Freud have to say about that?
Although there are tons of different strains of psychedelic mushrooms growing (and bred in labs) around the world, only one strain has become iconic in its own right and even managed to break through into the American mainstream.
Aptly named for its phallic shape, Penis Envy (PE) has earned a widespread reputation for its exceptional potency.
Various reports and spore traders claim that PE is two to three times more potent than a standard mushroom. Its potency is so different from other strains, according to journalist and scientist Hamilton Morris, that it’s “almost treated like a completely different species.”
As a result, PE has become one of the most sought-after strains of Psilocybe cubensis, the most common type of psychedelic mushroom. According to spore dealer Mushly, PE is the second most searched strain in their catalogue. And Morris, for one, confirms that “many spore dealers” report that it’s their top-selling strain, period.
However, the popularity and reputation of Penis Envy raises many questions about shroom potency: How exactly do we determine the potency of a given shroom and how much weight should we give to these numbers? In other words, does high potency necessarily result in a more intense experience?
To learn more about PE mushrooms, their effectiveness, and what the data really means to consumers, I turned to Oakland Hyphae, a leading organization in the field of mushroom testing and research. Oakland Hyphae also hosts the highly influential Psilocybin Cup series, as well as regular conferences on psychedelics.
And as an aside, of course, I tried out some Penis Envy for myself to see if they hit as hard as their reputation led me to believe.
“There’s absolutely a zeitgeist, a buzz around it,” Ian Bollinger, the scientific director at Oakland Hyphae, told Leafly. “Penis Envy are the long-stemmed beauty roses of the environment at this point.”
A most enviable name
Needless to say, Penis Envy has found an audience in no small part because of its flashy name. “I think it’s brilliant marketing, period,” Oakland Hyphae founder Reggie Harris told Leafly.
“It looks like a little circumcised penis,” Harris added, referring to the mushroom’s thick stem and bulbous cap that barely protrudes from the stem.
“It’s one of the few mushrooms that you can look at and identify what it is. For most fungi, the phenotypes are different. A Burmese mushroom might look like this if I grow it under certain conditions and very different if someone else grows it under different conditions.”
Experts and breeders have also identified and cultivated other PE crossbreeds: for example, as Harris noted, albino Penis Envy (commonly known as APE) features white coloring. Penis Envy Uncut, on the other hand, gets its name from the detail of its contours.
A look into the dark, murder-tinged history of PE
The aforementioned Hamilton Morris has played a prominent role in educating the public about the history of Penis Envy. Morris is also responsible for revising his own admittedly inaccurate reporting.
In 2009, he wrote an article for Vice that has long served as the de facto history of the unique mushroom. Morris reported that in 1971 the famous ethnobotanist Terence McKenna discovered a cluster of psychedelic mushrooms growing on a pile of cattle dung in the Colombian Amazon and brought spore prints of the mushrooms back to the United States.
Morris wrote in Vice that one of the spore prints found its way to a doctor and magic mushroom enthusiast named Stephen Pollock, who grew the spores into a particular mushroom that “burst out of his jar like a glittery Oscar Mayer sausage.” Pollock was shot dead in 1981, and as Morris claimed, “lying beside him was the great Amazonian proto-penis.” The case was never solved.
But in 2021, Morris admitted in a two-and-a-half-hour podcast uploaded to YouTube in April that one of his own sources, a notorious mycologist named Mushroom John, had purposely misled him about the Penis Envy story.
In the revised story, much credit goes to reclusive mycologist Richard Guitierrez, aka Rich Gee, for growing PE. Morris interviews Guitierrez, who explains that he received one of McKenna’s original spurs from a barber named Jules, who “was the guy you talked to about acquiring mushrooms.”
The mushroom’s name, Guitierrez claims, came from a conversation he had with a group of strippers in 1977, whose description of the mushrooms as “donkey dongs” inspired Guitierrez to ask them if they had penis envy.
You know, standard nomenclature.
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So is Penis Envy *actually* that strong?
Assessing the potency of Penis Envy — or other psychedelic mushrooms — underscores a deeper question at the heart of Oakland Hyphae’s work: What does potency data even mean in the context of psychedelic mushrooms?
Harris and Bollinger have no trouble identifying and measuring the various compounds in their samples, which include psilocybin and psilocin, among others. (To do this, they use some of the same machines chemists use to test cannabis for cannabinoid levels.)
But this data, they argue, does not paint a complete picture.
They explained that the way these compounds interact with each other – a process quite similar to the entourage effect of cannabis – remains quite mysterious.
Additionally, they pointed out that anecdotal reports from consumers cloud potency metrics.
Harris recalled situations where certain mushroom samples didn’t have particularly high levels of psilocybin, psilocin, or other active compounds, but fueled extremely intense trips, according to consumers.
“High numbers don’t always mean a long journey or an intense experience. “Big numbers are not equal to good” is the argument we want to bring up in the conversation. It’s about understanding the profile and the experience. It’s going to be a lot more personal,” he explained.
So when it comes to Penis Envy’s notorious potency, it’s wise to take its reputation with a pinch of salt.
“Our data shows that PE tends to do better, but it’s random every time,” Harris said.
“The tests we’ve run show that PE is more or less consistently more potent than other Cubensis mushroom varieties,” he added. “It comes out a little stronger than your average cubensis mushroom.”
Mushly’s owner – who asked to remain anonymous for this story – similarly downplayed PE’s notorious potency. “People say PE is three times stronger,” they told me in an email. “But in my personal experience, that wasn’t always the case.”
Microdosing didn’t do it for me
When I tried PE myself, I took a very small dose: just under a gram. I’ve dabbled with shrooms a few times and consistently prefer a small dose. Having heard that PE is so powerful, I figured I’d go small to ideally prepare for a similar experience.
Unfortunately, I found out that I had become too small.
On a summer hike through western Montana, I kept waiting for something to happen. But it never really did, aside from an occasional visual glimmer and slight euphoria. I had a great day, but the PE felt more like a lively sativa than a potent psychedelic.
In other words, what I was hoping for a light dose turned out to be a micro dose.
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When I mentioned my experience to Harris, he gently reprimanded me. “To be honest, in my opinion it’s unfair to eat less than an ounce and a half of any mushroom, period. What you took was at the high end of a microdose, meant to be barely noticeable,” he said.
Bollinger countered that a little less – two or two and a half grams – would have sufficed as “good reconnaissance space.”
Oops.
In any case, I’m hoping to have another opportunity to try them again soon, or for that matter one of the growing PE hybrids. Thanks to its popularity, PE has become a common strain to cross in a lab setting.
“[Growers] create very interesting non-natural forms that are as variable as the cannabis plant. Nothing is sativa anymore, nothing is indica anymore. Everything is a hybrid,” said Bollinger.
“We are at the very beginning in the mushroom sector. And Penis Envy is leading the charge,” he added.
Max Savage Levenson
Max Savage Levenson probably has the lowest cannabis tolerance of any author on the cannabis beat. He also writes about music for Pitchfork, Bandcamp and other bespectacled people. He is the co-host of the Hash podcast. His dream interview is Tyler the Creator.
Check out Max Savage Levenson’s articles
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