A mushroom nursery got busted in Pinetown, South Africa.
LinkTranslation :
The Hawks yesterday discovered a large scale hydroponic nursery of Psilocybe mushrooms - commonly known as Magic Mushrooms - at a house in a quiet neighborhood. At a home in New Germany detectives found harvested and dried mushrooms worth thousands of rands.
Last month, 40 kilograms of export quality marijuana was found in a nursery in a hidden cellar under a house in Durban North. When plants are hydroponically grown, they grow in sand, gravel or liquid instead of soil. Magic mushrooms sells for up to R80 per gram on the street, but is not a common drug in South Africa.
Police are investigating the possibility that the 59-year-old owner of the house in New Germany mushrooms have been growing the product for export, Jay Naicker, a police spokesman said.
Members of the Hawks and the police's crime intelligence unit raided the house on Sunday afternoon, acting on information recieved.
The garage had five plastic greenhouses which contained mushrooms in different stages of growth. In a log cabin behind the garage, they came across dozens of plastic bins piled high and in which the mushrooms had been grown.
Previous crops had been emptied almost everywhere in the large backyard, from which the spores started to grow new mushrooms. This causes the police to believe the nursery had been in operation for quite some time.
Spores of Psilocybe species thst grow naturally in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Thailand, was presumably imported from the United States to be grown here. The suspect, who employed six people at his house, has argued that he only cultivates the mushrooms for medicinal purposes.
He was charged with possession of drugs and arrested.
This is so sad. I saw mushroom spores advertised on the net, and I still wanted to try it out. Guess I will have to be extra careful.
The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were exceedingly strange. Sometimes they were noxious, but more often they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images.
People who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance.
- H.P. Lovecraft