Nice. It's wrong at some points of fact, alas.
The article states:
"Psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics are legally sold in The Netherlands." Unfortunately this is not true. Psychedelics in general are not legal in The Netherlands and magic mushrooms were banned several years ago, after decades of unproblematic availability and in spite of positive evaluation of psychedelic mushrooms by all official governmental scientific advisory bodies.* On the positive side, it was somehow forgotten to ban magic mushroom sclerotia (magic truffles) and private use and growing of mushrooms is not actively prosecuted.
Original text at
http://www.thelancet.com/journa...%2815%2900084-X/fulltextFreely downloadable pdf attached below.
*) The whole situation around the magic mushrooms ban was IMHO a total outrage. Several newspapers, particularly the "Telegraaf" newspaper (infamous for actively collaborating with WW2 nazis, but still the biggest newspaper in The Netherlands today) published scaremongering news stories about magic mushrooms. Over a couple of weeks, several incidents were reported and very quickly after this propaganda storm, a new law was passed, which simply outlawed all the psychedelic mushrooms listed by wikipedia.
Not only did the Dutch government blatantly ignore any and all scientific advice from the governments' own advisory bodies, while using copy-paste wikipedia information as an authoritative basis for legislation, it later turned out that
none of the reported incidents could be proven to actually substantially relate to the use of magic mushrooms, or to even involve any magic mushrooms at all.
As if all this was not painfully hilarious enough, the ban also included Amanita Muscaria, which until then was not known to be psychoactive by the Dutch public at large. It was traditionally associated only with fairy tales and childrens' stories and at most considered lethal. Now all the children were suddenly informed that the prosaic Fly Agaric is
drugs!. As far as I am concerned, it still is the number one gourmet mushroom in The Netherlands, if prepared appropriately.
Anybody still believing that The Netherlands is a very progressive and liberal country should think again. You can still come to the Amsterdam Tourist Open Air Dope Theme Park and buy any (overpriced) drugs. But behind the tourist facade, the Dutch drugs policy is turning more reactionary by the year. While even the USA is moving towards legalization of Cannabis, in the Netherlands a new law was passed only last month, aiming to curtail the sales of growing equipment, like lights and potting soil. The new Minister of Justice is even quoted to
"know of people who died from smoking weed". Sigh.