Magic mushrooms, or shrooms, are balls-to-the-wall hallucinogens that are the organic alternative to acid. So, all you hippies who want to save the Earth and still get high as ever, shrooms are your Mother Earth friendly answer.
Magic mushrooms have been around forever. And when I say forever, I'm not just yanking your chain. They can literally be found on every continent except Antarctica. In the Bible, there are several books about weird visions (see: Ezekiel, Kings [I and II], and Amos), as well as several prophets not important enough to have their own book that had these visions. Moses also saw the whole bush that was on fire, but not really. Modern science, and the all-powerful Atheismo probably, have screamed a mighty, "Bullshit! Those people were trippin' their asses off on shrooms when all those events happened." These events include the giving of the 10 Commandments, Moses talking to God, Ezekiel's visions and many others. So, shrooms for inventing the Tanakh and, therefore, the Bible, I'm sure the 2.5 billion Judeo-Christians in the world thank you.
Hinduism is also thought to be based on trips people took. The 900 million of those people could no be reached for contact because there are none in America.
Now before you go blaming all of religions fallings on shrooms, don't forget that, when you are tripping, everything gets muddled leading to a temporary case of synesthesia. Basically, what this means, is that what you hear is what you see.
Turn down the Judas Priest!
Shrooms also made their mark on America! Pretty much all the pre-European civilizations' witch doctors used magic mushrooms to talk to the gods. Taking magic mushrooms was an everyday occurrence, much like habitual alcohol abuse today. They were also used in coming-of-age ceremonies, again like habitual alcohol abuse. To these days, remnants of these civilizations have government exemptions allowing them to use these drugs allowing to a shit-ton of applications for legal acknowledgement of tribes that were made up by some teen in his basement that wanted to do shrooms, but lacked the balls to buy some.
[I was going to make a joke about a pimply teen being of the Acne tribe, but Google Image Search always brought up porn. Sorry for the lack of image!]
Flash forward a few centuries, and you'll notice a resurgence of shroom use. I'm talking, of course, about the 1960's... At that time, people became disillusioned with the manufactured world of acid, so they started doing magic mushrooms the get their rocks off. This of course lead to some of the most memorable music ever made, and is primarily responsible for the creation of 100% of the singles released in the era, along with the ganja.
This band wasn't so big on subtlety.
Magic mushrooms have experienced yet another resurgence, although this one is considerably less illegal. Science now wants to use psilocybin to treat clinical depression, schizophrenia, cluster headaches (as seen in that one episode of House!), and drug addiction. Yes, you read the last one right. Now, I'm no medical doctor. I'm not even allowed on most medical school campuses after some... incidents. But, to me, treating drug use with more drugs seems a tad drug-addled. Also, if shrooms could be used to treat schizophrenia, Syd Barrett would not only be alive, he'd be the healthiest person ever.
The most psychologically sound person ever.-- Science
Artificially synthesized psilocybin is becoming popular as a designer drug. People have even started to combine it with MDMA (or disco biscuits [or ecstasy, for the uninitiated]); this is called hippie flipping. This sort of artificially synthesized psilocybin is driving away some core shroom users, who, as mentioned before, use it primarily because it is natural.
Some street names for magic mushrooms include: shrooms (duh), god's flesh, purple haze, mushies, freedom caps, liberty caps, cybin, and hippie stew.
Classified as a Schedule I drugs, shrooms are illegal in most of the world, even though they can be found naturally all over the goddamned world. Exceptions are Japan (explains a lot, huh?), which allows for the buying a selling of psilocybin mushrooms as home decor, and Portugal.
Bitchin' home decor.