45th Telluride Mushroom Festival stays true to its psychedelic roots

In the 1980s, if you wanted to talk openly about psychedelics, there was one primary place Colorado you could do so: Telluride.

At the time, drugs like psilocybin and LSD were newly illegal due to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Richard Nixon’s subsequent War on Drugs made psychedelics a taboo topic in the prevailing culture, even if they had piqued the interest of medical professionals for decades prior.

One such enthusiast was a respected Denver radiologist named Manny Salzman. Though he was an expert on mushroom poisonings, Salzman was always interested in the psychoactive varieties and how they, too, might be a form of medicine.

In the late 1970s, Salzman hosted mushroom conferences in Aspen where doctors could come to learn about toxicity and poisoning. He lat