The Netherlands has a pretty easygoing stance on sin. You can buy a woman sitting in her undies in a shop window; go on a marijuana binge culminating in your eating a shipping container of Doritos; and take your bikini top off any damned well where you please.
Vagabondish is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read our disclosure.
But the local constabulary would like you to know: the mushrooms are off limits.
That’s the word out of Amsterdam after Gaelle Caroff, a visiting teenager from France, gobbled up some magic mushies, flipped out, and fatally ran off the top of a building.
That alone may be bad enough to get the psychedelic veges banned, but it’s only the latest in a string of mushroom-inspired self-inflicted damage from tourists. On one occasion, a British tourist went crazy in his hotel and started punching windows, while on another, an Icelandic tourist who thought he was being chased, jumped from a balcony and broke both his legs. A Danish tourist, also tripping on ‘shrooms, recently took his car on a magical joy ride through a campground, narrowly missing people asleep in their tents. Though, to be fair, have you ever talked to a Danish tourist? They’re ten kinds of crazy before they even go near the produce section….
But the owners of so-called ”˜Smart Shops’ (let the irony sink in), where the mushrooms are sold, are fighting back. “Used in the right way, there’s no problem,” said Chloe Collette, owner of Amsterdam’s Full Moon Smart Shop, to the AP recently. “It’s the other drugs people take with mushrooms,” she says.
Either way, it might be wise, if you’re headed to The Netherlands, to stick to carrots. They go with heroin much, much better.
So we hear.