So the courts have decided that a ban on growing and selling fresh hallucinogenic mushrooms can go ahead as from next week. One wonders whether the health ministry had been sampling some of the mushrooms before it crafted this legislation.

It is something only a mind dislodged from reality could think up. The new rules mean 200 types of mushroom will be classified as hard drugs.
Technically, you can be put in prison if police discover one of the species growing in your back garden.
At the other end of the scale, nature reserves are expected to make sure they don’t have ‘hard drugs’ growing on hundreds of hectares of wild land.
Of course, you can understand the ministry’s concern about the use of these mushrooms. A French teenager died last year after jumping off a bridge in Amsterdam allegedly under the influence of these mushrooms.
But an unenforceable, blanket ban is not the way to tackle the problem. The trade in the mushrooms will go underground.
Users will move onto to other hallucinogenic substances such as LSD, which are said to be much worse for your health – or go and pick mushrooms themselves without knowing which are poisonous rather than hallucinogenic.
This will surely result in more rather than less problems for the authorities.