Ahh, mushroom season. These lovely little delicacies pop up at random and are one of the many pleasant surprises of my daily run. I see them and think, "Edible, with caution!" I'm still restricting myself to only eating the supermarket mushrooms, but that is only because my wife has a sort of strange phobia of wild and poisonous mushrooms. Even if I can't eat them they are great photo subjects because they can't run away and they come in lots of beautiful colors.

This little jobber is a Japanese Inky Cap or Coprinus Plicatilis. It is a part of the Inky cap family which is mostly harmless, but has some species which contain a chemical similiar to a drug called Anabuse used to treat alcoholics. It has other species which are hallucinogenic.

The active ingredient in Inky Caps is coprine (hence comprinus in the name) and Anabuse is disulfiram. I'm sure our benevolent pharmaceutical giants know all about how these sorts of chemicals effect our various pathways so I was surprised to read:

Unlike disulfiram, coprine does not appear to inhibit dopamine beta-hydroxylase, the enzyme that hydroxylates dopamine to form norepinephrine within storage vesicles of presynaptic neurons. In experimental models, rats exposed to coprine are capable of eliciting a tachycardic response to ethanol challenge; those exposed to disulfiram are not capable of eliciting this response (presumably due to inhibition of dopamine beta-hydroxylase). Whether a similar response occurs in humans is unknown.

In English, a tachycardic response is a rapid pulse and maybe some sweating. Sort of like a panic attack. So if you really wanted your new anti-alchohol drug to a pack a wallop, it looks like you should just prescribe some regular trips to the forest to pick alcohol inky caps. Sounds like good non-traditional medicine to me. (Caveat emptor: I just a programmer with a big mouth and a website, and not a doctor).