the most important video I have ever done,” William “Willy” Myco tells his nearly 2,500 paying
subscribers. The video, posted on Halloween 2024, offers viewers step-by-step instructions on how to produce what he claimed is “100 percent pure
Wearing a baseball cap that said “Mycelium Familia” over his shaved head with his brown beard peeking out from beneath his mask, he declares his tutorial on synthesizing the
over the course of three days to be the “world’s first.”
“It has been a dream of mine to record this process so everybody has the scientific knowledge they need,” says Myco, which is short for mycologist, a scientist who studies fungi, in the video. (He doesn’t share his real last name, and he spoke to WIRED on the condition we wouldn’t use his last name due to the illegal nature of some of his work.)
When the process is finished, the video shows his chemist collaborator holding out a lab flask of a greenish-blue liquid, but no test of the substance is conducted on camera to confirm its identity. Nonetheless, Myco issues a stark if hyperbolic warning about the final product, telling viewers, if it “touches your eyes, skin, mouth … you better cancel your plans for a month, ’cause you’re not going to be able to do anything.” (Most LSD trips wear off after a day, though there can be
Willy Myco posts videos showing people how to synthesize drugs.
It was once unthinkable to post a video on the internet demonstrating how to synthesize a controlled psychoactive substance. But the masked psychedelic educator has released more than 120 how-to videos over the past decade which run the gamut from the attempted LSD synthesis to explainers on cultivating psilocybin mushrooms, extracting mescaline from mind-altering cacti, and preparing DMT vape cartridges.
In addition to his Patreon, which had more than 14,500 subscribers, Myco sells mushroom genetics, merch (in the LSD video, he wore his own branded hoodie with the slogan “Love My Country But Fuck The Government”), and offers consultancy services for mushroom growers. His YouTube channel, called “Willy’s World,” had over 96,000 followers but was taken down after WIRED reached out to the platform for comment. YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said it was removed “under our terms of service, which prohibit creating new channels after a termination.”
Myco responded on Instagram: “YouTube is back on their BS again. Channel had zero strikes whatsoever, I post super censored and safe content there … So if you’ve ever asked why I put all my energy into my patreon channel … this is why.”
But shortly afterward, his Patreon account was taken down too. In an email statement, a spokesperson for the platform said: “Patreon prohibits works that provide instructions around the creation of controlled substances or other recreational drugs. We take violations of our policies seriously, and after an internal investigation, we have removed the creator’s account.”
Myco hopes to successfully appeal the Patreon decision, as he pays his team through the funds accrued from his subscribers. “I know I’m a renegade, but I don’t promote the use [of drugs],” he says. “It’s all scientific. It’s all education, in the hopes to promote harm reduction.”
As hallucinogens edge closer to mainstream medicine, Myco is pushing in the opposite direction—away from clinics, regulators, and expensive trip-sitters, and toward radical self-sufficiency. To his many supporters, the outlaw chemist is democratizing psychedelic knowledge, out of the hands of academics, dealers, and erstwhile gatekeepers. To critics, his confidence occasionally outruns his science, and his commitment to secrecy raises questions about at least some of what he says.
from Boston who now lives in his parents’ native Puerto Rico, seems at ease breaking the law.
He claims that, in 2002, he produced his own DMT by following a published scientific extraction method. Smoking the resultant hallucinogen was a transformative experience. Psychedelics “became my entire world,” he says, adding that he was dealing with “a really serious depression” at the time, after his parents split and his uncle died. He says he communed with his late uncle in the throes of that DMT trip. “He reassured me that everything’s all right,” recalls Myco. From that point on, “I knew I wanted to be part of psychedelic history.”
After studying microbiology in college, Myco says, he started posting on drug forums like the Shroomery, Mycotopia, and Nexus in 2009 but was appalled by their cliquishness. “They treated new cultivators and chemists like shit,” he says. (A moderator from Shroomery says cliquish behavior does exist and can shut down people with new ideas, but they are glad it did not stop Myco “from pursuing his passion for chemistry and mycology.”)
Myco says he went on to work for a pharmaceutical company in Boston “making more money than I’d ever seen,” but it was only ever a stopgap. He says that in late 2014 he posted his first explainer