'SHROOM ALTERS STUDENT JEKYLL TO HORRIFIC HYDE

The young university student was acting completely out of character.
His friends had never seen him so crazy and agitated, running around
the beach at Hornby Island and yelling that he wanted to expose
himself. They tried to corral him for his own good, but he got away.

The group of men in their early 20s had come from Vancouver and
elsewhere for a July long weekend camping at Hornby. They'd taken
"magic mushrooms" and settled in for a mellow time in the
late-afternoon sunshine.

But that wasn't to be. One of the men, a 23-year-old Burnaby student,
went wild under the influence of the mushrooms. By the time he sobered
up in jail four hours later, a quiet Hornby neighbourhood had been
turned upside down by his violent behaviour and he was facing the
first criminal charges of his life.

The accusations were ugly. After running away from his friends at
Whaling Station Bay that July 2 afternoon, the student wandered into a
nearby residential area. In a brief but ferocious rampage through the
neighbourhood, he sexually assaulted a 77-year-old woman, jumped onto
a roof and hung naked from its eaves, terrorized another woman by
trying to smash through her patio door with a flowerpot and tore apart
the interior of a van he broke into. Police had to use pepper spray to
subdue him.

"He was so embarrassed in court the next day when he heard what he had
done," says Courtenay RCMP Const. Steven Wright. "He didn't remember
any of it."

Whether the mushrooms unhinged the young man may never be known; the
toxins don't show up in blood tests, says Gillian Willis of the B.C.
Drug and Poison Information Centre. But the student's bizarre
behaviour suggests a mushroom from the Amanita muscaria family or
related species, says Willis.

"There are two types of so-called magic mushrooms. The psilocybins,
you'll see some impaired judgment and people getting very sleepy,
maybe sleeping for as long as four to six hours," says Willis.

"Then there are the ones that contain a toxin called ibotenic acid.
Mad as a hatter, red as a beet, extremely agitated -- this is the
effect you get with this kind of mushroom."

Both varieties of mushrooms are common on B.C.'s coast, along with
several harmless varieties. Consume the wrong kind and you risk liver
damage or even death, says Willis -- or a Jekyll-and-Hyde reaction as
happened to the student.

"What is a concern is that people take magic mushrooms with no idea of
what they're actually taking," she says. "The muscaria ones in
particular can create wild, agitated, delirious behaviour."

If the young man also was drinking alcohol or using anti-anxiety drugs
from the diazepam family (Ativan, for instance), the "disinhibiting"
effects of those drugs might have affected him as well, says Willis.

"Whatever it was for this person, it clearly caused him to lose his
inhibitions," she says. "Everybody responds differently to drugs, and
these kind of reactions can happen to anyone."

The fallout from that day on Hornby has been severe, says Wright. Not
only is an otherwise law-abiding young man now on his way to a
criminal record for sexual assault, but the women he attacked were
extremely traumatized.

The first woman was attacked after saying hello to the student as they
passed each other on the street; he twisted her arm behind her back,
stripped off his shorts and demanded she perform oral sex on him.
Muscular, naked and strong, he was a terrifying sight, says Wright. A
second woman, who ran into her house to escape him, cowered inside
while he stood on her patio trying to smash through her glass door.

He then tore an outdoor light from the wall and broke into a nearby
parked van, breaking the CDs that he found inside and finally snapping
off the rearview mirror. The van's owner arrived to try to stop the
demolition, but was soon fending off an attack as well. Police were on
the scene shortly after.

"This young man's behaviour had some terrible consequences," says
Wright. "I'm just glad he didn't come across anyone else when he was
walking down that street."

The lesson is obvious, agree Wright and Willis: Stay away from the shrooms.
Individual reaction to the hallucinogenic varieties simply can't be
predicted, says Willis. And any wild mushroom is a challenge to identify.

"Don't experiment with mushrooms," she advises. "Even the experts
don't always know which is which."