Dream Flower and the Toadskin Spell by Doctor Spong aka geoponics

Dreamflower and toadskin spell: a hidden history of drugs / written and produced by George Monbiot

"Draws together writers and scientists, mushrooms and nuts, to ask: What have Santa Claus, Alice in Wonderland, South American villages and the Indian rope trick got in common? The answer is - drugs."

- from the New Zealand National Library cataloge entry

On a long car journey back from someplace in the early 2000s our parents flipped over one of the mixtapes we had with us and pressed play. As the haunting tones of the intro wound into life and Tom Baker's conspiratorial narration powered-up they said something about it being a documentary that had been on the radio in the 80s how one of their mates had taped it off there. There was a photograph of the moon cut out and stuck on the inner and inscribed carefully across the spine “Dreamflower and the Toadskin Spell”.

It blew my tiny mind: its eccentric professorial tour through the impact of drugs on culture and religion seemed deliciously subversive yet profoundly full of common sense. The feeling that I would be seen as insane if I recounted any of these “facts” to people I knew - my friends or teachers at school - only added to the sense that we had stumbled on a forgotten trove of socio-religious secrets, too dangerous – too true! - to be known publicly. Santa and fly-agaric fungi, witch's broom-sticks being used to topically apply hallucinogenic drugs – the Old Testament being the evidence of the early Christianity as a mushroom cult – all pretty entertaining information.

As the years passed by it was periodically re-remembered. But by the time I wanted to try and reuse some of the audio, the mixtape was long-lost despite several sessions of frantic tape-digging in my parent's attic. I couldn't even remember its name. And then one day last year whilst half-hopelessly searching for it, I stumbled upon the BBC Genome Project where they have usefully scanned in every copy of the radio times ever printed and so had included the only keywords relating to the tape that I could remember: Tom Baker, drugs, documentary.

But it took another while to come across somewhere that still had a copy of the damn tape. I regret to report that none of the British libraries seem to have this tape “in stock”. A copy was sent from a special collection in the National Library of New Zealand. Time has passed since the innocent shock of the 2000s and some of the “facts” contained herein seem less convincing than they did. But all of the charm is still here. The charm may have increased even.

As far as I know no copy of it exists on the internet. Here I am offering it up for everybody to enjoy and rework. To glory in the documentary style of another time, to revel in its odd delights and be amused and baffled by its strange proclamations.