Hikers high on mushrooms when they mistakenly reported pal had died on trail
Two hikers who called 911 to report one of their party had died on the trail - only for him to be found alive and oblivious - were high on magic mushrooms, it turns out.
The trio had been trekking in upstate New York when they found themselves lost. Believing their friend was deceased, the distressed pair called for help and reported their location near Lake Placid.
But after rescuers arrived at the trailhead they got a phone call from the 'dead' pal - very much alive, unharmed, and seemingly unaware of the unfolding chaos.
The trio were celebrating Memorial Day Weekend with a hike through the Cascade Mountain in North Elba when the nightmare unfolded on May 24.
At around 9am, Forest Ranger Praczkajlo received an emergency call from distressed hikers on Cascade Mountain, part of the Adirondack High Peaks range, according to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).
During the call, the two hikers reported that their friend had died while on the trail.
They also told authorities they had encountered a Cascade Summit Steward earlier and admitted they were lost.
'The steward determined the hikers were in an altered mental state,' the agency said in a press release.
Ranger Praczkajlo eventually reached the trailhead, where an ambulance was already waiting, and escorted the two panicked hikers back to the vehicle.
However, as they made their way back, a single phone call changed the entire situation - turning a straightforward rescue into something far more confusing.
On the other line was the 'dead' friend - alive, unharmed and seemingly unaware of the chaos unfolding around him.
According to the release, the group had allegedly eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms during their hike.
The effects of the drug are highly unpredictable and heavily influenced by the user's mindset and the environment in which it's taken, as reported by Desert Hope Treatment Center.
Given the unforeseeable nature of the drug, users may endure 'bad trips' - intense, distressing reactions that can be both frightening and disorienting.
Intense hallucinations, anxiety, panic and fear are just a few of the possible effects during a 'bad trip', often triggered by unfamiliar or chaotic surroundings.
Thankfully reunited, all three friends were escorted back to their campsite, where they could finally find safety and calm after their odd ordeal.
Bad trips leading people to behave in wild or erratic ways are not an uncommon experience with mushrooms, though the intensity can vary greatly from person to person.
For some, a 'bad trip' might mean intense anxiety and a pounding heart - unpleasant but bearable - while others unfortunately end up in dangerous or painful situations.
Last year, a man on vacation in Austria who took these 'magic mushrooms' entered psychosis that led him to amputate his penis and store it in a snow-filled jar.
Doctors labeled the heart-stopping incident as the first case of its kind - and a harrowing reminder of the dangers of psychedelic drugs.
The 37-year-old man ate four or five mushrooms before blacking out and taking an axe to his penile shaft - ultimately chopping it into several pieces.
As he came to, he staggered out of the home and dragged himself down a nearby street, bleeding profusely, searching for help.
In the middle of the night, around 2am, a passerby picked him up and brought him to the nearest village, and then to the closest hospital.
He was immediately carted to the operating room, where doctors got the bleeding under control and disinfected the myriad pieces of the man's penis in the snow and soil-filled jar.
Some damaged parts had to be removed, but the head of the penis and shaft were intact.
After cleaning the wound, doctors successfully reattached the penis, despite it having been without blood flow for about nine hours in total (five hours warm and four hours cold).
After inserting a catheter, the surgeon reconnected the tissues of the penis using dissolvable stitches. The scrotal skin was then sewn back to the cleaned skin of the amputated part.
Some of the skin on the tip of the man's newly reconstructed penis started to die about a week later - a condition called necrosis due to lack of oxygenated blood flow there - but doctors were able to treat it and reverse the damage.
Despite all this, the man was still experiencing hallucinations, even trying to break out of the hospital at one point.
Doctors found he had smuggled mushrooms into his hospital room, finding a handful of them in his nightstand in the urology ward.
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It's earned him the adoration of countless young voters at a time when social media is increasingly critical to winning elections – just ask Trump who, with his 106 million X followers and his Truth Social platform, literally owns political social media, leaving most Democratic leaders languishing in the wilderness. 'New Yorkers of all ages are engaging with the world around them through their phones,' Mamdani says. 'One reason we've been able to get so many to engage with us is that they've heard about our politics in places they typically would not.' He calls his social media strategy the 'politics of no translation'. What is that? 'It's when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people's own lives. If I tell you that I'm going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.' Mamdani puts his spectacular popularity with young New Yorkers down to a hunger for a 'new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it and showcases a new generation of leadership'. There's maybe something else also at play: he has a magnetism that just seems to draw people towards him. The young waiter who takes his order of grilled chicken salad appears starstruck, and after we finish talking the waiter comes back to the table and engages Mamdani in intense conversation. The candidate obliges, despite his frantic schedule that will see him dashing between boroughs late into the night. I get flashes of that magnetism as we sit at our table. Like any politician, Mamdani has his talking points, but he drops his guard when I ask him what he remembers about arriving in New York as a kid. He leans towards me, and his face opens, and he seems transported. 'I remember going to Tower Records around 66th Street or so, and browsing all the different CDS, then stepping outside and buying my first bootleg copy of Eiffel 65, the euro pop group with the song Blue (Da Ba Dee). I remember playing soccer in Riverside Park, I remember falling in love with chess.' Reverie over, Mamdani the mayoral candidate is back, shoveling down food in between espousing political strategy. And this is when we get down to it, and the real challenge he faces. Because his appeal to young New Yorkers is not enough to win. To defeat Cuomo on Tuesday he has to reach beyond young voters. He has to get to the older African Americans and Hispanics in the outer boroughs who dependably turn out to vote, and thus often decide the outcome of New York Democratic primaries. Polls suggest that such voters are still favouring Cuomo as a safe pair of hands, though there has been a recent uptick among older Latinos. Mamdani is candid about how hard this has been. 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'I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, and asked these New Yorkers, most of whom are Democrats, who they voted for and why. I learned that many did not vote, and many voted for Trump, and they did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago.' The plea he heard over and over again was for an economic agenda that would make people's tough lives easier. 'And that is how we have run this race,' he says. That's where his affordability ticket kicks in. Rents will be frozen in rent-stabilised apartments that house 2 million New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom are people of colour. Childcare will be provided at no cost, the minimum wage will be raised, city-run groceries will be opened offering cheaper healthy food, buses will be made fast and free. To pay for all that, taxes will be raised for corporations and for the top 1% of earners with incomes above $1m. When I ask him to imagine how he imagines New York would look after he had been in Gracie Mansion for two terms, he replies: 'It is a city that is more affordable, that works better, and where we have restored public excellence into public service.' Mamdani's affordability manifesto is a conscious blueprint for reconnecting working-class Americans, of all races, back to the Democratic party in the fight against Trump. It's also a damning indictment of where he believes the Democratic leadership has gone wrong. He goes so far as to use that word 'betrayal'. 'New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city,' he says. As evidence he points to Trump's deportations. We're still sitting in Le Pain Quotidien, Mamdani's salad now half-eaten and his tie off, and we are both painfully, though unspokenly, aware that Lander remains in custody as we speak (he was released a few hours later without charge). Up to 400,000 New Yorkers are at risk of Trump's deportations, he says, yet under the current Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, whose corruption charges were dropped by Trump in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, the city has assisted fewer than 200 people facing imminent removal. Mamdani pledges that under his leadership, the city would provide legal representation for all immigrants in detention proceedings. That would boost their chances of going home to their families some elevenfold. His critique of the Democratic party doesn't end there. For him, Cuomo is the epitome of where the established party has gone off the rails. 'I believe we lost the presidential election because we had left the working class behind a long time ago. They were told time and time again that their leaders would fight for them, and those leaders, like Andrew Cuomo, sold them out.' He's in his flow now, his arms flapping in grand gestures of the sort that his staff have worked hard to get him to tone down. There's animation in his portrayal of Cuomo, containing a hefty dose of venom, and even disgust. 'We are considering electing a former governor who resigned in disgrace, one who cut Medicaid, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA [which runs the subway], hounded the more than a dozen women who credibly accused him of sexual harassment even suing them for their gynecological records. It begs the question: what high ground do we have in the Democratic party when we critique Donald Trump?' Towards the end of his Terminal 5 rally speech, Mamdani warned his supporters to expect a barrage of negative attack ads from Cuomo and his billionaire backers in the closing stage of the race. But it's not just the barrage of TV ads that are attacking Zohran. The most withering criticism has come from the New York Times editorial board, which went so far as to opine that he didn't deserve a spot on the ballot. Mamdani swats that one away with the curt remark: 'These are the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers. They're entitled to them.' The paper described his proposals as unrealistic. That's paradoxical, he says. Working-class Americans are losing faith in the Democratic party, yet anyone who comes up with policies that address their daily struggles is castigated for being pie in the sky. 'If you want to fight for working people priced out of their own city, then you are told you are out of touch.' The Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum, and several Jewish leaders have also blast out to scorch him in the final stretch. Shortly after we meet, a podcast is posted by the Bulwark in which Mamdani was asked whether he felt uncomfortable about the use by some pro-Palestinians of the phrase 'globalize the intifada', which has been condemned by some Jews as a call to violence. He would not denounce the expression, saying it spoke to 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights'. The comment led to rapid backlash from some Jewish groups. That was just the latest in a pattern in which, stepping outside a campaign tightly focused on affordability, he has been prepared to speak out about the highly contentious issue of the Middle East. He has decried the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who was released on Friday after more than three months detention on the orders of a federal judge. Given the nature of his economically-focused campaign, wouldn't it have been expedient to skirt around the issue of Gaza? . 'I have always been honest,' he says. 'I am honest because I believe it is incumbent upon us to have a new kind of politics, consistent with international law, and I believe there are far more New Yorkers looking for that consistency than one would imagine.' Mamdani has clearly been riled by the attacks made on him, which he calls Islamophobic. 'I have been smeared and slandered in clear racist language,' he says, pointing to mailers from a Cuomo-supporting super PAC which altered his face to be darker and his beard to be thicker (the super PAC denied any intentional manipulation). In the days after our interview, the NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force announced they are investigating threats made against Mamdani, by an unidentified man who said he was a 'terrorist' who is 'not welcome in America'. None of this is new for him. He's had to deal with Islamophobia since 9/11, when he was nine and had been living in the city for just two years. He was spared the worst of the anti-Muslim fallout of the attacks, he says, partly thanks to a kind teacher who pulled him aside and told him to let her know if he was ever bullied. But 9/11 left its mark. 'Living in the shadows of that moment, it politicized my identity. It forced a nine-year-old boy to see himself the way the world was seeing him.' That young boy is now three days away from a vote in which he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. As he finishes up his salad and downs a cup of hot water with honey and lemon, before rushing off to his next engagement, he looks a strange mix of bone tired and fired-up for the battle ahead.
