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In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, August 15, Janet Yellen, the 78th US Treasury Secretary, shared that she accidentally consumed hallucinogenic or magic mushrooms while on a visit to Beijing, China, in July. She said that she was not aware that those mushrooms have hallucinogenic properties and that she learned about them later.
Janet told CNN that she went to China with a large group, and the person who organized the dinner ordered the dishes for the night. The name of the mushroom-based dish was Jian shou qing.
Certain parts of these magic mushrooms turn blue when they are sliced or bruised. A Kunming Institute of Botany professor, Dr. Peter Mortimer, told CNN that these mushrooms are considered toxic.
“However, scientists have not, as of yet, identified the compounds responsible for causing the hallucinations. It remains a bit of a mystery, and most evidence is anecdotal. I have a friend who mistakenly ate them and hallucinated for three days,” Dr. Peter Mortimer said.
Janet Yellen says her trip to China strengthened US-China ties
Janet Yellen took her oath as the Secretary of the United States Treasury on January 26, 2021. She is a trained economist who took office after about fifty years in public service and academia. The 77-year-old is the first person in the history of the United States to have led the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the White House Council of Economic Advisors.
After graduating from Brown University in 1967, she got into a Ph.D. program at Yale. Until 1976 Janet worked at Harvard as an assistant professor, after which she started working at the US Federal Reserve Board. She later worked at the University of California at Berkeley and became the Catherine M. Trefethen and Eugene E. Professor of Economics and Professor of Economics.
In 1994, she was appointed by then-president Bill Clinton to the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve. After three years, Clinton named her the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ Chair.
Janet later became the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. In 2010, she was appointed the Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair by former President Barack Obama. Joe Biden, the current US President, nominated her to the position of Treasury Secretary in December 2020.
On her four-day visit to China, she was accompanied by Antony Blinken, the Secretary of the State. Janet Yellen praised the trip and said it strengthened the United States’ ties with China.
A Weibo user shared the news about Janet eating at a restaurant called “In and Out” in China’s Yunnan province during her trip. The user added a hashtag in Chinese that translated to:
“US Treasury secretary Yellen’s first meal in Beijing is Yunannese"
After the post went viral, the hashtag started trending online. In her CNN interview, Janet assured the host in a lighthearted mood that nobody was affected after eating the mushrooms.
“I read that if the mushrooms are cooked properly, which I’m sure they were at this very good restaurant, that they have no impact. But all of us enjoyed the mushrooms [and] the restaurant, and none of us felt any ill-effects from having eaten them,” she said.
Janet Yellen’s visit and consumption of the mushroom dish reportedly caused the mushroom dishes in several branches of the restaurant to be sold out within hours.
Netizens react to Janet Yellen's magic mushroom consumption
Many made fun of the situation by saying that every high or drunk person says they are not intoxicated after consuming alcohol or drugs and implied that so was the case with Janet Yellen. Meanwhile, some wondered if she does not remember getting high and accidentally disclosing confidential information to the Chinese government.
Janet Yellen joined the group dinner to seek to rebuild economic relations between Washington and Beijing. At the end of her China trip, Janet told reporters that no visit would solve their challenges overnight. Still, she said, she expects the trip to build a productive and resilient communication channel between the two counties.
