"We saw a rise in the incidents with paddoes recently from 55 reported by the emergency services in 2004 to 128 last year," said Karin Donk, spokesperson for the health ministry.

"This year we already had over a hundred incidents reported, mainly in Amsterdam."

Around 500,000 doses of packaged mushrooms are sold in the Netherlands every year..

Statistics show that emergency services were summoned 148 times to deal with bad trips in 2004-2006.

Of those incidents, 134 involved foreigners -- Britons forming the largest group.

The decision to ban mushrooms came about partly as a result of the death in March of Gaelle Caroff, a young French woman on a school visit.

She had consumed paddoes before jumping off a bridge -- and her face was splashed in newspapers across the Netherlands, prompting a national debate on how to prevent such death.

Amsterdam's Mayor Job Cohen had proposed a three day waiting period for mushroom purchases.

But the health and justice ministries elected to ban them outright due to their natural variation in potency,

"It's impossible to estimate what amount will have what effect," said Wim Van der Weegen, spokesman for the justice ministry.

The advice from the Trimbos Institute -- a state funded drugs thinktank -- on mushrooms is that they are are not toxic and themselves pose no physical risk to users.

But their unpredictability could pose problems -- the intensity of the experience can be affected by someone's body weight; how much food they had consumed; past drug experiences; psychological health; and the setting in which they are taken

"The main danger to the user is that he will somehow hurt himself," said Marjan Heuving of the Trimon Institute.

"I should add that that's extremely rare."

The owners of the 'smart shops' that sell mushrooms are adamant that they are safe if used responsibly -- and that the ban has resulted from a moral witch hunt.

According to Erik van der Maal, a spokesperson for Dutch smart shops owners: "If I were in Paris and drunk myself silly on absinthe in some or other sleazy bar, and then went and jumped from the Eiffel Tower, than no one would call the French state to account, would they?"