Brick-and-Mortar Magic Mushroom Stores Pop Up in U.S., Canada

With all of the recent news about magic mushrooms – from the spread of decriminalization to adoption of microdosing psilocybin as part of the upper crust party scene – it seems logical that actual brick-and-mortar businesses would begin to crop up to challenge the illegality of selling the products in the U.S.

But it’s not just the U.S. Canada appears to be leading the magic mushroom brick-and-mortar charge, much as it did with legalizing the retail sales of cannabis, laying the groundwork for adoption below the 49^th parallel.

One Canadian dispensary making noise in the magic mushroom community is Shroomyz, now with two locations in Canada (Ottawa, opened in May, and Toronto, opened in September). It sells dried mushrooms, plus mushroom-infused gummies, bars, bites, and tinctures.

There are at least five other brick-and-mortar magic mushroom stores in Canada:

• Dana Larson’s Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary in Vancouver, founded in 2019, also sells LSD for medicinal use.
• Mushroom Cuts, opened in June 2021, offers same-day delivery that can be picked up at a nearby post office.
• Fungi Shop, opened in early 2021 in downtown Vancouver.
• Zoomers, opened in Vancouver in mid-2022.
• QuadCity T.O., a cannabis and magic mushroom store in Toronto, with same-day delivery.

As Canadians build up their magic mushroom retail store sales, brick-and-mortar business selling shrooms in the U.S. also are beginning to crop up in the light of day, particularly as more businesses who used to sell just regular functional mushrooms (or hemp or cannabis) look to get in on the silent-but-certain magic mushroom surge.

And that seems fair and right. Psychedelics have a special home in the U.S. market.

North America dominates the psychedelic drugs market in terms of market share and market revenue, and it will continue its dominance for the next seven years or so, according to Data Bridge research.

So today, in Tampa’s Ybor City, there is a magic mushroom dispensary being hailed as the first legal mushroom dispensary in the country. Chillum Mushroom and Hemp Dispensary stocks different grow kits, spores and mycology cultures, and yes, a certain form of magic mushrooms they claim is just under the radar of the law.

Chillum management said they legally can’t sell any mushrooms that contain psilocybin, but they can sell grow kits and mycelium cultures.

The company website states that the company “never advocates to break the law,” but the study of mycology is very legal as long as there is no psilocybin present. The active ingredient in the magic mushrooms they sell, amanita muscaria, is still legal in the U.S., according to the website, and that “these have been used ceremonially by indigenous Americans for thousands of years and are currently under research for medicinal use by the FDA.”

At Chillum, you can buy a (amanita muscaria) magic mushroom joint, a magic mushroom gummy, magic mushroom capsules, or magic mushroom snacks.

Another shop in the U.S., located in the heart of the LSD heyday, Haight Street Shroom Shop stops short of advocating for magic mushrooms. But it teases the potential customer about magic mushrooms by providing detailed instructions about how to grow a specific variety of mushrooms, along with psychedelic literature and other education through an appointment-only workshop space dedicated to home mushroom cultivation.

That store and others in the area are closely watching the decriminalization action that could instigate a groundswell of legal brick-and-mortar magic mushroom sales in the city. In September, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution stating that arrests and investigations into people using entheogenic (psychedelic) plants should be “amongst the lowest law enforcement priority for the city.” It also calls for the decriminalization of psychedelics on the state and federal levels.

But whenever legalized magic mushrooms hit the retail circuit for real in the U.S., the product line will be impressive. There are more than 180 types of mushrooms that contain psilocybin and psilocin, according to the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service.

And with the wide range of product formulations and presentations offered by the retail cannabis industry, it’s just a matter of time before we see a “superstore” of magic mushroom products of all kinds coming to a store inside a suburban multiuse development near you.

There will be struggles to come. Legalized magic mushrooms could present a huge headache for regulators trying to determine which variety of the 180 magic mushrooms is good and which is not, what the levels of hallucinogen are, how much is too much, and so on, before any true retail sales program can be rolled out in the U.S.

Maybe regulators will need to ingest a magic mushroom microdose made from a cap or a stem of a psilocybe cubensis, one of the most popular magic mushroom, to find their inner clarity.

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