The Decibel - Why mushroom dispensaries are sprouting up across Canada

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

On Tuesday, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May and NDP MP Alistair MacGregor held a news conference about medical access to psilocybin – better known as magic mushrooms. The psychedelic is illegal in Canada but there’s increased interest in the potential therapeutic benefits of the drug.This is happening while still-illegal magic mushroom dispensaries have begun to pop up in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. The Globe’s Mike Hager went to one, and explores the business behind magic mushrooms.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

I'm walking down Vancouver's busy Broadway Street and see a new mushroom dispensary has popped up in recent weeks. It looks like a pretty inviting spot. They've got a big open window, very clean storefront. It's called Electric Avenue. That's the Globe's Mike Hager, and he's standing outside a store that sells magic mushrooms. And I'm going to see if they'll let me in and see what it's like inside here. Gotta buzz in. I'm getting let in by the staff. Hi how's it going? What do you got here? You got chocolates, gummies? Different capsules with other adaptogens. What have you got here? You got chocolates, gummies. Different capsules with other adaptogens.

The psychedelic mushrooms are illegal in Canada, but dispensaries like this one are popping up anyway in cities across the country. And this comes at a time when the medicinal value of psychedelics is being debated as a potentially life-saving treatment for depression. I'm not imagining a world where psilocybin is as available as cannabis is today. On Tuesday, Green Party leader Elizabeth May and NDP MP Alistair McGregor held a news conference about the need for medical access to psilocybin. We're not making the case for legalization. We're making the case for access for specific patients who desperately need.

And I shouldn't speak as I'm not an expert. I'm not a doctor. But I've heard stories and, you know, it's anecdotal. But the change is not just a small change in one's level of depression, but an absolute cure, like a miracle. The Globe's Mike Hager is on the show to tell us why mushrooms are having a moment. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mike, thank you so much for joining me again.

No problem. Thanks for having me, Mainika. So we just started off the top with your visit to a mushroom dispensary. Can you tell me, what was it like in there? Pretty friendly. I mean, you heard she wanted to kind of explain what was on offer. They had some music going. It was pretty high profile. It was covered by some scaffolding for the subway line construction. But other than that, it's pretty in your face. It's right there and they're just, you know, selling as if they're selling any sort of health product.

So the sign is very visible. It's not something that's really hidden then. No. I mean, the scaffolding hides it a tiny bit, but a huge open window shows, you know, that they're definitely selling mushrooms in there. Before we get into these dispensaries themselves, let's just start with the basics. Like when we're talking about mushrooms or magic mushrooms, what exactly are we referring to here? Well, we're referring to all the various ways that people consume mushrooms with psychoactive or hallucinogenic properties that grow all over the world wild and are cultivated and often dried. Now they're increasingly ground up and put into tinctures, into drinks, into chocolate bars. So these are a naturally occurring psychedelic that come from the

compound psilocybin. So when we're talking about these mushrooms, like what happens when a person uses them? Like what's the usual experience? Well, it depends on how much you take and what form they are, the concentration of the compound. But typically, people will kind of have an elevated mood, a lot of giggles, and at higher doses, people will start to see kind of changes in the light and, you know. You mean like hallucinations you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, hallucinations. You know, everyone's heard of the bad trip and everyone who is selling these drugs and as well as Health Canada really warn people that that's an ever present risk. Bad trip can really be very painful for folks and not something that you want to experience. So that is a huge risk, although they don't appear to be addictive. Health Canada has said that there's no science showing that they are an addictive kind of drug like alcohol or cannabis can be.

Can you overdose on mushrooms? Not in the same sense that, you know, other illicit drugs are thought of in terms of the overdose. There is no kind of acute risk as there is with opioids or any number of other drugs. So Mike, how popular are they in Canada right now? Like, do many people actually use mushrooms? Well, it's kind of a tough thing. People don't usually like to tell their government that they're using illegal drugs, right? So you got to take any kind of stats on illicit drug use with a huge Himalayan-sized grain of salt. But what the latest data shows from a couple of years ago, StatsCan does its survey of drug use, and only about 2% of folks in 2019 said that they use hallucinogens. So it wasn't even broken out into magic mushrooms.

You know, comparison, cannabis after legalization, about 21% told the government in this survey that they're using cannabis in the last year. It does feel like we are talking about mushrooms a lot more these days. Are they having a moment right now? Like, is there kind of a surge in popularity? It does feel like we are talking about mushrooms a lot more these days. Are they having a moment right now? Like, is there kind of a surge in popularity? Yeah, I mean, I think everywhere you look, you're hearing about, you know, the power of mushrooms, fantastic fungi is a Netflix doc that got a lot of eyeballs. And there is a lot of new investment in psychedelics. I think a lot of money that was in cannabis is now looking, now that that market's down bad in Canada, looking to other psychedelics.

And there is kind of a rush into that space on Wall Street and Bay Street. But I think the main point, the main kind of watershed moment in Canada for this newfound interest and these shops in particular was August 2020. And that's when Health Canada approved of psilocybin use for a select group of patients who were kind of staring down a brutal terminal illness and asked to use psilocybin, which was synthetic, with their counselors to kind of grapple with the anxiety, the depression they were facing. And so that month, that summer of 2020, a lot was going on, but Health Canada quietly kind of started handing out these exemptions for people. And they've only handed out about 80,

but that really led to kind of this current moment in Canada. It is still very tough to get that approval. And that's the argument of some of these shop owners is that they're filling that void. Yeah. So it sounds like there's some research, there's some Health Canada approved stuff that's going on right now. So that's being done around the medical cannabis system and then home growing. And then, you know, the shop seized upon that, that people couldn't get medical cannabis readily.

So they had to start offering it for sale in storefronts. And so in that sense, psilocybin doesn't have that landmark case. There's one in federal court where people are arguing for that access, but people have kind of seized on Health Canada offering that little bit of access and saying there needs to be much more so we're stepping into that void. We'll be back in a minute. So let's talk a little bit about these dispensaries that we have seen popping up for mushrooms, for psilocybin. Can you tell us the numbers here, Mike? How many dispensaries are we talking about?

Well, they started to pop up in the fall of 2020, the first one in Vancouver, and then I believe a year later in Toronto, then Ottawa. They do ebb and flow like Vancouver proper, I believe has about eight right now. There was one in Hamilton that was shut down. I'm unclear as to whether it's opened again. Toronto has about three and Ottawa has about three. The people in Toronto and Ottawa I talked to who are running these shops, they said they waited until Vancouver opened and then they realized, okay, they're not getting shut down. Let's open here.

Huh. Okay. So help me understand, how is it that dispensaries can exist if mushrooms are illegal? What's going on here? Well, if you look at what police are grappling with in terms of illicit drugs, they will be very upfront, some forces, with the public interest being best served by tackling harder drugs that kill people regularly, daily. In BC, we have six people a day dying of opioid and poison drugs. Vancouver police were quite adamant that that's their priority, not, you know, mushroom dispensaries. If they get complaints, they'll investigate them. That's what other forces told me as well. But it's tough for them to justify, you know, the legwork it takes to shut these down. You can't just go into a shop and barricade it.

You have to gather evidence. and that requires surveilling. It requires a lot of police work actually to kind of prove that they're selling it illicitly, gather the documentation, the evidence, and then get that warrant and go through the court process. And lawyers told me like, ultimately, what do they get? If they go to court, what will a judge sentence them to? The people running the shops often don't have records and they're willing, you know, to be the fall person if they are raided. And you go to jail for a day or two, but those shops would be reopened after a raid. Many of them say that. And that's exactly what happened with cannabis shops. But again, psilocybin, as much as it is having a moment, magic mushrooms, they are still kind of niche, right? Like there's not as many shops, so it's not as conspicuous yet. So perhaps with, you know, more opening, then there will be more enforcement. Who knows? I guess to give us a comparison to cannabis here, Mike, when did we start seeing cannabis shops pop up? Before it was legalized,

when was it kind of around in that way? Those cannabis dispensaries started in the late 90s and they did really kind of orient themselves towards medical use. And, you know, there was intake forms. And then in the 2000s, there started to be a handful. And then 2011, they just started exploding. And then pretty soon we had more than Starbucks in Vancouver. But then they started going east around 2015, 2018, they started popping up in Toronto. And then cannabis was legalized in October 2018. So that's really what you're working up to there. That's right. But before that, I mean, everyone could read the tea leaves, right? The Liberals got elected in 2015 on a promise to legalize it. So that process started right about then. And that gave cover to all these entrepreneurs

with cannabis. So it'll be interesting to see when that kind of moment happens, or if it does, with psilocybin. The liberal government has signaled repeatedly that they're not interested in legalizing other drugs, right? We have experimented decriminalization happening in BC on the possession of small amounts of other so-called hard drugs, but that doesn't include psilocybin. So magic mushrooms are still very much illegal in BC and across the country. So aside from the dispensaries, I'm wondering about the broader business case here, because you mentioned earlier that we're seeing more money in this space. So tell me about what's happening here, Mike. Yes, big time. In the last few months, a lot of the sheen has worn off, but a lot of analysts argue the value is still there. Our colleague Jameson Burkow had a story a little while ago, looking at the investing in Canada in this space. And, you know, psychedelic companies listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, they raised more than a quarter billion dollars in the first six months of 2021. And that's just on one exchange. And, you know, there's, I think, at least 50

psychedelics companies listed on that exchange, the TSX Venture Exchange or the NEO Exchange during the pandemic. So, yeah, there's a boom for sure. It's slowed quite a lot and values dropped, but we will see a lot of magic mushroom talk, a lot of talk in the investment space about the benefits of psychedelics like psilocybin. too as well, though. We're, of course, talking about illegal substances. People can have bad experiences when taking them. If mushrooms do continue to become more mainstream, Mike, like what we've seen with cannabis, I guess, what are the concerns of having this product widely available? Oh, there's, you know, main concerns are young people using it. You know, we talk about the young brain not finishing its development until 25. There's a lot of concern around increased when it was still illegal to sell cannabis. They went and regulated it. So he's very worried.

He's a psychiatrist by trade as well and someone doing research in this space. And so he's very worried about more youth using it. And of course, the science is still developing on so many fronts. There is a lot of promise for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, even addiction. But of course, it is a very powerful hallucinogen in strong enough doses, and you don't want that anywhere near kids. Yeah. Mike, just last month, actually, Oregon in the States became the first U.S. state to legalize the use of mushrooms for adults specifically. And Oregon is actually usually ahead of the game on legalization. They were one of the first states

to legalize marijuana as well. I guess, is there a feeling that Canada may eventually go the same way? Like, will we see mushrooms become legal here at some point? I think, you know, let's talk in a couple of years and see whether more of these shops are open, not just in Toronto groundswell of support, but maybe the indifference from the wider public that will allow kind of more policy conversations to happen and perhaps even the laws to change. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. No problem, Menaka. Thanks a lot. Before you go, I just want to take a minute to say thank you to our founding senior producer, Kasia Mihailovic. Kasia's off to a new role here at The Globe, where she'll make even more podcasts. So you'll be hearing her name again soon.

Kasia, it's been great working with you and we'll miss you here at The Decibel. And I also want to welcome our new senior producer, Adrian Chung. Adrian's done a lot of great work at CBC and the Toronto Star and we're looking forward to working with him here. All right, that's it for today. I'm Maena Karaman-Welms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.