The city of Vancouver has seen a magic mushrooms vancouver boom with the opening of several dispensaries that make buying psilocybin as easy as getting a coffee. The stores offer a wide variety of mushrooms, including the Liberty Cap, which has become the symbol of Vancouver’s shroom boom because it grows everywhere from lawns and playing fields to grazed pastures. It contains the hallucinogenic compounds psilocybin and psilocin, and its consumption can cause you to see or hear things that aren’t there and to experience anxiety, fear, nausea and muscle twitches, plus an increased heart rate and blood pressure.

Vancouver’s Psychedelic Playground: A Guide to Magic Mushrooms

The federal government heavily restricts access to magic mushrooms – which are also known as psychoactive mushrooms or shrooms – because of their potentially harmful effects. Until recently, only people with serious mental health conditions were allowed to take them, but the federal government has since green-lit 21 clinical trials investigating psilocybin’s effectiveness in treating depression and end-of-life distress.

RCMP officers in Masset and the Queen Charlotte Islands say they aren’t arresting mushroom pickers this year, although they will continue to enforce drug laws. They are worried that the influx of transients will create social problems, and they plan to lobby the federal government to change the law.

But dispensary owners say they can fend off enforcement by offering a safe, regulated supply that allows them to test their product and verify the dose customers are taking. Many have also started community drug-testing services, like the one that Vancouver advocate David Larsen founded in 2019, to help people avoid unsafe contaminants.