Black Market 🍄🍫 Controversy

The underground market for psilocybin products is booming - pun definitely intended. Despite their federally and internationally illicit status, hundreds of professionally produced and packaged psilocybin mushroom products are readily available with relatively little effort required on the part of the customer.

In fact, while sitting down to write this newsletter, The Guardian just published an article about the danger of underground psilocybin mushroom products and the ‘cartoon branding’ that adorns many of them.

The aim of this edition of the Mycoprenreur Newsletter has now shifted from an underground product review to a critical response towards what feels like a lazy and entitled hit piece produced by someone utterly disconnected from the vast and nebulous underground mushroom space.

The author cites anonymous internet commenters as primary sources and makes no mention of any of the numerous premium quality mushroom chocolate or community-integrated mushroom brands and organizations producing world class psilocybin products that are consistently being safely consumed by countless people on a regular basis. I imagine that getting out to a local psychedelic society meeting or any of the dozens of community-focused psychedelic organizations currently operating with hundreds of thousands of members across the U.S. and internationally would have been too much due diligence, so quoting anonymous Redditors and YouTubers who sound like they’re 15 years old really sets the tone for this piece of propaganda. Here’s a choice quote they used for the piece:

As one YouTuber put it: “Polkas are the Dank Vapes of shrooms.”

And another: “I have never been so fascinated by trees,” one TikToker enthuses.

And yet another: One Redditor describes watching their husband after he accidentally ate some mushroom chocolate. “He started with the giggles,” the Redditor says, “but sounds like past family issues are starting to come up and he’s having a tough time.”

It’s a shame the author didn’t make it out to the California Psychedelic Conference in Los Angeles last weekend: Hundreds of people, including many families and small children, congregated in real life to normalize psychedelic education and to share best practices related to mushroom cultivation, entrepreneurship, and integrating psychedelics into family life. I counted at least a dozen high quality and rigorously quality controlled mushroom chocolate brands floating around that could each be traced to a real human with a real connection to their community.

It appears that “community helps each other transcend generational trauma” doesn’t grab as much attention as “underground mushroom chocolate bad, must regulate.” The paternalistic bent of the Guardian piece insinuates that communities can’t take care of themselves, and need our loving daddy government to intervene and save the children from the mushroom chocolate boogeymen.

It must be nice to sit on moral high ground and condemn the underground chocolate market while regulators waffle about at a glacial pace with no timeline on the horizon for legal access to psilocybin products for the majority of adults in the U.S. and beyond.

One of the mushroom chocolate producers present at the event last weekend - who I actually talked to face to face, rather than pulling comments from their anonymous online accounts - shared with me a mission to involve their young children in the family business. No, not by sharing the mushroom chocolate they make, but by having honest and direct conversations and educating the kids about mushrooms and the family business. This is a pretty common theme among many mycopreneurs I have met over the last 15 years. Education before regulation.

Furthermore, the mushroom chocolate brands name dropped in the article are bottom of the barrel mass-produced cash grabs sold illegally at smoke shops and by social media scammers. Sure, these products exist and should be scrutinized, but naming them without counterweighting these references with any of the numerous ethically-produced and high quality psilocybin mushroom products on the market is a huge blind spot in this article. Quote:

“The brand is actually Polkadot Bar. And they’ve become increasingly common in the psychedelic grey market. As more states open up laws around cannabis, Polkadot Bars and a range of other magic mushroom containing-candies – including One-Up Bars, Holy Grail Bars, Magic Bars and Mushie Gummies…”

It boggles the mind that anyone could take this piece seriously when the journalist is grasping at straws quoting anonymous teenagers on the internet and name-dropping trap chocolates (read: dubious quality mushroom chocolates. Through my work with Mycopreneur and in the nearly two decades before that, I’ve met thousands of people who consume mushroom chocolate and not a single one has ever mentioned consuming a Polkadot bar in our often prolonged discourses on the subject of mushroom chocolate.

This type of hysteria-inducing clickbait also fails to mention the incredible work done by an increasing number of labs in the U.S. and internationally to test mushrooms and products. There’s a vague illusion to QR codes at one point, but popping into a handful of smoke shops in Manhattan and lurking on forums online apparently qualifies for best journalistic practices mores than actually knowing what the fuck you’re writing about or being personally connected to vetted sources that do.

Here’s a link to the Tryp Labs, a world class lab based in Oregon where people can test their mushrooms. And here’s a link to an article I wrote about five underground mushroom chocolate companies that are ethically producing exceptional mushroom chocolate right now and making a tangible impact in their community.

Another panel at the California Psychedelic Conference focused on mothers from marginalized communities who have used mushrooms to break free from generational trauma to show up for their kids and be more present and engaged.

Yet another panel featured a half dozen young BIPOC men sharing how their mushroom use has helped them to transcend their violent pasts and redefine their sense of masculinity to go above and beyond the social circumstances that they were born into - which included violence, gang membership, incarceration and drug use.

Many of the people mentioned in the last few paragraphs are consuming - and in some cases producing - underground mushroom chocolate and directly attribute their positive transformations, as well as the resulting community impact, to their mushroom experiences.

The statistics mentioned in the Guardian piece also fall flat; In a nation of over 50 million children, 22 accidental psilocybin mushroom consumption cases have been reported by hospitals in the U.S. this year. It’s even noted that none of the kids have suffered any kind of serious debilitation from these incidents, and that children are actually less susceptible to repercussions - from the article:

Martin notes that psychological risks are actually decreased in children, as their exposure to these drugs is usually accidental and a one-off occurrence. “Generally a limited ingestion, once or twice, would not have significant long-term issues.”

Last week, in one room, I met the parents of more than 22 kids who have all benefitted tremendously from accessing ‘grey market’ branded mushroom chocolates, as described in the circumstances above.

The state of the underground market definitely invites unscrupulous opportunists and bad actors - but the antidote to that is not necessarily found in far off regulatory scrutiny, but in community sovereignty and connection. By investing in community and building up ethical entrepreneurs operating in the mushroom space, 99.9% of the dangers alluded to in this article no longer pose a threat.

I’m continuously evolving my own perspectives on the topic of regulation around mushrooms, but this piece should be regarded as gossip rag material. It seems The Guardian is chasing after the same type of low-brow psychedelic click-bait journalism that contributed to the recent sinking of Vice - another platform this journalist wrote ‘psychedelic content’ for.

There are many, many ethical operators in the ‘grey market’ mushroom products space, and citing TikTokers and Reddit commenters while name dropping bottom of the barrel mass-produced brands sold illegally in smoke shops without taking the time to investigate the other side of the story is neglectful and woefully uninformed.

If the goal is click bait, The Guardian hit the mark.

If the goal is an accurate depiction of the grey market mushroom product industry, this piece carries less legitimacy and weight than a .001 gram microdose.