Welcome to the Mycopreneur Newsletter

This is a weekly roundup of mushroom news from around the world, with an invitation to the Mycopreneur Incubator at the bottom. The Incubator is a free online mentorship and acceleration program for mushroom entrepreneurs and the mushroom curious.

The rise of popularity in magic mushrooms in recent years has yielded a wild west style marketplace with thousands of different brands seeking to ride the psychoactive wave. Many product manufacturers turned to Amanita muscaria due to it’s omission from the U.S. Controlled Substances Act and lack of federal or state regulation - except in the case of Louisiana, where it remains prohibited by law.

It was only a matter of time before regulating authorities in the U.S. moved to take action on this riding tide of psychoactive mushroom productization; Poland considered a ban Amanita muscaria in October 2024 though backlash from citizens in the heavily mycophilic culture led to them pressing pause on the idea.

The infamous ‘Diamond Shruumz’ case from earlier this year in which 180 hospitalizations and 3 potentially associated deaths were reported as a result of mislabeled ‘magic mushroom chocolates’ containing muscimol (one of the primary constituents of Amanita muscaria) among psilocin and other chemicals has been cited far and wide by regulators and media alike as a watershed moment in the turning tide against a free for all underground marketplace of unregulated mushroom products. If you’ll allow me to put on my tinfoil hate for a moment, let us consider that the U.S. Government has set a precedent of intentionally poisoning the alcohol supply during prohibition as a means of curtailing the illicit trade and introducing a legal and regulated market controlled by said government.

In any event, the FDA issued a “Letter to Industry on the Use of Amanita Muscaria or its Constituents in Food” yesterday notifying Amanita muscaria product manufacturers that they are now on high alert and will likely be cracking down on manufacturers productizing Amanita muscaria in gummies, chocolates, and any number of other possible permutations that exist and are marketed and sold as ‘Amanita’.

As opposed to psilocybin mushrooms, which are ubiquitously homegrown and cultivated in labs worldwide, not a single Amanita muscaria mushroom has ever been successfully cultivated in a lab - meaning that the bulk of the products that the FDA is moving against contain isolated and synthesized extracts of checmical constituents of Amanita muscaria rather than the whole fruiting body. This again is an unfair characterization of Amanita, considering that for example the Diamond Shruumz mushroom only contained Muscimol extract and not any of the other numerous alkaloids contained within the whole mushroom.

Regardless, the wave is set in motion for impending regulation of the vast and nebulous underground mushroom product marketplace, and in this instance it’s Amanita that has been placed in the crosshairs of federal legislators. But if anyone wants to guess how that’s going to work out, let’s consider that the cannabis industry is still a ‘tale of two markets’ in regards to the underground and untaxed cannabis trade continuing to be valued in ezxcess of the legal, regulated cannabis market almost 3 decades after the first iteration of legal cannabis in the U.S.

Serendipitously, yesterday I interviewed Amanita muscaria expert Tatyana Voloshin of Unidelics on the Mycopreneur Podcast before I caught wind of the FDA letter to Amanita product manufacturers. The podcast will come out tomorrow and there’s a ton of interesting info in there related to the historical and traditional use of Amanita up through today’s product landscape. Below is the FDA letter about the coming crackdown on the Amanita product marketplace.

Mycologists in Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 have ‘Discover’ New Species of Psilocybe Mushroom

The Psilocybe ochraceocentrata is the ‘closest wild relative of domesticated magic mushrooms, revealing new insights into the genetic history of psychedelic fungi.’

This find comes on the heels of the recent new to science discoveries of two Psilocybe species in South Africa earlier this year. The growing body of publicly available information about psilocybe species in Africa - as well as an emerging understanding of traditional uses of these fungi among indigenous populations across the continent, such as when Basotho healers in Lesotho were observed by researchers to be employing an endemic psilocybe species in their practice earlier this year - suggests that we are just scratching the surface in terms of our knowledge about mushroom species and traditions of mushroom use in Africa, as well as globally.

Global Psychedelic Week Aims to Connect Worldwide Psychedelic Community

I wrote a piece about Global Psychedelic Week in GreenState this week - GreenState is a cannabis and psychedelic media publication belonging to the same family as Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Men’s Health, and many more properties.

I’m the Co-Founder of “GPW” alongside Milica Radovic Mandic and in two weeks after publishing our initial Call For Speakers, we have over 100 applicants from 18 countries on 6 continents including numerous subject area experts relating to different niches of the global psychedelic community. The call is open until January 31 and I highly encourage anyone reading this to consider applying to speak or partner with us.

Excerpt from the article: “Our vision for Global Psychedelic Week 2025 is to create a world where the benefits of psychedelics are widely understood, accepted, and integrated into mainstream society. We envision a global network where individuals and organizations collaborate seamlessly, leading to breakthroughs in mental health treatment, scientific research, and personal development.”

Mycopreneur Collaborates With beehiiv 🐝

The beehiiv platform that hosts this newsletter is quickly becoming the #1 newsletter platform on the planet - and they reached out to me earlier this week to do a content collab on social media. I published the collaborative post yesterday across channels and have attached it here as well in case you’re not on social media.

I’m a big fan of this platform for a number of reasons, one of the primary ones being that when you’re starting out, ‘Psychedelics’ is a bonafide subject category you can designate for your newsletter; this is extremely future facing and intelligent, considering social media behemoths have become all but untenable for anybody creating content in this category. It’s incredibly refrshing to not have to write ‘Psy*Hedl1cs’ and stupid shit like that in the text here as even major brands and academic researchers have capitulated to doing on Instagram and TikTok, etc.

It was pretty awesome to publish a formal collab with beehiiv at their request the same week their founder Tyler Denk was featured on the cover of Inc. Magazine.

Mycopreneur Podcast

The latest Mycopreneur Podcast episode features Alexandra Plesner of Psychedelics Design. She grew up in a tiny town in the Austrian Alps and had never even heard the word ‘psychedelic’ until she moved to London and got her Masters in Applied Imagination at University of the Arts London - and now she runs a globally reputable platform focused on the intersection of psychedelics and design. If you ask me, there’s ‘Applied Imagination’ fits perfectly here.

Listen here and please consider leaving a review after you listen.

Here’s the invitation to today’s Mycopreneur Incubator

Mycopreneur Incubator is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Mycopreneur Incubator Time: Wednesday (Today) Dec 19, 2024 04:00 PM East Coast U.S., 1 PM West Coast

MYCOPRENEUR INCUBATOR INVITATION

The incubator is a low-key, cost free mentorship and networking opportunity for mushroom entrepreneurs, activists, journalists, lawyers, enthusiasts, etc. - anyone actively working on a project that touches mushrooms in any capacity. We have materials designers, philanthropists, researchers, policy advocates, cultivators, etc. all in the mix.

Though the incubator is free for all to attend, please consider making a financial contribution to support it if you plan on attending and are in a position to support -

Venmo: @mycopreneur

PayPal: [email protected]

Or hit me up in the replies here if you’d like to discuss sponsorship of an incubator session or sponsorship of this newsletter and the Mycopreneur Platform at large.

Thanks for reading and hit me up any time with questions, comments, or ideas about how the improve this newsletter.

Cheers!

DW