Magic mushrooms are against the law and can only be used for therapy in certain situations
On Tuesday, a store that sells illegal hallucinogenic mushrooms will open in Montreal. This puts the store and its employees at risk of a police raid and possible arrest.
Fun Guyz says on its website that it is a “medical” dispensary that sells “magic mushrooms,” which are a type of fungus that is thought to be a hallucinogen.
In Canada, it is illegal to make, sell, or have magic mushrooms, except in certain medical situations that require special permission from Health Canada.
But the people who make Fun Guyz think that they should be legal.
Someone who answered the phone at the Montreal store on Monday and said they were a chain spokesperson but didn’t want to give their name said that the store is part of a larger effort to make magic mushrooms legal.
Fun Guyz already has 11 locations in Ontario, with five of them in Toronto. Police have raided a few of the stores and taken goods and arrested workers, but each store reopened soon after.
The owners are going to court to fight the charges, a spokesperson said.
Jean-Sébastien Fallu, an addictions specialist and assistant professor at the Université de Montréal’s School of Psychoeducation, said the people behind Fun Guyz are engaging in civil disobedience similar to that of those who opened cannabis stores prior to the legalization of marijuana.
Fallu said, “Social change can happen in different ways.” “Either through debate and logical argument—that’s my job, that’s my business—or through civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a way to change things, as human history has shown.”
Fallu said that more and more scientific studies are showing that magic mushrooms may have health benefits.
Fun Guyz says that the things it sells are good for you.The store’s representative said that the products they sell are not meant to be used for fun. Instead, they are meant to be used as a kind of medicine.
But Health Canada has strict rules about how psilocybin, the main hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, can be used in medicine.
A path to legalization
Dr. Houman Farzin, a doctor at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital who uses psilocybin as part of psychotherapy for cancer patients in palliative care, said that Fun Guyz’s push for legalization is very different from the push to have the drug recognized as having therapeutic value in the right situations.
He said, “I don’t think it has anything to do with medicine.” “The reality is that the medical model we’re using and improving is very specific, and the people who use the system are different and have different needs.
“Doing this for health or fun is very different from doing it as therapy.”
Farzin also said that new data, which is about to be released, shows that a lot of people are in favor of using psilocybin for medical purposes and even of making it fully legal.
“Activism has an important role to play,” he said. “The truth is that even in our medical model, we’ve had to use activism to get patients access [to psilocybin]. What’s happening with this store is activism to give the general public access.”
The Fun Guyz spokeswoman said that the store would open on Tuesday at 11 a.m.
A spokesperson for the Montreal police wouldn’t say if they planned to raid the store or not, but they did say that they planned to follow the law as it is written in the criminal code.
A publication on the Health Canada website says that the federal government is aware of the growing interest in the “potential therapeutic uses of magic mushrooms and psilocybin.” But he said, “Although clinical trials with psilocybin have shown promising results, there are no approved therapeutic products with psilocybin in Canada or anywhere else at this time.”
Health Canada only gives access to psilocybin for clinical trials or for trained health care professionals to use in certain situations.