Notes From the Underground Mushroom Market

     

For the first time in his life, Chris Andersen* realized he was going to jail. It was December 2022, and his business—a CBD store in Manhattan’s East Village—was dazzled up for its annual holiday party. After wrapping up a Zoom meeting inside of his tiny office closet, he stepped out to find nine plain-clothed police officers standing at the front of the store. He nervously introduced himself as the owner. 

Wasting no time on pleasantries, one of the cops told him: “I can tear your place apart, but the warrant says I’m supposed to look for mushrooms,” Andersen would recall later.

He’d always known this day might come, but that did nothing to lessen the fear he felt in that moment. Resigned, he led the officers through a nondescript door at the back of the store and into a secret room, which was stocked with various psychedelic mushroom products; mostly spiked chocolate bars, encapsulated microdose supplements, and whole, dried mushrooms stuffed into large plastic bags. The cops arranged the products—along with a wad of cash they’d also confiscated—neatly on the floor for photographs, making the scene look like some low-level cartel bust. (The officers, notably, paid no attention to the significant amount of illegal cannabis that was being sold in the front of the store.) Andersen and two of his employees were handcuffed and arrested.

READ: 4-AcO-DMT Is the Most Accessible (and Mysterious) Drug on the Market Right Now

Scores of New York City businesses, including Andersen’s (now closed) CBD store, have begun selling illegal psilocybin products in recent years, fueled by the promise of significant profit and by a sense of immunity in the face of an under-resourced legal system. Psilocybin is unambiguously illegal in New York State, at the federal level in the United States, and across most of the world. Like other classic psychedelics (LSD, mescaline, and DMT), the compound is currently categorized as a Schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), meaning it’s been deemed by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to offer no medical value and to carry a high potential for abuse. Distributing psilocybin is a felony in New York State with a maximum prison sentence of seven years. New York City famously (or infamously) has the largest police force in the country. And yet, the city’s illicit mushroom market is not only flourishing, it’s brazenly public. 

This past fall and winter, hoping to untangle this paradox, I began visiting shops across the city that were selling psilocybin products and speaking with the people working behind the counters. I also spoke with police officers, government officials, drug policy experts, mushroom cultivators, chemists, and a man who, while tripping, was nearly attacked by a Mona Lisa that crawled out of his TV. Gradually, what began to emerge was a picture of a rapidly-expanding underground psychedelic market that’s been growing in tandem with hype and excitement surrounding the much-publicized “psychedelic renaissance”—and which, being entirely unregulated, presents some potentially serious risks both to public health and to the ongoing political effort to destigmatize and decriminalize psychedelics. It also quickly became clear that the phenomenon was much more widespread than I’d originally believed: Though New York City—with its burgeoning legal cannabis industry, overtaxed legal system, world-famous party scene, and predominantly younger population—appears to be particularly well-suited to a thriving market for illegal psychedelic products, the phenomenon has also been cropping up in a number of other major North American cities.

My search for psilocybin products began in the East Village, the same neighborhood in which Andersen had formerly run his store-slash-speakeasy. This part of Manhattan, not far from the sprawling New York University campus, is filled with trendy cocktail bars, psychics offering palm readings, and sidewalks littered with discarded vapes. I spent hours there, going from shop to shop, asking employees if they were carrying any mushroom chocolates, gummies, or the like. I like to think that I don’t come across as a narc, but despite my best efforts to play it cool I was eyed warily once or twice. Still, the majority of people I spoke with who were selling the products in question were more than happy to show me their psychedelic inventories. 

In fact, I was surprised to find a general lack of serious efforts to conceal these products. Andersen’s operation, with its secret back room and its ID-verification process, seems to have been the exception to the rule. Some vendors display their mushroom wares easily visible behind their counters, while others have an only ever-so-slightly clandestine operation in place: the products are kept in a small plastic bag or some other container, usually placed just out of customers’ sight. Given psilocybin’s strictly illegal status, shop owners don’t typically advertise mushroom products with any kind of obvious signage, although this isn’t the case everywhere—perhaps, most notably, in Venice, California on the boardwalk. 

In New York, the East Village seems to be the epicenter of the city’s underground mushroom market. The majority of smoke shops (and some bodegas) that I visited in this neighborhood were carrying psychedelics-laced products of one variety or another—or rather, ostensibly psychedelics-laced products. Like the shops themselves, most brands in this space avoid labeling their products with potentially incriminating words or phrases and instead use vagaries like “mushroom blend,” which means they could either contain psychedelic mushrooms or one of their nonpsychoactive counterparts, like reishi or lion’s mane. 

The people working at these shops tended to only confuse matters further. One vendor in the East Village confidently told me that the allegedly psilocybin-infused mushroom gummies he was selling were legal. (“Times have changed,” he said with a smile.) Others had no idea whether or not their products even contained psilocybin; we had to stand there, together, scrutinizing the cryptic fine print on the packaging looking for clarification, usually to no avail. Thankfully, Polka Dot—the brand that I spotted most often by far during my wanderings across New York City—now attaches QR codes, covered with lottery-style scratcher stickers, which link buyers to a NFT verifying the product’s authenticity, along with its psilocybin and psilocin content and the strain(s) of mushrooms that were used in production.

Polka Dot’s decision to begin using these stickers seems to have been a response to a wave of phony imitation products. “If your product does not have this sticker, then it is COUNTERFEIT,” the brand wrote on its official Telegram account last June. Polka Dot did not respond to requests for comment. 

I encountered two Polka Dot bars which had QR codes but did not link me to NFTs, suggesting they were fake. One East Village vendor who was selling Polka Dot bars at an unusually high price—they usually go for around $50—assured me that he was doing so because his competitors in the area were selling counterfeits, signaling an awareness of the underground IP infringement without providing evidence that he wasn’t also a part of it. (In addition to their chocolate bars, Polka Dot also sells gummies, chocolate truffles, and liquid shots with psilocybin.)

Psillys, another brand I routinely noticed in smoke shops across the city, sells “legal psychedelic mushrooms-infused gummies,” according to its mushroom-shaped bag. That immediately seemed to rule out psilocybin. A close look at the list of ingredients on the back of that bag, printed in almost illegibly tiny type lists a “hemp-derived isomer”—possibly a synthetic compound such as Delta-8 or Delta-10, which are legal in most states across the US and sold as alternatives to cannabis (another Schedule 1 substance)—along with “fly agaric extract,” which could be a reference to muscimol, the primary psychoactive compound in the legal Amanita muscaria mushroom. 

Aside from their occasional tendency to cause vomiting and dizziness, muscimol isn’t known to present any serious health risks. But according to Chris Pauli and Caleb King, both of whom own and operate an analytical chemistry lab called Tryptomics based in Boulder, Colorado, much of what is currently being sold as muscimol on the market is likely being cut with other, potentially more harmful drugs. 

“Some of the muscimol that’s coming into the United States is coming from China,” King told me, [and] some of the synthetic manufacturing in China is being done correctly, but others have brought in powdered substances that look a lot like muscimol and maybe have some effects that are similar to [its] sedative effects…but we’ve seen compounds like ketamine and an unknown phenethylamine that we didn’t recognize…That kind of shocked us.” Phenethylamines are a class of psychoactive compounds which includes stimulants like methamphetamine, as well as MDMA and the 2C class of psychedelics.

How much muscimol would one need to take, I asked, in order to feel its effects? Pauli told me that he and his girlfriend once took around 5mg of the compound—a microdose by psilocybin standards—which produced radically different experiences between the two of them. While he only felt what he describes as “a mild sedative effect,” his girlfriend reported having a full-on out-of-body experience that left her temporarily unable to walk. Watching her go through that experience left a powerful impression on him: “That was something that was just like, Whoa, this is sold over the counter, there’s no 18-year-old-and-up thing for this, and some people can respond to it very strongly,” he told me.

One full bag of Psillys gummies—five pieces, a “Trippy!” dose, according to the packaging—contains 150mg of “fly agaric extract.” The vagueness of this language makes it impossible to know exactly what that means, or how powerful of an experience someone might expect from eating a dose of that size. Scanning the QR code included on the package of Psillys gummies brought me to the equivalent of a 404 page, suggesting the brand may no longer be operational. Psillys could not be reached for comment.

Pauli and King have also tested mushroom chocolate bars and gummy products in their lab. In many of these, they detected 4-acetoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (4-AcO-DMT)—a synthetic tryptamine and a chemical analog of psilocybin which is converted to psilocin in the stomach.

Also known as psilacetin, 4-AcO in lower doses (in the 2.5-10 milligrams range) can produce effects resembling those of psilocybin while larger doses (roughly 20 milligrams or more) can lead to an experience comparable to that of DMT; a recent study with mice found it to be more potent than psilocybin. It was first synthesized in the early 1960s by Albert Hofmann, the celebrated Swiss chemist who discovered LSD. 4-AcO didn’t receive much attention from either the chemistry or the psychonaut community until the 1990s, when it began to emerge in the rave scene.

Due to the US government’s 1986 Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act—an amendment to the CSA which prohibits chemicals that are “substantially similar” to federally-controlled substances for human consumption—the legal status of 4-AcO is currently ambiguous in the US. There’s also financial incentive for the underground to sell 4-AcO—it’s easier and cheaper to synthesize than psilocybin. 

As Pauli explains, growing psilocybin-containing mushrooms will yield a quantity that’s measurable in milligrams, while the synthesis of its analogues in a lab “could produce potentially a kilo of 4-AcO.” This has led some modern chemists, including Dr. David Nichols, to suggest that it could become a more marketable alternative to psilocybin. It has also led to an influx of the drug within edible products that can be easily purchased over the counter, so to speak, in New York City and elsewhere across the US. “As the markets evolve, people are adding 4-AcO to products and claiming that there’s mushrooms in the bar—or in the gummies, in some instances,” says King.

Since the body converts 4-AcO to psilocin (which is nontoxic), it doesn’t seem to pose any serious health risks in and of itself, according to Pauli. But he adds a caveat: “When thinking about any synthesized molecule, there’s always a risk of solvents—chemicals used for the synthesis—being left in it, or potentially some heavy metals or different things that could come in those chemicals if you’re not buying the purest form. So that’s always something to be cautious about with any synthetic drug.” Additionally, the fact that large doses of the drug can produce experiences that differ dramatically from psilocybin could potentially lead to negative psychological outcomes for unprepared and inexperienced users. 

Pauli told me that his lab has detected 4-AcO in roughly fifteen percent of the more than two hundred psychedelic products his lab has tested over the past two years. Some of those, he adds, have been sent into the lab by good-faith manufacturers who aren’t knowingly adding the compound to their products, while those who are usually label their products accordingly.

READ: The Complete Guide to 4-AcO-DMT: Synthetic Shrooms or in a Class of Its Own?

In jail, Andersen mulled over the series of events that led him there.

He would never find out how the cops had been tipped off about his mushroom operation. Kati Cornell, Director of Public Communication for the Office of the Special Narcotics Officer for the City of New York, told me that the investigation leading to the raid on his store “was initiated by the NYPD in response to community complaints” and that there had been “obvious drug activity” taking place around the store. But Andersen, who says he’s still on good terms with many of his old neighbors in the East Village, finds that story dubious. 

He hadn’t initially planned on getting into the illegal mushroom business. “I really held off [for] as long as I could,” he told me the first time we spoke, in November. “What ultimately forced my hand was finances.” CBD products just weren’t selling enough to cover the high costs of running a business in the East Village, where commercial rent prices are among the highest in the city. After he noticed many of his competitors selling psilocybin products, he “finally bit the bullet” and decided to follow suit. A few months later, the store began to generate more money, enabling him to hire more employees and make some renovations to the space.

Andersen says he also wanted to help people benefit from the use of psilocybin, like he had. He’s never been much of a drinker (he claims to be allergic to alcohol), but he’d wrestled with a years-long cocaine dependence as a teenager growing up in San Francisco. A combination of cannabis, psilocybin, and wilderness therapy, he says, helped him to kick the habit at age sixteen. He remained curious about conscientious drug use for personal development, but this was tempered by a healthy fear, born from painful experience, and so he developed an affinity for independent, online research to teach himself about harm reduction and proper use. “Erowid was my Bible,” he told me, referring to the online resource where users can anonymously share drug information, advice, and stories. He began dabbling with psilocybin microdosing when he was thirty, around the same time that he opened the CBD store, hoping that it would boost his entrepreneurial acumen—a trend which by that point had begun to spread throughout Silicon Valley and much of the broader start-up world.

From the beginning, he brought this safety-oriented mindset with him into his business. His longtime girlfriend had a teenage daughter whom Andersen had been helping to raise, and that made him a stickler for checking ID’s; nobody under the age of twenty-one was to be admitted into the back of the store, he told his employees firmly. (Such precautions did not, of course, make a difference to the undercover cops who would later raid his business.) 

Now, sitting on a concrete bench in a cell with a metal toilet and half a dozen other people, Andersen says that he was refused a pillow and had to resort to resting his head on the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that they were given every day as a snack. As he anxiously whiled away the hours, on the verge of tears, one of his cellmates—a veteran of the legal system who’d most recently been arrested for smoking PCP on the subway—tried to calm him down. “I can see you’re going to start crying,” Andersen recalls the man saying to him. “Just don’t think about it…You’ve gotta get through this time, you’re gonna see the lawyer, and then you’ll see what’s up. Right now, we’ve gotta talk about stuff. You wanna talk about movies? What movies do you like?”

Overwhelmed with anxiety, Andersen at one point asked one of the officers on duty if there was “a different jail for good people” to which he could be taken. The guard blinked at him and pointed his baton into the cell. “If you’re in here, then you’re a bad person,” Andersen recalls him saying.

“I’ll never forget that cop’s face.”

Even worse than the immediate hell of being stuck in that crowded cell was the thought that he might be let out, found guilty of a felony charge in court, and then forced to return, potentially for a much longer stay. If that were to happen, he would tell me later, he probably would’ve taken his own life.

READ: Lab Tests From Diamond Shruumz Mushroom Brand Reveals Deceptive Practices 

My conversation with Pauli and King of Tryptomics, the lab in Boulder, left me with little doubt that there was much more to the psychedelic products I was seeing around New York City than what was being printed on their labels. To learn more, DoubleBlind decided to conduct a test of its own. We teamed up with Hyphae Labs—based in Oakland, California—to test ten different psychedelic products made by a variety of brands: five chocolate bars, two bags of gummies, one box of tea, a box of mints, and some raw, dried mushrooms.

Like King and Pauli’s lab, Hyphae detected 4-AcO in many of these products. The synthetic compound was detected in the mints, made by a brand called Magic Kingdom, or MK, as well as in two of the bags of gummies from MK and another brand called Road Trip—none of which listed the compound on their labels. Road Trip’s packaging conspicuously listed Amanita muscaria as an ingredient, but this was not detected by the lab. The packaging for both of MK’s products listed “Magic Blend”—a perfect example of the linguistic opacity that’s rampant in this industry—and was adorned with mushroom imagery as well as a Disney aesthetic. (“Magic Kingdom” is a reference to Disney—more later on why that’s relevant.) The MK mints also list “True Albino Teacher,” a strain of Psilocybe cubensis, on the front of its container.

“It’s very clearly misleading,” Tomás Garrett, Hyphae’s lab director, told me in an interview. “These mushroom-based products are said to be one thing, and they’re very clearly something else.”

The analysis found psilocybin in four of the five chocolate bars. The only bar in which psilocybin was not detected was one that was labeled as a Polka Dot bar. This bar did contain 71 micrograms of psilocin, suggesting the presence of 4-AcO. But that compound wasn’t detected in the bar, either, leading Garrett to speculate that psilocin hemifumarate—a Schedule 1 research chemical that can be purchased online—was the compound that was used in production. Polka Dot could not be reached to confirm or deny the bar’s origin or authenticity.

Garrett laments what he regards as an illicit drug market that’s being increasingly flooded with sketchy, poorly understood, and largely impure research chemicals. “I get chills down my spine thinking, ‘Damn, a lot of people’s first experience with psilocybin is now going to be this bastardized product, just because somebody wants to make some more bread,’” he told me.

In addition to their murky and sometimes overtly misleading labels, another common and arguably pernicious feature found among many edible psychedelic products is the use of bright, eye-catching packaging. As Hyphae’s Garrett puts it, “The main mechanism for getting psilocybin mushrooms at this point is now a colorfully-labeled, nostalgic candy.”

Polka Dot bars, for example, come in shiny, colorful boxes and a variety of flavors with household names, like Toblerone and Starbucks’ Caramel Macchiato. Some feature images of familiar characters that were originally designed to appeal to kids, like Lucky the Leprechaun and Tony the Tiger. The brand’s vibrant and playful packaging is an extension of its broader marketing aesthetic. One video ad found on its Telegram page looks like your typical American beer commercial: a group of half-naked, 20s-something girls laughing and twirling on a beach in slow motion while sparkly pop music plays in the background.

Manufacturers that are masquerading as Polka Dot seem to have even fewer compunctions about marketing to a young audience. Polkadotbarshop.com, an online distributor that sells what appear to be counterfeit Polka Dot products, shows a picture of a young child nibbling chocolate next to an arrangement of Polka Dot bars on its homepage.

That same website—which claims to ship in bulk to buyers across the world—also gives some troubling advice: “Grab one square or kick it up a notch with the entire chocolate bar,” it reads. “Psychedelic effects may be intensified by having more of these sweets, but psilocybin is generally safe for everyone.” The owners of the website could not be reached for comment. My call to the company was ignored, but they responded shortly afterwards via text, asking how they could help. My request for an interview went unanswered.

The same kind of character-adorned packaging that’s used by Polka Dot has been banned by legislators in regulated drug markets for the simple reason that it might attract underage users. In 1997, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) famously ruled that the R.J. Reynolds’ tobacco company’s use of the leather-jacketed character of Joe Camel in its marketing violated federal law by “[promoting] an addictive and dangerous product through a campaign that was attractive to those too young to purchase cigarettes legally,” the agency said in a statement at the time. Joe Camel was discontinued just a couple of months later. 

Likewise, state governments today tend to prohibit cannabis brands from marketing their products using cartoon characters or any other kind of iconography which might catch a child’s eye. Washington State, for example, forbids licensed cannabis vendors from displaying “objects, such as toys, characters, or cartoon characters suggesting the presence of a child, or any other depiction designed in any manner to be especially appealing to children or other persons under legal age to consume cannabis,” according to its website. 

The federal government also keeps an eye out for this kind of marketing among cannabis brands that are exploiting the legal loophole presented by THC isomers like Delta-8. Last summer, for example, the FTC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent cease-and-desist letters to six companies that were selling products spiked with Delta-8 “in packaging that is almost identical to many snacks and candy children eat, including Doritos tortilla chips, Cheetos cheese-flavored snacks, and Nerds candy,” the FTC wrote on its website. (I routinely see such products being sold out of smoke shops and bodegas in New York.) “Marketing edible THC products that can be easily mistaken by children for regular foods is reckless and illegal,” Samuel Levine, Director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “Companies must ensure that their products are marketed safely and responsibly, especially when it comes to protecting the well-being of children.”

Adding to the danger that unsuspecting kids might consume their psychedelic-laced products is the fact that, unlike licensed cannabis brands, unregulated brands like Polka Dot are under no legal obligation to use child-proof packaging. This has already led to some disastrous results. As The Guardian reported last spring, citing data from the American Association of Poison Control Center’s National Poison Data System, 22 kids were admitted to hospitals for accidentally ingesting psilocybin in April of last year. (The report notes that the data did not distinguish between cases involving dried mushrooms and those involving psilocybin-infused candies, but it’s fair to say that many fell in the latter category, since dried magic mushrooms don’t look, smell, or taste particularly appealing to most adults, much less to kids.)

The lack of education surrounding dosing is yet another danger presented by the unregulated psychedelic candy market. Take Rocket Bars, for example, which I first spotted being sold out of mobile cannabis and mushroom dispensaries in Brooklyn. According to their packaging, these chocolate bars contain 4mg of psilocybin and 100mg of THC. Personally, this seemed like a guaranteed recipe for a hellacious experience, but I also knew it wasn’t uncommon among experienced psychonauts to enjoy the combination of these two compounds. And while I’m all for immersion journalism, I wasn’t about to go full Michael Pollan and munch down one of these bars just to be able to subsequently report on the experience, which I firmly believe would’ve been a (potentially one-way) ticket to some unsettling psychological terrain.

I got around this problem by speaking with a resident of Austin, Texas, named Will*, who told me about a harrowing experience: After eating seven (of a total of 10) squares of a Rocket Bar—a “Shamanic” dose, according to its packaging—he was laying on his couch, watching Roku City float by on his TV, when the figure of the Mona Lisa emerged out of the screen like the little girl from The Ring and tried to attack him. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told me.

Looking back, Will believes he might’ve avoided the terror and intensity of that experience if there had been a clearer warning on the Rocket Bar’s packaging. “They’re very strong, and there should be way more guidance than what they say on the box…because I did underestimate it.” Rocket Bar could not be reached for comment.

I also spoke with Evan, a resident of Los Angeles who asked to have his last name omitted and whom I found through a Reddit post he had published, which was titled: “Be careful with over-the-counter ‘magic’ chocolate bars.” Last year, as a severe storm approached LA, he and his girlfriend decided they were going to ride out the ugly weather in his apartment cooking, watching movies, and nibbling on (what seemed to be) a Polka Dot bar that he’d purchased from a local smoke shop. His girlfriend didn’t have much experience with psychedelics, so they decided to play it safe and each eat just a single square. He would recall later that the chocolate had a distinctly acrid, cannabis-like flavor, contrasting with the pleasant taste of a Polka Dot bar he’d eaten in the past, but he didn’t think much of it at the time.

Soon after they sat down on the couch with their homemade vodka pasta, Evan began to feel uncomfortable. His appetite had disappeared. “All of a sudden, I started to feel like I had taken [a weed] edible that was just way too strong,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t function…I started to just feel extremely paranoid. I was having these ruminating thoughts and my heart was racing a million miles a minute.” His alarm heightened when he looked at his girlfriend: “she had red, droopy eyes, like she [had been] taking bong rips for the last hour.”

Evan never found out if the chocolate they ate that evening was laced with THC, 4-AcO, or something else, but he’s confident that it was not psilocybin. “It’s really kinda fucked with me to this day,” he told me. “There’s just an extreme discomfort that comes when you set out for a drug experience that you’re familiar with, and [it ends up being] something that is completely unexpected…you should know what you’re getting into.”

It’s easy to giggle at stories of people getting accidentally too high (Evan’s story will resonate with just about anybody who’s dabbled incautiously with THC edibles), but accounts like these underscore a real danger presented by the underground mushroom market. There are a growing number of legal alternatives—including retreats abroad, ketamine clinics, and facilitated psilocybin sessions in Oregon, and, soon, Colorado—but these are prohibitively expensive for most. An “individual ketamine journey” from Nushama, a ketamine-assisted therapy clinic based in Manhattan, costs $850, with preparation and integration sessions included. A guided session at a licensed psilocybin clinic in Oregon, meanwhile, costs $3,500. 

In a clinical setting, psilocybin experiences are monitored closely by trained therapists who have the skills, and if necessary the pharmaceutical means, to help subjects navigate a challenging trip, and later to analyze, or “integrate,” the experience. Without professional support, strong psychedelic experiences can exacerbate existing mental health conditions, or trigger latent ones. As a general rule, researchers recruiting subjects for studies involving psychedelics screen out applicants who have been diagnosed with or are genetically predisposed to serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. But in the underground market, the burden of responsibility falls on manufacturers and distributors to protect the health of their customers. Or not.

READ: You Can Buy “Legal Shrooms” On the Venice Beach Boardwalk

My search for mushroom products across New York City, which often felt more like shopping for a bottle of wine than for a Schedule 1 drug, left me feeling confused about psilocybin’s legal status. Surely, I began to think to myself, something that’s being pedaled this openly can’t be fully criminalized—or at least not very high on local law enforcement’s list of priorities. But when I approached a group of NYPD officers one brilliantly beautiful day this past fall in the West Village—another area that has a particularly high number of shops selling Polka Dot bars and other mushroom-laced products—I was told, in a gruff New York accent that was (understandably) thick with suspicion, that psilocybin was in fact strictly illegal and that the department had zero tolerance for the substance being sold on the street. I thanked them and could feel their eyes on me as I walked away.

Shortly afterwards, I strolled over to the nearby Washington Square Park, an iconic spot where throngs of tourists can be found mingling with a colorful assortment of local eccentrics; picture a mini Burning Man dropped into the center of Lower Manhattan. I’d seen psychedelic mushrooms being sold openly here before, out of a large glass jar, and I wanted to try my luck again. First, though, I decided to approach two NYC Department of Parks and Recreation’s officers, easily identifiable with their dark green uniforms, and ask them if they’d ever seen mushrooms being sold in the park. They assured me they hadn’t.

Less than ten minutes later, while strolling around the park’s central fountain, I was offered mushrooms by two men who had set up a small stand in plain view of the dozens of people milling about. After I politely declined, one of them handed me a business card and told me to call him if I ever changed my mind.

This seemingly sudden “shroom boom” in the city isn’t just a result of the recent hype around the psychedelic industry. New York City’s underground mushroom market has also blossomed alongside and in direct response to the sudden growth of the city’s cannabis market. Stroll through just about any neighborhood in the city these days, including posher areas like SoHo and Williamsburg, and you’re virtually guaranteed to see and smell an abundance of weed. 

While New York State legalized the sale of recreational cannabis in early 2021, vendors are theoretically supposed to obtain a license from the state’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM). The vast majority of cannabis shops that are currently operating in New York City have flouted this requirement. “Most of the [cannabis] stores open now—and there are thousands—are not legally allowed to operate,” New York State Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal told me. “It’s been a huge problem.” 

Sparked by the sudden opening of the legal cannabis market, a throng of opportunists set up shop before the state was able to get its licensing and oversight system in place. “It was a big failure,” Rosenthal says. “A huge failure…It just got out of control so quickly that it’s proving hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”

Now the state is playing catch-up, trying to shut down the growing number of illegal cannabis shops. According to Rosenthal, this effort has been “a tug-of-war between different governmental entities,” the product of a general lack of clarity around who, exactly, has the authority to accost and prosecute the owners of these businesses.. Meanwhile, they’ve been spreading like spores in the wind. Further complicating matters, Rosenthal tells me, is the fact that the OCM is chronically understaffed. In the OCM’s 2022 annual report, New York Governor Kathy Hochul compared getting the agency up and running to building a plane and flying it at the same time. 

On top of that, the city is now having to contend with the expanding sale of psilocybin products. Occasionally, a shop—like Andersen’s in late 2022—will be raided, but such incidents appear to be rare, based on my interviews with stakeholders in the underground. (The NYPD could not be reached to comment on the scale of these raids in recent years.) For the time being, the pace at which new unlicensed vendors are cropping up is outpacing the rate at which law enforcement has been able to shut them down.

This hydra-like problem can be traced back to the rotten core of drug prohibition itself, says Vince Sliwoski, an attorney based in Portland, Oregon who specializes in cannabis law. “Cities and municipalities are in a very difficult position trying to regulate something…that the feds are continuing to prohibit; I think that’s the absolute root of the problem,” he told me. “A place like New York City absolutely has its work cut out for it, and good luck, and they will fail—until federal prohibition ends.”

In January of last year, Rosenthal helped to introduce a bill aimed at legalizing some psychedelics for people in New York State who are 21 and older. The legislation, bill A114, points to similar decriminalization and legalization efforts that have recently been made in jurisdictions across the US—including Oakland and Ann Arbor, Michigan—and argues that “the continued criminalization of the use of [psychedelics] puts New Yorkers at unnecessary risk of incarceration and denies access to people who are desperate for their salutary effects.” If passed, the bill “would legalize the possession, use, cultivation and gifting or exchange of certain naturally-occurring substances”—specifically DMT, ibogaine, mescaline, psilocybin, and psilocin—“while offering protections to adults who may choose to use them.” The bill would not legalize the sale of psychedelics throughout the state.

At the time of this writing, bill A114 is currently in the Health Committee in the New York State Assembly. Rosenthal hopes that it will be moved out of the Committee in the Assembly’s current session.

READ: There’s Now A Way To Stay In DMT Space Longer

New York City is just one microcosm in a much broader underground psychedelics market. Numerous posts, like Evan’s, can be found on Reddit of people from various cities providing each other with intel around where to purchase mushroom candy products, advice around how to use them safely, and cautionary tales about counterfeits. “It’s killing me that instead of legalization and proper regulation, we’re getting sketchy, seemingly legal options with seemingly no regulation,” one user wrote in the subreddit for Greensboro, North Carolina in a thread about “Amanita Muscaria extract gummies floating around local smoke shops.” Evan, the LA resident, told me that “every single smoke shop” in that city “for the most part has some kind of [ostensibly psychedelic] product.”

Even in some parts of the country where mushroom candies aren’t being widely sold, interest in mushrooms themselves is rapidly growing. An anonymous source in New Mexico who works as a psychedelic mushroom cultivator, for example, told me that while psychedelics-laced candies are less prevalent in his area, seemingly “every frat house, every person and their uncle is growing mushrooms here.”

Then there’s all the varied ways in which the psychedelic market—from products to services—is unfolding in cities and states that have enacted some form of decriminalization or legalization. More than a dozen cities have made the possession of some psychedelics a low law enforcement priority, but that doesn’t allow for sales—still, companies are alleging that the reform puts them in a legal “gray area.”

Psychedelic-laced candies are a less common sight in Denver, Colorado, for example, which in 2019 became the first city in the US to make psilocybin a low law enforcement priority. Three years later, Colorado decriminalized the use of certain psychedelics statewide and paved the way for the establishment of facilitated psilocybin sessions for people over the age of 21. According to Shannon Donnelly, affiliate professor of cannabis at Metropolitan State University of Denver, locals “feel like their access points [to psilocybin] have skyrocketed,” but the situation “isn’t like New York where you can stop in a bodega…[and] you’re not going to be able to find it in licensed dispensaries.” And due to the language of Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act, which does not decriminalize the manufacturing of products with psilocybin, Donnelly says that the market in Denver is dominated mostly by raw, dried mushrooms. 

Andersen was incarcerated for three days. The press had picked up on the story during that time, and his bank accounts and credit cards had been frozen. “I just had to start rebuilding,” he told me. “It’s been a little bit of an uphill walk trying to get back on my feet…I can’t even get a fucking Discover credit card.”

His much-feared return to jail, though, did not come to pass. With the help of a lawyer whom he knew through his connections in the cannabis industry, and also thanks to letters attesting to his character written to the court by family members, Andersen was eventually let off with a disorderly conduct charge, a requirement to complete 60 hours of community service, and two years of probation. 

One week after his release, he asked his girlfriend to marry him. The two of them, along with her daughter, were vacationing in Oahu, and he proposed on one of the idyllic beaches where the TV show Lost had been filmed. She said “yes”—and a photographer took photos of them hitting a dab rig together.

Over the course of the following months, Andersen got to work setting up a new business: a printing and design company that partners with cannabis vendors. This ancillary business, he says, is an opportunity that he’d long overlooked: “During the Gold Rush, the people that got rich are the ones who sold the picks and the shovels,” he says. 

Today, Andersen looks back on his arrest and his brief but terrifying stint in jail as a necessary wake-up call that placed him on a happier, more sustainable path. “I see this as a blessing,” he told me during our most recent conversation, “because now I’m on the other side of the fence…[and] I’m still a part of the industry that I love.”

I asked him if, after everything he’d been through, there were any words of advice he’d like to offer the many brands and individuals out there that are still selling psychedelic candy products on the underground market. “Keep the kids safe, educate people as best you can, and treat it like what it is: it’s a plant medicine,” he said. “It can be used recreationally, but [we need to] maintain the conversation on wellness and taking care of our minds.”

This article was reported with support from the Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.

*Names have been changed for anonymity

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