Not so long ago, acquiring psilocybin mushrooms — a Schedule 1 drug in the United States — typically required a clandestine meeting with a dealer. You could grow them yourself, of course, but for that, you needed to have a thorough understanding of the cultivation and harvesting processes. These days, thanks to the miracle of the internet, you just need to open a website.
A quick Google search yields a host of websites devoted to connecting interested buyers with nearby mushroom distribution and delivery services. Shroomsnearme.com, for example, serves as an online directory where visitors can find local mushroom companies across several states.
Source: shroomsnearme.com
Other websites provide a direct-to-consumer service selling what they allege to be psychedelics-laced products –and, in some cases, dried psilocybin mushrooms. Many of the products listed in this latter category of sites seem to be trying to remain on the right side of the law by selling relatively legal variants of THC, like delta-8 (which was just outlawed in California, along with other intoxicating hemp compounds) and Amanita muscaria, an unregulated psychoactive mushroom. Others use packaging that suggests the presence of psilocybin while using language that’s difficult to parse. Ms. Mollie Cule tablets, for example, are described by one online vendor as containing “pure mushroom essence” (the name of this particular product suggests the presence of MDMA, which muddles things further).
In addition to online psilocybin directories and vendors, there are also sites that connect people to legal psilocybin services in states like Oregon, where psilocybin-assisted therapy has been legalized. Other sites are devoted to helping people find legal mushroom retreats in countries like Mexico and Costa Rica, where laws are more relaxed.
Some illicit mushroom sites seem to be basing their business models on the one originally pioneered by WeedMaps, the tech company designed to help people locate nearby cannabis businesses. Fungimaps.com, for example, connects buyers to mushroom delivery and mail-order services, as well as “dispensaries.” (The company describes itself on its website as “the WeedMaps of magic mushrooms, pairing buyers with trusted sellers who know exactly what they are selling.”)
Since its founding in 2008, WeedMaps has grown into a major operation, offering a mobile app and a SaaS platform for business owners and raking in more than $34 million in revenue last year. Such rapid growth has, of course, been enabled by the slow but steady legalization of cannabis in states across the country. Websites that offer mushroom-related services could be banking on a similar legal trajectory and payout around psilocybin, regarding themselves as claiming an early stake in what could eventually become a more widespread gold rush. (WeedMaps declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed for this story.)
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Online mushroom vendors have been on the rise for the past few years, and some of them remain in a state of perpetual rebranding, playing cat-and-mouse with law enforcement. 920 Maps, for example, describes itself on its Substack as an “online directory with a mission to make healing mushrooms accessible to all.” Its registered trademark from December 2021 has it listed under “communications services,” providing “online forums for transmission of messages among computer users concerning psilocybin, mushrooms, and herbal products.” Another one of its trademarks, this one from February 2022, describes the company as “electronic catalog services featuring mushroom, psilocybin, and herbal products.” (920Maps did not respond to requests for comment.)
The unregulated online psychedelic market presents some serious psychological risks for buyers, according to Dr. Brian Pilecki, a clinical psychologist and a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Oregon. He points out that in a clinical setting, someone who’s about to go through a guided psychedelic experience can discuss any lingering doubts or fears they might be experiencing with their therapist beforehand, which can ultimately lead to a more pleasant and productive experience — or, in some cases, to a mutual decision that a psychedelic experience might not be in the person’s best interests at that point in their life.
That’s not to say you can’t have safe and therapeutic experiences at home, with a friend, or out in nature. If you carefully create your set and setting to support such outcomes, you’ll likely have a positive experience. In fact, some people feel the clinical environment of psychedelic therapy can be too sterile for real healing. But that doesn’t negate the risks of buying substances from seedy stores or internet vendors.
Most internet vendors don’t seem to have enforceable age verification processes or comprehensive education efforts in place. “It’s very normal to have anxiety about taking a psychedelic, even if you’re experienced,” Pilecki says. “When you take something from a website, even if 1% or 2% of you is worried about it being contaminated or being unsafe in any way, that could easily be magnified during a psychedelic experience. Having any doubt [about] the environment or the situation can be seeds for paranoia, fear, or a number of adverse reactions during a psilocybin experience.”
The rise of online psilocybin services — both those that connect buyers to third-party vendors and those that sell products directly — parallels a similar surge that’s been happening in brick-and-mortar stores in cities across the US. Many smoke shops and convenience stores have begun to sell psychedelic products with labels that could be dangerously misleading. As part of a recent investigation, DoubleBlind sent 10 psychedelic edibles products — all of which were procured across Los Angeles — to an analytical chemistry lab and found that many of them contain 4-AcO-DMT, also known as psilacetin or, more colloquially, “synthetic shrooms.” While 4-AcO is considered nontoxic, some experts worry about other, more harmful chemicals that could be used during the synthesizing process, which users might also be unwittingly ingesting. Some vendors selling psychedelic gummies, mints, chocolate bars, and other products showed a concerning lack of awareness regarding the legality and potential risks associated with the recreational use of psychedelics — a situation made even more alarming by the fact that many of them failed to enforce any kind of age restrictions or quality control.
In the case of brick-and-mortar stores, the incentive to sell psychedelic-containing candy stemmed largely from a simple capitalist logic: If your competitors are selling a popular product, then you have a very clear financial incentive to do likewise. It’s also been allowed to flourish due to a relative lack of oversight from law enforcement. (The products’ ambiguous packaging makes them look less incriminating, and the legal status of 4-AcO is somewhat hazy — it’s technically illegal under the 1986 Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act, yet it’s currently not listed as a controlled substance by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and there’s some disagreement around whether or not it would even meet the criteria for being labeled as such under the Analogue Act.) More specifically, there’s been some debate around the Act’s use of the phrase “substantially similar” to categorize analogues of controlled substances.
“For one thing, the statute does not explicitly state what it means by ‘substantially similar.’ According to Andrea Golan, an attorney who specializes in the cannabis and psychedelics industries, there are three different tests used in different court circuits across the country. ‘There’s not a definitive answer to the substantial similarity question,’ she says. Based on her own analysis, Golan says that 4-AcO probably does meet the three criteria for being a Schedule 1 drug. ‘What it really reflects is how little this issue has come before the courts,’ she says. ‘There’s just not a lot of case law on [the] Analogue Act, period.’”
A similar dynamic seems to be at play behind the rise of online mushroom services. “It’s non-enforcement — that’s it, basically,” says Robert Rush, an attorney specializing in regulatory law around controlled substances, when asked how such websites could be allowed to operate on the clear web so conspicuously. “As for trying to find some way that this is legally permissible, I just don’t see it,” he says. “You’re selling a Schedule I controlled substance.”
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Rush points to a clause in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a federal law passed in 1970 that criminalized psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT and was updated in 1995 to explicitly prohibit “serving as an agent, intermediary, or other entity that causes the internet to be used to bring together a buyer and seller to engage in the dispensing of a controlled substance…”
The relative lack of federal oversight of the burgeoning online psychedelic market can always change, however. Modern psychedelic researchers, sobered by the hard lessons of their field’s initial wave of scientific study in the mid-twentieth century, which ended with the passing of the CSA, have long understood that public favor around their field is fickle. All it would take, according to some, are the careless antics of some new-age Timothy Leary or a high-profile and much-publicized bad trip to bring the whole movement to a halt for a second time.
“I worry about bad experiences that can occur, and [that] might motivate people who are more conservative to want to really lock this [research] down again,” says Pilecki, the Oregon psilocybin facilitator.
The death of “Friends” actor Matthew Perry in 2023 dampened some of the enthusiasm around ketamine’s therapeutic applications for mental health conditions, including depression and PTSD. The US Food and Drug Administration’s ongoing investigation into psychedelic-infused edibles brand Diamond Shroomz — which, according to the agency, has been the cause of at least 70 hospitalizations and potentially three deaths at the time of this writing — has also been raising public awareness about the dangers surrounding the unregulated psychedelic market.
The appearance of these blatantly over-the-radar and illegal online services resembles, in Rush’s view, the proliferation of illegal cannabis services across the country in recent years. Though cannabis remains a Schedule I substance, federal enforcement has dwindled to the point where many businesses feel safe enough to roll the dice. In New York City, where the sale of cannabis is only permitted with the licensure of a state-run agency, law enforcement has become so lax, and criminal prosecutions so rare, that thousands of illegal dispensaries have opened up in plain sight over recent years.
“People who are selling actual mushroom products or actual mushrooms online are simply agreeing to take the risk and assuming, correctly or not, that the federal government doesn’t have the resources to chase after them, fully knowing that it’s illegal and that at some point they might get shut down,” says Jodi Green, an attorney at Antithesis Law and an expert in the regulatory landscape surrounding cannabis and psychedelics. “I don’t think it’s much different from the cottage industry that’s erupted around synthetic and hemp-derived cannabinoids.” The 2018 Farm Bill, she adds, which legalized the cultivation and sale of cannabis with less than 0.3% THC, “is confusing and ambiguous, state laws are confusing and ambiguous, and companies are looking for a loophole, even if it means creating a less safe product and potentially misinforming consumers about what that product is.”
Such an environment of widespread confusion and ambiguity, she says, is a petri dish for opportunistic web-based companies looking to cash in on the burgeoning psilocybin industry. “They’re assuming they’re going to rake in a lot of profits in the meantime and that it’s going to be worth the risk.”
The bottom line is this: Until laws are passed to regulate the sale of psychedelic products — which probably won’t happen for a while, at least here in the US — vendors are going to keep using vague labels, and buyers are rarely going to have total confidence in the purity (and safety) of the products they’re ingesting. For the time being, an age-old piece of wisdom still applies to anyone looking to dabble with grey market psychedelics: know and trust your source. Also, remember that you’re buying a Schedule 1 drug — despite what online vendors might be claiming about its legality.
DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.
DoubleBlind Magazine does not encourage or condone any illegal activities, including but not limited to the use of illegal substances. We do not provide mental health, clinical, or medical services. We are not a substitute for medical, psychological, or psychiatric diagnosis, treatment, or advice. If you are in a crisis or if you or any other person may be in danger or experiencing a mental health emergency, immediately call 911 or your local emergency resources. If you are considering suicide, please call 988 to connect with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
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