Vancouver’s One-Of-A-Kind Mushroom Shop
In the midst of mushroom shop vancouver troubled downtown junkie district, a one-of-a-kind shop calls itself Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary and sells mushrooms, coca leaf (the plant from which cocaine is made); kratom (a stimulant extracted from a Southeast Asian evergreen tree); peyote (a cactus that contains the hallucinogen mescaline); and LSD, or acid. These substances are all illegal in Canada, and the shop is one of nine that have opened over the past two years and still openly sell them in defiance of government policy.
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The shop carries dried psilocybin mushrooms, infused psilocybin-based teas and chocolates, and a curated selection of functional mushroom products, like powders, shake and coffee mixes, and tinctures from reishi, lion’s mane, and cordyceps. It also carries an array of books on the subject, including “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide,” by David Paul Kauffman, and offers consultations to help new users navigate their experience.
Larsen isn’t new to pushing boundaries; he ran one of Vancouver’s early cannabis dispensaries, which the city forced him to close in 2015 after he began selling psilocybin-based psychedelics and other drugs. But he believes his shop and others like it will spur the federal government to legalize psilocybin, which is currently a Schedule III drug alongside heroin and methamphetamine in Canada.
Health Canada has started granting legal exemptions for the drug in recent years, allowing people nearing end of life to use it and health practitioners to be trained in guiding patients through therapeutic trips. But it won’t be long before natural substances like psilocybin and peyote gain fully decriminalized or even legal status in Canada, too.
