Magic Mushroom store set to open in Montreal despite warnings from the city

A magic mushroom dispensary chain will open in downtown Montreal Tuesday, despite warnings from the city, as the sale and production of the drug is illegal.

The chain is called FunGuyz and currently operates 11 stores throughout Ontario which are tolerated in the province, but some have already been raided by police and temporarily shut down by local authorities.

Owner of FunGuyz, Edgar Gorbans, in a mushroom costume.

“What we’re doing is illegal, it’s an act of disobedience,” says Edgar Gorbans, owner of FunGuyz, who did an interview with CityNews in a mushroom costume, to protect his identity for fear of repercussions. “And we’re trying to speed up the process of legalizing psilocybin. And in order to do that is to collect the amount of charges in order to process through the courts a lot faster, instead of doing it without legal charges.”

“We respect the law, we respect the government,” he said. “It’s just something that we have to do on behalf of ourselves as people.”

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“There’s a tolerance, but [police] will probably seize stock and make accusations. But that’s what the FunGuyz want. They want to challenge the courts and the justice system by pleading that, you know, the government doesn’t give access to something that can help,” says Jean-Sébastien Fallu, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s School of Psychoeducation.

The opening of the Magic Mushroom store in Montreal as well as Ontario was predictable and inevitable, according to Fallu. “Magic mushrooms regulation is following the same path as cannabis did with compassion clubs, like therapeutic or medical use, legalization, and then non-medical or recreational market legalization.”

The new store is located on Ontario Street East and Avenue Goulet in the Village and offers various magic mushrooms and microdosing products with the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin, all of which remains illegal in Canada, but Fallu says while rare “medical exemptions are possible within the law.”

“Psilocybin has some medical benefits, usually when a substance has medical benefits, it changes the social acceptability and it’s the first step towards legalization,” said Fallu. “I know also that magic mushrooms or psilocybin is difficult to access legally and there are benefits. There’s the special access program from Health Canada that allows physicians to ask to use it with clients for therapy.

“It’s very hard to gain access with 19 practitioners in all of Canada when there’s about 40 million people in Canada, so it’s unfair,” said Gorbans.

Gorbans is also advocating for legalizing magic mushrooms for himself.

“It helped me with a lot of mental problems that I was going through, it changed my life like many others throughout Canada and it’s something that we have to do,” he said.

The long-term effects of using the hallucinogens are still uncertain, but those who promote the product say its main hallucinogenic compound, psilocybin, is effective in the treatment of mental health challenges. “There is medical use, therapeutic use for helping…depression, anxiety, stress or even other addictions,” says Fallu.

According to the Health Canada website, while clinical trials with psilocybin have shown promising results, “at this time, there are no approved therapeutic products containing psilocybin in Canada or elsewhere.”

The Montreal police tells CityNews in a statement: “The retail sale of magic mushrooms and derivatives of their active substance, psilocybin, is regulated by the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). As this drug is prohibited under Schedule III of the CDSA, the SPVM is entitled to apply the regulation as it is set out in the Criminal Code if offenses were to be committed.”

In a statement from the office of Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, the administration said: “From a public health perspective, decriminalizing simple possession of drugs for personal use saves lives through harm reduction. This is also a position that is shared by Montreal, while a statement to this effect was adopted by the city council. However, despite the strong position of our administration regarding the decriminalization of simple drug possession, the sale of psilocybin remains illegal and the SPVM will therefore continue to apply the Act.”

“They have a job to do, we have a job to do,” said Gorbans. “It’s not a drug, I look at it as medication like all the other pharmaceutical prescribed medications that they are.”

A second Quebec store is set to open next week in Laval, just north of Montreal.

“We’re going to be doing the constitutional challenge and we’re going to take it to the next level,” he said.