The mushroom market in Canada is growing fast. The government’s food availability release of 2021 shows that Canadians ate an average of 1.7 kilograms of mushrooms that year, up from 1.4 kilograms a decade earlier. Mushroom farms in British Columbia are expanding rapidly, too. The province now has the largest reported mushroom area, and most of that goes to Liberty Cap fields that produce large harvests of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Hundreds of people gather in these fields every autumn to pick mushrooms that they can then divide into grams or ounces and sell to others across Canada and the United States. The slender fungi are known to contain the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin. In the past, pickers risked arrest because psilocybin is a Schedule III substance under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, meaning it’s illegal to grow or sell without authorization from Health Canada. Learn more organicshroomcanada.co

The psilocybin in magic mushrooms can induce feelings of altered time and synesthesia, and cause a person to see or hear things that are not real (hallucinations). It’s also thought to have psychological effects like enhanced introspect and changes in self-perception, as well as some physiological effects like an increase in blood pressure and heart rate (Fricke et al. 2017).

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At Organic Shrooms Canada in Vancouver, a small storefront is home to a new kind of fungus business. The company’s founders have created a process to grow the mushrooms and their byproduct, called sclerotia, so that they can be sold legally as supplements. CBC took a tour of the production space at Filament Health and was shown how this process unfolds, from growing the mushrooms to putting them into capsules that can be consumed for psilocybin-assisted therapy.