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Over the last year, there has been an explosion in the number of mushroom products, particularly in vape shops, said Eric Leas, an assistant professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.
“We started seeing a bunch of them popping into shops last fall,” said Leas, who runs a statewide program that monitors products that are sold in smoke shops.
At ShroomLand LA, a magic mushroom dispensary in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, business is booming.
Rod Mendez, the store manager, said the shop has been inundated with customers since it opened last year.
“We see a lot of people with muscular pains, people who have sleeping problems or even eating disorders,” Mendez said, estimating that it is selling around 400 mushroom edibles a week. “Mushroom edibles are the new vapes,” he added.
The Risk of “Magic” Mushroom Edibles
Magic Mushroom Gummies & Chocolate Bars
Mendez said that the recent FDA warning about Diamond Shruumz and Australia’s Uncle Frog mushroom gummies didn’t give the store any problems. “In the six months that I’ve been working in the store, I have never seen someone having any problems with the products regarding effects or quality or anything bad at all,” he said. All the products in the store, he said, are lab-tested and certified, with test results available to customers upon request.
Last month, Leas and others published a letter in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine calling for increased regulation of Amanita muscaria products, citing a 114% increase in Google searches related to the products.
Underscoring how recently mushroom edibles have emerged on the market, poison control centers added codes to better track cases related to the products in late 2023, said Kaitlyn Brown, the clinical managing director of America’s Poison Centers, the group that’s working with the FDA and CDC on the Diamond Shruumz investigation.
“We’re seeing them emerge where we hadn’t seen them before,” said Dr. Christopher Holstege, director of the Blue Ridge Poison Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. “The poison control centers are always the tip of the iceberg.”
Blue Ridge Poison Center has managed five cases of people who were sickened after eating mushroom edibles, all labeled as containing Amanita muscaria, since September. The cases were detailed in a report published Thursday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Four of the cases were in adults who were treated in the emergency room after they developed symptoms, including confusion, rapid heart rate, and chest pain.
Last month, the authors wrote, the poison control center also received a report of a 3-year-old who was hospitalized after having eaten two Amanita muscaria gummies. The child, whose symptoms included sleepiness and vomiting, didn’t require any treatment and was discharged after one day.
The authors were unable to identify the specific brands the people reported consuming, but they purchased and tested six similar products at gas stations and smoke shops. Four of the six products contained psilocybin or psilocin; none contained compounds found in Am
Amanita muscaria mushrooms. They were also found to contain compounds including caffeine, ephedrine, and kratom.
“I think that is dangerous ground when you’re starting to take things when you don’t know what they are,” said Michienzi, who was the lead author of the report.
Holstege said the true scope of the health risks associated with such products may be difficult to quantify, as compounds like muscimol require specialized laboratory testing that isn’t routinely available to doctors.
“I think it’s a huge problem right now that we can’t test for it, so it’s hard to know exactly how much is out there,” he said. “You’re going to be left with someone who had complications like seizures, and they got better, and they scratch their heads and aren’t sure exactly what caused it.”
The use of mitragynine in magic mushroom gummies
Some mushroom gummies were found to contain mitragynine, which interacts with adrenergic and serotonergic receptors in the central nervous system. Regular ingestion of mitragynine increases the risk of opioid dependency.
Are magic mushroom edibles safe?
Amanita muscaria mushroom gummies or chocolate bars, such as Silly Farms mushroom chocolates, do come with risks. One of the biggest, Holstege said, is the risk of seizures.
Dr. Mason Marks, a senior fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, said that while he wouldn’t recommend consuming such products, he doesn’t think banning them outright would solve the problem, either.
“It’s kind of like whack-a-mole, where if you prohibit psilacetin, then something else might crop up,” he said. “Prohibition is not the solution, but educating people about this can be quite helpful.”
He drew an analogy to delta-8 THC products, unregulated cannabinoid products that rose in popularity as a workaround to obtaining marijuana in states where it is illegal.
Marks said he would like to see minimal regulatory standards set to ensure that what’s in the product is actually what consumers are getting. He also suggested, as an extra safety step, that consumers look at the lab analyses detailing what’s in the products. While the companies typically provide those, he acknowledged that sometimes they may not always be reliable.
The rise of legal tryptamines in mushroom edibles
In addition to Amanita mushrooms, legal tryptamines are the new kid on the block and are becoming a popular ingredient in the world of magic mushroom edibles, including gummies and chocolate bars, such as Road Trip mushroom gummies, Moocah magic mushroom gummies, and Wunder mushroom gummies.
Tryptamines are a class of compounds that interact with serotonin receptors in the brain. Some tryptamines are controlled substances, but others are legal and can provide mild psychoactive effects similar to psilocybin, with unique differences.
In the case of magic mushroom edibles such as polka dot gummies and polka dot chocolate, organic magic mushroom extracts are used in place of Amanita muscaria mushrooms, offering a unique psychedelic experience in these shroom chocolate bars and gummies.