Interview With Ontario's First Shroom Shop
The Golden Teacher's anonymous owner talks to us.
The Golden Teacher was Ontario’s first magic mushroom dispensary, opening its doors in January 2022 in the nation’s capital, Ottawa. As of this writing, they are being monitored by the police, who have started sending notes to their landlord about criminal activity, forcing them to change day-to-day operations to a pickup or delivery model rather than a comfortable walk-in shop. Stay tuned for updates and check out the store here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Shroomtown
Tell me about the store. Why did you decide to open in the first place?
Owner
Well, I had really positive experiences with microdosing.
I was doing a house arrest stay. Things were getting a little bleak, you know, losing the schedule. And the only thing that I was really averse to was taking medication like antidepressants. I didn't want to turn to anything pharmaceutical like that.
So, a friend of mine got me on to this idea of trying to microdose LSD, and I tried it.
I was also in a breakup because of the charges and the house arrest; all that stuff was coming together. [Microdosing LSD] completely flipped my perspective on everything I was looking at.
It didn't change anything. It didn’t chemically change how I felt or make me feel better. It gave me the opportunity to look at the same problems and see them in a different light.
That was huge for me, but it took years before I thought it could actually be something that could be marketed to others. Funny enough, I was at my brother's house, and he had that Paul Stamets Netflix documentary, Fantastic Fungi, on. I was watching it with them, just in passing. They were talking about this mycelium network and all this stuff working together. And it's really interesting, but I didn't expect them to pivot mid-documentary to talking about psychedelic mushrooms.
My mind just went, wow, I’ve been [in the] black market before. I've watched what happened with the weed stores. It just clicked. I went, like, this is gonna be the next socially acceptable thing; it's gonna be the next thing.
And honestly, I called a real estate friend. I started looking right away. Our concept is the only one with functional mushrooms, I believe.
Shroomtown
Yeah, you're the only ones that are offering that at the storefront level, which is cool. I love how the store is split up into “Behind the Counter” and then the functional stuff
Owner
We're trying to be a mushroom-based wellness store where the message is that all these mushrooms have benefits when working together.
Not all of them are actually even psychoactive, and the ones that are, we want to give you guidance on them, and that's why they’re behind the counter— the same way it would be in a pharmacy.
Shroomtown
Yeah, you treat it like medicine. You keep it behind the counter, and the people who come ask for it can get it, but they might have some questions about it.
Owner
Talk to the pharmacist, so to speak, you know what I mean?
[The movie] talked about all these things and how they can benefit you.
I find it a very interesting way to walk people into something that was ultimately scary for many people. Psychedelic mushrooms are scary for people.
I think my first time doing shrooms, I took an eighth. I was losing my mind. I was probably in grade nine or something. But that's the way that it was available. You weren't gonna get it in a microdose pill.
Shroomtown
You were just gonna get a Ziploc baggie full of it from your friend's brother. And then kind of hope for the best.
Owner
With no guidance! You were going to eat like crazy! It was like, who could eat them all?
We didn't really look at mushrooms as drugs. We looked at them as kind of a fun thing to do.
Shroomtown
You just looked at it as a goofy way to have fun.
Owner
It was kind of a roller coaster.
[Mushrooms] can really go based on where you're mentally and where your mind is. You can go for a ride if you're taking a lot of psilocybin. There are definitely beneficial uses, and you’ll hear people say, "Oh, I did that. I do that once a year,” that’s kind of the way you want to do it — a trip every once in a while. Shake up that perspective, like really ruffle the leaves, you know? You're not stuck on those cars, neural pathways that you've been taking for, really, forever.
Traditionally, we only thought of mushrooms as a big dose, but continuously taking microdoses is a [relatively] newer concept.
We wanted to mainstream the benefits for everyone, which was one reason we didn't design a store with blacklight posters and spray-painted mushrooms, you know? We wanted it to be like, “See? You’re not going to your brother’s friend’s house to buy mushrooms.”
Shroomtown
You wanted to feel more legitimate. I think having a retail space like yours, which is so clean, nice, and welcoming, removes much of that fear from people who may be new to it.
It also opens up an accessibility portal for people who might have apprehension. Maybe they’ll feel more at home.
Owner
It’s all about comfortability and seeing something [differently] that was once brought to you as a really scary thing. So many people out there need perspective shifts and are turning to pharmaceuticals.
You know, my mom would try it.
Shroomtown
Really?
Owner
She recently told me she worries, but it's a beautiful thing [I] did.
Shroomtown
That's awesome.
Owner
You know, a sixty-year-old woman can recognize that, and she definitely would have been one of the ones not doing the shrooms in her day.
And now it's just like, Oh, I heard about this on Facebook.
Shroomtown
Have you noticed many older people, older than 35, 40-plus, coming into the store?
Owner
We have a huge baby boomer demographic. It's almost the majority of our demographic, which is a huge success for me.
We put a lot of effort into branding the items and everything down to a strain or word on the shelves. It's all been really thought through.
We put so much effort into getting that comfortability because we were the first ones and had to make it approachable. We're in the capital city. Unfortunately, it's only recently even become an issue when it's like maybe our third or fourth time being on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen, and there are like seven stores now, and it just keeps going and going and going. But it's part of the movement, I guess.
Shroomtown
So, you opened in December 2021, if I'm correct.
Owner
I call it January. I think I was in there getting the internet hooked up on Christmas Day, so basically, we call it the beginning of January 2022.
Shroomtown
And then the next store [Shroomyz] in Ottawa opened in May 2022. So you guys paved the path in the city.
Do you think that other stores and other people saw what you were doing and that, like, you could, basically, and they started wanting to open stores up, too?
Owner
Definitely, I mean, without approaching, like, vanity level? Definitely, for sure.
When I first reached out to a real estate agent, I explained my thought process: That it wasn't just going to be a dispensary; it was going to be a mushroom wellness store with all these other stores. At that point, I had already talked to Forage Hyperfoods, which is a cool company based out of Carleton Place, a functional mushroom brand.
We already had them on board, pre-opening, so we knew we could do a functional medicine side. So I had to explain it [to the real estate agent].
The first place that I wanted to be called me back, and he told me that there's a particular real estate agent for this particular spot who said that we are the fifth group to approach him with a mushroom dispensary about this location in the last few months.
Shroomtown
Oh my god.
Owner
And this was November or October 2021.
So this was the choice: Either I give up or I find a place.
So now we’re open, and not only first, but we set the bar extremely high. I do believe we did that.
I’m rarely in the store. I might be in the store to drop something off, and I've heard multiple people kind of singing praises, talking about how fun this one, that one was.
Someone once said, “I went to another store, and it almost felt criminal in a way, and I know this is also criminal, but you know what I mean? You had to ring a bell and get through a bar or something like it still didn’t feel the way you guys presented it,” and just ended it with, “Anyways, I'm not going anywhere else.”
We put the bar high, for sure.
We had to jump on quickly because I realized that there were other people already thinking about this.
That made me put the gas on and want to be first. I also think it made it easier to convince landlords to let you in once you could use us as an example.
Shroomtown
It's super interesting that people were already trying to get into that space. Talk to me about the branding of The Golden Teacher. Your branding is so strong; the store looks super cute. You were telling me before that you came up with all the branding?
Owner
So I don't want to put it like that. I think, you know, you have to like put people together like a little team of people that are like the absolute strongest in their areas.
That's something that I'm good at overall: choosing who's going where.
I'm good at choosing a direction, and I'm really detailed, and I have the vision, but I'm working really closely with, for example, the designer. The graphic designer and I might have spent eight hours some days on the phone together. It’s just constant, you know, coming up with all these ideas.
I'm not drawing it, but I’m very involved in it.
We're gonna keep tweaking it. And it's painstaking sometimes, but I think there's a way to do this: make it cute, approachable, and fun. We created a voice for the brand that's still intelligent, but it's kind of cheeky and funny at the same time.
We put a lot of little details. I read all the packaging, and make sure to write something where you're not expecting anything funny, and it hits.
Shroomtown
The marketing is really good. The voice is really unique, and even the names of the products, you can tell that there's thought and effort behind them. For example, the Super Psil-ly stuff.
Owner
Oh yeah, Super Psil-ly— I'm trying to trademark that.
I would honestly say that we put so much more thought than the other stores.
Shroomtown
On the note of the other stores, do you ever interact with them at all, or not really?
Owner
We've actually started to talk recently.
So the police have contacted the owners of [our] building with a letter saying there's alleged criminal activity and to do something about it.
Our landlord seems to be the only one worried right now. We're working on that. So that's a new development, but I'm not saying the store is closed. I'm saying that we're fighting our way back into this.
Following this letter, within 48 hours it coming in, our landlord came in, and he’s kind of freaking out. I started getting messages like, “Hey, my friend owns this other store like yours, and he wants to talk. Is that okay?”
I said, “Yeah, yeah. You know, fine, let's talk.”
We started to talk a bit [with the other stores] to share information.
I talked to one woman, and she said, “You know what? We respect you guys. You guys were first, the first to open and you're the first to get shut down. It's not good for us. Right? It's all the same movement,” and I was pretty warm and accepting to that. It was sweet, you know? We're rooting for you to win; we’ll share info. Let's share strategies. We're just starting to talk in the last week or so. I got off the phone with another store owner 20 minutes ago.
Shroomtown
That’s cool. I also agree with that sentiment; I think it is like a collective goal. I know here in Toronto, some of the stores do talk to each other, especially when there's kind of like a string of raids happening; people will visit each other.
Owner
We don't think we should be in trouble for this. We don't want anybody else in trouble for this. That doesn't make sense. Right? It is all the movement. I would only get mad that we put so much more effort in; that's my only thing, but ultimately, that is the fact that we're all here, and they see us, and they go, “Oh, me too. I'm down. Let's do this.” I like it.
I've never been to another store, but I’ve heard about them— Just spray-painted mushrooms on that on the brick wall. It's really tacky. But again, that's just my [aesthetic] opinion. I think they're making it approachable. And in that sense, it could be great for the movement as if, let's say, if they all looked like our store— but at the same time, it is inevitably changing the public's opinion.
Shroomtown
Yeah, because seeing them so much changes people and their minds. In one of my articles about it, I talked about how people in Toronto just walk past the shroom shops, and they treat it like it's just like an LCBO [an alcohol store in Ontario, Canada] or like another weed store. And maybe that's kind of the way— people shouldn’t be reacting to it.
Owner
All the stores are desensitizing people.
I mean, the first time we were in the paper— Holy shit. It was kind of scary.
But now, it's so common. It's [news] if there are raids, but other than that, people are almost starting to lose interest.
Shroomtown
Yeah, it's not about news that they're there, and people like us expect them now.
Do you think the movements can expand outside of BC and Ontario? I know there hasn’t been a lot of luck in the central provinces so far.
Owner
I think it's gonna keep going.
Shroomtown
What's your estimate, just from being actively in the space, what do you think is expected for legalization? Personally, I think it’s pretty far off.
Owner
I was gonna say I can't even speculate.
Shroomtown
Yeah, but I think that the stores are gonna keep growing. What do you think?
Owner
That they're popping up like mushrooms.
Shroomtown
Yeah, that's what I keep saying.
Owner
Everybody's turning onto it.
Sofie Mikhaylova is a psychedelics, pop culture, and travel writer, among other things. Her writing has appeared in Vice, leafie, Psychedelic Spotlight, The Washington Post, Fodor's Travel, Double Dot Magazine, and more. Find her on Instagram, her newsletter Sofieland, her podcast Sofieland, and her website.