What's Going On In Canada's Shroom Shops?
The openings, the closures, and the raids.
Canada has become a bit of a breeding ground for experimental and guerilla psychedelic protests and marketing, with shops selling shrooms, coca leaf, and even DMT having cropped up in waves in the last year. Since the opening of the first Ontario shop, The Golden Teacher in Ottawa, in December 2021, and the opening of Shroomyz, also in Ottawa, in May 2022, following September’s foray into Toronto (and Toronto’s first store), more and more people have taken it upon themselves to open up a magic mushroom store, and not just in downtown centres.
Of course, neither Shroomyz nor The Golden Teacher were the first — Vancouver is home to most of Canada’s first shroom shops, starting with longtime cannabis and drug reform activist and harm reduction pioneer Dana Larsen’s Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary and Coca Leaf Cafe (also featuring a kratom vending machine, for the hippies, ya know) and of course, the famed Zoomers, known for its massive mushroom strain selection that blows the rest of the competition out of the water.
But is there really competition? Can’t we all just get along? And how are these stores even staying open?
FunGuyz, perhaps the most financially backed chain in the game, has 13 locations spread out across Ontario (including two that are now shut down), one in Montreal (that constantly hangs between being open and closed), and one, apparently, in Detroit, somehow, as well as their own line of products. But we won’t get into America’s shroom shops — that’s a story for another time.
Shroomyz, the other big chain-based player in Canada, has more than four locations, though it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which are open when, as raids happen and some get shut down, including one in Hamilton, Ontario that got raided in July 2023 and is seemingly frequently closed or shut down due to the police involvement there. Unlike in metro Vancouver or downtown Toronto (we’ll get into that a bit later in the article), Hamilton’s police care a bit more, and other mushroom shops like The Mushroom Cabinet have faced a similar fate (though apparently, it’s since reopened).
On September 6th, 2023, a Shroomyz location in Barrie, Ontario, was hit with a stolen vehicle in the middle of the night. Apparently, the car had been stolen from Toronto the day before. This on its own is a bit odd: Somebody went out of their way to steal a car, drive it all the way from Toronto to Barrie (no small feat— the journey takes about two hours from the downtown core), find only one of Barrie’s magic mushroom shops, and crash into it, afterwards, abandoning the vehicle. At the time of this writing, no arrests have been made.
If this was an attack on psilocybin stores in general, why wasn’t the other one hit? Despite a police raid on their Barrie location in June 2023 (and two charges brought against staff members), FunGuyz was operating just fine in the city, and no stolen car was hitting their shop. And if it was an accident, it just seems like an oddly coincidental one.
But let me shuffle back to FunGuyz and its role as Ontario’s main mushroom shop chain. Rumours are whispered around the city in the underground scene about the company, where their money comes from, and the product itself. With their large number of storefronts and constant raids, it’s no wonder people are curious. Who are the fun guyz? And where did they come from?
The first FunGuyz store in Toronto opened up at 1275 Queen Street West in January 2023. It was then followed by an east end location and a Danforth Avenue location, then Spadina and all the others in quick succession. My understanding is that their Niagara Falls location was actually the first one. The Danforth location used to operate as a separate franchise under the FunGuyz branding before the owners sold it back to FunGuyz and left the business. In short, all 15 FunGuyz stores opened up in 2023, making their growth trajectory extremely rapid.
FunGuyz has recently expanded even beyond psilocybin products, now selling DMT-N,N and 5-MeO-DMT vape pens on their online store. This comes with its own set of issues: Unlike Dana Larsen’s Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary, which comes with a whole pamphlet of information on harm reduction and a website that describes, in detail, the crucial differences between DMT and 5-MeO, FunGuyz’s site just has the same copy for both pens, and sells these substances as a quick and easy trip to space: “The effects are felt within seconds and last approximately 30 minutes, making DMT a perfect and reliable way to ease stress and quickly get back to business.”
Sure. Sounds about right. Let me just turn my brain inside out on my lunch break and head back into the office. You got it.
Like with Shroomyz, it can be difficult, even more so than Shroomyz, to keep up with FunGuyz’s expansions and shutdowns. With so many storefronts and new ones opening up every month or so, their presence is very much known across Ontario — so much so that they even have their own Wikipedia page now. They are apparently planning to open a new store in Laval, Quebec, but this will likely face similar issues to their Montreal location.
The FunGuyz team has especially faced a lot of issues when attempting to expand out of Ontario into Quebec. Since the Montreal store’s opening in July 2023, they’ve been raided at least three times, including their first raid four hours after their grand opening. But it’s not just their Montreal location that’s getting hit— to my knowledge, their Danforth and Spadina locations in Toronto as well as their St. Thomas, Ontario spot have also been the target of police raids, and one of their earliest stores in Bradford ended up being shut down, much like their Wasaga Beach location, earlier this year. At every raid, at least one or two staff members get arrested. In August 2023, a raid at their St. Catherine’s location led to another arrest. A FunGuyz spokesperson has said that anyone who is arrested will be provided with "the best lawyers in the country."
Let’s be clear here: Since the shops are illegal, raids do happen, oftentimes more frequently outside of the downtown city cores, with a string of raids hitting southwestern Ontario over the summer. The stores, however, seem to react to them passively; when the first Shroomyz raid happened in November 2022, they reopened the next day and opened up a second downtown Toronto location the next month. For the most part, though, the Toronto police seem to just, well, have better things to do. To quote this Global News article, “Ottawa-based lawyer Eugene Oscapella, who specializes in drug policy, told Global News that police have discretion over what to pursue and what to leave, and may have more pressing issues to place their resources.
“There are huge issues out there — is going after magic mushroom shops an effective use of police time?” he said.”
Vancouver’s police have said, in simple terms, that the mushroom shops are not their priority right now, hence the expansion and the growth of more shops. Constable Tania Visintin said that the police will “continue to target violent and organized criminals who produce and traffic harmful opioids, which fuel gang violence and contribute to the ongoing health crisis of illicit drug deaths,” which a lot of people took to mean that for now, they don’t care, and they can choose to operate their shroom shops until the police look up.
Some Toronto shops play nicely with others, attempting to warn fellow shopkeepers of past raids and the plainclothes officers who apparently execute them. If you’re working in a shroom shop or are operating one, consider this a passed-on warning: Word on the street is that police are still raiding shops in Toronto, although apparently not as frequently as in other cities. Looks like the preferred procedure is to send a casually dressed officer in to initiate a purchase before the whole crew busts in afterwards. That’s just what I’ve heard; I am not the source.
Speaking of legal issues, it seems a few people still think these mushroom shops are operating in a “grey area” of the law, a thought as dangerous as it is untrue. In my interview with Toronto lawyer Marc Goldgrub on my Sofieland podcast, he tells me of a time he went into a mushroom shop in Parkdale, a west-end neighbourhood in Toronto, to talk to the staff, only to be told, to his surprise, that this staff member did not think he could (or would) get arrested, and did not believe that psilocybin was illegal in Canada. I’ll spare you the legal jargon: It absolutely is, and these shops do not operate in any “grey area” of the law — what they are doing is criminal activity, and this is why raids often lead to charges. Yes, the charges sometimes get dropped, but it’s borderline irresponsible to hire staff to work at illegal dispensaries and not, at the very least, warn them of the nature and the risks of the job.
But even if the staff at some of these shops don’t know about the law, do they know about shrooms?
Reviews on Reddit claim the staff at some of the FunGuyz stores are unknowledgeable about the product. Similarly, some Reddit users also claim that the mushrooms at Shroomyz are low-quality compared to what you can get online from long-serving retailers like ShroomBros. In an interview I did with a Shroomyz manager a while ago, he told me that he doesn’t think their staff need to have experience with the product in order to sell it.
A former Shroomyz partner (now operating a different store in downtown Toronto) told me that he left Shroomyz because ethics on product and staffing became a dividing factor, with, apparently, two of the owners willing to compromise on quality and becoming too driven by money. Eventually, things reached a boiling point, and the partner left to open up their own store, which they claim gives staff full training and legal advice, and all staff members have experience with the product.
In addition to Canada’s main chain mushroom shops, there are a handful of indie shops that operate on their own. In Ottawa, The Golden Teacher (and, notably, Ontario’s first-ever magic mushroom dispensary) is a favoured stop, with beautiful branding and functional products available in-store and online in addition to psilocybin products. Jordan Armstrong, the face of the shop, gives many public interviews and considers the store a form of protest.
DayTrip and Mush Luv are two well-known shops in the downtown Toronto scene, and recently, Shroom City and Mush Mush have opened their doors on Spadina Avenue.
Outside of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, though, is there much of a mushroom scene?
Magic Mush, a small chain with one location each in Toronto and Ottawa, opened up a Winnipeg shop in May 2023, only to be promptly raided and shut down. In an interview with Global News, the anonymous manager spilled some of the same incorrect information we’ve been hearing from other sources— that psilocybin shops are a “grey area” and “allowed” to operate in Ontario and BC. Again, it’s important to reiterate this: The shops are illegal, but law enforcement is simply choosing not to go after them so much.
So far, there seems to be no end in sight. In a phone interview I did with Dana Larsen a few months back, he told me he loved the shops, and shared a prediction, estimating that in the next two years, there will be 100 shops across Canada. Seems like a high number, but I think I believe him, especially if FunGuyz and Shroomyz take their business models across the country. Raids or not, they keep on going. If Ontario is a case study, soon mushroom shops will be popping up all over Canada like, well, mushrooms.
Note: For a living list of all magic mushroom dispensaries in Canada, check out my post on Medium here, updated as frequently as I get news about the shops.
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.