About an hour after I left FunGuyz opening day in Montreal — the police showed up, conducted a raid, and arrested 4 people.
FunGuyz, a chain illegally selling psilocybin mushrooms, opened a Montreal location on Tuesday. FunGuyz promotes itself as a “medical dispensary” and has 12 other locations across Canada (including one in Detroit). Magic mushrooms are still illegal in Canada, except under rare exceptions granted with Special Access Programs by Health Canada — so FunGuyz owners have experience with tip-toeing the lines of legality.
Because of this illegal status, the mayor of Montreal has threatened to act if the store opened as planned. In the lead-up to the opening, Montreal mayor Valerie Plante said “Mushrooms [are] not legal in Canada so, of course, we will apply the law and Montreal police officers will be ready to act based on the law.”
And it seems the city decided to take a hard stance on Montreal’s first grey market psychedelic dispensary.
The police showed up, arrested 4 people, stock was seized, and the cool psychedelic storefront art was aggressively taken down.
It seems the FunGuyz team was prepared for this. According to reporting by CTV News, owner Edgar Gorbans said: “We’re going to try. They can’t technically shut us down, they can come in, seize our product and when their search warrant ends, we would open right back up…”
“We’re trying to provide access to psilocybin that the government can’t.”
According to Global News, the store’s spokesperson described FunGuyz as a form of protest to challenge policy on psychedelics, saying they plan to open five more locations in Quebec this summer.
And so police action was expected, as they’ve dealth with it in their other location. “We do expect the police to come in and raid us because obviously what we’re doing, it’s illegal. The idea behind everything is, are the police willing to use the taxpayers’ money for mushroom stuff?”
We can debate whether this level of police action was necessary on day one. Personally, I’ve witnessed first-hand how these “grey market” shops have helped people in need. At Vancouver’s Mushroom Dispensary
, one of the pioneering psychedelic dispensaries in Canada, I spoke to a woman who said access to psychedelics from the Hastings Street shop had been a god-send after her stroke, the only thing that had given her any serious therapeutic benefits after her stroke. There are countless stories like these.
So while increased access is something most of us would probably support — especially as governments drag their heels, leaving sometimes desperate patients in need — the prevalence of illegal dispensaries does create some potential problems.
First, there is safety. While psychedelics have been proven to be one of the safest psychotropic substances available, they should be used in a responsible manner. Do these unregulated shops provide enough guidance and support for inexperienced users? Unknown.
Then there’s the potential harm to the greater psychedelic movement if one of these shops were to be embroiled in a situation where someone has a bad outcome.
Do dispensary owners have a responsibility to current patrons and future patients?
These were the larger questions I had while leaving Quebec’s first psychedelic dispensary. But then the police showed up and turned this into just another War on Drugs story.
See this report from Global News for details on the raid.
Montreal police on Tuesday raided a store selling illegal magic mushrooms on the day it opened to the public.https://t.co/2600Fcq01h
— Global Montreal (@Global_Montreal) July 11, 2023
