Are Microdosing Cafés the Future of Psychedelic Culture?

The words “Microdose Café”, written in a giant yellow font on the awning outside a pink-colored storefront, are designed to generate attention. Plastered with ads for psychedelic shooters, mushroom elixirs, LSD, kratom, and “mind-enhancing beverages and brain tonics of all kinds,” the café door feels less like an entrance to a coffee shop and more like a portal to a trippy future and a weird afternoon.

“A lot of people come in and they're like, ‘I can't believe you do this: Do you really sell that?’” says Scout, an employee at the café in Vancouver’s hipster neighborhood Mount Pleasant.

Vancouver, an urban West Coast mecca for laid-back outdoorsy living, has replaced Amsterdam as the vanguard of the western drug legalization experiment and is perhaps the only city in the world to have more than a dozen storefronts openly selling psychedelics, with the police and local authorities generally tolerating the illegal ventures.

The psychedelic offerings on the “Microdose Shooter Menu” at the Microdose Café are as follows: LSD, psilacetin, methylcybin, 2C-B, or mal-escaline. LSD is, well, acid, so I’d be in it for a long haul even with a microdose. Psilacetin is a synthetic version of a lesser-known psychedelic drug contained within mushrooms. Methylcybin is an even more obscure mushroom analogue, which I’ve never tried. 2C-B is a popular dancefloor euphoria-inducer that tails off smoothly, whereas mal-escaline, a version of mescaline derived from certain cacti, can apparently last for as long as 16 hours.

I opt for 2C-B. Scout, who has curly hair and innumerable facial piercings, applauds me for my choice because it is also his favorite. 

“It's very relaxing if you take it in a microdose,” he tells me. “It might make you feel a little like you're on MDMA, but not in the tweaky way, just the nice way.” 

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