The Psychedelic Turf Wars Have Officially Begun

Bullets sprayed a wall-sized menu advertising “astral” magic mushroom chocolate bars at a FunGuyz store in Toronto back in May. Luckily, no staff members were standing in front of it at the time of the shooting. The still-unexplained attack was one of the first in a string of unresolved acts of violence this past summer targeting gray-market psychedelic dispensaries around Canada’s most populous city. 

The shooting was one of seven serious incidents at mushroom shops in Toronto that week. “I heard about 10 to 12 [shots], ‘bang, bang, bang,’ and I was thinking it was early Victoria Day fireworks,” one local business owner told CBC. For locals, Toronto’s psychedelic boom has come with what feels like a gangster movie subplot.

But who is behind the shooting: Drug gangs peeved at mushroom dispensaries eating into their profits? Anti-drugs locals who don’t want psychedelics being sold on their doorsteps? Or is it mushroom shop owners caught in an unseemly turf war?

The violence continued through the summer. In July, a Shroomyz store north of Toronto caught fire in what police called an alleged arson attack, just after reopening from a previous blaze. The next month, another Shroomyz dispensary, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, was set aflame in another suspected arson, before a pickup truck smashed into the same shopfront a week later in a hit-and-run. Days following, a vehicle crashed through the window at another of the chain’s locations. 

Not long after that, a Mushroom Land store just outside of the city was also struck by a car, causing a gas leak and an evacuation. “It’s been a bad trip for magic mushroom dispensaries lately,” local media reported.

The owners of Toronto’s cash-only mushrooms dispensaries — there are well over a dozen across the city — remain a mystery. Store staffers, let’s call them “triptenders,” usually have no idea who is in charge, even as they rake in over CA$5,000 on busy days. The owners might only communicate over text using pseudonyms to provide instructions, according to a source who wishes to remain anonymous. They say that during some of the attacks, triptenders were threatened at knife- and gun-point by crooks and urged to close the premises, otherwise there would be hell to pay. The source did not wish to comment further. And none of the dispensaries in question returned requests for comment.

While consuming psychedelic mushrooms is shown to have benefits for psychological well-being, the proliferation of dispensaries across Toronto has seemingly amounted to a net negative thus far for local communities. And the attacks raise some fundamental questions about the nature of a mushroom trip. The mushroom is supposedly meant to dissolve egos, not incite turf wars — yet some in Toronto’s gray market have turned the scene into something of a battleground. 

Can a five-hour-long journey make a pacifist an egomaniac? Can it convert a narcissist into a selfless person who can feel empathy? Might it leave a psychonaut with paranoid— even homicidal — delusions? Doubtful, probably not, and yes! Either way, psilocybin mushrooms are powerful non-specific amplifiers, according to Stanislav Grof, meaning they magnify whatever is going on in the psyche. Perhaps criminals should not be in control of them.

“These attacks are clearly coordinated and tied to organized crime,” says John Gilchrist, communications director at Therapsil, a non-profit campaigning for legal access to psilocybin. “We have seen cars driven into shops, arson, and gunfire, and the violence keeps escalating.”

Gilchrist says the Canadian federal government “tells patients to seek legal access to these substances, but the pathway is so broken that it pushes many toward unregulated storefronts where they risk bullets or a truck coming through the door.” Federal leaders should “step up and regulate now, before someone is seriously hurt.”

The dispensaries are, of course, illegal, and some of them sell DMT along with the mushrooms. But they operate in an effective gray area, thanks in part to a compassionate use access program to psilocybin therapy in Canada that provides some theoretical, moral, and legal justification for wider access. Mostly, their continued — albeit imperilled — survival owes itself to the apparent reluctance of local authorities to crack down, despite sporadic raids and forced closures, especially in the wider Ontario province.

The dispensaries and their shady ownership have refused to speak to police about the attacks, according to sources and news reports, and an omerta (a Mafioso code of silence and a refusal to give evidence to police) has taken hold, adding to the sense of mystery and gangsterism around the violence. 

If the authorities “really want to make things more safe, then making it legal and having a path to legality will avoid things like that,” says Paul Lewin, a Toronto-based cannabis and psychedelics lawyer, “so that people, maybe, if they feel like they’re being victimized, can go to the police more openly.”

The more urban the location, and the more progressive the neighborhood, the more tolerant people are of the dispensaries, he adds. “In more central parts of Toronto, you'll see stores that exist for a good long time and are left alone. The police just want to make sure they're not selling to young people, that they're not selling other drugs, and that there's no weapons or gang affiliations.” Outside of Toronto, however, Lewin suggests the police have “a little too much time and money on their hands” and so they sometimes make dispensary crackdowns a priority.

With 30 locations across Ontario, FunGuyz has found itself in the crosshairs, suffering a reported 120 raids over the past several years since opening. In York, a town south of Toronto, police seized 181kg of dried mushrooms, 137kg of psilocybin edibles, and almost 170,000 capsules from multiple FunGuyz stores in the city in April. Some 179 grams of DMT was also nabbed, enough for over 3,000 trips, according to police reports cited in local media. Officers said the seized psychedelics were worth more than $3.5 million, and 15 people were charged with production and distribution offences.

Lewin is currently leading a constitutional challenge before the Ontario Court of Justice on behalf of a FunGuyz operator who was criminally charged for operating the stores, arguing that Canadians have a right to psilocybin under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ protection of freedom of thought. “We say psilocybin is a freedom of thought tool,” he told CBC. “This is about the ability of the average Canadian to use psilocybin to improve their own wellness, just to improve the way they think.” On Wednesday, October 15, however, an Ontario Court Justice ruled that the ban on psilocybin mushrooms are not constitutionally protected as a tool of thought.

Such lofty ideas, however, are unlikely to stem the violence until mushrooms are legally regulated and dispensary owners can share information with police without as much fear. As the use of psychedelics continues to increase, with 6% of Canadians using a psychedelic in 2023 — that’s about 2.5 million people — the potential bounty for criminals to fight over is only becoming more lucrative, but Shroomyz is digging in. At least one of its stores recently installed bollards outside the shopfront to protect against any future hit-and-runs, though the prospect of violence is likely leaving its staff on a razor-sharp edge. It’s one thing to be a trip-sitter, another to risk being a target of an attack.

A Toronto Police Services spokesperson says that raids on psilocybin dispensaries are largely a response to community complaints. “Unfortunately, as soon as these shops are closed, they often reopen shortly after under the same or different names,” they told DoubleBlind. “In terms of priorities, enforcement by TPS is largely focused on the trafficking of illegal drugs that are resulting in overdose deaths, and having a traumatic and devastating impact on our communities.”

Let’s just hope that the dispensary violence does not force its way up the police’s list of priorities. And that the fundamental essence of the mushroom trip — peace,  love, and health — may prevail.

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