There I was, standing in a local smoke shop, browsing the display cases, when a collection of technicolored vapes, gummies and chocolates caught my attention. The raised lettering and foil trim of the packaging glinted in the light. Soaring mushrooms, some with eyeballs, put out a very trippy vibe on products with the brand name Trē House.
“Whoa,” I said to the clerk who’d clocked my surprise. “A magic mushroom vape pen?”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’re pretty amazing.”
I didn’t waste time. My logic went: magic mushrooms — obvi — means psilocybin, a Schedule 1 substance under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, and only permitted in therapeutic settings in Oregon. If I was getting away with buying something illegal, I knew enough to not lollygag with questions.
Forty dollars later and back home, I tore into the packaging. The black vape in my hand looked sleek, just like one for nicotine. Yet its packaging featured a helpful dosage chart replete with slightly confusing syntax: 1-7 puffs (“Ideal for the subtle benefits psychedelics potentially offer”; 8-14 puffs (“Feel euphoria flow through your body as your mind unwinds”); 15+ puffs (“Experienced users seeking high potency and legal mushroom vapes for a trippy time”).
I puffed. And then I puffed some more. A microdose did little more than make me feel guilty for vaping around my dog; a full dose (15+ puffs) gave me brain fog, a cloudy visual periphery and the nagging notion that I shouldn’t be sucking so much vapor, trying to get high.
I scoured the Trē House website for answers. The company states that the mango smoothie contains undetectable traces of mescaline, DMT, psilocybin and psilocin.
I felt duped. Is there anything better — predictably effective — than nibbling a microdose of actual magic mushrooms — or chowing down a quarter-ounce, for that matter, and blasting through the stratosphere?
Proof is in the pudding
The therapeutic use of psilocybin became legal in Oregon after Ballot Measure 109 became codified as ORS 475A in November 2020. The Public Health Division of the Oregon Health Authority is the home of Oregon Psilocybin Services, the program that dictates the manufacturing, transportation, delivery, sale and purchase of psilocybin products and the provision of psilocybin services, according to its website. Psilocybin Service Centers began operating in summer 2023.
Unlike the legal, recreational use that psychonauts enjoy in Colorado — the only state that has fully legalized magic mushrooms — Oregonian trippers must purchase and consume psilocybin in sanctioned, therapy-forward service centers, of which there are presently two dozen in the state. (New Mexico has a similar setup.) Mushrooms are grown by nine licensed growers, according to OPS. And no, we can’t take them to go from the service centers.
Turns out, I’m not alone in my sour feeling about the “magic mushroom” bait-and-switch back at the local smoke shop. In September, scientists at Oregon State University and Rose City Laboratories published a study of such gas station “psilocybin” in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal put out by the American Medical Association. The results are eye-popping.
Daniel Huson is the owner of Rose City Laboratories, the only laboratory in the state licensed by OPS. That means samples of the legal psilocybin produced by licensed growers to be used in licensed psilocybin service centers must first pass through his team’s liquid chromatography method. The potency and purity of a particular mushroom strain is discerned to the milligram. Huson had also noticed the “magic mushroom” products in gas stations and headshops. Dubious of their authenticity, Huson sent a team to collect 11 gummies and one chocolate so they could test the results in his lab.
Of those 12 products, none of the psychedelic mushroom products contained psilocybin, despite one advertising on its label 100 mg of the psychoactive compound per gummy, the team found. Four samples contained zero active constituents at all. Three products did, however, contain psilocin, which is the psychoactive compound that results from the body’s breakdown of psilocybin. But the absence of the attendant precursors to mushrooms typically found with actual psilocybin led Huson’s team to conclude that the psilocin was synthetically created.
Synthetic psilocybin is sketchy because researchers don’t fully understand its side effects. Similarly, some products falsely advertised as containing synthetic cannabinoids can cause health problems that can be life-threatening, according to the National Institutes of Health. New Yorkers — and former ones like myself — saw the scary effects of “K2” and “Spice” in real-time, as users fell ill and manic in public, DNA Info reported in 2016. The fake-weed epicenter was right outside a Brooklyn building I called home for years. (There, at a corner bodega, I, too, bought synthetic weed. Smoking in my apartment, a couple tokes caused slasher violence to race through my mind; I threw the crap away and immediately went to bed.)
Prior to collaborating with OSU, Rose City Labs presented its findings at a scientific trade show called Pittcon, which held its first Psychedelic Symposium in 2024. The presentation piqued the interest of Jonathan Ferguson, a representative of Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, a Japanese maker of analytical and measuring instruments. Ferguson encouraged Huson to send his test extracts to Richard van Breeman, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the Linus Pauling Institute at OSU. Van Breeman’s laboratory is home to two types of Shimadzu mass spectrometers, which break apart, identify and qualify the chemical makeup of a test sample.
In the “magic mushroom” study, the detectable active ingredients in products absent of psilocin read like a grocery list of things buyers hadn’t intended to put in their bodies: caffeine, those aforementioned cannabinoids, kavalactones — which can cause liver damage, vision impairment, seizures and nausea — and synthetic psychoactive tryptamines, which are similar to DMT and break down as psilocin. They can also induce psychosis and paranoia and do not occur naturally in psychedelic mushrooms.
What’s alarming, van Breeman said by phone, is that the added ingredients, like kava, can be especially dangerous for consumers with health conditions.
“There’s no evidence on most of the labels about how much they contain, although what they contain is not usually disclosed,” van Breeman said.
He added that his team declined to publish the “magic mushroom” brand names because, to their knowledge, their products hadn’t harmed anyone.
Not knowing what you’re taking can be dangerous. In November 2024, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration reported 180 illnesses (one in Oregon) related to folks eating products purporting to contain “magic mushrooms.” Of those, 73 cases resulted in hospitalizations, and 118 stemmed from products made by a company called Diamond Shruumz, which makes chocolates, gummies and other edibles. Three deaths were potentially related, according to the report. Diamond Shruumz products were subsequently recalled by the FDA.
“There’s no way for people to figure out what something is by using it, or what the effects might be,” van Breeman said. “Whatever happens might not be what they expect.”
Huson finds the imaginative advertising more than false; he considers it an affront that delegitimizes the 24 licensed and regulated psilocybin service centers presently operating in Oregon. Roll out happened in summer 2023. In total, 36 psilocybin service centers have been licensed since Jan. 2, 2023. To date, 12, or 33%, have closed, according to OHA data.
“The [Oregon Psilocybin Services] system is collapsing because of the misconception that mushrooms are legal, and you can buy products at the headshops,” he said. “So why pay money to a service center?”
Therapy-forward
Ryan Reid is the co-founder of Bendable Therapy, a psilocybin service center in Bend. His became the fifth licensed psilocybin service center in the state.
Despite his skin in the psilocybin game, Reid isn’t fazed by the not-so magical mushroom cottage industry. That’s because Bendable Therapy, a nonprofit, leads with a therapeutic approach to psilocybin. The psychedelic experience is the means to an end — not a recreational end to itself.
“Clients don’t come to us because they just want to buy mushrooms. They want help with their mental health goals,” Reid said. “This is a program that includes legal psilocybin, but the focus isn’t even ultimately on the psilocybin. It’s this therapeutic program with licensed providers. I view it as totally different from what’s going on at the gas stations.”
A session at Bendable Therapy, which costs about $3,800, is much more than an expensive vacation to the moon. The price tag involves 20 hours of treatment with a staff of mental health professionals across four weeks, Reid said.
“The Bendable program has multiple integrations and consultations, which make it a little more clinical — more in line with traditional mental health practices.”
“It’s cheaper than if you did the hourly rate with a therapist,” Reid said, adding that health insurance, however, doesn’t cover Oregon’s Psilocybin Service Centers.
Reid says surreptitious magic mushroom products may muddy the public’s understanding of psilocybin’s legal status in Oregon. Yet the testing that Rose City Labs provides, Reid says, ensures precise psilocybin dosing amounts, which can vary in psychedelic mushrooms across batches. That’s way safer than meting out doses in grams — “street dosing,” Reid calls it.
“That’s one of the benefits of the legal, regulated model: you know exactly what you’re getting, which is high-quality stuff,” Reid said. “Our licensed grower grows them, he freeze-dries them, they taste great. An eighth-ounce costs $100. That’s more expensive than street mushrooms, but it’s a higher quality product that’s regulated, tested and validated.”
‘People should be suspicious’
Mary Sheridan picked up my phone call on her way to a psychedelic mushroom foraging trip along the Oregon Coast. Sheridan has owned and operated Myco-Vision, which offers guided psychedelic therapy sessions in Bend since 2022. Because her business doesn’t provide psilocybin, Myco-Vision doesn’t require licensing through OHA’s Oregon Psilocybin Services Program. As the sole facilitator, Sheridan leads clients on sessions aided by psilocybin, MDMA, LSD or 2C-B, which they supply themselves. Sheridan also writes “The Psychedelic Frontier” column for the Source. After I told Sheridan about the results of the OSU/Rose City Labs study, she said she’s “not at all surprised.”
“I think that there’s a pretty good understanding among the people that I associate with, such as fellow facilitators, that these are not real,” she said. “These products are not safe. They don’t have psilocybin-containing mushrooms in them.”
Sheridan says if clients were to hire her to guide an experience with a “magic mushroom” vape like the one I wrote about above, she’d instead steer them toward a substance whose purity she can verify with a Miraculix test kit.
“People should be suspicious of — and testing — anything that purports to be a controlled substance,” she added. “Whether they bought it at a gas station or vape shop or from an underground dealer.”
But Sheridan doesn’t worry about gas station “magic mushroom” products watering down the public’s understanding of the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, nor of the service she offers.
“It’s similar to why you would go out to dinner instead of making food at home,” Sheridan said. She explained that, at a restaurant, you’re not necessarily paying for the access to food so much as for the experience of eating somewhere equipped with chefs and table service. At Myco-Vision, Sheridan charges anywhere from $350 to $3,500 for 20 total hours of therapy, which includes preparatory meetings. Often, Sheridan pegs the hourly rate she charges to the hourly rate a client earns in their respective profession.
“I do spiritual coaching, I help people prepare for and navigate the psychedelic experience. It’s not about that access,” Sheridan said. “You know, you can get mushrooms in the wild, too. You don’t have to pay anything for them if you know how to forage. …My services are not just about the mushrooms.”
Mostly priced out
The therapy provided at psilocybin service centers like Bendable Therapy, or that offered by Sheridan, sound great. I’ve benefited greatly from conventional talk therapy and the more woo-woo-seeming Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, for example, in addressing anxiety, depression and PTSD. But until Psilocybin Service Centers can accept health insurance — which won’t likely happen until psilocybin is legalized on a federal level — I’m left holding the bag of psychedelic mushrooms I just bought from my Johnny-on-the-spot dealer.
You know the time-worn saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice …that’s not very cool, man!
This article appears in the Source November 13, 2025.
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Gas station products are not real? Who would have guessed? I’m glad investigative reporters are covering important topics like this!