Photo by DmitrySteshenko
At 17, I read Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, which offers a blueprint for psychedelic trips. Leary argued that a high-dose trip could lead to a spiritual rebirth, completely dissolving the self-centered ego.
Leary casts the egoless state as antithetical to the modern condition of competition and self-involvement. He calls this our everyday “ego-games.” Our lives—careers, relationships, aspirations, and desires—are, according to him, largely constituted by these ego-games.
As a teenager, I believed drug prohibition meant this liberation would always be confined to the underground market. Learning about Canada’s open psychedelic dispensaries changed everything. So, I went to Vancouver to witness the unthinkable: stores openly selling the very compounds meant to undermine our ingrained self-involvement.
Dreaming of Vancouver
On my way to Hastings Street in an Uber, near downtown Vancouver, were cloud-piercing mountains and shores tracing the city’s boundary outside the window. I exchanged a brief conversation with the driver about the plans, not mentioning the psychedelic shops. In the last few minutes of the drive, he informed me, unprompted, that drugs entered Vancouver through the surrounding ports and warned me of certain areas to avoid.
I was dropped outside the dual-named shop, Coca Leaf Café and Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary, the second mushroom dispensary to ever open in Canada after Zoomers (a mushroom shop I visited later the same day).
Inside, workers were attentive. They diligently answered questions on interactions between substances and the onset of effects. They were knowledgeable, friendly, and attentive. A soft-spoken salesman told me their preference of substance (2-CB, an MDMA-like compound) and why. The store is the only shop in the world that sells mushrooms and practically every major psychedelic—LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, 2C-B, among other analogues.
The store reminded me of a provisionally assembled coffee shop (specializing in drugs). It had a binder menu. Drugs were viewable behind glass. Cannabis plants were in the window, rare peyote cactus on a shelf, a Kratom vending machine, and books lining one wall.
The owner of Coca Leaf Café, Dana Larsen, feels these dispensaries are a “prerequisite” to the legalization of psychedelics. He compares them to the illegally operating cannabis dispensaries that officials tolerated prior to legalization in Canada.
Paul Lewin, a lawyer in Canada who specializes in psychedelic criminal law, told me these dispensaries popping up across the country are “a form of civil disobedience that makes things more progressive moving forward.”
Through collective civil disobedience, activists like Lewin and Larsen are hoping psychedelics, starting with psilocybin, can be legal in Canada.
Raids and Renegades
While the Vancouver dispensaries offer a vision of psychedelic retail, other mushroom dispensaries outside of the city have a different story. A co-founder of the largest mushroom retailer in Canada, Funguyz (who only identified himself as “David”), told me the abridged story of the chain. After mushroom dispensaries began opening in Canada, David and others opened Funguyz in Toronto. They eventually opened 30 locations across the country.
In 2024, Ontario police raided them in an operation called “Project Magic.” This led the company to lose millions of dollars in product and cash. David attributes these raids to Funguyz being targeted for growing too quickly and gaining visibility to authorities. Regardless, they’ve managed to keep over 20 of their stores open across Canada.
David explained, “The police did a heavy investigation [from] March to December in 2024. They were following people, tapping people’s phones, and putting trackers on them. They managed to raid our warehouse. They charged 14 people and spent a lot of money.”
David estimated that around 120 officers were involved in the raids.
To him this use of resources was absurd. “They made a whole task force because we’re selling something that’s the least worry of any type of drug,” said David.
Lewin said that Funguyz has met opposition because of the disparate politics across Canada. He told me that while Vancouver is the equivalent of California in America, in terms of progressive policies, Canada has other areas with very different views. “We also have very conservative places where you open one and the next day, they’re talking about how much jail time you should get.”
Unlike Vancouver, Toronto has conservative areas deeply opposed to selling psychedelics. Accordingly, shops that open there are liable to be raided and to result in jail time for those operating them. Yet, according to Lewin, police activity is also largely contingent on local responses.
“It depends on the community. If there is a complaint, that would drive the police. A neighbor could just have a really bad attitude about it and call the police, and that will make them more responsive.”
A Prerequisite to Legalization
The spokesperson of Funguyz, Samer Akila, is attempting to legalize psilocybin in Canada through a constitutional case. Lewin represents him.
If successful, Canada could be on the way to rescheduling psilocybin as a legal compound. Like America, psilocybin is currently an illegal substance. Lewin’s argument for the legalization of psilocybin centers on Canada’s constitutional right to freedom of thought. Accordingly, he appeals to “cognitive liberty,” which is the right for citizens to explore their own consciousness.
Lewin told me psychedelics are about, “connecting to fellow men and women on the Earth, and even the plants and the trees. Feeling one is part of a bigger thing. It’s not my own struggle, which really seems to bring out the worst in us when we’re always trying to compete with our fellow man.”
To Lewin, the competition that ego-centrism brings leads to a me-versus-others mode of life. Psychedelics present the total opposite: a life oriented not around the self but a larger connection, if only fleetingly.
Like the radically optimistic Timothy Leary thought, one can be, in some small way, ‘reborn’ through this experience. The right of cognitive liberty is the right to strive for that.
But as those like Lewin and Larsen believe, gaining access to that right will likely require increased civil disobedience through more illicit psychedelic retailers. As Larsen told me, mushrooms, like cannabis, may need to “overgrow” the governmental position.
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