CanadaShrooms is the first major magazine in North America devoted to the cultivation, collection and use of psilocybin mushrooms (also known as magic mushrooms). It aims to be the go-to source for everything you ever wanted to know about growing and taking these psychedelic fungi.

While marijuana has become a staple of the Canadian drug scene, psilocybin-containing mushrooms remain in a legal limbo. But despite that, storefronts and online businesses are proliferating, selling psilocybin for recreational and microdosing purposes. For employers, this presents a number of challenges.

From Forests to Homes: The Rise of Shroom Enthusiasts in Canada

Psilocybin is a Schedule III substance under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, meaning that consuming or possessing it is illegal. However, a variety of exemptions exist. And with Health Canada dragging its heels on approving therapeutic psilocybin, gray market dispensaries are operating in a grey area that puts them in danger of police raids.

Despite that, the storefronts are popping up in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, with names like Fun Guyz and Shroomyz. And while the shops have been subject to numerous raids, they’ve generally not been shut down. It all has a familiar feel to it: in the 1990s, owners of cannabis stores openly defied police and mounted challenges to archaic drug laws.

In the meantime, mushroom pickers in places like Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are harvesting for personal consumption and to sell for thousands of miles away, without fear of arrest. And even a RCMP officer on the island of Graham in the Queen Charlottes says that, for the time being at least, they’re not going to arrest people picking mushrooms, and leaving their haul behind in public areas.