The ‘shroom boom’ has yielded the global market all manner of ways to consume the enigmatic and ancient ‘magic mushroom’.
Branded chocolates, capsules, sublingual lozenges, sprays, transdermal patches (at least a few people are working on these) and…magic mushroom vapes?
Hold on a second – if ‘magic mushrooms’ are still a highly illicit substance in 99% of jurisdictions across the world, then how are there magic mushroom vapes stocked in thousands of smoke shops, from the United States to Malaysia, and openly traded online? How are these products possible when there is evidence that heat or high temperatures can break down psilocybin, potentially rendering it inert?
The simple answer is because there are generally no psychedelic mushrooms at all in the booming, branded ‘Consumer Packaged Goods’ market for magic mushroom vapes.
The combination of global prohibition and consumer demand for accessible psychedelic products has led to a skyrocketing industry of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) – named. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, NPS could be anything; it is “a substance of abuse, either in a pure form or a preparation, that is not controlled by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs or the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, but which may pose a ‘public health threat’”. To understand the scale of NPS supply, the UN has detected an average of 520 new NPS per year from 2013 to 2024.
So what actually are NPS molecules, and how did they end up saturating the global market for psilocybin while still managing to be marketed as magic mushrooms or “proprietary mushroom blends”?
“No accepted use”
When the UN established its global drug conventions, psilocybin was relatively unknown. The term for the substance itself wasn’t coined until 1958, and despite thousands of years of its traditional and ritualistic use, Western institutions labelled it as one of the most dangerous – and therefore controlled – substances available in the world. Psilocybin was and remains a schedule I substance in the UN’s drug control conventions – meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”.
In 2006, Roland Griffiths and his team at Johns Hopkins University published clinical research substantiating the potential of psilocybin to “occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance”, which led to high profile publicity. It began the cultural shift of the narrative around magic mushrooms. The research initiated by Griffiths kicked open the doors to the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, a period marked by renewed clinical research interest into psilocybin and other psychedelics’ potential. Along with it came more media attention and a change in public perception – and consequently, consumer demand – for psilocybin and other psychedelic molecules.
The wave of hype around psilocybin – which the notorious United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared a ‘Breakthrough Therapy’ in 2018 in an effort to “speed up the development and review of drugs that treat serious or life-threatening conditions” – ultimately created a demand that no one was or is able to legally fulfill.
Consumer demand for magic mushroom vapes explodes
Consumer demand for magic mushrooms spiked through the roof in the absence of any comprehensive or culturally and scientifically informed framework for regulation. And despite the effort for the “psychedelic renaissance” to ensure that psilocybin is slowly and carefully studied through a medical lens, certain businesses have been looking to cash in from the wave of consumer interest in these products.
Thanks to government inertia on decriminalising or regulating access to traditional psychedelics, companies have exploited the market by creating cheaper, less restricted compounds that possess similar psychopharmacological properties to psilocybin while having a longer shelf life and being potentially less legally risky than psilocybin mushrooms due to their unscheduled status. A similar market has developed for synthetic cannabinoid agonist receptors (SCRAs) that supposedly simulate the feelings of THC highs through other chemicals – like HHC.
Consider the legendary late underground chemist Sasha Shulgin, who is purported to have an intellectual property portfolio of over 500 psychoactive molecules that have not been publicly released in any significant way yet. There are many tryptamines and compounds, such as 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-MET, that impart ‘tryptamine buzzes’ similar to psilocybin, which is itself the prodrug for psilocin. After all, both 4-AcO-DMT and psilocybin convert to psilocin upon entering the bloodstream.
The principle remains that numerous research chemicals can be unassumingly packaged, labeled and distributed as a ‘magic mushroom product’, causing uninformed consumers to still feel a ‘psychedelic-ish’ buzz reminiscent of magic mushrooms. If they don’t dig too deeply into the ingredient list of their products, they may not be suspicious of anything.
And because magic mushrooms have entered the cultural pantheon of mainstream global society during this ‘brave new world’ era of hypercapitalism, their image and likeness has been plastered onto all manner of consumer packaged good and imprinted upon the dominant social trends and tropes of our time – namely, vaping – which ultimately leads to a market flooded with magic mushroom vapes.
What is inside magic mushroom vapes?
I sampled a ‘psilocybin vape’ once in 2021 at a conference afterparty. There was a distinct tryptamine-like buzz that set in – a palpable sense of buzzing, time distortion, and visual perturbations marked by a sort of ‘alien insectoid’ visual field. However, it never made me feel compelled to seek it out again; a brief encounter with this product was enough.
Let’s check out the copy from one of the largest sellers of ‘mushroom vapes’:
“With their mind-melting, fruit-flavored formulas, these disposable vapes offer fast-acting effects that are perfect for microdosing the triptastic feels of shrooms.”
Conveniently, ingredient lists are often missing from these listings – stating only that there’s a “proprietary” mushroom blend inside them.
Notice the “triptastic feels of shrooms” part – not an actual shroom feel. Given that heat will destroy the active compounds in actual psilocybin-containing mushrooms, what seems to be used here is instead a NPS compound. This category includes a broad range of novel tryptamines – which includes thousands, if not millions, of possible molecular combinations that can produce similar effects to the psilocybin molecule.
There are even dodgy ‘news’ sites offering advertorials for ‘Best Magic Mushroom Vapes’ that effectively market the same NPS containing products on multiple websites.
A platform called ‘Houstonia Magazine’ published an article on January 28, 2025 titled “Best Mushroom Vape: Top Shroom Pens for Mind-Melting Fun”.
The article touts the high quality “proprietary mushroom blend” with “800 puffs per pen”. At the same time, it has a disclaimer stating that “these products do not contain psilocybin or psilocybin mushrooms.”
A few sentences below, two mushrooms are mentioned for the first time by name:
“Mushroom extracts like lion’s mane and amanita muscaria are good for you. They can make your brain work better and your heart healthy”.
So does that mean there are Amanita and Lion’s Mane mushroom extracts in these ‘Magic Mushroom Vapes’? Maybe. Let’s look at a recent high profile case that tells a story about what could be in some of these products.
The infamous Diamond Shruumz ‘Premium Microdose Chocolate’ fiasco in the summer of 2024, in which a ‘magic mushroom’ product in a similar vein to the vapes discussed here was linked to 180 hospitalisations and potentially two deaths. FDA product testing uncovered a cocktail of drugs in the chocolates: 4-AcO-DMT, pregabalin, kavalactones (found in kava), muscimol (found in amanita mushrooms) and, finally, psilocin.
Global availability
The interest in these Magic Mushroom Vapes is not just in the West; it’s worldwide: they have become extremely popular with young, unmarried Malaysian adult men as well. The global reach of online markets means these substances can be used anywhere in the world where there is no legislation controlling NPS.
A post from 6 months ago on the Reddit forum r/Brunei asks: “Do guys know about ‘magic mushroom’ the one that are famous right now and they are using it on vape??” The top response on the forum claims “what’s really inside is a synthetic drug more specifically synthetic weed/synthetic thc that mimics cannabis but is ×10-100 more powerful than weed.”
To cut right to the chase: Magic mushroom vapes likely contain much more than the innocuous promise of a ‘natural microdosing mushroom experience’. There is no research or data of what vaping the smorgasbord of chemicals will do to your mind and body, in the short and long term. These products are unscrupulously capitalising on the broadening consumer interest in mushrooms, delivering some sort of “high” specifically engineered to evade legal repercussions and fit commercial purposes, rather than provide people with psilocybin mushrooms with any verifiable benefits.
I’m not saying I’d never hit one again if the time and place were right, but I’d strongly advise against using this type of product. As a cognitive libertarian, I believe it’s fundamentally your right to vape as many research chemicals as you want. This should, however, be done in a transparent way, with people aware of what they’re putting into their bodies.
