Magic mushrooms are illegal in AZ. This reporter tried mushroom products you can find in stores

MARK BRODIE: Magic mushrooms are illegal in Arizona, but as my next guest found, that doesn’t mean Arizonans can’t get related products in retail stores. And it also doesn’t mean there’s consensus on whether those products are safe to use.

With me to talk about this is Hank Stephenson of the Arizona Agenda. Hank, good morning.

HANK STEPHENSON: Happy Monday, Mark.

BRODIE: Happy Monday. I mean, so you really took one for the team here, trying some of these products out, huh?

STEPHENSON: Yeah, I figured my staff would mock me mercilessly if I just wrote a story about all these magic mushroom questioning if they are actually magic mushrooms and didn’t do the basic work to find out myself.

BRODIE: It’s dedication to the craft. So what are the kinds of products that one can buy — and maybe that you did buy in stores across the state?

STEPHENSON: Well, that’s kind of the big mystery. These things are labeled as “magic mushroom” products in some phrase or another. But none of them actually say what the active ingredients in these are. So I kind of turned to Reddit and poked around, see what the experts of Reddit do.

And they said, “Well, we think it’s some other kind of mushroom.” A lot of these things can be kind of, you know, processed in a way that removes their toxicity and enhances their regular psychoactive effects. And after quite a bit of work, I finally got a mycologist on the line. He said, “Yeah, yeah, the people of Reddit are right, surprisingly.”

The best guess is there’s, there’s a handful of other mushrooms that can be “psychedelic” or “magic.” But generally they take a lot more processing. And the psilocybin mushrooms that anyone who grew up in the 1960s or ’70s will remember well.

BRODIE: So what does that mean for the effect that these products will have on the body of a user?

STEPHENSON: Well, they work. I can tell you that much, Mark. So I ate one gummy out of a pack of two gummies that said three gummies was a emoji-face-melting experience. And I wasn’t expecting much out of it. I’ve eaten mushrooms in my life and kind of know what to expect from them.

Popped one of these gummies, kind of forgot I did it, was walking around and about an hour later I said, “Oh man, these are magic mushrooms.” Question one, check, figured that out.

They are a legitimate mushroom experience. Whether or not they’re slipping in some kind of psilocybin mushroom in this to get that experience or whether it’s truly another magical blend of processed mushrooms, nobody really knows.

And that’s the real problem here. You know, as drug innovation continues to outpace drug regulation, we just get weirder and weirder drugs with fewer and fewer regulations on them. Nobody really knows what they’re taking.

People have become sick from these off-brand mushroom products in the past. Last year, there was kind of a wave of — one company had put out a bunch of products that were making people sick. And it seems like that was more the company itself rather than the underlying plants. Maybe they weren’t processing things correctly.

But these certainly come with risks associated with eating mystery magic mushrooms. But my experience was fine. Good times.

Katie Campbell/KJZZ

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editorial | staff

BRODIE: [LAUGHS] Good times. Well, so what is the legality? Because obviously you can’t go into a store and buy an actual magic mushroom — at least not yet in Arizona. But clearly the things that you bought are being sold in the open?

STEPHENSON: Yeah. I walked down to this liquor store near my house. I don’t even drink, but my dog and I go down there to pick up a soda. And I’ve just seen these things on the shelf for a few months. And I kind of poked around a couple of different head shops, liquor stores in my neighborhood, and all of them have it.

These are not hard to find. And they’re basically impossible to regulate because we’d need the Legislature to outlaw the kinds of mushrooms we assume that they’re using. And then we’d need somebody to enforce that to go and pick up samples of these things, see what they’re actually using and then decide whether it’s illegal, which is just a whole headache.

And the other thing to keep in mind is like, people’s opinions — you know, you said at least not in Arizona, psychedelic mushrooms aren’t legal. But in a growing number of places, including Denver, they’ve been decriminalized. Or even in Arizona, we’ve started pumping money into magic mushroom research to see if it can help PTSD with vets and all sorts of other ailments.

So I kind of wonder whether there’s a political will to go after these things and just constantly be chasing the next iteration of some synthesized magic mushroom. Or is it more likely that the Legislature at this point just legalizes mushrooms to some degree? Because that’s the path we’re heading down with these kind of research things that we’ve been doing in recent years.

BRODIE: Well, and it kind of sounds, Hank, like what you’re describing in terms of trying to track down each iteration of magic mushroom that some scientists somewhere might come up with — it kind of sounds like the issue that law enforcement has, and to some extent continues to have, with different iterations of cannabis, of THC, that kind of thing. That there’s just consistently new versions of it, and at a certain point, you can’t make a new law for every new chemical compound.

STEPHENSON: Exactly. And every year there’s some new kind of chemical compound drug that’s being outlawed at the Legislature. But I kind of came into this thinking about the fight over Delta 8 and Delta 9 products. Earlier this year, BevMo and a bunch of other major retailers were selling essentially, you know, THC, cannabis marijuana drinks. Because there was some sort of provision in the federal farm bill that dealt with hemp and kind of loosened the constraints on hemp products.

And these are technically derived from hemp, so they thought they could get away with it. The AG’s office stepped in and kind of made some threats: “If you keep selling these drinks, clearly you’re not a cannabis dispensary. You can’t do that.” And everyone backed off.

And this is kind of a very similar thing, except for we don’t have, you know, an underlying drug to say, “This is illegal.”

If they were putting little bits of psilocybin in this, they could be regulated. But because presumably they’re not, there’s not much the law can do unless the law changes.

BRODIE: Right. That’ll be interesting to keep an eye on. All right, that is Hank Stevenson with the Arizona Agenda, perhaps our trippiest guest of the day. Hank, thanks as always.

STEPHENSON: Anytime, Mark.