”Magic mushroom” edibles sold at smoke shops and other retailers might be missing psilocybin but can contain undisclosed ingredients, according to a joint study published Thursday.
Oregon State University researchers collaborated on the analysis with Rose City Laboratories, a state-certified testing lab in Portland, and the manufacturer Shimadzu Scientific Instruments.
The edibles, including gummies and chocolates, contained caffeine and synthetic psychedelics. Richard van Breemen worked on the research and is a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at OSU.
“Syndelics represent a rapidly growing area of drug design, where medicinal chemists create novel compounds inspired by known psychedelic agents like psilocybin and LSD,” van Breemen said in a press release. He joins us with details of the study.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Buyer beware – it’s a good warning in general. According to a new report by researchers out of Oregon State University, it might be especially important to keep in mind if you are buying edibles in Portland that are supposedly made with “magic mushrooms.” The research bought and tested a dozen of these products. None of them had any psilocybin, but some of them did have synthetic psychedelics.
Richard van Breemen is a lead author of the study. He is a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at OSU’s College of Pharmacy, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Richard van Breemen: It’s a pleasure to be here, Dave.
Miller: When Oregon voters approved the psilocybin measure back in 2020, it led to the creation of a very regulated system. It’s nothing like the recreational marijuana system where if you’re over 21, you can buy flowers or edibles or other products. You just go into the store, show your ID and you can buy it, and the state of Oregon says that’s fine. With psychedelic mushrooms, the only legal way to take the drug is at an approved facility under the supervision of a licensed facilitator. So what exactly were you testing?
van Breemen: We were testing products which are outside of this regulatory system. We certainly advocate for standardization and testing products to ensure a safe and effective product when it is reproducible so that clinical care providers, patients and consumers can expect to have a reproducible, safe experience. And we certainly want to support the research of “magic mushrooms,” psilocybin and similar compounds because they have great potential to help with difficult to treat diseases like post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and substance abuse disorder.
Miller: Can you describe the products that you and your researchers bought? I mean, what do they purport to be?
van Breemen: These products are available quite widely on the internet, but also locally at convenience stores, gas stations, smoke shops. And they are typically packaged with sort of psychedelic colors, prominently display pictures of mushrooms and talk about psychedelic activity. And they’re marketed as consumables, usually gummies but chocolates are also out there on the marketplace.
We selected 12 randomly from multiple brands and my colleagues at Rose City Laboratories – who are the Oregon State certified laboratory to measure and standardize the psilocybin content for medical use – tested them, and none of these 12 products contained psilocybin. So they sent the mixtures to us that they had prepared from these gummies for further analysis and we helped them to identify active constituents, all other than psilocybin ...
Miller: Just to be clear, these products had psychedelic colors, as you say. They said they had “magic mushrooms.” The implication, I guess, is that they had psilocybin. Did they actually explicitly say that they had psilocybin, the psychoactive component from a particular family of mushrooms?
van Breemen: Some did specify psilocybin.
Miller: But none of them had it. So then, you got these samples. What did you find in these dozen different products?
van Breemen: We found some contained no active ingredients. They were basically candy. Others contained kava, a root that’s consumed as a beverage or a tea, and available as a legal dietary supplement for its relaxing and anti-anxiety properties. One gummy contained an extract of cannabis, which is rich in cannabinoids like THC and cannabidiol. But disturbingly, one had caffeine at a high level and three of the products had what we call syndelics or synthetic analogs of psilocybin that are not naturally occurring in mushrooms.
Miller: So synthetic psychedelics like LSD?
van Breemen: Well, think of a penicillin as an active drug, an antibacterial agent. Many analogs of penicillin have been made. So apparently illegal laboratories are making analogs of the base unit of psilocybin and these analogs are called syndelics, which may or may not have psychotropic and psychedelic activity. They may or may not be safe to consume. But they are being produced by laboratories illegally and apparently are being added to these gummy products and chocolate products on the market.
Miller: One of the scariest things about what you’ve just said is how little it seems like researchers or regulators even know about these compounds.
van Breemen: That’s correct. There is active research on some of these analogs, but they are not ready for human use, and consumers are unwillingly and unknowingly being used as guinea pigs to test their activity and safety. Last year alone, the Centers for Disease Control reported 180 emergency room visits in 34 states, and three deaths were reported to be caused by these products.
Miller: Caused by edibles that purport to have magic mushrooms?
van Breemen: Correct.
Miller: Do you know from that literature, according to CDC data, what kinds of medical episodes were responsible there? One hundred and eight emergency cases, 73 hospitalizations and three deaths. What exactly in general were people experiencing?
van Breemen: It looks like they were being traced back to a few specific brand products that probably contain syndelics, which are these synthetic analogs of the tryptamine-based analogs of psilocybin. And the dosages of psilocybin in medicinal use are very, very low, but we are finding quite high levels of these molecules in the products we tested.
Miller: I’m reminded that you mentioned that at least one of these gummies had no active ingredients. You called it just a candy, just a plain old gummy bear or whatever the shape was. From a public health perspective, I imagine that’s the best case scenario, that someone is unwittingly buying candy as opposed to something that has an undisclosed or novel psychoactive ingredient.
van Breemen: The biggest problem I think is the lack of labeling to inform consumers of what they’re buying and what they’re using. One of these products contained a very high level of caffeine, two botanicals or these psilocybin analog syndelic molecules. If one were to buy one product that has nothing but candy and find no effect, and then try a different product but take multiple doses, thinking it to be very weak or not active, and finds that it’s extremely potent, then they might be in trouble.
Miller: What advice do you have for the general public or more specifically the specific public that is maybe interested in buying these products?
van Breemen: Well, support research in the safe use and development for medicinal properties and in utilization of these products. Buy from trusted sources. Read the labels. If the labels don’t disclose anything tangible, if they don’t say that they contain psilocybin or psilocin or, for example, kava or cannabinoids, if they don’t say how much of something if it is listed, beware. Look for quality labeling. And buy from trusted sources.
Miller: But is there such a thing? I guess I’m confused by that last night. It seems like great advice in general to buy from trusted sources, but if we’re talking about a fully unregulated product that, unless I’m mistaken, is illegal. You cannot legally buy a psilocybin gummy at any store in Oregon. That’s not the system that Oregon voters approved or that Oregon Health Authority has set up. How are these even being sold? How is it that convenience stores are allowed to sell them?
van Breemen: That’s a very good question and I don’t know the answer. But I do support regulation and analytical testing to produce products that are hopefully safe, as well as effective. And we need more quality control of this market. Clearly, if no one buys products that are unlabeled and poorly controlled, the demand goes away, the products may not be marketed illegally. So, I don’t advocate for buying products that are just completely unknown. It’s not a safe approach.
Miller: Richard, thanks very much.
van Breemen: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Miller: Richard van Breemen is a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the OSU College of Pharmacy and a researcher at the Linus Pauling Institute. He is part of a team that recently analyzed a dozen products bought at Portland stores that were labeled as “magic mushroom” edibles. None of them had any psilocybin. Some of them did, though, have relatively or fully untested synthetic versions of psychoactive compounds.
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