Seven days subsequent to a raid on an unauthorized compassion club in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, law enforcement trained their sights on three purportedly psilocybin mushroom-selling retail establishments. This action comes in the wake of a growing number of magic mushroom dispensaries emerging across the city, reflecting a trend akin to the pre-legalization “grey market” cannabis shop operations.
The Vancouver Police Department declined to specify the targets of Wednesday’s operation, but seasoned drug legalization proponent Dana Larsen affirmed his three licensed businesses on East Hastings Street, West Broadway, and Granville Street were on the receiving end.
Larsen, taken by surprise, communicated, “This is very unexpected. It’s bewildering to witness a raid when roughly a dozen other dispensaries in the city run without encountering legal issues, despite holding business licenses.” Upon the related video going live, a source revealed Larsen was in police custody.
In their press statement, the VPD reported seizing “a variety of controlled substances” suspected of being wholesaled to walk-in customers. Sgt. Steve Addison warned, “Anyone trafficking controlled drugs from unlicensed and illegal retail businesses should expect to risk arrest and criminal charges.”
For months, Larsen has been at loggerheads with city officials who accuse him of transgressing his business licenses’ terms, leading to a concerted effort to revoke the same. Ruminating on this in his Facebook video, Larsen lamented, “We were under the impression that like with cannabis dispensaries in the past, the city would delegate the bureaucratic mechanism here. We’ve been functioning transparently at this location for three years.”
Historically, officials and law enforcement tacitly accepted cannabis dispensaries, whose numbers rivaled those of Starbucks and Tim Hortons. Larsen has reinvested earnings from his dispensaries into a drug testing project out of his East Hastings location since 2019, conducting more than 60,000 analyses to date.
Despite the setback, Larsen is struck by the potential for change stating, “While this raid may not be the best allocation of resources, it might spark the much-needed discourse around the role of mushroom dispensaries in our city and our progressive drug movement.”
Previously, the Drug User Liberation Front’s Hastings Street office was raided, with arrests made and drugs seized. This organization dedicated to reducing drug overdose deaths in the city met this enforcement action with uproar from harm-reduction advocates.
B.C. Premier David Eby, however, backed the law enforcement action. Even while acknowledging the organization’s “important, life-saving work,” he firmly maintained that actions violating the law cannot be overlooked.
