Is Amanita muscaria
legal in Canada?

This is the first question people ask about the mushroom, and most of the pages answering it belong to someone selling it. We sell it too, which is worth knowing before you read on.

The short answer

Amanita muscaria is not a controlled substance in Canada. The species does not appear on the schedules of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and neither ibotenic acid nor muscimol appears on them. Those two compounds are usually what the question is really about, and both are described on our specimen page.

What the short answer does not cover

Drug scheduling is one question. How a thing may be sold is a different one, and it changes the moment something is offered for people to eat. Food and natural health product regulation is a separate body of rules with its own approvals, and absence from a drug schedule does not open that door. The two questions get run together constantly.

What Health Canada's ingredient database says

Health Canada's Natural Health Products Ingredients Database lists what may go into a natural health product, and it holds an entry for this species. The entry gives its reason in a line: classified as an NHP under Schedule 1, item 1 (a fungus) of the Natural Health Products Regulations. Item 1 reads, in full, "a plant or a plant material, an alga, a bacterium, a fungus or a non-human animal material". The mushroom is on that list because it is a fungus, on the same footing as every other fungus.

The entry gets passed around as an approval. It is not one. Section 4 of the same Regulations: no natural health product may be sold unless a product licence has been issued for it. An ingredient entry is where an application for that licence would start. We have not started one, and nothing sold here is a natural health product.

What a seller may do

• sell the dried mushroom as a botanical specimen
• say where it was picked, when, and by whom
• describe drying and curing as process, because that is what it is
• point at the published record and let a reader read it

What a seller may not do

• call it food, or offer it for consumption
• attach a health, wellness or therapeutic claim to it
• reach the same place sideways: a seller who regrets that the law prevents them from telling you more has told you anyway

Under the Food and Drugs Act, the health representation is what decides the category. Say the thing does something for a person's health and you are selling a drug, and a drug needs an authorisation this shop does not have and has not applied for. Hinting at a claim while declining to state it is still making it.

Why this shop sells a specimen

The category is not a form of words chosen for the look of it. Every item here is a botanical specimen for collection and study: not food, not a supplement, not a medicine, not for consumption. By reserving you confirm you are 19 or older and are acquiring the specimen on those terms, and the same line runs along the bottom of every page. We set the 19+ rule ourselves, and we apply it to every order. The list of what is sold on those terms is the shop page itself: every weight priced, and the batch each pouch was filled from.

The species on the federal record

Natural Resources Canada has kept a herbarium at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria since 1940, listed as DAVFP in the Index Herbariorum: over 35,300 catalogued specimens of forest fungi and disease, across more than 3,000 species. Two of its entries are this mushroom. Amanita muscaria Fr. has six collections, Amanita muscaria var. muscaria has eight, and all fourteen came out of British Columbia: Sooke, Metchosin, Langford, Duncan, Tofino, Masset, Cowichan Lake, Victoria. Every record gives the same substrate, soil and duff. The oldest was picked at Duncan in October 1942, the newest at the Cowichan Lake research station in October 2015.

We point at it for the obvious reason, that it is federal documentation of the species growing wild in the province ours come out of, and for a less obvious one. A dried mushroom, labelled and filed so somebody can look at it later, is not a category this shop invented to get around a rule. The federal government has kept that cabinet since 1940.

Where the wording on this site comes from

One passage carries most of the weight. It is written once in the source of the site and reused wherever the question comes up, so the answer on a product page cannot drift away from the answer in a private reply. In full:

People ask what it does. There is a great deal written about this mushroom, and we are not the ones who get to summarise it for you.

Health Canada does not permit a business selling a botanical specimen to make health, wellness or therapeutic claims. So we make none, in either direction. And the literature would not let us make a simple claim even if we were allowed: the same reviews that discuss possible applications also record poisonings, hospital admissions and a firm warning against self-medication. Anyone who hands you a tidy answer about this mushroom is selling you something. Usually the mushroom.

What is not in dispute is the history. Amanita muscaria has been treated as an out-of-the-ordinary mushroom for thousands of years, set apart from every other mushroom by the reindeer herders of Siberia, by Sámi, Norse and Slavic tradition, and written about continuously ever since. That record is public. Read it yourself: the ethnography, then the chemistry, then the arguments, then the rebuttals, and read the criticism beside every claim.

Our part stops at the forest floor: gather it properly, dry it properly, cure it properly, and tell you exactly what we did.

The same reasoning governs the rest of the site. Our library page on this mushroom is a reference to the species and its literature, with the chemistry set out as chemistry and the folklore labelled as folklore. The product page for whole dried caps gives weight, origin, drying method and what is in the pouch. None of it says what the mushroom does.

Outside Canada

This is a Canadian page about a Canadian shop. Other countries take a different line, and several restrict or prohibit the species outright. We ship within Canada only, to every province and territory, so no parcel of ours crosses a border. If you are reading from somewhere else, check your own rules before you order anything from anyone.

Where to check any of this

None of it has to be taken on our word, and on this subject it should not be. All five documents are public.

• Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the schedules in full. Search them for Amanita, muscimol or ibotenic acid and nothing comes back.
• Natural Health Products Regulations. Schedule 1 is what counts as a natural health product substance; section 4 is the licence a sale requires.
• The ingredient database entry for Amanita muscaria, carrying the classification quoted above.
• Food and Drugs Act, for the definitions. A drug is anything "manufactured, sold or represented for use in" treating a disease or modifying organic functions; a food is anything represented for use as food or drink. Both turn on what the seller says about the thing.
• Pacific Forestry Centre's Forest Pathology Herbarium, with its records for Amanita muscaria Fr. and for var. muscaria.

What this page is not

It is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. It describes the position this shop works under and where that position came from. Where we had no source, we left the sentence out. The full terms, shipping and returns sit on the legal page.

The questions that come with it