The Booming Market For Psychedelic Consumer Packaged Goods
DISCLAIMER: All information and resources provided are strictly for educational and harm reduction purposes only. We do not encourage or endorse the sale, consumption, or advertisement of illicit substances. Any depiction or discussion of substances is solely for educational purposes within the context of harm reduction.
In 2017 and 2018 respectively, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration designated MDMA and Psilocybin as ‘Breakthrough Therapies’ meant to fast-track their review and approval for legal, medicalized use in treating specific indications. More than seven years later, neither of these psychedelic compounds has become federally legally available in the United States.
With positive topline data coming out of clinical trials, and an emergent “Psychedelic Industry” of publicly traded biotech and pharmaceutical companies pouring billions of dollars into drug development and navigating the FDA-approval process, the “Psychedelic Renaissance” hyperbole started coming from all directions. Michael Pollan achieved New York Times No. 1 Best Seller status with his blockbuster book “How to Change Your Mind” in 2018, while “Have A Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics” reached the No. 1 spot on Netflix worldwide in 2020. Suddenly, Oprah, Prince Harry, Anderson Cooper, and a revolving door of high-profile public intellectuals, CEOs, star athletes, and seemingly everyone else, were validating and amplifying the extraordinary health benefits of psychedelics.
But where was everyone getting these psychedelics, which at a molecular level are all still scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act?
What the FDA designation and corresponding mainstream media coverage over the better part of the last decade have truly managed to do, in effect, is create a massive market demand that no one was able to legally fulfill. The “Psychedelic Renaissance” has legitimized these molecules from a safety and efficacy standpoint, dismantling prohibitionist rhetoric and the drug war’s crusade against them in the process.
Psychedelic Packaged Goods From Coast To Coast
By the time the “psychedelic industry” conference circuit cropped up in 2021, there were numerous full-on Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) psychedelic products that had surfaced coast to coast. They were readily available among the hubbub of high-profile events like SXSW, Art Basel, various pop-ups, and parties in major cities all over the U.S. and globally. Suddenly, suburban moms were sharing branded, precisely dosed psilocybin mushroom microdose capsules instead of uncorking wine bottles, and pharmaceutical-grade, branded MDMA gummies were finding their way into casual boutique art gallery openings and intimate invite-only gatherings. The highly psychoactive African root bark extract, ibogaine, has even made its way into sleekly packaged CPG form, to the chagrin of Nagoya Protocol watchdogs.
The psychedelic industry has definitively entered its Consumer Packaged Goods era. While this may be controversial on some level, the reality is that this flourishing market is fully established, and demand is booming. The market is global as well – I have personally come across CPG psychedelic products openly for sale in trendy shops in multiple countries from the U.S. to Latin America, Europe, and East Asia. In Jamaica, psilocybin mushrooms are nationally legal, and several CPG brands offer infused chocolate and microdose capsules, among other forms of the product. The same is true of branded psilocybin truffle products and various other molecules in smart shops in Amsterdam.
DMT vapes, MDMA gummies, psilocybin mushroom chocolate bars, and LSD microdots seem to be the most popular forms of psychedelic CPGs – with reports of designer drug formulations like 2C-B and 3-MMC gummies also cropping up recently. While psilocybin mushrooms seem to be the most prevalent substance of any CPGs on the underground market, there is a wide range of molecules available in precisely dosed, standardized, and branded units.
Decentralizing Knowledge of Underground Chemistry
Part of the reason for the expansion of psychedelic consumer products is that knowledge of underground chemistry has become more decentralized and publicly available in an only slightly less prolific way than knowledge of psilocybin mushroom cultivation. Synthesis and extraction practices are in the public domain, and legally available natural products containing psychoactive compounds are ubiquitously available. For example, take mimosa hostilis bark, which yields ultra-potent, concentrated DMT when subjected to an extraction process.
Less than one year after the FDA rejected MDMA, prolific psychedelic educator and content creator Willy Myco published the world’s first open-source step-by-step tutorial of how to synthesize MDMA using commonly available supplies. This was, of course, after he released a step-by-step video tutorial on how to synthesize LSD.
The bulk of media coverage on the underground psychedelic space hyperbolizes the risks and paints the unregulated product landscape as a lawless, never-know-what-you’re-going-to-get charade run by unscrupulous actors and nefarious middlemen cutting everything with who knows what. The reality of the situation is much more grounded in real-world pragmatism and simple market economics than this cartoonish depiction. Building customer loyalty and a good reputation while consistently producing premium quality products is a license to print money no matter which industry you’re a part of.
To be clear, there are definitely bad actors in the underground, but scamming or hurting customers is a one-way ticket to financial insolvency as a brand. Take the infamous ‘Diamond Shruumz’ case in the summer of 2024, as an example, in which 180 reported illnesses and three potentially associated deaths were tied to a defective product sold at smoke shops and gas stations across the country. This case made international headlines and was covered by seemingly every major media platform while being used as fodder for politicians and stakeholders in the developing licensed and regulated psychedelic space to further the agenda of stringent state-sanctioned regulation. But this case was an exception rather than the rule in the psychedelic CPG space.
Regardless of where anyone may be sourcing their products, it’s best practice to test your substances by using a kit from the likes of Miraculix or DanceSafe, or having samples submitted for testing at labs like Tryptomics.
The sophistication and formulation of some of these products are nothing short of extraordinary. For example, reports have surfaced that the famous “LightWand” 5-MeO-DMT vape achieved its current user interface thanks to none other than Bill Atkinson, one of the lead designers of the original Macintosh computer.
There are services in place to encourage the development of industry-wide standards in the underground psychedelic product space; ‘Elevated Product Testing’ labs like Tryptomics publish open source potency and purity data on various products, and Hyphae Labs has recently expanded their pioneering psilocybin potency testing to include a range of other products, such as MDMA, given the evolving landscape of the underground market. PsiloSafe and Shroomski are two organizations that have developed a certification process for verifying the safety of underground mushroom products.
Thanks to a disjointed patchwork of drug laws around the world, the same psychedelic CPG products that are legal, aboveground products in certain jurisdictions are labeled as “underground” in others. The following overview covers psychedelic CPG products globally, though the purchase of any of these products may be legally prohibited in the country you’re reading this from. There’s another layer of legal complexity given that there are at least 500 “psychedelic churches” operating within the United States, which claim psychedelics – including in CPG form – as their official sacrament.
Always be sure to comply with local laws.
Here are a few of the psychedelic CPG brands that have established themselves as consistently dosed, safe, and premium products in the psychedelic CPG market.
Entheo* CPG psychedelic brand has a prolific presence nationwide. They offer professionally designed and dosed 500 mg DMT disposable vaporizer pens, MDMA “Pure Heart” gummies with 400 mg of “Heart Blend” per bottle, and even “Nexus” 2C-B gummies and LSD “Sunshine Microdot” microdoses. This outfitter takes a science-forward approach to product formulation, applying rigorous dosing standards and quality ingredients to their products for a consistent dose.
Have a look at some of their product offerings below:
4L gummies are also widely recognized – at least within certain circles – and have reportedly surfaced at various events in multiple cities over the last few years. These gummies contain red and green formulations within clearly labeled packaging, with one of the gummies containing a “full point” 100 mg dose of MDMA and the other “chargers” intended as 25 mg boosters to be taken some hours into the experience. The color codes and instructions are clearly printed on the packaging.
Looking at psilocybin mushroom chocolate, the options seem to be endless. It’s important to distinguish between products that use research chemicals like 4-AcO-DMT or 4-HO-MET, which are both analogues to psilocybin. This means that the effect of consuming these molecules can be very similar to what you might experience with “magic mushrooms,” but they are structurally unique molecules synthesized in a lab. These chemical analogues also lack the “entourage effect” of psilocybin mushrooms, which is the synergistic combination of psilocybin with other various alkaloids and compounds found in the whole mushroom, such as baeocystin, norbaeocystin, and aeruginascin, to name a few. While some people actually prefer the research chemicals over the mushrooms, the latter have millennia of human use, whereas the analogues are less than a century old.
Neau Tropics is one of the premium mushroom chocolate producers on the market. They have a variety of different flavors such as “Seafaring Pretzel”, “Hawaiian Taro Cookies,” and “Birthday Cake.” Neau Tropics also offers psilocybin mushroom-infused gummies with flavors like “Mango Tajin” and “Berry Bliss.” The brand even has celebrity endorsement via the well-known comic Hans Kim.
The Boom Bar is also a well-known mushroom chocolate producer that has a strong foothold in the CPG mushroom chocolate space.
In Jamaica, home of the world’s first nationally legal psilocybin mushroom CPG industry, multiple brands have established themselves as leaders in the market:
Choose Happy is one of the pioneering psychedelic CPG brands on the island, as well as Patoo Jamaica. Both of these psilocybin mushroom brands are available at a number of retailers and via delivery service on the island.
In the European Union, Mabel Life is a psilocybin truffle CPG brand targeted towards serving women’s health. It has received major international press coverage and ships across the EU. The Netherlands also allows the production of psilocybin truffle products, which are for sale in numerous “smart shops” across Amsterdam.
While these are only a few of the many quality psychedelic CPG brands on the global market, this brief overview is the first of its kind in assessing the maturity of the market.
The Scope of the Underground Market
An NIH study from 2010 indicates that over 30 million people in the United States have tried psychedelics at least once in their lives. While no such up-to-date research exists today, one only needs to open TikTok, or even the white-collar LinkedIn, to find an endless scroll of first-person narratives about personal use, product reviews, analyses of clinical data, or cultural tropes centering psychedelics.
A RAND Corporation report estimated that 8 million adults in the U.S. had used psilocybin in 2023; this number feels low-ball considering psilocybin mushroom content on TikTok has billions of views, and there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of brands on the market that focus on creating access to mushrooms. One must also take into consideration that many people simply “grow, gather, and gift” these mushrooms rather than commercialize them in any form.
The fate of the underground market remains unclear as rapid psychedelic policy reform takes the global stage. Multiple states in the U.S. have legal psilocybin mushroom access in a controlled setting, while multiple others are eyeing a way forward for approval. More than a dozen cities across the U.S. have decriminalized the use of psilocybin mushrooms and various other ‘natural medicines’, and many others have introduced prospective policy changes along these lines to the legislative process.
Worldwide, countries like Mexico, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands have all embraced drug policy reform to roll out potential pathways to legal access for substances like psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA. Therapy with both of these compounds has already been legally available in Switzerland for some years now. While most of the policy change is geared towards clinical and medical access to these substances, the growing social acceptance and consumer demand for these types of psychedelic compounds continues to drive the psychedelic CPG market forward one flavored, branded formulation at a time.