Some mushroom edibles contain alarming additives, testing reveals : Shots - Health News : NPR

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

The wave of public interest in psychedelics has been accompanied by a flood of edibles that claim to contain mind-altering mushrooms that are also legal. It's a murky industry, and now federal authorities are investigating why some people are getting sick from the products. Here's NPR's Will Stone.

WILL STONE, BYLINE: Dr. Michael Moss couldn't explain why the man in his hospital's ICU had started convulsing after eating a mushroom-infused chocolate bar, but he knew there was more to the story.

MICHAEL MOSS: This does not make sense. Nobody gets put on a ventilator and has a seizure from eating psychedelic mushrooms.

STONE: The patient had been flown to the large hospital in Salt Lake City, where Moss is medical director of the Utah Poison Control Center. Curious, he tried to get more intel.

MOSS: Had he ever used other psychedelic products before? He said, yeah, no, I've had a mushroom trip before, and this was crazy. I don't know what happened.

STONE: The candy bar in question was packaged in trippy artwork and purported to offer a microdosing experience, thanks to a mushroom blend. Moss started calling up other poison centers.

MOSS: And then Arizona said, actually, over the weekend, we saw four cases.

STONE: Patients with nausea, vomiting, agitation, seizures, loss of consciousness and other symptoms. That was in late spring. Now there are 130 known illnesses, 53 hospitalizations and two suspected deaths, all linked to a brand called Diamond Shruumz, according to the FDA.

MOSS: We still don't know the culprit in the Diamond Shruumz case. These products are living in this very strange legal gray area.

STONE: These psychedelic-inspired mushroom edibles are sold in convenience stores, smoke shops and online, ostensibly because they do not contain illegal substances. Initial testing in the Diamond Shruumz investigation has turned up various undisclosed ingredients, including herbal supplements like kava, the prescription drug pregabalin and a synthetic version of psilocybin mushrooms. None of these findings surprise Caleb King. His company, Tryptomics, specializes in testing natural psychoactive products. Over the past year, they've analyzed more than a hundred of these kinds of edibles.

CALEB KING: People are throwing the kitchen sink into some of these and calling them, you know, a natural blend.

STONE: They found stimulants, including precursors to MDMA and other synthetic chemicals, basically spinoffs of popular hallucinogenic drugs.

KING: I'm seeing compounds that I hadn't seen yet, and so we're rapidly trying to discover what are they?

STONE: Prophet Premium Blends, the maker of Diamond Shruumz, did not return multiple email and phone requests for comment. The company recalled its products in June, citing toxic levels of muscimol. That's a compound found in the iconic red-capped and white-spotted mushroom known as Amanita muscaria. Picture "Alice In Wonderland" or Super Mario.

Roy Gerona runs a toxicology lab at the University of California, San Francisco, that works with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He says the investigation here is tricky. Most labs were not ready to test for this mushroom. That's true even for his lab that specializes in finding designer drugs. On top of that, the compounds in it are hard to detect, especially in, say, a chocolate bar.

ROY GERONA: That's the reason why, you know, it's taking a little longer than what the public is used to. The analysis itself is very challenging.

STONE: The FDA has confirmed muscimol in some of these products, but not all of them. So far, none of the current findings adequately explain these illnesses.

GERONA: I think some of us are asking ourselves, what are we missing here?

STONE: Gerona says they are doing more testing. Along with muscimol, there's another compound in Amanita muscaria that might play a role. Documented deaths from eating these mushrooms are rare, although compounds in it can be toxic in high doses. On the other hand, he says, it's possible the illnesses could be due to an entirely new designer drug. Kevin Feeney is an anthropologist at Central Washington University. He edited a compendium on the mushroom species, which is not a controlled substance.

KEVIN FEENEY: Amanita muscaria is psychoactive. It's not psychedelic in the way that psilocybes are.

STONE: Feeney is suspicious of many of these new edible products.

FEENEY: The marketing side seems to be heavily focused on Amanita muscaria. This is a legal mushroom. So that's sort of the bait and switch. They draw people in. Nobody really knows what's in it.

STONE: The mushroom has not been studied extensively in humans, but it does have a small and growing following, people who believe in its healing properties. He says larger doses can be quite unpleasant, so most people microdose. Christian Rasmussen runs MN Nice Botanicals, a major Amanita retailer.

CHRISTIAN RASMUSSEN: It's the Santa Claus mushroom, so it, like, brings kind of a joliness to it.

STONE: In the last few years, he's seen a lot more people get into this business, and he worries about a backlash from federal authorities, especially now.

RASMUSSEN: It's been a thorn in our side 100%. It detracts from Amanita.

STONE: The proliferation of these unregulated products, whether they contain the mushroom or other ingredients, concerned Eric Leas. He's an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego.

ERIC LEAS: This is an investigation of one company, but there's hundreds who are selling these products.

STONE: For now, there's little to help consumers sort out what's safe.

Will Stone, NPR News.

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