"Magic mushroom" edibles sold at smoke shops and convenience stores are likely to contain no psilocybin but instead a range of undisclosed active ingredients, a study led by an Oregon State University College of Pharmacy scientist shows.
The research collaboration, which included a state-certified testing laboratory and a scientific instrument manufacturer, published its findings today in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association.
In Portland, the scientists purchased 12 gummies and chocolates labeled as magic mushrooms and analyzed their contents. Psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound produced by Psilocybe species of mushroom, was not detected in any of them. Neither was muscimol, a psychoactive compound found in Amanita mushrooms.
Among the undisclosed ingredients found were caffeine and extracts of the botanicals hemp and kava, said OSU's Richard van Breemen, professor of pharmaceutical sciences and a researcher at the university's Linus Pauling Institute. Also detected among the adulterants was a class of chemicals the collaboration coined "syndelics," shorthand for synthetic psychedelics.
"Syndelics represent a rapidly growing area of drug design, where medicinal chemists create novel compounds inspired by known psychedelic agents like psilocybin and LSD," he said. "Although this approach offers therapeutic potential for the discovery of drugs that might be useful for treating a range of mental health conditions, any new drug entity requires years of development to evaluate human safety and efficacy, and premature exposure to these compounds poses significant public health risks due to unknown pharmacology and toxicity."
In the United States, LSD is a schedule 1 controlled substance, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use. But psilocybin is under investigation for treating depression and substance use disorders and is legal for medical use in Oregon (in Colorado, it's legal for recreational use).
"For safety, psilocybin products require both analytical standardization and production that follows current Good Manufacturing Practices," van Breemen said. "Advances in analytical chemistry are needed to detect new syndelics and other adulterants in consumer products, to expose misbranding, to support law enforcement and regulatory agencies, and to assist poison control centers and hospitals as they encounter overdoses caused by unknown compounds."
Key to those advances, he added, are studies such as this one that foster collaboration among academia, public health and industry to develop and validate detection methods using state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation like biomedical mass spectrometry. Different types of labs have unique capabilities, and combining them is necessary for the best retrospective analyses and real-time public health surveillance.
Van Breemen, whose lab at the Linus Pauling Institute specializes in dietary supplements and natural products, noted that during 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 180 emergency cases related to magic mushroom products. The cases spanned 34 states and included 73 hospitalizations and three deaths.
Collaborating with van Breemen on the study were pharmaceutical sciences graduate student Daniel Simchuk of Oregon State, Bjorn Fritzsche and Daniel Huson of Rose City Laboratories in Portland, and Scott Kuzdzal and Jonathan Ferguson of Shimadzu Scientific Instruments of Columbia, Maryland.
