Tucked inside an ocean blue box with extravagantly serifed white lettering, an Azul Chocolates bar wouldn't look out of place on the shelves of my local Erewhon in Los Angeles. The packaging touts that it’s vegan, gluten-free, pesticide-free, and made with 70% organic cacao that has a fruity, berry-forward aroma.
Unlike other chocolates enhanced with mushroom adaptogens that tease dramatic benefits, Azul’s effects won’t be difficult to perceive. And it will be a long time before they’re found on any grocery store shelves. The first giveaway is how hard it is to slip the candy out of the box; it’s childproof. That’s because it contains a lab-tested, high-quality psilocybin chocolate bar.
On weekend trips and at dinner parties, at workplaces and on TikTok, magic mushrooms are having a moment. The revival of research into psychedelics and its status as a technocrat accessory has fostered a new openness to psilocybin among the professional creative set in New York and Los Angeles, Austin and Miami. Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind popularized psychedelic’s benefits to the New York Times subscription demographic. Branding studios have gotten involved.
This enthusiasm obscures a basic fact: Psilocybin is illegal almost everywhere in the US. It’s lurching toward different types of medical use legalization in Oregon and Colorado, but even there, it will be highly regulated. Selling magic mushrooms remains illegal everywhere in the US. Despite this, mushroom chocolates have made the leap from truffles homebrewed by a local dealer to branded, manufactured candy bars and bon bons.
The aesthetics of most of these mushroom chocolates skew funkadelic and cartoonish, combinations of trippy ‘90s computer art and manic candy branding. One of the most common brands is PolkaDot, and it tends to come in nostalgic flavors like cookies and cream and “fruity pebbles,” though the term “brand” might be a stretch. There’s no trademark protection in illicit capitalism, so a Google search surfaces endless variations of URLs that claim to sell “Polka Dot,” while dispensaries and smoke shops in Los Angeles and New York sell both authentic and less legit versions openly; someone is selling purported PolkaDot bar molds on Ebay.
David, of Azul, says his company set out to make a product whose branding emphasized its “good intentions” and child safety. (Because buying and selling psilocybin is illegal, “David” is a pseudonym.) He uses his own chocolates largely to microdose in everyday life or while snowboarding or playing tennis. “Personally, I have an issue with being present,” he says. Microdosing, he says, helps him resist that tendency. But “I definitely take my full dose of mushrooms a couple times a year.”
With a crew cut and a gray polo shirt, David doesn’t look like the groovy mushroom guru I’d envisioned. Previously, he was a white-collar professional. He says that he tripped on mushrooms as a teenager and found the experience to be special, and different from cannabis, but it was re-discovering their history as potential treatments for a wide variety of mental illnesses that opened his eyes to how important having a quality product—one that is responsibly grown, lab-tested, and consistent—could be.
The Azul customers I spoke to use its products for a wide variety of reasons. (I haven’t tried any, for the record. Because buying psilocybin products is illegal, I agreed to identify them by their first name only.) Chris, an artist and entrepreneur, initially began taking microdoses of Azul chocolates to help manage his depression while working with a psychedelic-supportive therapist. “I was crying less and hurting less, I muted my ego so my head and heart could communicate more effectively,” he says. But he also found that they provided a better recreational experience than alcohol. “I would eat some of the chocolate and wake up with a positive hangover instead of looking at my Amex statement through my fingers.”
Sam, a multimedia artist, who is a more experienced psychedelic user, says he likes to use the chocolates for special occasions. “I’m a bigger dose guy,” he says. “It will quiet my discursive, analytical mind. That’s great for making art, great for experiencing nature, great for making a deep connection with a friend.” He says that he appreciates the lab testing that Azul performs because there is a big difference between a 2-3 gram dose, which he prefers, and a bigger one, say 4-5 grams.
Vanessa, also an artist, swears by psilocybin for treating her migraines (there is promising anecdotal evidence for this, and a study is currently underway at Yale). “I feel just these waves of healing and insight and relief, and within 15 minutes, it’s gone.” While she acknowledges this is “woo-woo,” she finds that different mushrooms have different energies; she once threw out a whole bag that was “too sad.” Of Azul, she says, “Energetically, these mushrooms are the most beautiful mushrooms I’ve ever experienced.”
Processing mushrooms into chocolates offers a number of advantages, according to those who make and consume them. For one, they taste better, at least to most people, who might find the dried variety recall dirt, feet, or, more mercifully, pumpkin seeds. The texture isn’t great, either. “I prefer not picking mushrooms out of my teeth,” David says. Chocolates are also shelf stable for months, unlike the mushrooms themselves, which will oxidize if not stored properly. Bars also offer a good way of standardizing dosage, and letting people take as much or as little as they would like, since they break apart. “The most important thing is to create consistency,” David says.
This emphasis on consistency makes sense: Psilocybin can have a much wider range of effects than weed. Large doses can have powerful effects, good and bad; Pollan’s book details his careful approach to taking large amounts of psilocybin and other substances, often with professional help. A case history published in the American Journal of Psychiatry seeks to illustrate the risks: “While our patient’s experience began positively, it ultimately resulted in profoundly deleterious consequences for her mental health and personal life, both acutely and long-term.”
A mushroom grower I’ll call Jaime, whose small grow room reeks of earthy, humid mushroom funk and tinkles with magnetic stirrers agitating spores, provides customers with handouts about the strength and effects of different mushrooms. (The world of illegal psilocybin is surprisingly heavy on educational handouts.) Jaime grows specialty strains, like a farmer’s market vendor preserving heirloom vegetables. One variety might spark “fairly benign yawning fits followed by big smiles,” while a more intense strain could produce “powerful visuals even at lower doses.” Jaime also offers customers an infographic about dosing, which describes a range from the tiny micro-dose to amounts that may cause, according to more than one person I spoke to, “ego dissolution.”
The choose-your-own-adventure nature of psilocybin, including the possibility of a capital-A adventure, is one of the reasons that the substance has been stuck in legal and cultural limbo for a long time. Even with its newfound trendiness, and the rise of more carefully branded products, it’s likely that definitive research and broadly accessible mushroom chocolates are a while away. According to Ophelia Chong, who started out as an advocate in the cannabis space and has since become an expert in the world of mushrooms, the push for psychedelic legalization has come most emphatically from mental health and medical advocates, including veterans groups, so the process will probably look more like a new medicine coming onto the market than the consumer-focused rollout of legal, recreational weed. Already in Colorado, psychedelic guides working semi-underground face unclear paths toward becoming licensed. At Oregon’s first licensed psilocybin center, a guided session will cost thousands of dollars, especially for the higher doses that research has most clearly shown to be helpful.
Azul’s David hopes that what he sees as the benefits of psychedelic mushrooms will one day not be available solely to those with thousands of dollars to spend on a licensed session, or even just to those struggling with serious mental health challenges; he envisions a more expansive role for psychedelic therapy, one that could include chocolates for sale like his—made with sustainably sourced cocoa and an eye toward flavor, in addition to any therapeutic effects.
After all, he microdoses simply to enhance his everyday life. “In 10 years, microdosing will be like taking vitamins,” he says.