Montreal police raid an illegal magic mushroom shop on opening day and arrest four people
Montreal police raided a shop selling illegal magic mushrooms on Tuesday and arrested four people, but a spokesperson for the shop said they expected the shop to reopen within 24 hours.
The first FunGuyz Quebec location opened in Montreal on Tuesday, offering pills, dried fungi and chocolate bars, all containing the psychedelic drug psilocybin, a substance subject to sale and possession bans in Canada.
Hours later, Montreal police confirmed they had launched an operation against the store in the Sainte-Marie neighborhood of the city, making four arrests.
The spokesperson for the store, who identified himself as Edgras Goban, described the raid as a “simple” seizure of produce and a “waste of taxpayers’ money”.
FunGuyz, he said, has already been the target of police raids in Ontario, where it has 10 franchises. He said the company “has been through this several times before”.
The spokesperson has been identified in media reports as a co-owner of FunGuyz stores in Ontario. Those reports have spelled his name in different ways, including “Edgars Gorbans” and “Edgar Gurben.” He declined to say on Tuesday whether he owns the brand, nor did he want to reveal the identity of the Montreal franchisee.
Goban said he expected police action at the Montreal location. “We expect the police to come in and raid us, because of course what we are doing is illegal,” he said before police raided the store on Tuesday. “The idea behind everything is, are the police willing to … use taxpayers’ money for mushrooms?”
He described FunGuyz as a form of protest to challenge public policy around hallucinogenic drugs, adding that the company planned to open as many as five additional locations in Quebec this summer, including a store in the Montreal suburb of Laval , which he said would be opened. within a few weeks.
Several customers had managed to purchase products at the FunGuyz Montreal location before the police raid. Among them was Ahmed Adel, who said he used to go to Amsterdam to consume magic mushrooms.
“When this opened here, it saved me the flight,” he said, ignoring authorities’ warnings about psilocybin.
“I don’t like the police. I don’t work with the police. I don’t recognize the police. I have nothing to do with the police and what they think is completely irrelevant.”
Roman Lebourg was also one of FunGuyz’s curious customers on Tuesday. “I was very intrigued and wanted to check it out before it was shut down by the authorities,” he said.
Lebourg expressed concern about the content of FunGuyz’s products in the absence of quality control legislation, unlike the quality assurance in Quebec’s government-owned cannabis stores.
“This is a whole different can of worms.”
In a statement, the office of Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said that despite “the government’s strong stance for the decriminalization of the simple possession of drugs, and the adoption of a statement on the matter by the entire city council, the sale of psilocybin remains illegal, and the (police) will continue to enforce the law.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 11, 2023.
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This story was produced with the financial support of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said the store is located in the Village neighborhood. It is in fact located in Sainte-Marie.
