A South Okanagan cannabis company based in Osoyoos is hoping to get the green light on psilocybin mushroom production this fall.
Way2Grow Biopharma Corp. (W2G) opened last year and currently produces organic cannabis products through tissue culture and molecular biology. The company focuses on the medical use of their products.
They submitted an application recently to grow psilocybin mushrooms (also known as magic mushrooms, or shrooms) which will allow them to grow them for research purposes.
“We want to be part of the community and not looked upon as a bad thing. We’re trying to bring a new industry and a new science to Osoyoos,” said co-founder Jamie Filipuzzi.
Psilocybin is a psychedelic substance which is currently illegal in Canada. However, a company may apply for a special licence to grow it for certain purposes which include research.
Jamie and Nikki Filipuzzi, founders of W2G, have been interested in going this route for quite a while, having done a ton of research around the health benefits of psilocybin. After opening up the space for W2G last year, and having the room to potentially grow psilocybin, they decided to apply for the licence to be a cultivator.
The W2G facility has two buildings, one of which is used to grow cannabis. The second building is used to process the cannabis products and will also be used to grow psilocybin.
“We are talking now to a couple of partners who work for larger science groups, so we’d be directly supplying as a partner with them. They’ll be doing the science and we will be doing the cultivation,” said Jamie.
The company would be supplying the organically grown psilocybin to researchers and universities.
“These drugs, cannabis and mushrooms and funguses have been used for medicines for thousands of years until the pharmaceutical came in and started [doing medicine] because it was a faster, easier way to do it,” explained Jamie.
However, he also said that you cannot do large scale production like that when you’re working with natural productions while making sure they are grown and produced organically. You can’t do large scale production like they need on a natural scale.
“But now there’s choices, and I think it’ll definitely be an interesting couple years as it comes into life here,” he said.
Although the push to access the medical use of psilocybin has been ongoing for a long time, Jamie said there has been a shift in interest in recent years.
“I think a lot of it’s just this pandemic [and the] anxiety, stress, and depression that it’s causing people,” said Jamie. “And now with so much positive research coming back, and people are just trying things, they’re not wanting to do pharmaceutical grade; they’re looking for something natural.”
He goes on to explain that they’re trying to cut back the stigma of being high and focus more on the goal of using the products as medicine.
“It’s not about being high anymore; it’s about your health and what it actually does. And you don’t need to do things on large scales. You can just do small micro doses, but it’s doing its job right in the background. So you don’t need to be or have that,” said Jamie.
