Which came first, the mushroom or the spore?
It is legal to collect spores from wild mushrooms: to bust a producer the government would be under the usual legal burden to demonstrate that they were actually illegally cultivating mushrooms: the mere fact of their possessing and selling spores would probably not measure up. I don’t know if you read the actual PF statement, but according to him, in order to get the bust the DEA had years of surveillance, the DEA itself ordered a syringe and followed the provided instructions to successfully grow mushrooms, there were a number of people who apparently got busted with mushrooms and “ratted” on PF, they found growing and dried mushrooms in his house… and for this slam dunk case they plea-bargained a no jail-time deal for him and his wife and two family co-defendants got dropped from prosecution entirely. You can bet if they thought they could really make a charge that he’d grown all the mushrooms for those spo
Just since there hasn’t been a full answer yet, I’ll relight the flame on this one. As many other people have said, there is no psilocybin in the spores, and it is only the chemicals that are outlawed. Obviously, they have a cover, which in most cases is that hobbyists enjoying looking at them under microscopes. Judging by the sheer number of online spore shops, it’s a pretty big hobby that nobody I know seems to take part in. As for the grow bags and other commercial products such as the “Let’s Grow Mushrooms!” series, their makers specifically market them for legal mushrooms such as oyster or shitake. They can’t actually outlaw these bags since the only reason they would do so is to stop people from “misusing” them. That’s like saying you’re going to outlaw knives, things that have known, acceptable uses, because they can be used for murder. It’s very difficult to make a case for it, and as others have said, mushrooms have no ties to organized crime and have no potential for physical
