The Picks and Shovels of the Psychedelic Economy

In every gold rush, somebody figures out that selling picks and shovels can be a safer bet than digging for gold. The modern psychedelic boom is beginning to look much the same.

The past several years brought a flood of investment, startup activity, and hype around a future legal psychedelic industry. Then came the harder part: slow-moving regulation, expensive state-level markets in Oregon and Colorado, and the FDA’s 2024 rejection of Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA application. For companies built around the assumption that widespread legal access was just around the corner, the wait has been punishing.

But the psychedelic economy is much bigger than drug developers and licensed treatment centers. Around them, an infrastructure of media, education, cultivation supplies, genetics, testing, events, harm reduction, advocacy, and community has continued to grow. Many of these businesses do not depend on broad psychedelic legalization to exist. They sell the tools, knowledge, services, and spaces that support a culture already here.

That may be where the more durable opportunity lies. While the legal psychedelic market is still fragmented and uncertain, the people building its infrastructure are already learning how to survive before the next gold rush fully arrives.

When I attended my first psychedelics conference in Las Vegas in 2021, a panel of venture capitalists was asked where they would put $250,000 into the emerging industry. Three of the four panelists gave the same answer: media and education. Their logic was straightforward. Publishing information, building an audience, and offering education did not require waiting for psychedelic drugs to win federal approval or for state markets to open.

That was an “aha” moment for me. I was already building Mycopreneur through podcasting and journalism, but I hadn’t thought of media itself as part of the psychedelic infrastructure. In an industry where the primary product remains legally inaccessible in much of the country, information can reach the market first.

Oregon and Colorado have created formal training requirements for licensed psilocybin or natural medicine facilitators, while New Mexico is now developing its own facilitator and education standards as it prepares to launch a regulated medical psilocybin program by the end of 2026. 

Advocacy Builds the Ground Rules 

Advocacy has become another piece of the infrastructure developing around psychedelics, particularly as states and cities experiment with new approaches to access, regulation, and decriminalization. Organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Chacruna Institute have spent years building public education, policy engagement, conferences, and other programs around psychedelic reform and culture. MAPS is a nonprofit research and educational organization, while Chacruna combines public education and policy work with a particular focus on Indigenous knowledge, reciprocity, equity, and cultural context.

The economics look different from the for-profit side of the psychedelic ecosystem. Nonprofits in this space can draw support from donations, memberships, philanthropic funding, educational programs, and events. Chacruna, for example, offers paid memberships, courses, workshops, community forums, and conferences alongside its advocacy and educational work, while MAPS publishes financial reports detailing its nonprofit funding and operations.

Microdosing has also developed its own policy movement. The Microdosing Collective argues that psychedelic regulations should distinguish between sub-hallucinogenic microdoses and larger doses rather than regulating them identically. Its stated goal is to build a legal framework for regulated microdosing access without requiring the same setting or facilitator model used for higher-dose psychedelic experiences.

Advocacy is also one of the broadest, and often most accessible, entry points into the psychedelic sector. The category spans everything from drug-policy reform and harm reduction to Indigenous rights, patient access, education, reciprocity, and local organizing, with a growing number of nonprofits, coalitions, and grassroots groups working across those lanes. 

Psychedelic Third Spaces 

Community is at the heart of the psychedelic movement. It requires connection, conversation, and a place to converge in the physical. The emergence of “third spaces” is becoming another part of the psychedelic-adjacent economy, with operators creating places for people to gather without centering the experience around alcohol. That idea is arriving at a moment when alcohol consumption is declining, particularly among younger adults. In 2025, just 50% of Americans ages 18 to 34 told Gallup they drink alcohol, down from 58% two years earlier.

District216 in Santa Barbara describes itself as a membership-driven psychedelic social club, with year-round programming built around education, networking, art, music, wellness, and psychedelics. Its events range from roundtable discussions and workshops to fireside chats with educators and advocates, including Edward Crowe and Stephanie Karzon Abrams.

Other businesses are folding that same community function into more familiar spaces. Los Hongos Cafe in Portland, owned and operated by David Poplin, positions itself as a café and plant bar built around fungi, food, education, and connection. The space hosts cultivation classes and other mushroom-focused programming, along with a recurring “Open Myc” for comedians, musicians, and poets. Its menu centers on legal functional mushrooms, kava, coffee, and mushroom-forward food, including oyster mushroom tacos.

What makes these spaces interesting for this story is that they don’t require a mature legal psychedelic market to function. They monetize the culture around psychedelics through memberships, food and beverage, events, education and community, while giving people an actual place to meet before legal access catches up.

The Business Behind Mushroom Cultivation 

Psilocybin mushrooms are now the most commonly used psychedelic in the United States. A 2025 RAND survey estimated that roughly 11 million U.S. adults had used psilocybin in the previous year, ahead of every other psychedelic measured. That level of interest has helped create a sizable adjacent market for the basic tools of mushroom cultivation: sterilized substrates, all-in-one grow bags, genetics, cultures, and other mycology supplies.

Unlike businesses built entirely around a future legal psilocybin market, many cultivation suppliers also serve people growing culinary and functional mushrooms. That gives the category a broader customer base while still positioning these companies to benefit from growing interest in psychedelic mushrooms.

Mycology supplier Booming Acres offers one example of how quickly that demand can scale. Founder Howard Novak says the company outgrew the kitchen where it started five years ago and now operates out of roughly 6,500 square feet of warehouse space, producing about 20,000 all-in-one grow bags each month.

“A lot of people are interested in mushrooms and they don’t know where to start, and those all-in-one bags just make it where it’s like, ‘Okay, so I buy a bag, I buy the spores, put them together, and a couple weeks later, I have mushrooms.’ It really can’t get easier. We tell people it’s easier than growing a houseplant,” says Novak.

Genetics are another part of the same cultivation economy, although the legal landscape requires more precision. In a January 2024 letter, the DEA clarified that mushroom spores or other material that contain no psilocybin, psilocin, or other controlled substance are not controlled under the federal Controlled Substances Act. If that material later contains a controlled substance, including following germination, it becomes controlled under federal law. State laws can impose their own restrictions.

Colorado has gone further at the state level. Adults 21 and older may cultivate and share natural medicine for personal use without remuneration, subject to state restrictions, while commercial sales outside the regulated system remain prohibited. That framework has helped support an active cultivation community and businesses selling genetics and other supplies into the broader mycology market.

Full Canopy Genetics is one company operating in that space, offering mushroom genetics alongside cultivation supplies such as grow bags and culture media. The particulars may vary by product and jurisdiction, but the broader business model is straightforward: sell the tools that cultivators need rather than wait for a conventional legal psychedelic retail market to arrive.

Testing the Psychedelic Gray Market 

The growth of gray-market psychedelic products has created another ancillary business opportunity: figuring out what those products actually contain. As mushroom gummies, chocolates, extracts, and other psychoactive products have spread through smoke shops, online retailers, and informal markets, analytical testing has become increasingly valuable to producers, consumers, and researchers looking for basic information about potency and composition.

That demand extends beyond packaged products. Mushroom cultivators have also turned to testing to compare potency between samples, while competitions and testing events have made some results publicly available in an effort to bring more transparency to a market with few consistent labeling standards.

Oakland Hyphae was an early player in that emerging ecosystem, launching its Psilocybin Cup in 2021 and using laboratory analysis to compare submitted mushroom samples. The company has continued offering potency and analytical testing services as interest in mushroom testing has grown.

Colorado-based Tryptomics has taken a broader approach, offering analytical testing for mushrooms and other naturally derived psychoactive materials. The company has also launched Test My Shroom Gummies, a public-facing project that publishes laboratory results for mushroom-branded gummies and similar products sold online and through smoke shops.

Testing may eventually have a role beyond confirming potency and catching mislabeled products. Some operators are also looking at whether deeper chemical analysis can help explain why people report different experiences from mushrooms with similar measured psilocybin levels.

Kevin Sullivan of Serenite Labs has been among those pushing for a more individualized understanding of mushroom effects based on testing, consumer feedback, and chemical data.

“We learned that if you compare three mushrooms that are exactly the same psilocybin content, people report wildly different experiences. And that is a mystery and riddle that I feel like we need to understand—there are secondary metabolites and other naturally occurring chemicals in mushrooms that contribute to the ‘Entourage Effect’, not just psilocybin,” says Sullivan.

The role those secondary compounds may play in the psychedelic experience remains an open question, and differences in reported effects can have many possible explanations. But the question points toward another potential frontier for analytical testing: understanding psychedelic mushrooms as chemically more complex than a single potency number.

For now, the simpler business case is already clear. The more uncertain and poorly standardized the psychedelic marketplace remains, the more valuable reliable testing becomes. In that sense, analytical labs are another classic picks-and-shovels play: they do not need to sell the gold to make money from the rush.

What Survives the Gold Rush

The psychedelic industry is still waiting on many of the breakthroughs that once seemed imminent. Regulations remain fragmented, pharmaceutical development is slow and expensive, and legal access looks very different from one jurisdiction to the next. But the ecosystem forming around psychedelics has not been waiting quietly for the market to arrive.

Media outlets, educators, advocates, community spaces, cultivation suppliers, genetics companies, and testing labs have found ways to operate around the edges of that uncertainty. Some are businesses. Others are nonprofits or community organizations. What they share is that their survival does not necessarily depend on a single drug approval, legalization measure, or speculative investment cycle.

That may be the real lesson of the picks-and-shovels approach. The companies and organizations building the infrastructure of psychedelic culture today are not betting solely on what the industry might become. They are responding to what already exists: millions of people interested in these substances, communities organizing around them, cultivators looking for tools, consumers looking for information, and an emerging marketplace badly in need of education, standards, and accountability.

The next psychedelic gold rush may still come. The people selling the picks and shovels are building in the meantime.