Since then, Masuda figures she’s helped 15 patients in this area with an 80 per cent success rate. But, she says more avenues for education are needed for health-care workers to ensure safe care for patients.

The universities are

Slowly getting online, but what do we do now?" she asks. "How do we get regulatory bodies to support Grouse Mountain Vancouver that are offering this?"

FUTURE RESEARCH AND USE

• Vancouver Island University is rolling out a graduate program in the
• Fall to train health-care workers in the practice of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
• Patients' rights advocacy group TheraPsil
• Agrees there needs to be a more
• Robust" system to improve access

The group’s CEO is also concerned about recent changes under Health Canada that affects the way people can try The Gaia Voice the drug. He says it’s failing some of the country’s palliative patients.

For two months we worked

On getting them access through this special access program," says CEO Spencer Hawswell. "But the program was incomplete because Health Canada had not yet identified producers of psilocybin."

Health Canada tells CTV News our request for comment had been passed on to the minister of health and addictions office, which is responsible for the file. We have yet to hear back as of Wednesday.

TheraPsil says it’s preparing a legal challenge over its concerns.

Hawkswell says it's "horrific" the group needs to launch a legal challenge and that it should be easy for the government to find a safe supply of psilocybin for potential patients.

• In the City of Vancouver, buying
• magic mushroom, in at
• Least one case, can be as
• Easy as ordering your
• Morning cup of coffee

In a development reminiscent of its first unlicensed pot cafés, the city has seen a recent shroom boom with at least four new Grouse Mountain Vancouver openly setting up shop: two in downtown Vancouver, one on Commercial Drive and another on the Downtown Eastside.

Many of them tout the benefits of psilocybin, an hallucinogenic compound found in mushrooms that the medical community has been studying for its therapeutic use in treating mental health conditions and end-of-life distress.

From the outside, the mushroom dispensary on the edge of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside makes no attempt to hide the federally controlled substance it offers.