Online supplement marketers prey on consumers by exploiting the margins of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which exempts supplements from FDA oversight if they state in fine print, "This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" right after making claims that read like they replace medicine.

FDA can only act if they poison or kill someone or overtly claim they cure something like cancer. That means every dangerous fad that comes along puts people at risk, like Amanita muscaria mushrooms, which some claim, along with psilocybin mushrooms, can treat depression. Except not really claim, because they don't want to have FDA sending in federal marshals, like kratom companies got when they pushed their marketing too far.

The problem for consumers, warns an article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is that the compounds in Amanita muscaria mushrooms, muscimol and ibotenic acid, are more toxic than fentanyl yet don't need a prescription if they are 'found in nature.'


If you wouldn't take valium or cocaine from some weird internet site, don't buy Amanita muscaria mushrooms either. The LD50 will ruin you just the same. Source: Singleton E. The Story of the Universe: Told by Great Scientists and Popular Authors. P.F. Collier and Son; 1905.

No one is doing clinical trials for these products and using cocaine, PCP, and fentanyl for the control groups, so the harmful results have been shown in mice, and the science reality that Mice Are Not Little People is why grifters who exploit the Naturalistic Fallacy can sell candy containing this stuff. Candy which can be consumed by children. They are leveraging the belief by some that psilocybin mushrooms are an antidepressant - by binding to serotonin receptors. Amanita muscaria is also a mushroom, but suppresses the central nervous system like benzodiazepines and alcohol. 

Yet you can buy Amanita muscaria from sketchy websites while psilocybin - 'magic mushrooms - are a Schedule 1 drug under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. The Biden FDA loosened restrictions on it last year for the same reason Clinton exempted a lot of supplements in 1994; his constituents distrust science and medicine. You still can't legally get Magic Mushrooms outside a clinical trial. Kids can buy Amanita muscaria candy. Thailand thinks it is too dangerous but the Biden administration lets American kids buy it.

Though still in placebo/anecdote land, if companies want to spend money putting psilocybin into clinical trials as a treatment for depression, they can, but companies playing by FDA rules will go to jail if they violate any laws while companies selling supplements have to basically put people in the hospital.

That has already happened. Louisiana is the only state that that bans Amanita muscaria, meaning the public have to wait for FDA or the Federal Trade Commission to see enough kids get harmed before cracking down.