Very weird product. Sold as "micro dosing", but there's absolutely no information about what exactly you're dosing. None of the mushrooms in the recipe are psychotropic.
But the branding is heavily implying that you will be high, and even encourages large doses, with a graphic of bloodshot eye for reference.
So either this stuff is cheaply-made snake oil that doesn't dose you with anything meaningful, and they just poisoned everyone with some sort of bacteria from dirty equipment, or they are adding some sort of drug to the product that is leading to extreme side effects.
These internet chocolates never contain mushrooms according to everyone I've known or read about who have had them. If you're lucky you get 4-aco-dmt which is safe and hard to tell apart from the real thing. This is an unregulated market and no one else cares about your health. Be careful out there.
It's not entirely clear what is in the chocolates or what could be causing the illnesses. The FDA said it was working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as America's Poison Centers to "determine the cause of these illnesses and is considering the appropriate next steps."
On its website, Diamond Shruumz says that its chocolate bars contain a "primo proprietary blend of nootropic and functional mushrooms." The website also contains reports of laboratory analyses on their products, some of which indicate the absence of select known fungal toxins and compounds such as the hallucinogen psilocybin and cannabinoids.
My guess is that they accidentally grew/used the wrong type of mushroom. PCR tests on the bars will tell us for sure.
Second, really really shitty of the article to imply these bars have cannabis or psilocybin when they do not have either of these compounds according to the manufacturer's website.
My brother went from touting the benefits of microdosing to taking massive doses (we're talking total disassociation) within a month because of these ads. The other day he wrote about how he had his wife with him to make sure nothing went wrong, but she fell asleep.
I've done shrooms on occasion and it's fun, but these ads are fucking people up in more ways than one.
We've had a spate of mushroom related "events" in Australia. Seems to be centred around Melbourne.
Of course it's entirely possible that nothing except reporting has changed, but that would mean that "journalists" do actual research, but that doesn't pay for clicks, so who knows what reality is.