Achi news desk-
A magic mushroom shop in Kitchener has reopened its doors after a pair of police raids.
The Kitchener FunGuyz location was back open for business Wednesday after Waterloo Regional Police raided the store on April 10 and April 13, seizing products and making arrests.
Waterloo Regional Police Services Chief Mark Crowell was asked about the reopening Wednesday after the police service’s board meeting. on Wednesday.
“We are doing our best, from an enforcement perspective, to conduct investigations that will hopefully lead to the closure of these businesses, but there is a process involved. So we are looking for local support from the courts and the local Crown attorney’s office with the charges that have been filed. We are also looking to coordinate it from a provincial perspective because there are other jurisdictions where this business also operates.”
He added that the police will use all the means they can to continue to act against the stores.
Speaking Monday, CTV News public safety analyst and former Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Chris Lewis said that while the stores are illegal, the raids cost taxpayers money.
“You take a number of police officers out of what they would normally do. There is no end to the work available to them outside, so for them to prepare a warrant, to execute the warrant, to bring people before the courts, is a lot of work.”
Lewis also said police have more serious, and potentially more harmful, drugs to focus on.
“[Psilocybin] can be physically harmful, but on the grand scale of things, when you look at opioids that are actually a microdot of which can actually kill someone, there’s no immediate physical danger like that in terms of death.”
For now it appears that the owners of the psilocybin stores have no plans to close for good.
“It’s like some kind of horrible drug war anachronism from some other era that shouldn’t even be on the books, and hopefully we’ll change that,” FunGuyz attorney Paul Levine said during an interview with CTV News earlier this week.
With reporting by Hannah Schmidt and Colton Vince
