Can You Smoke Shrooms?
Updated September 2026 · SuperFunGuy
Smoking magic mushrooms does not work. You will waste the material, get nothing from it, and irritate your lungs for the trouble. The reason usually given for this is wrong, though, and the real reason is worth understanding because it also tells you what to do instead.
The usual explanation is not quite right
Search this question and you will be told that heat destroys psilocybin. That sounds obvious enough, and it is mostly false.
Psilocybin is fragile and any heat breaks it down, so smoking it burns the active compound away.
Psilocybin holds up better than that. It has been shown to stay intact at temperatures around 190°C, and it survives boiling water for up to an hour. Degradation is driven more by oxidation and long exposure than by warmth on its own, which is exactly why mushroom tea works.
So if psilocybin can sit in boiling water for an hour and come out fine, why does putting it in a joint fail? Because burning something is not the same as heating it.
Three reasons smoking fails
Combustion is a different order of heat
The tests above cover cooking temperatures. A burning coal at the end of a joint runs in the several hundreds of degrees, many times higher. At that point you are not warming the compound, you are pyrolysing the plant matter and converting it to smoke and ash. Very little survives that intact, and what does is not going where you want it.
The dose is physically impossible
This is the one that settles it. A threshold dose of dried mushroom is around a gram, and a common full dose is two to three and a half grams. Nobody can combust and inhale that much dried fungus. A joint holds well under a gram of material, most of which turns to ash and sidestream smoke rather than reaching you. The arithmetic does not work even before the chemistry does.
Psilocybin is not built to vaporise
Psilocybin is a phosphorylated molecule and a fairly polar one. It does not lift cleanly into vapour the way THC does, which is why there is no sensible way to inhale it at all. Your gut removes that phosphate group and converts it to psilocin, which is the compound that actually does the work. Eating it is not a workaround. It is the mechanism.
What actually happens if you try it
You get a harsh, acrid smoke that tastes like burnt mushroom, because that is what it is. Dried fungus is mostly chitin and it does not burn pleasantly.
Beyond the taste, you have inhaled combusted fungal material, including spores, which is an unhelpful thing to put in your lungs and can leave you coughing for a while afterward. And you will feel nothing psychedelic, which tends to be the part that convinces people to stop trying.
The genuinely bad outcome is a second dose. Someone smokes a gram, feels nothing, decides mushrooms do not work on them, and then eats a large amount to compensate. That is how a first experience turns into a far heavier one than intended. If nothing happened, it is because the method failed, not because your tolerance is unusual.
What to do with them instead
Every method that works puts the mushroom through your digestive system. The choice is about comfort and onset, not potency.
| Method | Onset | Why people choose it | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eat them dried | 30 to 60 min | Simplest, nothing to prepare, easiest to measure on a scale | The taste and texture are the main complaint |
| Tea | 20 to 40 min | Gentler on the stomach and faster to come on, since the material is already broken down | Takes preparation, and you should drink the mushroom matter too |
| Lemon tek | 15 to 30 min | Fastest onset and often a shorter overall experience | Comes on hard and fast, which is not what a first-timer wants |
| Capsules | 45 to 90 min | No taste at all and a fixed amount per capsule, which is why microdosers use them | Slowest onset, and you are trusting someone else’s measurement |
Onset times vary with what you have eaten and how much. An empty stomach is faster and rougher.
Our preparation guide walks through tea and lemon tek properly, and the dosage terminology piece covers what micro, average and hero actually mean in grams.
Where the idea comes from
Two things feed this question, and neither is really about psilocybin.
The first is that plenty of other mushrooms genuinely are smoked or burned in herbal traditions, and people reasonably assume the category behaves the same way. The second is simple pattern matching: cannabis is dried plant material that works when you smoke it, mushrooms are dried material, so the same rule should apply. It is a fair guess. It is just wrong, because the two active compounds behave nothing alike.
If you want the chemistry in more depth, what is psilocybin covers how the conversion to psilocin works, and how psilocybin affects the brain picks it up from there.
Keeping them so they stay worth taking
Since oxidation matters more than heat, storage is where potency is actually lost.
- Dry, dark, airtight. Light and air are the enemies, not room temperature.
- Properly dried means cracker dry. They should snap rather than bend. Anything still flexible holds moisture and will grow something.
- Do not freeze fresh ones. Ice crystals rupture the cells. Dry them first, then store.
- Months, not years. Well stored they hold up for a long time, but they fade gradually rather than keeping indefinitely.
What we carry
Dried is the straightforward starting point, and it is what every method above begins with. Our dried mushrooms run from $58 for a 28g of Ecuadorian up to $85 for Code Blue, with Golden Teacher at $75 as the usual first pick. There is also a 14g assorted at $49 if you would rather try a few before committing to an ounce of one.
If you want a fixed amount with no measuring and no taste, the microdose capsules start at $30. Our Golden Teacher vs Penis Envy comparison is the place to start if you are choosing between strains, and set and setting matters more than which one you pick.
For adults 19+. This is general information, not medical advice. Psilocybin can interact with medication, particularly antidepressants, and is not suitable for everyone. If you take prescription medication or have a personal or family history of psychosis, read our notes on antidepressants and psychedelics and how safe magic mushrooms are before you take anything.
