A man in San Diego County has admitted to not only feeding his young children hallucinogenic mushrooms but also roping them into a scheme to distribute the illicit fungi.
Randal Vance, 43, said he, his wife, and a friend grew and distributed psilocybin mushrooms from two locations in San Diego County. He made the admission as part of a plea deal, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of California.
“Vance, the ringleader of the conspiracy, pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to use a minor to produce and distribute a controlled substance, conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, two counts of distributing a controlled substance to minors, and conspiracy to obstruct justice,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office. “Two co-defendants – his wife Rebecca Vance and friend Keir Ceballos-Rivera – previously pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.”
He also admitted to feeding his 9 and 11-year-old sons the hallucinogenic mushrooms via capsules every other day. Vance said he began giving his children the hallucinogens around October 2023 and by 2024 began giving the boys the capsules every day.
“Psilocybin mushrooms are a controlled substance,” the attorney’s office said in a statement, “that act as hallucinogenic drugs, inducing altered states of consciousness and vivid sensory experiences.”
Vance’s defense attorney, Peter Blair, said the government was misrepresenting his client.
“Mr. Vance made statements that he micro-dosed his children and he takes full responsibility, but many of his statements were either exaggerated or wholly dishonest in an attempt to ease the anxieties of friends and relatives seeking to replace their pharmaceutical prescriptions with mushrooms for medicinal purposes,” Blair said in a statement to Courthouse News.
He said Vance’s microdosing claims had to be “dishonest” because the boys would have experienced some ill effect from the volume of hallucinogenic mushrooms they would have consumed if his claim were true.
“Some of the doses my client said he gave the children, 0.2 grams every other day, for example, would have caused significant long-term effects, and the children have always denied that they felt any mind-altering effects from any of the supplements or mushrooms they were given by their father,” he said.
Blair said Vance’s children were doing fine.
“Mr. Vance regretfully put his family in a horrible situation,” Blair continued. “Despite that, the children are thriving, getting straight A’s in school, and are extremely well-adjusted, showing no signs of harm from any resonant exposure to illicit substances.”
He said that Vance initially became interested in the mushrooms as a possible treatment for Lyme disease and for his wife’s mental health struggles.
In October 2024, police executed a search warrant at one of Vance’s operating locations in Fallbrook, where they found 257 pounds of mushrooms and 18 pounds of growing material. Law enforcement officials found 25 pounds of mushrooms and five pounds of psilocybin capsules, as well as six firearms, at another location in Bonsall.
The firearms seized in the search include a Glock 34 pistol, a Walther P22 pistol, a Henry Survival AR7 rifle, a Smith and Wesson revolver, an H&R Model 900 revolver, and a Browning 30-06 rifle
Vance reportedly used a pair of websites to market the mushrooms and provided both his wife and his eldest son — 12-years-old at the time — to sell the drugs to their friends.
The plea agreement says that Vance and his co-conspirators destroyed evidence by deleting messages from their phone and shuttering the websites used to market the drugs,
Vance is scheduled to be sentenced on September 18.
