The Mushroom That Saved My Life: How One Night Ended a Two-Year Opiate Addiction
John James Staniszewski on rock bottom, the medicine that brought him back, and why he believes fungi are going to heal the world. A feature in his own words.
I had fifteen first-place physique finishes, a hormone clinic partnership, and a fresh engagement. Then I tore my L4/L5 lifting weights, and a doctor handed me five Norcos a day and told me to rest.
I felt no pain. I had energy. So I went back to the gym instead.
My back healed. My opiate dependency didn't.
Twenty a Day
Five Norcos a day became ten, then fifteen, then twenty.
In June 2016, my grandfather, the man who raised me, passed away. I didn't grieve him. I numbed instead, with more pills and more training. The twenty Norcos became OxyContin.
For almost two years, my mornings looked like a chemistry experiment: Adderall, pre-workout, a fistful of pills before training, an espresso, more pills after a full day of clients, something to come down, something to sleep. I was a sponsored athlete and a personal trainer running seven to nine clients a day, and underneath all of it I was disappearing.
My mother had been a lifelong addict. She'd been on oxygen for seven years with COPD and lung cancer, and in June 2018 she passed, the same week as my wife's birthday. It shook me to my core. I knew exactly what I didn't want to become, and I was already most of the way there.
I tried to get off the opiates twice. The pain pulled me back both times.
By then my grandmother was the only family I had left. I'd promised my grandfather I'd take care of her until the end, and I knew I couldn't do that as an addict. If I kept going the way I was going, I was going to die and leave her with nobody.
So I went looking for a way out, and what I found changed the rest of my life.
The Night Everything Changed
My uncle had given me some mushrooms months earlier. They sat in my closet, untouched, because I was too scared to try them. One night, I finally did.
Within an hour I was somewhere else entirely. I had what I can only describe as a come-to-God moment, a voice telling me it would save my life if I saved the world with mushrooms. I was up for hours. I passed out near dawn and woke up the next day and drank some water, and for the first time in two years, I felt no urge for opiates.
I did it two more nights. Each morning after, I needed less of everything. By the end I'd stopped the opiates, the vaping, the energy drinks, all of it. I felt like my old self had died and I'd been born again. Everything just made sense in a way it hadn't in years.
I started telling my clients, mostly doctors, lawyers, programmers, successful people who almost all had some underlying issue, usually autoimmune. One client tried microdosing for her ADHD and noticed her psoriasis started clearing up. Another client's eczema cleared within a month. A third, an ex-Navy officer who'd been on medication for chronic seizures for years, was able to come off it entirely. When he stopped microdosing, the seizures came back. When he started again, they stopped.
I didn't understand the science. I just knew something real was happening, and I decided right then to dedicate my life to it.
From the Closet to the Lab
Psilocybin is illegal, so it could never be the business. But I'd found something bigger than the mushroom itself: a belief that fungi, broadly, were medicine the world had forgotten how to use. I went looking for what was legal and just as powerful.
I landed on Cordyceps militaris, backed by real research on athletic performance and VO2 max, and I spent six months studying before I ever tried growing one. I didn't know what an agar plate was when I started. I learned the language, then I learned the craft: sterilizing grain, building grow tents and a flow hood and a clean room, getting it wrong more times than I got it right. I started small, jars to containers to trays, ten to fifteen pounds a month, sold on Etsy across the country.
That lab was one of the greatest gifts I've ever given myself. The science, the discipline, the art of it. It changed me from the inside.
Building Windy City Mushroom
Then I met Guy Furman, a shrimp-and-mussel farmer turned mushroom farmer running one grow room in an old warehouse on Chicago's west side. I asked him for space to grow Cordyceps, and we went into business together.
When his mycologist left, I stepped in and learned everything else: oyster, lion's mane, black pearl, chestnut. I fell in love with what gourmet mushrooms could do for a plate and for a body. We pooled our savings, moved into a 50,000-square-foot facility, brought on a third partner, and built Windy City Mushroom into one of the largest indoor mushroom farms in the Midwest. Thousands of pounds a week, grown from scratch, spore to fork, all in-house.
We struggled financially for four years straight. We lost relationships along the way. The mission kept growing anyway.
Fungitarian
Three years ago, sitting at a farmers market, I had a realization: I was never going to get the whole world to cook fresh mushrooms the way I did. Most people want convenience, not a lesson.
So I built convenience.
It started by accident, with about a hundred pounds of a high-end mushroom dish a restaurant had backed out on at the last second. We hired a chef, perfected the flavors, and landed on five, one for each night of the week, hot and ready in five minutes: Asian Zing, BBQ, Marinara, Taco, and the Original. Vegan, gluten-free, organic, real ingredients, nothing else.
I coined a name for anyone who'd made mushrooms a real part of how they eat, meat-eater or not: a Fungitarian.
Today Fungitarian supplies more than fifty restaurants and a hundred and fifty grocery stores, including every Midwest Whole Foods. We're in a dozen farmers markets, we ship nationwide, and we recently filled a 3,200-pound order of Marinara for a hundred Chicago Public Schools.
Three years ago this was a five-thousand-dollar-a-month idea. Last month it did a hundred and twenty-five thousand.
Back to the Medicine
Once Fungitarian was running, I felt the old pull again. I'd built a food company. I still hadn't built the medicine company I actually set out to build the night everything changed.
I started developing tinctures and gummies, partnering with a local extraction company to formulate dual extractions, then pushing further into alcohol-free, liposomal versions made from fruiting bodies only, work I believe made them some of the first products of their kind on the market. I launched them under Fungitarian, shipping nationwide and building a community around them, while I kept consulting on mushroom farms across the country.
Then I decided I could build something even more rigorous.
With my partners Tony and Devin, I started Forgotten: dual-extracted, liposomal mushroom tinctures and gummies, verified by independent lab testing, with certificates of analysis tied to actual published research, true full-spectrum extracts of both fruiting body and mycelium.
Most products on the market are unverified powder riding unverified claims. Forgotten is the opposite of that, on purpose.
What I Actually Believe
People ask what I call myself. I tell them I'm God's volunteer.
I believe mushrooms are going to help heal this planet, and I mean that at the level of people, one at a time, the way they healed me. Not as a slogan. As something I watched happen to my own body, and then watched happen around me.
The goal isn't a supplement line or a farm or a brand. Those are just the vehicles. The goal is a community of people willing to tell the truth about their addictions, their grief, and what actually brought them back, out loud, without shame.
I didn't plan any of this from a whiteboard. I planned it from a closet, alone, at the lowest point of my life, with mushrooms I was too scared to touch until I had nothing left to lose. Everything since, the lab, Windy City, Fungitarian, Forgotten, has been the same belief taking a different shape.
I think we're closer than people realize to a world that takes this seriously. I intend to spend the rest of my life helping get us there, one mushroom, and one person, at a time.
The Mush Room Podcast
That's also why I started a podcast. There's only so much of this I can fit in one article, and there are so many more stories like mine, and unlike mine, that deserve to be heard.
Every week on The Mush Room, I sit down for real, no-hype conversations about mushrooms and mycology across medicine, food, business, consciousness, and culture. Some weeks the guest is an expert moving the field forward. Other weeks it's an everyday person telling their own transformation story, the same way I'm telling mine here.
We get into addiction and recovery, mushrooms as medicine, microdosing and discipline, mushrooms as food and identity, the supplement industry, and consciousness and ceremony.
If any part of this landed for you, that's where the conversation keeps going. Listen to The Mush Room on Spotify or YouTube.
Psilocybin remains illegal under federal law in the United States. This is one man's account of his own experience, not medical advice or a recommendation. If you are struggling with substance use, the SAMHSA National Helpline is free, confidential, and available 24/7 at 1-800-662-4357.
John James Staniszewski is The Oracle's July 2026 Builder. This piece first appeared in the July 2026 issue. The Builder series profiles people building something real from something hard. Join the CHC community to meet more of them.
