Yves here. The use of psychedelic mushrooms as a mental health treatment is a potentially important step forward, but this post suggests that the experiment part is not an inaccurate description. This article gives the impression that not much is concretely known about the potential benefits of these mushrooms. By contrast, I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that there was a lot of research in the 1950s and 1960s on LSD. I was surprised, for instance, to see extended periods of anxiety as a possible outcome. I has understood that one of the supposed big used of these psychedelics would be to treat anxiety, since neither talk therapy nor meds have much success with it.
Also, not surprisingly, the costs are fairly high, not due to the cost of the mushrooms but all the liability prevention (screening) and needing a trained minder during the session. A mushroom trip is only a few hours, versus about 12 hours for LSD. An open question is whether a single administration of mushrooms will produce a lasting difference. Many users report so via it changing their perception of reality. Is this universal or merely common? Recent studies suggest that differences in responses to psychedelics could have a genetic basis.
By Kate Ruder (@KateRuderWriter). Originally published at KFF Health News
Colorado regulators are issuing licenses for providing psychedelic mushrooms and are planning to authorize the state’s first “healing centers,” where the mushrooms can be ingested under supervision, in late spring or early summer.
The dawn of state-regulated psychedelic mushrooms has arrived in Colorado, nearly two years since Oregon began offering them. The mushrooms are a Schedule I drug and illegal under federal law except for clinical research. But more than a dozen cities nationwide have deprioritized or decriminalized them in the past five years, and many eyes are turned toward Oregon’s and Colorado’s state-regulated programs.
“In Oregon and Colorado, we’re going to learn a lot about administration of psychedelics outside of clinical, religious, and underground settings because they’re the first to try this in the U.S.,” said William R. Smith, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Psychedelic mushrooms and their psychoactive compound psilocybin have the potential to treat people with depression and anxiety, including those unresponsive to other medications or therapy. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, says the risk of mental health problems caused by ingesting mushrooms in a supervised clinical setting is low, but may be higher outside of a clinical setting. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a social media post last year, before his nomination as U.S. health secretary, that his “mind is open to the idea of psychedelics for treatment.”
Medical experts say more research is needed, particularly in people with a diagnosis or family history of psychotic or bipolar disorder. Adverse effects of psilocybin, including headache and nausea, typically resolve within one to two days. However, extended difficulties from using psychedelics can last weeks, months, or years; anxiety and fear, existential struggle, social disconnection, and feeling detached from oneself and one’s surroundings are most common. After the decriminalization and legalization in Oregon and Colorado, psychedelic mushroom exposures reported to poison control centers ticked up in these states and nationally.
In February, about 40 people organized by the psychedelic advocacy group the Nowak Society gathered in Boulder to talk about the coming changes in Colorado. They included Mandy Grace, who received her state license to administer psychedelic mushrooms, and Amanda Clark, a licensed mental health counselor from Denver, who both praised the therapeutic power of mushrooms.
“You get discouraged in your practice because the current therapies are not enough for people,” Clark said.
Colorado voters approved Proposition 122 in 2022 to legalize natural psychedelics, after Oregon voters in 2020 approved legalizing psilocybin for therapeutic use. Colorado’s program is modeled after, but not the same as, Oregon’s, under which 21,246 psilocybin products have been sold as of March, a total that could include secondary doses, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
As of mid-March, Colorado has received applications for at least 15 healing center licenses, nine cultivation licenses, four manufacturer licenses, and one testing facility license for growing and preparing the mushrooms, under rules developed over two years by the governor-appointed Natural Medicine Advisory Board.
Psychedelic treatments in Oregon are expensive, and are likely to be so in Colorado, too, said Tasia Poinsatte, Colorado director of the nonprofit Healing Advocacy Fund, which supports state-regulated programs for psychedelic therapy. In Oregon, psychedelic mushroom sessions are typically $1,000 to $3,000, are not covered by insurance, and must be paid for up front.
The mushrooms themselves are not expensive, Poinsatte said, but a facilitator’s time and support services are costly, and there are state fees. In Colorado, for doses over 2 milligrams, facilitators will screen participants at least 24 hours in advance, then supervise the session in which the participant consumes and experiences mushrooms, lasting several hours, plus a later meeting to integrate the experience.
Facilitators, who may not have experience with mental health emergencies, need training in screening, informed consent, and postsession monitoring, Smith said. “Because these models are new, we need to gather data from Colorado and Oregon to ensure safety.”
Facilitators generally pay a$420 training fee, which allows them to pursue the necessary consultation hours, and roughly $900 a year for a license, and healing centers pay $3,000 to $6,000 for initial licenses in Colorado. But the up-front cost for facilitators is significant: The required 150 hours in a state-accredited program and 80 hours of hands-on training can cost $10,000 or more, and Clark said she wouldn’t pursue a facilitator license due to the prohibitive time and cost.
To increase affordability for patients in Colorado, Poinsatte said, healing centers plan to offer sliding-scale pay options, and discounts for veterans, Medicaid enrollees, and those with low incomes. Group sessions are another option to lower costs.
Colorado law does not allow retail sales of psilocybin, unlike cannabis, which can be sold both recreationally and medically in the state. But it allows adults 21 and older to grow, use, and share psychedelic mushrooms for personal use.
Despite the retail ban, adjacent businesses have mushroomed. Inside the warehouse and laboratory of Activated Brands in Arvada, brown bags of sterilized grains such as corn, millet, and sorghum and plastic bags of soil substrate are for sale, along with genetic materials and ready-to-grow kits.
Co-founder Sean Winfield sells these supplies for growing psychedelic or functional mushrooms such as lion’s mane to people hoping to grow their own at home. Soon, Activated Brands will host cultivation and education classes for the public, Winfield said.
Winfield and co-founder Shawn Cox recently hosted a psychedelic potluck at which experts studying and cultivating psychedelic mushrooms discussed genetics, extraction, and specialized equipment.
Psychedelic mushrooms have a long history in Indigenous cultures, and provisions for their use in spiritual, cultural, or religious ceremonies are included in Colorado law, along with recognition of the cultural harm that could occur to federally recognized tribes and Indigenous people if natural medicine is overly commercialized or exploited.
Several studies over the past five years have shown the long-term benefits of psilocybin for treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, and the Food and Drug Administration designated it a breakthrough therapy. Late-stage trials, often a precursor to application for FDA approval, are underway.
Smith said psilocybin is a promising tool for treating mental health disorders but has not yet been shown to be better than other advanced treatments. Joshua Woolley, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, said he has seen the benefits of psilocybin as an investigator in clinical trials.
“People can change hard-set habits. They can become unstuck. They can see things in new ways,” he said of treating patients with a combination of psilocybin and psychotherapy.
Colorado, unlike Oregon, allows integration of psilocybin into existing mental health and medical practices with a clinical facilitator license, and through micro-healing centers that are more limited in the amounts of mushrooms they can store.
Still, Woolley said, between the federal ban and new state laws for psychedelics, this is uncharted territory. Most drugs used to treat mental health disorders are regulated by the FDA, something that Colorado is “taking into its own hands” by setting up its own program to regulate manufacturing and administration of psilocybin.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado declined to comment on its policy toward state-regulated psychedelic programs or personal use provisions, but Poinsatte hopes the same federal hands-off approach to marijuana will be taken for psilocybin in Oregon and Colorado.
Winfield said he looks forward to the upcoming rollout and potential addition of other plant psychedelics, such as mescaline. “We’re talking about clandestine industries coming into the light,” he said.
“In Oregon, psychedelic mushroom sessions are typically $1,000 to $3,000, are not covered by insurance, and must be paid for up front”
I’m obviously in the wrong business…I can understand overhead and probably plenty of liability insurance, but that seems way out of line for a product that is practically free, when you grow it yourself. It sure doesn’t sound like they’re solely in the business of helping people with trauma, addictions and depression.
Anything medical is like a license to overcharge, it seems, particularly in the USA.
There’s been quite a lot of studies done on psilocybin in the past decade or so that demonstrate its overall positive therapeutic function ranging from treating depression, decreasing psychological distress, death-related anxiety in cancer patients etc. Though most of the studies seem to be still on a smaller scale and don’t focus on long term potential adverse effects… https://doi.org/10.1080/14740338.2022.2047929
Interesting, CBC Radio had a report roughly a year ago on the use psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD. I’m not sure if this was experimental or regular treatment but CBC was reporting some success.
I can strongly recommend a recently published book “OUR BRAINS, OURSELVES”, sub-headed ‘What A Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain’, by Masud Husain. In particular chapter 4, ‘Visitors in the night’ which covers this subject.
I am nerly 70 years young and haven’t taken any drugs at all for many many decades. But in my teens I was an ‘aficionado’ with LSD and other psychotics, and therefore consider myself somewhat experienced, if not knowledgeable in these matters. I can confirm Mr Husain’s broad findings, particulaly in regard to how these powerful drugs upset the mind’s ability to ‘predict’, resulting in an unleashed mind offering ‘options’ which we may call ‘halucinations’. I can imagine how it might work for some – if their minds needs changing.
To add to the post above, I can confirm that psilosybin is characteristicly ‘warm’ or ‘soft’, with a shorter ‘hit’ than LSD which is ‘hard’ and lasts longer. It has been my experience that it is not for everyone, so perhaps mushrooms are a better starting point. However, LSD can definitely change your mind – forever!
I don’t ever need to go back to those ‘experiments’, the memories of them are still vivid so today the ‘hit’ would likely just be boring. But hey, if you don’t risk it, you won’t get the biscuit.
I agree with you here Richard, my mind was expanded for the better. It opened my mind to things like a higher power, the paranormal and gave me revelations I might of never had as a life experience. In ways it made me a better more whole person. I am speaking of LSD. All of my experiences were good. I was always in control of it and knew that I was. Music was absolutely a gift beyond belief. Mushrooms were not a good experience for me as I think the dosage was not as controlled. The only bad trips I ever took were on mushrooms. I have nothing but fond Memories of acid. Peyote was something I was warned against. The same uncontrollable dosage issues. There was something weirdly tribal about mushrooms. I would think these people would be messing with fire unless they took it themselves and were schooled in its effects being experienced. I was with people that were and knew how to keep things in perspective. Doing this in the wrong setting seems like it could do a lot of harm. There might be people that never come back from this experience. It’s something from the past that I would never attempt again. I hope these people know what they are doing.
My guess is that turning “tripping” into a franchise, will get results all over the map. Really good, to really bad. Just like when the government was running those experiments in the early days, you take people, give them a hallucinogen in some sterile environment with people “watching” you, and not participating… or any one of the myriad ways a clinician may overvalue their experience and purpose in relation to the person who is in the process of meeting themselves.
Whereas, now we would have a profit motive, and not a “good friend”.. or some other safe space to explore.
So, maybe some people get it, and help people, and maybe some people “work” for people.
My take on periods of anxiety, after tripping… is that it is “one of the ways people react”, after they start seeing the world anew. It is the deconstruction of the self that was…. and the birth of the self that is.
There is also the sickness at the beginning, as a way to break you from “the norm”. It is a thing you go through. It isn’t really supposed to be “comfortable”.
That is why these journeys are never so easy, and we never get there.
But relaxing societies puritanical means of control over the masses, has to start somewhere.
As a clinical psychologist I’ve worked with people who suffered marked after effects from taking hallucinogens. When people talk about anxiety they often fail to appreciate how much mental effort goes into managing our emotions, as opposed to managing our worries about the external world. For some people, the hallucinogenic experience brings a loss of a sense of control over their emotions — which to some extent they may not have been consciously aware of — and this can lead to negative outcomes ranging from generally increased anxiety to psychotic episodes. In my experience people who had over-defended against aggression were most likely to get into trouble, but homoerotic feelings or most any other “shameful” impulse would set them off. (I once met with a fellow who had suddenly experienced a wish to eat dog feces and was horrified. What someone else might have laughed off — “stuff really can make you crazy” — he couldn’t sufficiently separate himself from. Just why is a story.)
I’m not saying this to try to deny the positive experiences some people have. But at this stage of the game it is irresponsible to discuss the use of hallucinogens without acknowledging that the experience can be disastrous.
I started off as an agnostic. For a solid month after the first trip, I seriously thought I would go to church and embrace Christianity but now my religious attitude is closer to Bhuddism. It really does fire off spiritual feelings and is mind opening, at the risk of causing emotional dependence.
Once I realized a few months later with repeated trips I was asking Dr. Mushroom too many questions it couldn’t answer, it was time to back away. Mushrooms aren’t really addictive so I had the choice at least. It’s been years.
It’s not risk free.
I regret overdoing it, but I do not regret the first time. That was absurdly glorious. Perhaps another time some day.
At one point in peak intensity, I saw the ball of light. A light of absurd brightness in a dark void. It was as if I was seeing the face of God, or the universe itself. I felt a part of something. It was a good feeling.
I call magic mushrooms a spiritual AED.
I did quite a bit of hallucinogens as a yout’, mostly in smallish doses, and based on my experience would recommend them highly. That said, care must be taken, and they can trigger psychotic-type episodes (or longer-lasting problems ) in a small subset of users.
Well … The first time I tried psylocybin I ate the whole 3.5 grams and thought someone must have put LSD on those dried up husks, so dosage is a thing. There is much room for success here, iny mind, but tethered to the capitalist structures, I don’t expect much.
I’ve only done Shrooms a handful of times over several decades.
They always make me want to take off all my clothes and go talk with the trees.
Any anxiety I feel is from being distanced from nature, so I’ll take them when I go camping, not clubbing.
Mother Nature’s realm is where you want to be when indulging, and the experience can be profound in that you tend to see things that were always there, but never quite noticed.
It’s weird with pricing, in that marijuana is now 1/6th of the retail price versus the turn of the century, whereas more than a grandido for ‘shrooms is on the frankly ridiculous side.
My only experience involved a pizza, some beer, and sitting in a bar, suddenly noticing how incredibly cool the foam patterns on my glass were.
And how “Like a virgin” by Madonna sounded awesome, even though I was a metal head at the time.
Legalizing recreational use of hallucinogenics is a recipe for psychotic disorders, some life long.
I know personally 2 schizophrenics that the precipatating events were a single LSD trip. One time, life long disability. Mark Vonnegut published Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, about his experiences; IIRC it was psilocybin that initiated his schizophrenia.
High test weed has been definitively linked to increased hospitalizations for psychosis.
Powerful drugs should be used only with competent medical supervision.
A drunk, drugged and/or psychotic population is apathetic and not part of a vanguard for change. DC legalized mushrooms, need we sat more?
I would be interested in knowing what your thoughts are on legalized or recreational alcohol.
The posting was about hallucinogenics. Read the last sentence. My daughter was killed by a drunk driver. My son has schizophrenia which appeared after months of smoking daily high test weed in his first year at university.
Shrooms are easy to get here in B.C. and there are official legal clinics in at least two places, one near Vancouver IIRC and one in Kelowna. I tried to grow them, but it’s much too much hassle for the amount that you get.
I was experienced long before I needed any anti-anxiety treatment because I’m so old I was savouring Purple Owsleys in Northern California even before it was illegal. Changed my life forever for the good. After it became illegal the bad people got involved and I quit.
When I eventually read “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan, I could identify with what he said, but I’d never do the ayahuasca thing. I hate throwing up. I did that for nine months solid when I was pregnant.
Then when mushrooms got going here in B.C. I tried microdosing shrooms and it has been a fantastic way to beat anxiety. 125mg five days on, two off. What a relief, thank Dog.
Hmmm… Third try at a comment about a certain S Gottlieb experimental program. The other two were eaten by Ye Internet Dragons.
Hint: It is often mistaken for the Majestic Twelve.
What does guru RFK Jr. say lol
I took shrooms once at university. The experience was pleasant and I felt very attached to nature while tripping; couldn’t stop staring at the trees. More experienced friends mentioned that coming down you should get drunk with tequila. I did not. The next day felt suicidal, a sorry excuse for a human being and a stain on society. YMMV. Willing to try micro dosing tho.