The medicinal power of psychedelics is finally being recognised

Note: Usual caveat that street versions of any drug can be incredibly dangerous, for more on this see What's in My Baggie?. Dealers hate drug testers, to the point of trying to hunt them down. All to say trying to treat yourself without guidance is incredibly dangeorus.

Denver has decriminalised magic mushrooms – the medicinal power of psychedelics is finally being recognised

Amanda Fielding

We found that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy shows enormous promise in the treatment of a number of intractable conditions, such as treatment-resistant depression and tobacco addiction (which kills some six million people worldwide). Profound benefits have also been reported for the treatment of existential anxiety by those faced with a terminal diagnosis, and much exciting research into other conditions is currently underway. A bright future awaits us!

The UK is undergoing a burgeoning mental health crisis, which has created an urgent unmet need for the development of new treatments. Prescriptions for antidepressants more than doubled between 2006-2016, with mental illness costing the UK around £100bn a year, and distressingly, suicide is now the leading cause of death among the young (with psychedelic usage linked to lower suicide risk).

Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy can provide an amazing opportunity for a new approach to treating mental illness. Rather than putting the patient on a daily drip of SSRIs, which like a plaster hopefully suppresses the symptoms but leaves the root-causes unaddressed, psychedelics can increase neuroplasticity and reset the brain, so that maladaptive thought and behaviour patterns can be unlearned.

Re-classifying psilocybin would make it much easier and less expensive to carry out the much needed research to investigate more fully the great potential of this compound and its cousins.

Note: Usual caveat that street versions of any drug can be incredibly dangerous, for more on this see What's in My Baggie?. Dealers hate drug testers, to the point of trying to hunt them down. All to say trying to treat yourself without guidance is incredibly dangeorus.

The Psychedelic Miracle

Mac McClelland

Dr. X is a dad. Appropriately – boringly – at 4:37 p.m. on a national holiday, he is lighting a charcoal grill, about to grab a pair of tongs with one hand and a beer with the other. His kids are running around their suburban patio, which could be anywhere; Dr. X, though impressively educated now, grew up poor in a town that is basically nowhere. Like most Americans, he is a Christian. Like a lot of health-conscious men, he fights dad bod by working out once or twice a week, before going into his medical practice.

Somewhat less conventionally, two hours ago, he was escorting a woman around his yard, helping her walk off a large dose of MDMA. He’s the one who’d given it to her, earlier in the morning, drugging her out of her mind.

This would be psychedelic-assisted therapy, the not-new but increasingly popular practice of administering psychotropic substances to treat a wide range of physical, psychological and psycho-spiritual concerns. “Some people stagger out” of the room in Dr. X’s home that he uses for these “journeys,” as sessions are called in the semiofficial parlance. Some have to stay for hours and hours beyond the standard five or so, crying or waiting to emotionally rebalance, lying on a mattress, probing the secrets, trauma, belief or grief buried in their subconscious. Dr. X recalls a patient who was considering a round-the-clock Klonopin prescription for anxiety; she reluctantly decided to try a journey instead. On the “medicine,” she spent seven hours unraveling ballistically, picturing herself dumping sadness out of her chest into a jade box that she put a golden heart-shaped lock on and tossed into the sea. She’d been skeptical going in, but after it was over, Dr. X says, “She was so angry that it was illegal.”