I always had this kind of idea that magic mushrooms
just grow deep in the forest, and they're hard to identify.
So I went out to wander around,
and I brought a little paper bag with me
that, if I saw mushrooms,
and I did, because they were like everywhere.
Sean is a Portland-based social worker
who asked that we only use his first name in this story.
In 2016, he and his girlfriend
were foraging for psychedelic mushrooms
in a nearby state park,
when they were stopped by a park ranger.
They saw me bending down, and they screeched to a halt
and came up and started questioning me.
I kinda knew it was illegal,
but I thought, ah, they'll give me a ticket or something.
I'm going to get chewed out.
Maybe they'll kick me out of the park or something.
He was arrested
and spent the weekend in county jail.
He pled guilty to felony possession,
which derailed his career.
He was fired from his job
at a community mental health agency.
And it has made him ineligible to receive insurance
in his private practice.
Professionally, it was devastating.
Personally, it was devastating. It was really hard.
It's still impacting me to this day.
Four years later,
Oregon voters decriminalized low-level drug possession.
If that law had been in place in 2016,
the park ranger would probably have ticketed John $100.
In a separate 2020 ballot initiative
Oregon voters also opted to legalize psilocybin,
the psychoactive compound and magic mushrooms,
for use in therapeutic settings.
Regulators have until January 2023
to begin issuing licenses.
I think it's a great thing
to be able to start to have this system in place,
so that we'll be able to do that work above ground, legally.
But Sean didn't wait around
for the state licensing program.
He started treating his clients with psychedelics
after his felony conviction
destroyed his traditional practice,
under the condition that they supply the drugs.
Psilocybin from magic mushrooms has real potential
to revolutionize mental health treatments.
Really effective in ways that other medications
that are available now are not
to help us in ways that dress bigger existential questions
about the meaning of life, our place in the universe,
and allow the deep work that otherwise
in therapy can take years.
There's robust evidence that therapy with MDMA,
or ecstasy, is an effective treatment
for post-traumatic stress disorder.
And the FDA has deemed psilocybin a breakthrough therapy
for treating severe depression.
Sean says that psilocybin has helped many of his clients
overcome traumatic episodes,
including a middle-aged man whose life was upended
after he was robbed at gunpoint.
No other treatment options had worked.
He was desperate for some relief when he came to me,
and we did just one session with mushrooms,
and an hour into it or so, I asked him how he was doing,
and he said, I opened this door to this vast space.
Having this kind of vision then of himself as a child
in this vast open field,
just being able to run free and feel that joy.
And after a while of not being able to find that fear
that had been this ever-present thing in his life,
this thing had been haunting him for years,
he considered a complete cure.
Researchers have resumed studying
the use of psychedelics in therapeutic settings,
picking on promising research that began nearly 80 years ago
but that was halted by drug prohibition.
When psychedelics were first discovered
in the early 40s and then really distributed
to the psychiatrists around the world in the 50s,
it quickly became apparent
that psychedelics had the potential
to become the cutting edge of psychiatric research.
So in a sense, the mystical mimetic properties
of these drugs were a highly unusual.
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist Charles Grob
published a seminal study,
which found that psilocybin demonstrably alleviates
the end-of-life anxiety of terminal cancer patients.
What we observed with this study was that our subjects
to begin with were in great existential crisis.
Their sense of self had eroded,
the sense of continuity over time,
often a sense of loss of meaning, loss of purpose.
What we found with these psychedelic experiences,
individuals reported they were often able
to reestablish that sense of self continuity
with the previous parts of their lives
and strengthen their sense of meaning and purpose.
Denver decriminalized psilocybin in 2019.
Oakland decriminalized all naturally occurring psychedelics
later that year, and Santa Cruz followed in early 2020.
The California legislature is considering legalizing
several psychedelics statewide,
but Oregon is the first state
that will establish a legal framework
for the sales and use of psychedelics
in a therapeutic setting.
I don't believe that the state should have anything to do
with what's going on in my mind.
I never signed off, nor do I know anybody else
who signed off and said,
yeah, you get to control what I put in my brain.
Joe Eaton is a retired counselor
who now works as a psychedelic sitter,
taking care of his clients while they're tripping.
He may not be eligible for a state license.
I come to the substances with the idea that,
whatever you want to do with them is fine.
You just want to party? That's fine.
And you want to hire me to keep you safe? That's fine.
You want to seriously do a search for God?
Great. Let's do that.
You want to do psychodynamic work on your trauma issues?
Sure. Let's do that.
Some psychiatrists, including Grob,
are concerned that, if psychedelic use is unregulated,
it could put some patients in danger,
such as people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The experience,
particularly under adverse conditions,
may push them over the edge into a psychotic state.
Eaton says that a regulatory apparatus
isn't necessary to protect this population.
I don't think keeping it in the hands of the professionals
who have clearly shown that they're gonna screw it up,
they've shown they're gonna screw it up
time and time again
by listening to Nixon and his cohorts for the last 50 years.
I just don't have a lot of respect
for any of the professional organizations.
Oregon's law created
the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board
to work with the health department
to create licenses and training programs
for manufacturing, selling and testing psilocybin,
as well as providing broadly defined psilocybin services.
I can at least imagine certain kind of training programs
and what sorts of things I think would be good to have
in something like that.
But I don't think that somebody needs to have gone
to a Master's program in social work,
MD program in psychiatry,
to be able to safely and effectively dispense and guide
the use of these substances
to facilitate their therapeutic use.
The good news is that practitioners like Eaton
who may not be obtaining an official license
will still be mostly protected, thanks to Oregon's decision
to decriminalize low-level drug possession.
Sean plans to apply for a license as soon as he can.
Very often, when people have bad trips
in more recreational contexts,
it's because they get some idea
that they're gonna get busted,
they're going to get in trouble legally,
and that anxiety then spirals.
So I do think that just having that legal safety is huge.
So I already had pretty strong opinions about the drug war,
and certainly having that personal experience,
I guess maybe care about it that much more
and realize how severely it can impact person's life
to get tangled up in the criminal justice system like that.