 I always had this kind of idea that magic mushrooms must 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. Saw me bending down and they screeched to a halt and came up and started questioning me and like I kind of knew it was illegal but I thought like I don't know getting a ticket or something I'm gonna get like chewed out and maybe they'll like 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 kind of devastating personally it was devastating it was really hard 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 Sean a hundred dollars. 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 for 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 address bigger existential questions about the meaning of life our place in the universe and allow the sort of like deep work that otherwise a 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 kind of asked him how he was doing and he said you know like I open this door to this like kind of vast space. Having this kind of vision then of himself as a child in this vast open field just kind of being able to kind of run free and feel that joy and after a while of like not being able to find that fear that had been kind of this ever-present thing in his life this thing had been like like haunting him all for years he considered a complete cure. Researchers have resumed studying the use of psychedelics in therapeutic settings picking up 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 psychiatrists around the world in the 50s it quickly became apparent psychedelics had the potential to become the cutting edge of psychiatric research so in a sense the mystical mimetic properties of these drugs were highly unusual. Harvey UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist Charles Grove published a seminal study which found that psilocybin demonstrably alleviates the end-of-life anxiety of terminal cancer patients. What we observe 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 Eden 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 kind of kind of work on you know on your your trauma issues sure let's do that. Some psychiatrists including Grove 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. Eden 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 going to screw it up they've shown they're going to screw it up time and time again by listening to 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 kind of imagine certain kind of training programs and 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 Eden 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 sort of bad trips in more recreational context because they get some idea that they're going to get busted they're going to get in trouble legally and that kind of anxiety than than spirals. So I do think that just having that legal safety is 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.