Measure 109 supporters anticipate ‘a huge societal shift’ if magic mushrooms are legalized for medical use
On the morning of July 19, a Sunday, Neal drove from his home in Portland to a cabin in a remote part of Oregon.
The person he traveled to meet greeted him and welcomed him in. On her advice, he’d abstained from drinking alcohol or caffeine for a few days, and they had a brief conversation about what he hoped to get from his experience that day.
After their conversation, the woman put on a five-hour playlist she’d created for the meeting with Neal’s input, then set a bundle of sage on a ceramic plate and started burning it.
Then she gave Neal a dose of medication, mixed with cacao and fermented honey. After about 15 minutes, Neal told Katie he needed to lie down because he was starting to feel different. Katie gave him a sleep mask, and he lay down in a dark room and his session began.
Neal and the woman he met at the cabin both work in health care. Both asked that their professions not be described in detail, but Street Roots independently confirmed their professional status. Neal asked to be referred to by his first name, and we’ll call the woman Katie, a pseudonym.
They met, Neal said, after he began investigating the possibility of using psychedelic mushrooms for personal growth and learned that someone in Oregon was offering guided sessions with psilocybin.
In November, Oregon voters will decide whether to make it legal for licensed service providers to provide psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic use.
If Measure 109 passes, Oregon will be the first state to legitimize the use of psilocybin for medical purposes.
The drug was banned in 1970 by the Controlled Substances Act and is listed as a Schedule I controlled substance — meaning that in the eyes of the federal government, it has a high potential for abuse with no accepted medical application.
But medical and legal attitudes about psychedelics have undergone a tectonic shift in the past decade.
The idea that psychedelic drugs can have therapeutic, or transformative, effects is not new. There’s evidence that indigenous people in Mexico used psychedelic mushrooms in purification ceremonies but were forced to take the practice underground when Spanish conquistadors arrived.
A Mexican ethnobotanist named Blas Pablo Reko identified the psychoactive properties of some mushrooms in a 1936 research paper. In 1957, American writer and ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson took mushrooms in a ritual called a velada, under the supervision of a healer named María Sabina, and published an article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life magazine.
Wasson’s piece got Americans and Europeans interested in the drug, and when Sabina’s identity was revealed, her village rapidly became a tourist destination where she hosted traveling beatniks and hippies, including counterculture celebrities like John Lennon and Bob Dylan — and tourists still flock to Oaxaca to experience veladas for themselves.
Journalists have since revealed that Wasson’s visit to Oaxaca was funded by the CIA under MK-Ultra, a sweeping set of experiments in mind control that included investigations into the effects of psychoactive drugs, including psilocybin, LSD, DMT and cocaine.
Partly as a result of Wasson’s article, researchers in the 1950s and 1960s who weren’t linked to the CIA also took an interest in psychedelics. A 1962 study on psilocybin, for example, found it induced “mystical states” and those who took it were more engaged in their religious lives than they had been previously. Researchers also investigated the potential application of psychedelic drugs for pain relief and addiction.
But the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965, and later the Controlled Substances Act, put a halt to most research, and while a few more studies were performed in the 1970s, by the end of that decade, the field of psychedelic study was dead.
That field has seen a small revival, and a push to end the prohibition of psylocibin in particular.
A Santa Cruz, Calif.-based nonprofit called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was founded in 1986 to source funding for psychedelic research, and in 1992, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed regulations to allow the use of psychedelics for research purposes.
The 21st century has seen a minor renaissance in psychedelics research, and in 2018, Michael Pollan published a book called “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” bringing much of that research mainstream. Almost overnight, the face of psychedelics wasn’t the scruffy college kid waxing poetic about Terrence McKenna’s spoken word records; it was Silicon Valley executives microdosing to maximize their productivity.
But it was also terminally ill patients who, under the Right to Try Act passed in May 2018, were allowed to use an “eligible investigation drug” that has not received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The dosing, they said, lessened their depression. It was also Iraq War veterans who said they no longer suffered from panic attacks or other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
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And in the past two years, three cities — Denver, Oakland and Santa Cruz — have passed measures ending prohibition of psilocybin. But Oregon would be the first jurisdiction in the country to legalize medical use of the drug.
Neal’s session was a gift to himself for his 50th birthday; he paid Katie $850 for the experience.
Katie demurred on the question of how much the mushrooms cost her but confirmed that she charges for sessions on a sliding scale. “I used to tell people I charged $600 to $800 for the experience, but now I say between zero and infinity,” she told Street Roots. “I want to make it available to people who don’t have a lot of means.”
Neal had no previous experience with psychedelics and, until recently, little knowledge about them apart from warnings he received attending Christian school in Texas in the 1980s, when teachers cautioned kids that strangers could give them postage stamps with cartoon characters on them laced with LSD.
He’d never seriously considered that psychedelic drugs could have therapeutic value until 10 years ago when he moved to Portland. At the 2018 EcoFilm Festival at the Hollywood Theatre, he saw a short film called “The Kingdom — How Fungi Made Our World,” which addressed magic mushrooms.
His interest piqued. At the time, Neal was in the middle of doing a lot of what he called “self-work” to cope with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder from a difficult childhood. He had read books such as “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van Der Kolk’s 2015 work about the relationship between trauma and physical and mental health, and Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.”
He’d done a number of things he said were “incrementally helpful” in addressing his trauma and had tried “all that medicine had to offer.”
But “all the self-work seemed to lead to mystical, transformational work,” Neal said.
He started reading recently published research out of institutions such as Yale and Johns Hopkins University, and found it compelling.
He met Katie through contacts in health care and decided to undergo a session, figuring the worst that could happen would be a bad trip — but that he would have someone to help him handle that.
Before each guided psychedelic session, Katie holds an initial meeting to talk to clients about their intentions and what they hope to get out of the experience. They discuss the potential risks of the drug, such as fear and paranoia, including the small risk of psychotic break. And she takes a brief medical and mental health history before deciding to proceed.
“There are some people I choose not to work with. There is a personality type that does not do well with psychedelics,” Katie said.
People who are “highly rigid and anxious” struggle with the experience of losing control of their perceptions, she said. She’s been offering guided sessions for about two years, and said a few clients didn’t have much reaction to mushrooms — either because, she suspects, the particular batch lacked potency or because they were on medication that can interfere with their reaction to hallucinogens — but no one has become ill or had a bad experience.
During sessions, Katie said, she rarely intervenes unless the client seems to be having a challenging time.
“I might hold their hand or give them a tissue,” she said. “I typically don’t talk to them unless they want some reassurance.”
Katie’s clients wear an eye mask because people on hallucinogens are often distracted by the changes in their optical field and, as Neal explained it, “your brain is overwhelmed with novelty.”
Neal was there to process grief, to go to the heart of it. That manifested at first as a fight between his ego and his inner child, or his self-compassion, he said — with the voice that represented his ego saying, finally, “I surrender.”
After that happened, he said, the faces of people who harmed him as a child appeared before him and he was flooded with profound feelings of love and forgiveness for them. He saw the faces of several pets he had loved in his life.
He also saw the image of a particular photo of himself that was taken when he was 6 years old. In the photo, he said, he was looking away from the camera; but during the session, the child turned and looked at him — as innocent and joyful as he had ever looked.
“It was almost like my psyche was being rebuilt,” Neal said.
He told Katie he was with God — that if he drew his last breath that day, he would be ready.
Tom and Sheri Eckert are the chief petitioners of Measure 109. They’re both therapists and founders of the Oregon Psylocibin Society.
In an interview with Street Roots, Tom Eckert said he had no experience with psychedelics but got interested in their therapeutic applications in 2015 after seeing published research on the issue.
If 109 passes, the Oregon Health Authority will have two years to appoint an advisory board, develop the framework and begin educating the public about psilocybin therapy.
That would include a process for licensing practitioners and creating training programs for providers about how psilocybin is used.
“It’s not like it will pass and suddenly there will be psilocybin sessions happening,” Tom Eckert told Street Roots.
Measure 109 won’t legalize the drug for recreational use. But another measure on the ballot this fall, Measure 110, would decriminalize it, along with some other federally controlled substances, making possession a civil violation with a maximum of a $100 fine.
Katie became interested in psilocybin after using it recreationally and finding it profoundly helpful for the depression she experienced in her teens and early 20s. She trained with guides in California who have been doing similar work underground for 30 years. She spends a couple of weekend days per month on the work, which she calls her “soul work” — it’s separate from the work she does to pay her bills, but she is hopeful that if Measure 109 passes, she’ll be able to go above ground and do the work without fear of retribution.
Katie does have some hesitation about potential unintended consequences of Measure 109, including the possibility that those who’ve been doing therapeutic guide work underground won’t be included in the regulatory apparatus.
“The thing that concerns me is when you medicalize things and Big Pharma gets involved, everything becomes about money,” Katie said.
And the way the practice has traditionally worked creates a particular bureaucratic hurdle.
“One of the things that my mentors have to told me is that in order to do this work, you have to get on the mat, they call it. You have to go on your own psilocybin journeys yourself on a regular basis,” Katie said. “That’s going to be a tricky spot, a really sticky situation. That’s the most important thing; you have to have your own experience with this medicine. And a lot of it, not just once or twice.”
But Katie and Neal are both optimistic about the measure as a whole.
“We’re going to see a huge societal shift here,” Neal said.
Once a session is over, Katie said, she’ll usually cut up some fruit for the client and sit quietly with them on the back porch. She encourages them to take the evening and not jump immediately back into regular life because they need time to process the experience — and an “aura” can linger for some time after the drug wears off.
Neal drove to Cannon Beach, rented a motel room and spent the next 24 hours journaling so he would remember and processing the experience.
He’s back in Portland with his wife and two Tibetan spaniels, and he said he’s still processing the experience. He’s contacted family members he had been estranged from and is able to interact with them with more compassion, he said. It’s also easier for him to be compassionate with himself when he’s feeling stressed and to approach his day job with more creativity and insight.
While he was on psilocybin, the ceramic plate Katie had been using to burn the sage broke in half.
“She said, ‘This has never happened before,’” Neal told Street Roots. He took the broken halves back home with them, and he keeps them in his bedroom — a reminder of the time his ego broke, and of how destructive black-and-white thinking can be.
“I have them spaced with space between them. That’s where compassion is,” Neal said. “The hardest part is making sure I don’t break the plate again.”
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