- Thousands of Oregonians across the state came together to make sure psilocybin therapy will be on the ballot this fall. Now more than ever, Oregonians struggling with hard-to-treat anxiety and depression need access to this breakthrough therapy. But our work is just beginning: Sign up today to help us carry this momentum into the election.
Good for Oregon. Hopefully we can begin to move out of this politically enforced pharmaceutical dark age.
As a recreational user of psilocybin mushrooms, I cannot be happier about this. There is extraordinary value to deeply, viscerally, understanding your place in the universe, and how interconnected everything really is. Unlike LSD, which crafts things that aren't there, psilocybin pulls down our artificial/perceived barriers between things, and helps the individual feel connected, rather than disconnected. In junior high school science classes, at some point the teacher will slap their hand on the table and explain there is more empty space in the table, than table. So why does their hand stop? And they go into atoms and attractive forces and blah de blah. But when you assess all of the forces at play around you - from biochemical, to gravitational, to temperature, to smells, etc. - you realize there is no separation between what is YOU and what is EVERYTHING. Our brain crafts this concept of you "ending" at the surface of your skin, and nowadays we understand that our breath carries COVID to other people, but that's really an abstract and difficult to understand idea... that we are just a collection of atoms moving through a larger collection of atoms. My experience with psilocybin was the only time that became crystal clear. And it wasn't disassociation of myself, it was association with everything that surrounded me. There's an early TED talk with Jill Bolte-Taylor, a neuroscientist who has a stroke, and diagnoses the stroke as she is goes through the phases of it. At one point, she is leaning on the wall of the bathroom, and has that psilocybin-like experience where that "dividing the self from the outside world" part of the brain shuts down, and she loses the sense of where she "ends" and the wall "begins" and she feels integrated with the world in a deeply moving way. I hope everyone gets to feel this some day.
I did mushrooms again for the first time in ... what? ... two years? ... just this weekend. Spend the 4th of July out on some remote property along a river with my wife and two friends. We kept our social distance, but also spend that evening doing mushrooms and having quite an extraordinary experience. Hit a LOT of reset buttons in my head. I feel a lot better now.
Psilocybin for recreation and psilocybin for therapy are pretty different animals. Also there is a protocol in place that doesnt involve picking up a bag of "definitely boomers dude, Ron said so! Looks like a quarter!" And blending them with orange juice or putting them in a PB&J or whatever else while trying to remember the McKenna quote about the number of dry grams for a "heroic" dose. Also, I dont need to tell you that psychoactive drugs of all kinds have side effects / toxicity / danger associated with them. I have a tic from a 3 month course of duloxetine over 3 years ago, as one example. Now, hopefully, researchers and therapists in Oregon will hopefully be able to take a scientific and compassionate approach to this particular chemical/class of chemical.
I really, really hope this passes. It’s the right thing. Have you seen the documentary Fantastic Fungi?