The Battle Over Psychedelic Therapy’s Future

[Music] most people are ignoring their suffering to me it's not like psilocybin is the magic bullet and it ends it actually starts i was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer the psilocybin journey that i did was just so transformative for me i stopped living with the expectation that i'm gonna wake up the next day i'm preparing for my own psilocybin experience the initial consultation it was six hundred 600 if this is as revolutionary as people say it is anybody with a mental health issue deserves to be able to try it but it shouldn't be limited just to those who can spend an exorbitant amount of money on it there is so much ownership of medicine in this culture by a certain group of people there's money to be made in this emerging field and people are grabbing as much as they can what's going on here it doesn't feel right why do you think you need your patents in order to be successful i think we're gonna pop up are we off so i've just taken two fistfuls of psilocybin capsules sayonara [Applause] [Music] [Music] we're on a six-hour drive through the mountains of oaxaca on our way to a remote town called wildlife humane we're trying to figure out what the future of psilocybin therapy will look like so we figured where better to start than the place where it all began [Music] what is it is [Music] [Music] a the mazatec community uses psilocybin mushrooms ceremonially as they have done for centuries but now the sacred medicine is about to become a modern commodity [Music] i have a cautionary tale to tell about tripping it was super fun i just want to caution people about it 60 years after shrooms first came to america it started when a new york banker visited that mazatec village took part in a mushroom ceremony and then wrote about it for the biggest magazine of the day and that helped kick off a counterculture revolution in the 60s a generation hell-bent on making love not turn on tune but it wasn't just a counterculture movement it was a scientific one too psychedelics were tested as potential treatments for a range of mental health conditions with promising results but instead of world peace the psychedelic movement started a new war america's public enemy number one is drug abuse hippies still tripped and dealers still made money but scientific research was stopped cold until the turn of the century when the food and drug administration allowed clinical trials to start up again magic mushrooms could hold a cure for depression they say they show great promise in helping people heal conditions they simply can't escape psilocybin isn't even legal yet but it's already part of a psychedelics industry projected to be worth billions it's in the process of being rebranded as a pharmaceutical something to be owned and controlled bought and sold with no guarantee that those who need it most will be able to afford it as soon as i came out of the trip i've been trying to illustrate the blunt imagery that i saw my guts were on those 26 spikes yeah like a spider web i turned into sound a handful of times like actual sound waves it's one single sound being moving between these like two thousand pound gongs like ricocheting off of them and then at one point i turned into a white moth [Music] and i was on a pond a really tranquil pond at night it was beautiful evan craig is part of a small 30-person clinical trial looking at whether psilocybin can alleviate depression in cancer patients trials like this are the only way to receive psilocybin therapy legally in the u.s it was six hours and it felt like maybe two time just flew by and it was almost like i was dreaming while being awake in terms of your diagnosis what have you been told your prospects are i was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer and uh i think it's past the point of being cured of it so just living with that was hard especially with my kids being so young i want to see them as teenagers i want to see them as adults and just not knowing if i'm going to be able to do that it's hard i would just stay in bed all day and sleep and i mean it was a mix of you know going through treatment on top of all of this so it was hard and did you try any other more traditional established forms of mental health treatments i had gone to therapy a handful of times i had been on antidepressants for four years and i mean those helped to an extent it got to the point where i'd rather find something natural than take more pills they say that even after the dosing and after you're out of the trip that your brain is still you know very active even holding the babies like we're just trying to figure this world out together i was like i understand i was like you in my journey and i'm gonna hold you and we're gonna get through this man we're gonna get through this and he stopped crying he stopped crying the hardest part was i had one vision where my wife and my son had just woken up and my other kids ran into the room and i was dead on the bed and i guess it's something that i never wanted to visualize it's something that i guess i had been putting off for you know the fear of but in a psilocybin trip you can't control it so i saw it i went through it you feel like it's given you a quality of life i've stopped living with the expectation that i'm gonna wake up the next day and in that i've just learned to appreciate every day so just appreciate every moment psilocybin treatment isn't just promising for cancer patients trials suggest it has the potential to treat a range of mental health issues including mine i've struggled with depression most of my life but when my mother died at the height of the pandemic suddenly the antidepressants and talk therapy i'd always relied on weren't really cutting it [Music] i started looking into high-dose psilocybin therapy as an alternative when a friend recommended it coincidentally around the same time i began reporting on this story and now i'm planning for my own experience the treatment isn't legal in the u.s but there is one psychedelic that is hi hi josh this is the form of ketamine approved as anesthesia but it's also used off-label by doctors as a treatment for depression the way in which i practice unfortunately is very expensive i do long sessions typically three hours when i'm working with someone in ketamine assisted psychotherapy sometimes there's preparation and there's a lot of integration afterwards how are you doing so far so good so why don't you sleep on your mask what i found with ketamine different from anything else was it was an exploration of mind it was the closest thing i'd ever experienced to the highest levels of meditation that i'd heard about when you're done and your mind clears what you feel like is as if someone went into your brain with a sponge and cleansed you most versions of the drug aren't covered by insurance and neither is the therapist's time dr gita vade charges up to 600 an hour psilocybin therapy could end up being equally expensive there's an argument out there that people have been using psilocybin for centuries outside of a medical setting without trained medical professionals why do we have to medicalize it in this way which is going to cost so much usually there's shamans or priests who are holding the knowledge it's rarely everyone just can access and do it themselves there are a lot of kids who are using all of these medicines recreationally in all sorts of contexts and it's not clear to me that overall they're more enlightened so even the idea of why don't we just make them accessible and distribute them to me it doesn't seem convincing at least that that is a path towards overall health and benefit i'm preparing for my own psilocybin experience and i wanted to talk to a psychiatrist and i have pretty good insurance in america and yet for the initial consultation it was 600 mental health coverage in america is quite challenging right i mean even forget about psychedelics insurance coverage is not great generally speaking and then a lot of doctors don't accept insurance i think psilocybin is going to be obviously a different challenge because it's such a longer acting substance it does then require longer sessions right now pharmaceutical companies non-profits and state governments all have different visions for what psilocybin therapy could look like sheila love has been reporting on how it's being folded into the american healthcare system if you are somebody who's covering mental health neuroscience psychology psychedelics became an inescapable topic several years ago if we look at other maybe examples like ketamine therapy where it's not very well covered by insurance what's the future looking like is it going to be able to be affordable how can we make it more accessible this is a huge question and one that i worry about a lot which is if this is as revolutionary as people say it is anybody with a mental health issue deserves to be able to try it we've never tried to make a mental health treatment like this available before which integrates both a very extensive psychotherapeutic piece as well as a drug there are several clinical trials that are collecting data to present to the fda to try to get psilocybin approved at the same time there are movements to pass laws in states to get legal access to psychedelics so in oregon last november measure 109 passed and that sets up a plan for within two years by 2023 anybody can get a license to perform psilocybin services in oregon home to some of the world's loudest psychedelic advocates oregon has long been a mecca for psilocybin even while mushrooms are still a schedule 1 drug oregon has become the first state to allow facilities to administer that psilocybin treatment passing with 56 percent of the voters saying yes measure 109 passed in 2020. measure 109's regulations require psilocybin only be used by adults in licensed clinics supervised by trained facilitators this is very different from the medical model instead oregon's new law skirts the federal approval process and the state will regulate how and where people can get mushrooms it is one o'clock an advisory board made up of doctors lawyers policy makers and experts in the field is trying to tease out the details this is a whole new paradigm and the facilitators are the are the backbone mason marks is a senior fellow on psychedelic law and policy at harvard in oregon we're very careful to call this psilocybin services and be clear that it's not a form of therapy so if someone is administered psilocybin the facilitator is there to just make sure that they are safe and everything is going according to plan one of the goals here is access you won't need a prescription to qualify for psilocybin services is there a risk that some of that spirituality will get lost or is it a necessary sacrifice to get this out to the most people possible measure 109 was trying not to create a medicalized model because there is so much ownership of medicine in this culture by a certain group of people angela carter is a naturopath and the board's vice chair they're dedicated to making this therapy safe and available to everyone who wants it we are in the middle of late stage capitalism and we have to work within that framework and also at the same time try and shift it and i feel like psychedelics have a really good potential for creating that shift as long as we start off well and do it right the first time [Music] it is true that of course psilocybin is a schedule one controlled substance and that means that according to the government it has no currently accepted medical use and high potential for abuse the evidence just does not support the categorization of psilocybin in schedule one what limitations if any does that put on things unfolding here there hasn't been a lot of dialogue with federal agencies about that but they tend to take a very drug development approach to psilocybin and what we're doing here is very different for now pretty much everyone else is going with the drug development approach which means trying to make psilocybin a prescription medication there are only a handful of places in the world that make medical grades psilocybin and this is one of them the usona institute believes in open science so they make their research available to anyone who wants it and they offer their psilocybin for free to clinical trials purified crystalline psilocybin this is what psilocybin looks like at the last step of the synthetic process there are different ways of getting this to market the for-profit route like biotech and pharma companies and then there are the organizations that claim they want to put their mission before profits can you tell me what usona's commitment to open science means you make available your findings in ways that would make it harder to get intellectual property or to patent something so it's essentially a commitment to share our discoveries with the world so the best use can be made to them we'd like to see this sort of heritage molecules the molecules that are either directly derived from plants or that have been in the world for quite a while or that were previously developed as pharmaceutical things like lsd perhaps or certainly psilocybin which we work on to be available in an open space with all the private sector interest most non-profits aren't able to compete but usona can partially by hosting mega fundraisers with mega donors this might be a slow burn [Music] [Applause] if there was ever any doubt that psychedelics are well on their way to mainstream legitimacy you need only glance around this crowd these people are all here for a groundbreaking which will soon be the site of a brand new psychedelic therapy center by usonia which will be ready to accept patients the moment the fda gives the green light of legalization everyone is welcome even the former enemy of psychedelics republicans what brought you here today i'm talking to these special operators these marine force recon these army green berets these navy seals and they're being able to see really positive effects by the use of psychedelics i became really intrigued with changing the laws in the country many veteran groups want psychedelics to be legalized because they show promise in treating ptsd when they become legal and all of us are allowed to take psychedelics will rick perry ever be open to having a psychedelic experience absolutely be open to it but before former governor rick perry can trip on mushrooms psilocybin still needs federal approval and that means more research [Music] this clinical trial is the same one that evan craig participated in the cancer patient we met earlier there are dozens of trials like this each trying to prove that psilocybin is a viable therapeutic it doesn't feel like your typical cancer center not to me anyway yeah i was very deliberate in the design and you needed to be medical but also be very comfortable for people this is what psilocybin therapy will look like if and when it becomes legal and accessible to the public for it to be accessible it will have to get approved by the fda and the insurance companies would have to pay for it and so they'll need something that the medical system sanctions as being helpful and so it'll look like some variation off of this how you dealt with some of the skepticism around even trying psilocybin in the first place with people who maybe have preconceived notions about what psychedelics are most people are ignoring their suffering and to have something that at least talks about it they're generally open to that to me it's not like psilocybin is the magic bullet and it ends it actually starts the healing journey starts after that because they're not as stuck and they can then start working with their struggles watching the trials i started anticipating my own treatment still two months away i've got goosebumps i just left the control room where i was allowed to go in and observe a live feed through the screens and i could just tell from from the tone of the interactions with the therapists and the patients that something very profound and very important is going on in there drug trials cost millions and the one i witnessed was paid for by compass pathways all four patients compassionate thought through care this is a pharmaceutical company focused on psilocybin treatment and they used patents to gain ownership over their form of the drug compass pathways is one of the first sort of rock star for-profit psychedelic companies their patents have had a lot of scrutiny placed on them because they were one of the first to file for patents for synthetic psilocybin their formulation of it and that upset a lot of people because there was disagreement about whether or not their crystalline form of psilocybin was really different than what exists already along with the fact that they get a lot of their money from peter thiel who is a right-wing investor supporter of donald trump and some of their more recent patent applications that include elements of sentence setting all of these things combined together to kind of make them the bad guy in the space and is it possible to look into your crystal ball and say what's it gonna look like in a year and two years it's really hard to say and i think it'll have a lot to do with how much various actors want to control the process somebody gets ownership over any sort of basic element of this therapy it could restrict other people from performing that kind of therapy or accessing certain molecules [Music] lawyer david kassimi is visiting this archive full of old rare documents on pharmaceuticals and drugs today we're here for mescaline but future trips so this is exciting for you yeah when i see three drawers full of ancient materials very very exciting 1800s yes it is so pre pre-synthesis he's digitizing all these documents to make sure the government has the information it needs to decide whether or not to grant a patent so the story behind this is the pharmacists who are training had to look through here and identify the different substances not surprisingly it's the cannabis that's gone away it's the cocaine that's gone away do they go missing from this archive your silence fix volumes patents are the government's way of saying that an idea or invention is new and belongs to someone anyone else who wants to use it has to pay for the privilege or risk being sued in 2021 alone there have been more than 400 patent applications related to psilocybin we were seeing some patents coming out of the patent office that should not have granted why are these patents being granted that shouldn't happen so the innovation has to be new and non-obvious and the way the patent office typically identifies whether something is new or non-obvious is they review their own internal databases and look at public databases to see if someone's done it before this particular field has almost unique problem of a lot of the prior work that's out there where someone had already done it is not found in traditional databases largely because these drugs have been illegal for a large number of years can it create a problem of monopoly it does typically what you see is price increases as high as 70 to 80 percent when a drug is patented versus when it's not and obviously the buzz the controversy in the psychedelics community at the moment is around one company compass the major controversy that compass has brought forth with their patent filings is some of the patent applications they have in the queue specifically they filed for an international patent to use psilocybin to treat depression and a range of other mental health conditions included in the application is the setting a place where the patient feels safe and comfortable with soft furniture plants and muted colors if those get granted they in theory can stop a very important market that's you know deep into fda trials at this point and in theory years away from being in the clinic [Music] compass also has five u.s patents granted on the way they make synthetic psilocybin vice news spoke to more than a dozen people scientists therapists and lawyers who are worried they're trying to own as much of the psilocybin therapy process as they can i'm walking through a pretty affluent part of central london headed to the home of two out of three of the founders of compass pathways who also happen to be married and hopefully i'm going to get the opportunity to put to them some of the concerns that others in the psychedelic space have about their patent strategy why do you think you need your patents in order to be successful it's really simple clinical trials to be done at the level of quality cost tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and it doesn't prevent anybody from finding magic mushrooms taking magic mushrooms whatever they choose this is a different model we're a mental health care company and this is about bringing new models of care to patients desperately in need for something different than they currently have do you really believe that your form of psilocybin is novel and non-obvious well it doesn't really matter what we believe what does matter is what the u.s patent office believes what the uk patent office believes which germany what hong kong believes and all of them believe that actually it is because we have the granted patents moving on to your international patent the one that touches on setting we know that mushrooms have been used for hundreds of years how do you claim that that's novel we do have you read the patterns i've tried my best and i've consulted with some some people who know more about patents than i do and have they read the patents yes i think having this kind of echo chamber is not helpful that's how the wrong message gets amplified i think just answering your specific question why do companies in the field of medicine develop patents waiting on the wings always is a very aggressive set of companies who are generic manufacturers who look to come in and take over right after that patent expires you know we have to protect the future this isn't about protecting the past but we're not patenting off a color we're not patenting a cushion we're describing the best way to administer our particular product so for those and those those watching this who worry that your patents getting approved could impact other people's ability to operate psilocybin therapy would you do a patent pledge sort of reassuring people perhaps no we don't need to reassure people right now what we need to do is to do the evidence of is it safe and effective and for whom and we can't comment on what the future will be because we can't really predict the future but right now our efforts are very much focused on this so is there any way to sort of guarantee that your patent application wouldn't have any impact say in oregon because we spoke to some people who in oregon who aren't really worried that your patents could have an impact on them operating opening psilocybin treatment centers in the future i think you should look into the source of that narrative this narrative doesn't even make any sense right to anyone who is involved in clinical development again i think it's responding to gossips i know the story has been covered a million times but i just wanted to get into again a more personalized version of how you even got into psychedelics because as far as i'm aware you've both had underground experiences right no wait i don't think we're going to talk about this right i think we're going to wrap up what do you think prep i don't think it's going in the right direction i don't think you guys um are you don't you don't yeah do you want to want to do you want to say a bit more about not on camera not not this way um i do think we just let's take a time out for a moment off mike and um and have a conversation okay i haven't tried to talk about anything that wasn't already right out there take this hello just you know so are we off with the cameras off the founders and their staff said they felt our questions were unfair but they agreed to finish the interview as long as we moved on from patents you started asking us about origin the origin for us was having front row seats on what happens when mental health doesn't go right it was for me my ex-wife who died of slow-motion suicide from alcoholism and seeing how that manifests over 13 years and how no matter what treatments or what access she had she was not able to be helped it has nothing to do with people wanting to expand their consciousness see their lives in different ways who aren't suffering in this fashion many people benefit from that that's different what we're talking about are the people who can't get out of bed can't go to work can't be don't cry george i was worried you were going to cry because i heard that you cried before and yeah i do it occasionally right because it's really moving what we're doing right and people are suffering and we're kind of talking about patents now talking about how to help people get the help they need [Music] so i'm back from london where i met with george and katya of compass i'm still trying to process what happened with that interview so as part of that i'm on my way to meet a man in new york whose name comes up time and time again when looking at who out there is trying to challenge compasses patents [Music] hi carrie it's charlotte how are you really great to see you carrie turnbull was on his way to becoming a monk but then he changed his mind and went into finance and made millions for the past dozen years he's been using his own money to fund research on psychedelics something he became passionate about after reading promising scientific literature on the subject in the early 2000s so one of the more topical features here is uh the wallpaper there's a firm in paris so my wife got pictures of psilocybin mushrooms and she said to them put these little mushrooms on the ground so here's the psilocybin mushrooms that keep going up the wall there's an entertaining piece of art that claudia and i got in a room upstairs i'll show you should we go for it who have we got here it's a chanel punk diamante baby buddha as to what it means i don't know i can't explain it certainly a conversation starter turnbull is an og psilocybin guy he sits on boards advisory committees and holds university chairs that promote psychedelic research he's suspicious of newer companies like compass patenting things he says have been around for a long time so he started an organization to try and prove that their patents should be revoked no one seemed to know or care that somebody had filed a patent on psilocybin and as i began to look at it and think i'll spend a little money just trying to figure out what's going on here it doesn't feel right to me to be clear what is your stance on patents are you just anti-patent i'm not anti-patent nor anti-profits they're meant to encourage formation of capital pools to cure previously incurable illnesses i think that bad patents are bad medicine for the pharmaceutical industry while we were visiting turnbull one of freedom to operate's attorneys stopped by to explain the petition they recently submitted to the u.s patent office as a patent litigator throughout your career how does this case compare i think this case is it's unique in a lot of ways it's very rare for companies to think they've invented a new crystal form for something that has been out in the world for so long psilocybin has been used in clinical trials right it was made in 1957 by albert hoffman and our research has shown so far that of the dozens of samples that we've tasted many of them have the same x-ray powder diffraction structure as shown in the compass patterns which is a key way to measure whether or not there's a polymorph in a particular chemical when i first heard polymorph i thought the hell is a polymorph i didn't know what that was so what a polymorph is is when you make these organic chemicals synthetically you make them in a beaker and they dry into a crystalline salt pattern and the pattern that that salt makes is called as polymorph it appears that they've got a dirty mixture of two polymorphs together that the reason it looks different is it's two different polymorphs in response to request for comment compass told vice news that they don't comment on specifics in active patent matters but that they are highly confident in the strength of their patents so the bottom line is if we are successful in persuading the patent judges about this the patents and the key claims will be revoked and declared invalid and with that everyone will be free to do research and to sell psilocybin without fear of being threatened for patent infringement even if freedom to operate is successful psilocybin therapy could remain a treatment by the elite for the elite jamaica for example one of the few countries where it's not illegal has a growing mushroom retreat industry where sessions like the one i'm joining can cost thousands of dollars i arrived in beautiful jamaica i'm beyond excited to be here and of course a little bit nervous but you know i think they're going to take pretty good care of me i am rocking up with a camera crew after all psychedelic services are a largely unregulated industry and that's created opportunities for abuse so people keen to try this therapy must contend with these added risks i had to and after doing my homework i chose a group retreat called micro meditations this place has had its own controversies accused of not having therapists on staff of having lack safety protocols and of being founded by a guy with a guru complex after four former staff members told us they believed the issues stemmed from this former leadership we spoke to the new ceo obviously micromeditations has suffered its own scandal in the past what's it been like recovering from that the company's come a long way it's made significant strides in the last two to two and a half years since that happened and frankly we couldn't have done it without listening to our guests frankly having some humility and listening to critics as well what makes someone like you qualified to make decisions like who to dose how much to dose them all that kind of thing micromeditations as a company has dosed over a thousand guests and has administered many thousands of doses of psilocybin but we don't decide this on our own i work alongside experienced psychiatrists and therapists and other mental health experts that all feed into that decision about what the dose should be for any given guest we have about maybe a dozen therapists that we rotate through because we're doing quite a few retreats every month we have a psychiatrist on team and then we have a nurse on each retreat and then we have what we call facilitators one of the allegations was facilitators dosing themselves alongside guests a shaman uh consuming a substance alongside the person in the group they're working with goes back thousands of years now with that in mind we are building a gold standard model the fda is never going to approve any retreat leaders or therapists or psychiatrists or psychologists taking a substance alongside the guest they're working with so we decided to stop that over a year ago so it kind of balances itself out in the end after the interview i was ready to join the group so the retreat starts tomorrow i'm going to take three doses of psilocybin across the course of a week and i'm hoping the experience could help me with a bunch of stuff for example difficult things in my childhood related to my mother but even though it's me going on this journey i also hope that the experience might prove useful to anyone who like me is curious about what similar simon can do for privacy reasons we couldn't film the rest of the group of the three doses i did we'll show you the second which was the most intense for me down the hatch as well so i've just taken two fistfuls of psilocybin capsules which is double what i had yesterday um i'm on a map because i feel like might encourage me to like move more i am um trying to try again with the music which i found really annoying last time thank you sayonara okay sayonara i'll be back around soon okay okay i'll just be here [Music] um [Music] ugh [Music] [Music] [Music] i was just like everything is so annoying every thing in the world is off i was really like angry i was like everyone needs to focus everything's so annoying i'm fine i'm it's like thank you do you have more tissues everything makes sense and i knew it before but it just this was very validating i knew it before but i didn't know what to do about it and i just thought i had to live with these this malaise but now i know more what to do about it why do i love this pillow [Music] i'm so angry maybe i just needed to like whinge and moan and just talk about myself and get off my chest that in polite society you feel like a drag doing that why is everything so annoying sorry it's disgusting it's funny i ignore my feelings it's almost like my mother in my head as well being like don't be so pathetic get up it was not fun it was hard it was very useful i'm obviously still me but i feel like something's been torn off a bit and i'm like it's more like yolo [Music] it's been a couple of months since my retreat this is not his first rodeo but um the altitude is making it really hard for me personally i feel like a fog has been lifted but as psilocybin migrates to the marketplace it's unclear who stands to gain the most i think that there has been so much fear-mongering around psychedelics and i feel that with the psychedelic renaissance that is happening now i think people are coming to understand that it's not just this two-dimensional toxic substance maybe this opens up a whole different way of thinking about what's possible what's treatable and how one can really not only treat illness but also move towards flourishing and wellness we used to call them love drugs and we said and they blow your mind and you get that now what they're saying is they're antidepressants and they cause openness fortunes will be made and that's not necessarily bad it's something we've got to be cautious about it's hard to get into people's minds and and identify all of the motivations but i think the most likely explanation is some flavor of greed los angeles [Music] nerve [Music]

Channel: VICE News

Views: 1,709,467

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020

Id: w5iB0AQ24r4

Length: 44min 35sec (2675 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Nubstix]

Taking Psilocybin can be life changing under the right environment. It can be terrifying and relieving. Its not about the visuals, but more about thinking differently about the past present and future. It is already being studied for treating depression and ptsd. I hope this scientific work continues.

[u/dethb0y]

I wish we'd just do away with the entire scheduling system and functionally legalize all drugs. It can't be worse than the current situation.

[u/FeelinLikeACloud420]

FYI for anyone outside the US, the video is geolocked but using a VPN works (though YMMV as using a cloud server in the US didn't work so it seems some IP blocks are blocked).

[u/srof12]

The Emerging Magic Mushroom Monopoly

[u/shpydar]

Not an issue here in Canada. After about a year of trials Health Canada approved psilocybin and MDMA for medicinal therapies back in January.

[u/doctorhino]

My body my choice for the vaccine. Our choice for everything else. -Republicans

[u/000011111111]

Let’s start with a skiing comparison.
“Thinking over and over again is like skiing down a mountain - once you go down one way you are more likely to go down that way again. In depression, people often ski down well established ruts. Psilocybin is like a new coating of snow on the mountain, so that there is much more freedom to ski anywhere (a greater ability to think freely and tolerate a broader range of emotions). The psilocybin can be seen as helping you find different paths down the mountain.”

This is a great comparison as it covers the range of potential benefits and risks of these substances.

Google "psychedelic psychotherapy metanalysis" or "systematic review " which does exactly this.

Using google scalar https://scholar.google.com/ to find studies like the linked below

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33125716/

​

Music playlist (v1.2.) for psychedelic therapy sessions for depression with psilocybin
The music playlist used in this study is displayed below. Please note that the playlist did not merely list the selected songs in the structure suggested below, but included a thoughtful mixing of volume, fade-ins, fade-outs, and moments of silence. Also note that following this study, an updated version of this playlist has been developed that incorporates insights from this study. I particular the return-phase has been replaced by calming ambient music. The latest playlist version can be found via www.mendelkaelen.com

Start with Uncle bens Tek https://www.reddit.com/r/unclebens/

[u/Arkhiah]

Psychedelics saved my life. I’ve seen firsthand the potential it has to treat - even cure - mental illnesses and substance abuse issues. Thanks to DMT, my depression, anxiety, social anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and alcoholism are far behind me. Psychedelics need to be legalized for medical purposes, at the very least.

[u/Imthaschmidt]

They’re scared cuz they know the truth. A woke nation revolts