In addition to making psilocybin available to anyone with a doctor’s prescription, the bill would permit therapy that uses the actual mushroom that a government office of traditional medicine would help regulate. It also calls for scientific research on Indigenous medicine and providing compensation to Indigenous people for “patents” involving their traditions. But we’re coming from a mental health and healing angle only,” Zach says. The authors hoped that psilocybin’s evolutionary history would clarify the most basic question — what does psilocybin do for mushrooms? The psilocybin-producing gene clusters likely have some benefit, but no one knows what it is. Their analysis revealed two distinct gene orders within the gene cluster that produces psilocybin.
It’s important that we’re aware of that and think about how we’re going to keep people safe and keep therapists safe in this very vulnerable setting. The hallucinogenic effects of shrooms usually work about 30 minutes after you eat them. Most trips last about 4 to 6 hours, but it’s also possible for the effects to last longer.
Health Canada says it recognizes there may be times when access to unauthorized drugs may be appropriate. Zach Walsh, a psychology professor at UBC Okanagan, has worked extensively in the world of psychedelics through psilocybin-assisted therapy sessions and his own research. “These results are strong and compelling and point to a very interesting thing about psychedelic compounds — that their effect persists long after they’re administered,” Dr. Ghaznavi says. “But doing bigger trials across many countries and facilities will be really important.”
The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) is the reference point on drugs and drug addiction information in Europe. Inaugurated in Lisbon in 1995, it is one of the EU’s decentralised agencies. Hallucinogenic mushrooms can give people stomach cramps or make them throw up.
Indigenous communities in Mexico have long considered psychedelic mushrooms to be intermediaries to the spiritual world. But their growing popularity outside of Mexico has spurred a debate over who should have access to them and whether science and Indigenous medicine can or should be reconciled. Research published in the journal Experimental Brain Research this July by University of Florida scientists suggests that psilocybin can actually restore damaged brain cells. The scientists trained mice to be fearful of an electric shock, and then administered some of them psilocybin. They found that the mice on psilocybin were more relaxed and less fearful, but they also noticed that the psilocybin restored partially destroyed brain cells.
Voters in Oregon passed a measure legalizing magic mushrooms for therapeutic use in 2020, and lawmakers in Washington and New York have proposed legalization bills this year. “We really need to fast track this because we see the rates of overdose, we see the rates of suicide. This [mental health disorders] is one of the major causes of death and Punch Bar Cream disability so we should be throwing all our resources at it,” he says. Lightburn says the psychedelic’s potential to treat the national mental health crisis is a big force behind the growth in interest. Patients’ rapid response to psilocybin is comparable to that of the drug ketamine (Ketalar), which Dr. Cusin administers at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Ketamine Clinic.
