Psilocybin, a molecule in hallucinogenic mushrooms, begins to make its way into the United States in 2023. On January 2, the Oregon (western) government began receiving applications from what is a fledgling industry linked to psychedelic therapies.
The state became the first to legalize the chemical in 2020, allowing anyone over the age of 21 to consume the mushrooms under supervision in a special center.
The regulation does not yet allow wholesale or recreational use.
After two years of testing and developing a scheme, the state Psilocybin Services Office has started its first paperwork.
The first licenses for these centers will soon begin to be issued.
More than 4,000 patients have shown interest in the properties of the drug for the treatment of addictions, depression,
The substance, which can be found in various types of mushrooms and causes vivid hallucinations, has embarked on the same journey that marijuana began in 1996, when California legalized it for medicinal use.
Both weed and psilocybin remain federally illegal in the United States, but this hasn't stopped states and cities from starting to decriminalize them, following Canada's lead.
Last November, Coloradans voted to legalize the drug, which by 2024 will be available to everyone 21 and older.
Colorado was the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use.
This advance is part of a global trend that has been recovering research on psychedelic substances for about five years, which had been abandoned in the 1970s in the crusade against drugs led by the United States.
There are many studies underway with very promising results to treat mental health pathologies, especially, although for the moment the evidence is not robust enough to use them as medicines in most cases.
Natural Medicine Colorado was the organization that initiated the collection of signatures to carry out the referendum in the State.
The group has among its promoters Kevin Matthews, an ex-serviceman who studied at the prestigious West Point military academy and who was one of the main activists who fought for Denver to become the first city in the country to decriminalize the chemical.
Veterans have since become allies of psychedelic mushroom therapies after seeing some of its benefits.
“Psilocybin therapy helped me when nothing else had worked for me,” says Luke R. Gruber, a soldier who fought in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps, but when he returned home he began to deal with psychological problems: depression, anger and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
He also had suicidal thoughts.
In fact, he knew about the case of some soldiers from Colorado who ended up taking their own lives.
"I could be one of them," he confessed in a testimony for Natural Medicine.
The pills that include small traces of fungus helped him "break the cycle of pain and negative thoughts."
At the moment, the FDA, the regulator in charge of authorizing the consumption of medicines and food, does not consider that psilocybin has the properties of a medicine.
“This substance, along with MDMA [a drug known as ecstasy], are in the third stage of FDA clinical trials.
We will continue fighting so that all veterans and ex-military personnel can have access to this treatment that changed my life”, Juliana Mercer, an ex-marine who has chaired the Heroic Hearts Project since 2019, explains in an email from San Diego, an organization that promotes among soldiers the use of these therapies.
California, the largest market for drugs in the United States, could see decriminalization of all plant-based psychedelics, such as psilocybin and DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca.
Local Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco progressive, has filed a bill to be negotiated in the state Congress session.
The norm will face stiff opposition, since a little over four months ago a similar proposal failed due to the opposition of the police, the Republicans and the most conservative Democrats.
“These drugs save lives and are present in very promising treatments,” Wiener said when he introduced his law.
Some cities in the entity, such as San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Oakland, have already decriminalized natural psychedelics.
Seattle, the largest city in the State of Washington, also managed to remove these substances from the prohibited list in 2022.
In the east it has been done by Ann Arbor, in Michigan.
In May 2022, the government agency in charge of combating addictions, Samhsa, responded to a congresswoman who asked the Joe Biden Administration for information on the use of MDMA and psilocybin in treatments for post-traumatic stress and depression, respectively.
The response obtained by the Democrat Madeleine Dean, representative of Pennsylvania, showed that the Government is preparing the creation of a working group that will follow the irruption of these treatments.
These teams have already been launched in states such as the conservative Texas and Utah, where they have invested in the investigation of medical findings.
Maryland has also promised a million-dollar grant to encourage research in this field.
"Samhsa agrees that too many Americans are suffering from a mental breakdown and abusing substances (...) so the potential for psychedelic assisted employment therapies to address this crisis should be explored," the document said on behalf of the Secretary of Health, Xavier Becerra.
The researchers have expressed confidence that the FDA's go-ahead will come within the next two years.
The regulator last year gave its approval to the University of California at Berkeley, a pioneer in research with psychedelic substances, to carry out studies with these drugs.
mushroom therapies
The supposed benefits of mushroom therapies have multiplied in recent years.
Last summer, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study of 93 people with drinking problems.
One group of the patients took pills with 25 milligrams of psilocybin and the other took a placebo.
After ingesting the capsules, the participants' eyes were covered with a blindfold, they were asked to lie down in an armchair, and music was played through headphones.
In total, there were 12 sessions that were complemented with traditional therapy.
The results show that eight months after taking the drug for the first time, those who took the capsules with the mushroom ingredient were able to reduce their alcohol consumption "robustly and sustainably."
Study author Michael Bogenshcutz, a physician in New York University's Department of Psychiatry, said nearly half of those who took the psychotropic stopped taking it.
In the control group, the figure was lower, at 24%, motivated mainly by talk therapy.
A psilocybin therapy assistant makes notes in a notebook during a training course in Portland in December 2022. AMANDA LUCIER / New York Times / ContactoPhoto (AMANDA LUCIER / New York Times / ContactoPhoto)
Bogenschutz believes that the active substance improves neural connections, at least temporarily.
"More parts of the brain talk to other parts of the brain," said the doctor.
In more than 20 years, no new drug has been approved to treat alcoholism, and only three drugs are known to reduce alcohol dependence.
Similar studies have yielded positive results in the treatment of depression.
Doctors offered psilocybin capsules to 233 adults in North America and Europe.
The results, published in the New England Medical Journal, showed that the higher the dose, the better the results.
After the first three weeks of sessions of between six and eight hours, 37% of patients with higher doses had improvements in their symptoms.
But the result did not have a lasting effect, since after three months several of the problems returned.
Those behind the study, including Compass Pathways, a publicly traded London-based firm seeking to develop psilocybin for commercial use, have announced that they will conduct a larger-scale study.