Category: Magic Mushroom

Contemporary psychonauts are looking for insight, relief, fun, escape, and a million other things to make their lives more interesting and bearable.

The Saturday after voters in Washington, D.C., and Oregon voted to loosen legal restrictions on magic mushrooms, my girlfriend and I celebrated in the most appropriate way possible. We each ate almost 5 grams of the stuff, ground up and stuffed into capsules. This was a Venti-sized, mind-blowing “heroic dose” in the parlance of the late Terence McKenna, the Johnny Appleseed of hallucinogenic fungi, and we tripped for a good chunk of the afternoon and early evening.

Journeying to the center of our minds via vision-inducing drugs (variously called hallucinogens, psychedelics, and entheogens) is perfectly suited to a world that is hyper-polarized, literally and figuratively locked down, and increasingly a little too close to an Edvard Munch painting for comfort.

Keep reading at Reason.com.

Lawmakers in Connecticut and Florida have filed new bills to reform state laws on psilocybin mushrooms—the latest in a trend of psychedelics proposals to emerge in 2021.

Rep. Michael Grieco (D) filed the Florida legislation on Thursday, which would establish a legal psilocybin model for therapeutic use in the state, similar to an initiative that Oregon voters approved in November. It also seeks to deprioritize criminal enforcement against a wide range of psychedelic plants and fungi.

The Connecticut bill, sponsored by Rep. Josh Elliot (D) and four other legislators, would simply create a task force responsible for studying the medical benefits of psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms.

The main objective of the broader Florida legislation is to promote mental health treatment with the help of psilocybin.

Keep reading at Marijuana Moment.

Magic mushrooms may be making headway in medicine.

As voters in Oregon and DC opt to decriminalize psilocybin, there is growing evidence that the active compound in “magic,” or hallucinogenic, mushrooms might benefit individuals with moderate to severe depression—at least when used alongside psychotherapy under a doctor’s supervision.

“The findings that we have in our study, we believe, are related to the fact that it was in a controlled setting where we have trained professionals,” explained Alan Davis, a psychologist, social work researcher at Ohio State University, and adjunct assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

“We certainly would not suggest that someone go out and take this on their own,” he added. “However, there are currently multi-site trials going on in the US and Europe, testing this in phase 2 and phase 3 trials in order to hopefully garner FDA approval in the next couple years.”

More at Forbes

A Vancouver-based psychedelics company has become the first in Canada to complete a legal harvest of magic mushrooms since the last wave of psychedelic research ended there in the 1970s.

Numinus Bioscience, a healthcare company with a focus on research and product development, announced the harvest of its first flush of psilocybe mushrooms yesterday at its licensed facility in Nanaimo, B.C., where it operates a research and testing laboratory. The firm is developing formulations and solutions intended for use in the burgeoning psychedelic therapy space, and received a license from Health Canada to grow and extract magic mushrooms as recently as June of this year.

The license, issued under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, allows Numinus to test, import, store, and distribute MDMA, psilocybin, psilocin (two compounds present in psychedelic mushrooms), DMT and mescaline.

Read more at Forbes

On Tuesday, supporters of Measure 109 came together virtually to talk about the mental health benefits of the drug.

If passed, this measure would allow the manufacture, delivery and administration of psilocybin at supervised, licensed facilities to adults aged 21 and over.

Currently, the manufacturing and consumption of this drug is illegal under both state and federal law.

Supporters say psilocybin therapy relieves debilitating anxiety and depression that comes with a terminal illness.

On the Zoom call Tuesday, attendees heard from a cancer patient in Portland who has a terminal diagnosis.

Mara McGraw says she underwent psilocybin therapy with a trained facilitator recently after trying other options.

“In just one session, I feel tremendous relief from fear and anxiety that had been burdening me for three years now, and I did not receive that type of relief through a year of talk therapy. So, one session gave me more than going weekly to talk therapy for an entire year,” said McGraw.

Keep reading at MSN

City Council members voted unanimously this week to decriminalize the use of psychedelic mushrooms in Ann Arbor.

The city joins a handful of others across the country. Ann Arbor is a college town that prides itself in a more relaxed approach to drug enforcement. In the 1970s, it was among the first to decriminalize marijuana. Now, it’s doing the same thing with mushrooms and other entheogenic plants.

“They are non-addictive chemicals,” Ann Arbor City Council member Anne Bannister said. “They are healthier than many of our pharmaceuticals people can fill their bodies with for years for treatment resistant anxiety.”

The drugs in question are ayahuasca, from South America, ibogaine, from Africa, and popular ’60s drugs such as mescaline, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms.

The Council voted 11-0, saying Ann Arbor police should stand down enforcing possession.

Keep reading here

Magic mushrooms should be legalised as a potential medical treatment for depression and mental ill health, say leading doctors in a major report on the emerging benefits of the drug.

The researchers, from King’s College, London, Oxford and Manchester universities, say psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, has been shown in early trials to be a promising treatment for mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

They propose a law change that would re-categorise it as a drug that could be legally used as a therapeutic treatment in medical trials in a similar way to the Government’s rescheduling of cannabis for medical use. Any recreational use of the class A drug would continue to be illegal.

Read more at the Telegraph.

In 1955, a bank executive and a New York society photographer found themselves in a thatch-roofed adobe home in a remote village in the Mazateca mountains. Gordon Wasson, then a vice president at J.P. Morgan, had been learning about the use of mushrooms in different cultures, and tracked down a Mazatec healer, or curandera, named María Sabina. Sabina, about 60 at the time, had been taking hallucinogenic mushrooms since she was a young child . She led Wasson and the photographer, Allan Richardson, through a mushroom ceremony called the velada.

“We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck,” Wasson wrote in a Life magazine article, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” “We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms.”

Read more at VICE

Advocates for decriminalizing “magic mushrooms” and other psychoactive plants are asking D.C. voters to sign a petition online or by mail to put Initiative 81 on November’s ballot.

Decriminalize Nature D.C., the nonprofit behind the decriminalization effort, first will send 10,000 petitions to D.C. voters to sign and return by mail or email. Depending on the response to the first 10,000 mailers, the campaign intends to send out 250,000 additional petitions to voters.

The group needs to get 30,000 valid signatures by July 6 to put the “Entheogenic Plants and Fungi Act of 2020” on the ballot.

The D.C. Council last week approved its omnibus coronavirus-related bill, which changed how petitions can be collected for ballot initiatives to make the process safe during the pandemic.

Read more at Washington Times…

Denver, Oakland, and Santa Cruz voted to decriminalize mushrooms. Washington, D.C. just took a major step toward adding legalization to the Nov. 2020 ballot. Chicago city leaders passed a resolution supporting scientific and medicinal research, with a goal of decriminalization. Vermont lawmakers filed a bill to decriminalize it, as well. Even Oregon is pushing to legalize psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes.

All thanks to reports that show psychedelics have therapeutic benefits. For example, researchers at New York University found psilocybin mushrooms caused a “rapid and sustained” reduction in anxiety and depression in patients with cancer, as reported by the Financial Post. Researchers from the University of California David found that micro-dosing with psychedelic drugs for a prolonged period of time showed promise.

Read more here…

A nascent effort to reduce penalties on the possession and use of magic mushrooms and other psychedelic plants in D.C. was dealt what seemed like a fatal blow by the coronavirus pandemic — but proponents say they plan on soldiering on, using the mail to collect tens of thousands of signatures to put the issue on the November ballot.

To get an issue on the ballot, proponents have to gather signatures from 5% of D.C.’s registered voters — roughly 25,000 signatures at this point — within a six-month period. But with normal signature-collection a virtual impossibility because of the city’s stay-at-home order and social distancing norms, leaders of the Decriminalize Nature D.C. say they instead plan on sending petitions directly to households and asking voters to sign them and send them back.

Read more here…