Magic Mushrooms Could Be the Next Big Treatment for Addiction

Psilocybin still remains illegal under federal law, but there are some clinical trials running to study the drug and how it can address the psychological needs of addiction. Brendan Barrell, contributor to The New York Times, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Brendan, Thanks for having me well. Researchers are getting a little bit excited about what could be the next big treatment for addiction. There's been not very much research done in this in this sector when

it comes to using psychedelic drugs. There's limited things that have been going on, but they're trying to use these things to help manage conditions like depression, anxiety, chronic pain, even eating disorders. And the one thing that kind of has been standing out above other things is psilocybin, which is also known as magic mushrooms, and some of the studies that they've been doing, they're showing that it has some really good potential to help, especially when it comes

to alcohol and harder drugs, also nicotine. So Brendan tell us more about this, please, So, yeah, the psychedelic drugs had sort of been studied back in like the nineteen fifties and sixties, kind of the heyday of l s D era, and with sort of the passage of the Controlled Substances Act, all that stuff was made illegal the highest sort of category of of illegal drugs, basically Schedule one,

and so research came to halt. But some you know, over the last twenty years, there have been sort of some looking in the archives and noticing some of these promising early studies showing that LSD could help people quit alcohol maybe. And so now we're seeing this the incredible resurgence, and a lot of it has focused on ketamine, which is this anesthetic drug special K and so on that creates some some psychedelic effects, and that's that's showing promise

in sort of ending alcohol abuse. But psilocybin is the next horizon and it has an even more profound psychedelic trip and people scientists feel like this is critical to having allowing people to change their lives. And you know, there's a clinical trials going on with psilocybin to the point of how things have progressed, right the John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. I mean, you know these are the whole departments now set up looking to this,

and you know it's helping people. Right. There was a small example that you had in the article about a woman who had a smoking habit she wanted to kick that. She got involved in one of these clinical trials and she took the psilocybin in accompaniment with a therapy session and she was able to kick her smoking habits. So these are the kinds of things that they're seeing with these types of treatments. Now, yeah, she had a really

profound experience. I mean, she's a an investor, lives part time in Boston, who you just never expect is going to be taking up hallucinogenic mushrooms, right, And so she goes into this clinic, lays down and sort of she described to me her trip is like climbing up this series of interconnected ladders looking out to these pools that sort of for her were these psychological problems that she was facing, and it was like she comes back from

the trip. It lasted about five hours and she's like tells the two therapists in the room, like, I understand why I smoked, and I don't need to do that anymore. And yeah, I mean, so far the the early results, I mean, I think we have to be cautious here because these trials have still been sort of small trials and we're seeing sort of eight percent success rate in about fifteen smokers. Was that that trial that Amy participated in, And that's I mean compared to current sort of best

outcomes is about thirty percent. So these these things are very exciting, but we don't know that they work for everybody, and even if they're just a little bit effective, it can have a huge public health impact. Definitely. Yeah, And you know, recently on the podcast, we even did a story about how some of these drugs are being adopted by like wellness culture, right, the whole micro dosing things, and obviously what we're talking about right now, we're done

in clinical settings. Johns Hopkins, Right, they just received a four million grant from the National Institutes of Health to keep on studying these things. But even in in people's everyday lives, they're approaching psilocybin is something that can help them out with So they're looking at this for more of the more than just chemical dependency to when you're you know, when we're talking about drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and the nicotine and them, they're even looking for

it to help with other psychological needs. I think the point there is when we think about people have an addiction to cocaine or alcohol and you try to quit that, you're using it every day, your body goes through just this physical withdrawal. You get the shakes, and your heart rate is high, you feel anxiety and all of that. That tends to go away within a few weeks after quitting a drug or alcohol, right, But why is it that people then go back and take that drug again.

The physical symptoms are gone, and that is where you need something to sort of flip a psychological switch. And what these researchers believe is that psilocybin or other psychedelic drugs give people this kind of profound spiritual experience in some sense, and that helps the therapy they're going through sort of stick and give them sort of the mental flexibility that they can reconfigure their life and move away

from their addiction. And so what are next steps with all of this that you know, some are saying that they worry that they're not studying evaluating psilocybin and poor communities where you know, people might have greater addictions and you know, just the number of them. So people are saying, maybe we should move clinical trials there or at least leave it open to people like that. So these are might be some next steps that in in the study

of all this. Yeah, I think the point is that that the author Michael Pollen has written a very well received book about the you know, the future of psychedelics and how they change your mind and so on. So there's like lots of white people out there who are very well read and are like, sign me up, I

want to do this, um. But the impact of addictions is actually is, as you point out, most profound and and poorer communities and communities color and some of these people are not as sort of well first in these potential benefits. And so if we really want to value how well these things work, yes we should be testing them in places and like Berkeley, but we should also be testing them in Birmingham, Alabama to really get a full picture of how well they work and to help

the people most at need. It'll be interesting to keep following this, say, you know, attitudes around a lot of different up of drugs have been changing very much recently, so we'll see what continues with this. Brendan Barrell, contributor to The New York Times. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm Oscar Ramires and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on

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