Can Magic Mushrooms Heal Us? In Oregon

 We really need to get stroke added to this.

Psilocybin: Magic mushrooms have been found to boost neurogenesis. August 2013

Psilocybin induces time-dependent changes in global functional connectivity: Psi-induced changes in brain connectivity February 2020

 The latest here:

Can Magic Mushrooms Heal Us? In Oregon

The first couple paragraphs are here:

Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon announced the members of the state’s newly formed Psilocybin Advisory Board this week. Why does Oregon need an official board to offer advice about the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, you ask? Because Oregon is about to become the first state in the country to try to build a support infrastructure through which psychedelic mushrooms can be woven into everyday life. This framework is different from what we’ve seen before: not legalization, not medicalization, but therapeutic use, in licensed facilities, under the guidance of professionals trained to guide psychedelic experiences. Whoa.

“Like many, I was initially skeptical when I first heard of Measure 109,” Brown said in a statement. “But if we can help people suffering from PTSD, depression, trauma and addiction — including veterans, cancer patients, and others — supervised psilocybin therapy is a treatment worthy of further consideration.”

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Measure 109, the Oregon Psilocybin Services Act, approved as a ballot measure in November, is the brainchild of Tom and Sheri Eckert, who shared a therapy practice in Portland. In 2015, the Eckerts read a piece by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker titled “The Trip Treatment.” The article described the emerging research around using psychedelics as a therapeutic tool and unearthed the largely forgotten pre-Timothy Leary period in which psychedelics were widely used by psychiatrists. The government funded more than a hundred studies, and as Pollan recounts in “How to Change Your Mind,” his subsequent book, Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson and Cary Grant all underwent LSD-assisted therapy. Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who’d given up drinking with the aid of a hallucinogenic plant called belladonna, considered bringing LSD-assisted therapy into AA in the 1950s, but was met with disapproval from his board.

This was a very different model of psychedelic use: There was a trained mental health professional in the room and subsequent therapy to help turn the insights into action. The early results were promising, though the studies were poorly designed. At times, the fear was the compounds were too powerful and left people too malleable to the suggestions of their guide. One early practitioner worried that on psychedelics, “the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient,” and that even though the healing was real, the pathway was “nihilistic,” bordering on something like hypnosis. This era of study ended before these questions could be resolved, when psychedelics slipped into the counterculture, where they were used without therapeutic safeguards, and the Nixon administration targeted them as part of its culture war. A remnant of healers who used psychedelics in their work remained, but they were driven underground.