Mushroom magic

Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.

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Sean Rameswaram: Let me describe the first psilocybin trip I had. I made a tea, and I was at my home in New England. I walked through my garden, and at the peak of the experience, I felt that consciousness, subjectivity, was spread over all the species that I encountered. In other words, all the plants seemed to be conscious in some ways, to have a point of view. The leaves were returning my gaze. I walked through the garden and made my way to a little building that I built where I write. And there are two trees that frame the view, this very elegant white oak and this kind of stumpy white ash. And I realized for the first time that these trees were my parents. The white ash was my father, and the white oak was my mother. And I was like, why didn't you ever know that before? It had this kind of almost ecstatic passion through the garden. It had never looked more beautiful. It had never been more alive. And it had this sense of being animated. You know, we're normally the subject observing objects. But here we were all subjects. I was being observed as much as I was observing. It's a hard thing to describe to someone who hasn't had the experience, and we tend to go right to this place of hallucination, where we're having a complete visual fantasy. Psychedelics are not full-blown hallucinations. I mean, I knew where I was, I knew what I was looking at, but what I was looking at had completely changed in its affect, and in its weight, and in its meaning.

Michael Pollan: I'm Michael Pollan, Son of Trees, author of How to Change Your Mind, a book that's all about the science of psychedelics.

Sean Rameswaram: Oakland just became the second city in the United States to essentially decriminalize magic mushrooms following Denver just a few weeks ago. Before we talk about what all of that means, can we just talk about what exactly is being decriminalized here, magic mushrooms?

Michael Pollan: So magic mushrooms is a group of fungi that contain this chemical called psilocybin or a second chemical called psilocin that acts in a very similar way in the body. And that chemical closely resembles serotonin, the neurotransmitter. So it can fit neatly into the receptors we have for serotonin. This creates a cascade of effects in the brain, which is neuroscientists talk for, we don't know what the fuck's happening right then. But what it seems to act on in the brain, and this has been one of the most interesting findings of this renaissance in psychedelic research that's going on, it seems to suppress the activity in something called the default mode network.

Sean Rameswaram: The default mode network. Yeah. The default mode network, interestingly enough, is involved in the various brain functions we associate with the self. Self-reflection takes place there, the ability to impute mental states to others, and something called the narrative or autobiographical memory, which is the part of the brain that's involved in taking the events of our lives and tying them in, weaving them into the story of who we are. I mean, if the ego can be said to have an address, it's in the default mode network.

Michael Pollan: So what exactly do psychedelics do to the default mode network? What's interesting about psychedelics, and this is also true of meditation, by the way, is that it suppresses activity in this network. So the ego essentially is quieted and very often dissolved completely. When the default mode network goes offline, interesting things happen. Other brain networks that don't normally communicate directly with one another, but only through this hub of the default mode network, start striking up conversations. Your visual cortex, say, might speak directly to your sense of touch or your sense of sound, and you might be able to see sounds or hear the things you're seeing.

Sean Rameswaram: When it happens, the relationship between subject and object, that duality breaks down, and everything feels connected because there's no wall anymore. I mean, what the ego does is create that container. You know, this is me, and that's something out there.

Michael Pollan: I had an experience of complete ego dissolution during a guided psilocybin trip. And I looked out at a certain point, and I saw myself burst into a little cloud of post-it notes. And then be spread out as a coat of paint on the ground. I knew it was me, but I was observing it from this new perspective. And there I was watching, you know, this self 60 years in the making be completely obliterated, and I was fine with it.

Sean Rameswaram: The next day when I went back to my guide I said, well, I had this experience in which I realized that I'm not identical to my ego I don't have to be that guy all the time and she said, well, isn't that worth the price of admission and I said, yeah, but now my ego is back in uniform back on patrol doing his usual stuff so what good is it and she said, well, you had a sample of a different perspective and you can cultivate it.

Michael Pollan: And I asked her how and she said through meditation. And indeed I do that through meditation. Not reliably, not every time. But this temporary rewiring of the brain with all these new connections being formed, often for the first time, seems to have something to do with the therapeutic value of shaking up the brain, rebooting it in a sense.

Sean Rameswaram: What kind of psychological issues or diseases is this being used for right now?

Michael Pollan: It's being used to treat several conditions, such as depression, anxiety, addiction, obsession, that are characterized by a kind of stuckness, a rigidity of thought, and sometimes by a hyperactive ego. People who are depressed, their egos are attacking them. You know, I'm unworthy of love. I'm a worthless individual. My work sucks. These thought loops are very hard to break.

Sean Rameswaram: So the thinking is, and the reason that psilocybin seems to be having some success with all those indications, is that it breaks those patterns by temporarily rewiring the brain. But it's really important to say there's a lot we don't understand. That's generally the rule with the brain.

Michael Pollan: I went into this thinking that there's a clear explanation of how SSRI, antidepressants work. In fact, nobody has a clue. But temporarily quieting the default mode network seems to be very effective in treating a certain type of mental disorder.

Sean Rameswaram: Is there a procedure these things have? What do these treatments look like?

Michael Pollan: There are typically two therapists or guides who are with you the whole time. The first part is that they prepare you very carefully. You have a series of sessions. They learn about your mental difficulties or the kinds of problems you're hoping to solve. They also prepare you for the experience because a lot of these patients have never used psychedelics before. And they tell you what to do if you get into trouble because you can have really terrifying experiences, so-called bad trips.

Sean Rameswaram: And they kind of tell you how to deal with that. And the main advice they give you is to surrender to whatever is happening. If you feel you're dying or going crazy or your ego is dissolving, let it happen. Don't fight it. If you fight it is when you get really anxious and things can really go south.

Michael Pollan: They also encourage you to go toward whatever's happening. If you see a monster or a cave or a staircase, go for it. Climb it. Go through that window. So they have these flight instructions that they give you. And then during the journey, as they call it, they say very little because they're trying not to direct you. And then after it's over, you return the next day and they help you make sense of what can be a very confusing experience. And basically help you integrate what you've experienced into your life.

Sean Rameswaram: Have there been scientific studies on any of this?

Michael Pollan: There are trials. They're at different stages. They tend to be small. There has been what's called a pilot study, which is like a dozen people on depression at Imperial College in London. But in the case of many of the volunteers, their depression returned. This wasn't a permanent release, but it did give them a couple months of not being depressed. And in the case of one woman I talked to, she had been depressed since 1991. And this was the first month off she had had.

Sean Rameswaram: Can you imagine that? And she said that, yes, my depression has returned, but things are different because I know what it's like not to be depressed.

Michael Pollan: The other signal that this might help with depression comes from much larger trials, giving the drug to cancer patients who are struggling with depression and anxiety because of their diagnosis, people fearing death and fearing recurrence, they got about 80% success of essentially relieving people's depression and anxiety about their death. Many people lost their fear of death entirely.

Sean Rameswaram: But depression is not the only thing that they've done trials for. They've also had successful trials treating people for addiction, cigarette addiction, alcoholism, and cocaine.

Michael Pollan: And psilocybin has been granted what's called breakthrough therapy status by the FDA, which means that they are actively helping the researchers to speed the approval process. If these larger phase three trials do well, it's possible that psilocybin as a treatment for depression will be approved within the next five years or so.

Sean Rameswaram: You mentioned bad trips. Are magic mushroom advocates being realistic about the dangers here? People going to a dark place and hurting themselves, hurting others while tripping?

Michael Pollan: Look, they're definitely not for everybody. This isn't cannabis. This is a much more serious drug. In the university trials, people at risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and other personality disorders are not admitted. They they don't feel it's safe for them to take it.

Sean Rameswaram: In these university trial settings, they've had very few adverse events, but using the drug recreationally obviously carries more risk. There's the risk of having a terrifying trip and the kind of panic reaction to that trip that lands people in the emergency room.

Michael Pollan: There's the risk because your judgment is impaired of walking into traffic or, you know, doing something really stupid or trying to drive a car. There are cases of people who are pre-schizophrenic that had their psychotic break on a psychedelic experience.

Sean Rameswaram: So people need to be careful. But it's also worth noting that there are very few biological risks. There is no lethal dose for psilocybin that's been established or for LSD.

Michael Pollan: And compared to other psychiatric medicines, which you take every day, which are addictive in many cases, which have bad side effects, these are very clean drugs.

Sean Rameswaram: As this becomes more normalized, which it certainly appears to be doing right now, what are the dangers that this does become sort of like an unregulated national trip of some kind?

Michael Pollan: Well, I mean, it is unregulated now, right? One of the issues with prohibition, of course, is you can't regulate it. But it's like it's unregulated now, but a little harder to get, maybe.

Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, sure. There's no psilocybin delivery services with billboards.

Michael Pollan: And that one of the reasons I don't support legalization at this point. I do believe though that no one should go to jail or be arrested for using psilocybin mushrooms or cultivating them.

Sean Rameswaram: But people also need to be educated. I think if this is going to become more popular, public education is really vitally important.

Michael Pollan: Scientists are doing more and more research on how magic mushrooms could help with depression, addiction, anxiety. But this is not the first time we're going through these magic mushroom motions. That kind of research was all over the place a half century ago.

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Sean Rameswaram: Mr. Pollan, magic mushrooms weren't always taboo, right? Doctors were researching psychedelics back in the 60s?

Michael Pollan: Yeah. You know, we kind of see psychedelics as a product of the 60s. Yeah. But in fact, it's a 50s word. It was coined in 1957 as part of a fertile period of research.

Sean Rameswaram: This is a glass of water, colorless, tasteless. It contains 100 gamma of LSD-25. LSD is very unusual in that under carefully controlled scientific research circumstances, it can tell us an enormous amount about the mind.

Michael Pollan: Let us observe the effect some three hours later. Everything is in color and I can feel the air. I can see it. I can see all the molecules. I'm part of it. Can't you see it?

Sean Rameswaram: I don't think people realize, but during this period, there were six international conferences on LSD, 40,000 research subjects, 1,000 academic papers. It was a big deal.

Michael Pollan: Using the drugs to treat pretty much what we're using them for now, depression and addiction and to help the dying. For the past seven years, we've been treating persons who suffer from alcohol abuse with the drug LSD-25.

Sean Rameswaram: I actually saw the body of me slowly dissolving. All the meat would go completely from under my skin. I couldn't see any blood. Finally, only the skin was hanging on the bones, and I was lying as a skeleton. I certainly don't feel like now that I would want to drink. It seems trivial. It just didn't seem necessary.

Michael Pollan: Then what happened is we had this backlash in the 60s. Good evening. The pot and psychedelic cult, whatever else it may be, is new and different. Today's LSD cultists say that they are turned on, not turned off. And if they talk of dropping out, they do so because they reject square society and claim they can build a better one.

Sean Rameswaram: As it became a big counterculture drug, millions of young people were using psychedelics. And their elders thought that it was changing them. Hippies are very interesting to the young. They praise the effect on the mind of hallucinatory drugs. The drug holds their subculture together. And the drug is extremely dangerous.

Michael Pollan: President Nixon thought that it was sapping the will of America's young boys to go fight in Vietnam. What? Well, yeah. I mean, he passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. And that's when psychedelics were federally made illegal. And this is how we get to the war on drugs. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

Sean Rameswaram: And we learned subsequently, John Ehrlichman gave a quote years later, we needed a tool, he said, to go after blacks and hippies. And psychedelics was what they had to go after.

Michael Pollan: Jumping back to the present, is it the normalization of pot that we've been seeing over the past decade or so that has led to this new thinking on psychedelic mushrooms?

Sean Rameswaram: I think it's had a lot to do with it. In the last few decades, marijuana first got established as a medicine and then that changed its image in a way that paved the way to overturning anti-marijuana laws. And I think 10 states now have legalized marijuana.

Michael Pollan: And that playbook I think is in use here with psilocybin at least among the activists putting it on ballot initiatives. But the difference here is that there really is a lot of good research about psilocybin. Most of what we knew about cannabis when we were approving these medical marijuana initiatives was anecdotal.

Sean Rameswaram: There were very few studies, actually, partly because the government made it almost impossible to conduct them. Whereas psilocybin, for reasons I don't quite understand, the government, beginning in the late 90s, was willing to let people study.

Michael Pollan: And then there's the fact that the drug war in general is kind of running out of gas. You know, Jeff Sessions wanted to go after the states that had legalized marijuana, and he was basically told to stand down, because Trump probably recognized it was a losing issue now.

Sean Rameswaram: And you had the fact that maybe the government didn't need it as much. Ever since we had a war on terror, the war on drugs was less critical. And now we have a war on immigrants. So, you know, there's always a war, but it's not on drugs right now.

Michael Pollan: You mentioned there's this gap in what kind of research has been allowed. Mushrooms, fine. Weed, not so fine. Is that because shrooms are mostly for white people?

Sean Rameswaram: I'm not sure. I mean, the psychedelic world is kind of notably white and fairly affluent in my experience. Unlike psychedelics, marijuana seems to cut across classes and to be used and popular in all different social strata.

Michael Pollan: And I think there are reasons for that. To have a positive psychedelic experience, you need a lot of leisure time and you have to feel really safe in your physical environment. Many African-Americans don't feel that safety and for good reason.

Sean Rameswaram: And I'm sure there are other interesting cultural reasons why the psychedelic world seems to be, at least right now, to be fairly white.

Michael Pollan: And in a fairly white state, Denver became the first city in the United States to decriminalize magic mushrooms, making the use and possession of them all but legal.

Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the first time that psilocybin has been on a ballot initiative, I was really surprised by this because I didn't think enough people knew what psilocybin was to have an opinion.

Michael Pollan: But yeah, in a real squeaker, the people of Denver and Denver County basically passed a ballot initiative that makes the prosecution of psilocybin crimes the lowest priority. It doesn't allow for sales. It's not legalization. It's really just this kind of decriminalization.

Sean Rameswaram: Is this the beginning of something?

Michael Pollan: Oakland followed Denver's lead decriminalizing magic mushrooms on Tuesday. Is a whole state next? Colorado was among the first to legalize recreational marijuana. That's right. And it was a pioneer there. The state is very libertarian on drug laws, and I do think it's the beginning of something.

Sean Rameswaram: Oregon is expected to have a ballot initiative in 2020 that would actually legalize psilocybin therapy. So guided psilocybin experiences and reduce penalties for recreational use.

Michael Pollan: And there's a group in California who would like to get it on the ballot here.

Sean Rameswaram: Is it still too tainted by the fact that this is something that makes you trip for someone like, I don't know, John Boehner to hop on board?

Michael Pollan: The 60s legacy and the 60s stigma of psychedelics is very powerful and these are not drugs to be used casually like cannabis it is a profound experience and I don't think we're ready to legalize it I don't think we know enough I think that there should be some way to fold it into our culture that it could be very useful to a lot of people and not just people who are sick.

Sean Rameswaram: You know, I do think that healthy people like myself have gotten a lot out of this experience. But I also think it's going to have to be carefully regulated.

Michael Pollan: Do you think we'll get to the point soon where you could like take mushrooms like in a pill before you go to work if you're suffering from depression? Like how far away are we from that? Like Johnson & Johnson getting in on the game.

Sean Rameswaram: Well, the pharmaceutical industry is not interested, at least so far. And the reasons for that are you won't take it every day. You will only do one experience or two experiences. So how do you make money selling a couple pills?

Michael Pollan: The other reason is that it's not just a pill. It's a package. It should not be called psychedelic medicine. It should be called psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. It's a square peg to fit in the round hole of how we practice medicine or psychopharmacology now.

Sean Rameswaram: I think what will be approved is the use by psychiatrists in this very carefully regulated procedure. And that may not be that far away. You know, it really could be in the next five years, which is quite astonishing.

Michael Pollan: Will that give the rest of us access to psilocybin? It might, but I still think that there is a role for the betterment of well people in psychedelics. And how we're going to navigate that is the really interesting question for the next few years.

Sean Rameswaram: Michael Pollan is the author of How to Change Your Mind, a book on the science of psychedelics. He was raised by trees. And fun fact, his brother-in-law, Michael J. Fox.

Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. This is Today Explained. The show is made by Irene Noguchi, Bridget McCarthy, Noam Hassenfeld, Afim Shapiro, Amina Alsadi, and Halima Shah.

Sean Rameswaram: Jillian Weinberger, Miles Bryan, and Britt Hansen helped this week. It feels a lot like Sama here in the district, and we have two Sama interns. Their names are Alex Pena and Will Reed.

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