As Canada grapples with growing demand for magic mushrooms from people desperate to improve their mental health, Capital Current’s Victor Bigas Alvarez takes a closer look at this growing debate in a four-part series: Today, it’s all about mushrooms and the mind.
The history of magic mushroom use is long.
What began as ancient healing ceremonies performed by indigenous communities has evolved into recreational travel and clinical trials as part of high-tech medical research.
Many people claim that psilocybin mushrooms can help people explore spirituality through psychedelic experiences.
Psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics are incredibly intriguing: they’ve been around for thousands of years, grow from the earth, and can induce intense and complex states of consciousness. It’s no wonder people want to learn more about these strange fungi. But doing so could have disastrous consequences.
Consider the case of Maria Sabina, who had no idea what she was getting into by allowing foreigners to observe and participate in healing rituals that involved the use of hallucinogenic fungi.
Born in 1894, Sabina was a Mazatec woman who lived in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she used psilocybin mushrooms as a therapeutic tool through ceremonies called veladas.
Sabina named the mushrooms “Los Niños Santos,” which means “Holy Children” in English.
In 1955, an American, Gordon Wasson, persuaded Sabina to let him and his wife take part in one of these ceremonies.
Two years later, Wasson published an article about her experience in Life magazine, which made Sabina famous, and people from all over the world began coming to receive the healing, rumored to include celebrities such as John Lennon and Walt Disney among the foreign visitors.
The fame was disastrous for both the ceremony and Sabina.
Some tourists who had “bad trips” would run around town naked. Her house was frequently raided by the police. Her community turned against her. Her house was burned and her son murdered.
Sabina’s example serves as a warning to those considering the efficacy of using psilocybin for medical and recreational purposes.
For example, Amy Bartlett, a member of the Ottawa Psychedelic Education Network, a local “community of people interested in psychedelics, entheogens, plant medicines, plant teachers and other-ordinary states of consciousness,” says that “(psychedelics) should be available to anyone who wants to use them, and the reasons for using them — therapeutic, spiritual, recreational — are all legitimate, but they shouldn’t be the norm.”
The PhD student in psychedelic studies at the University of Ottawa believes there is something inherently problematic about limiting access to psychedelics to the medical system and medical model.
“There’s an underlying assumption amongst these that you need to be diagnosed or deemed ‘unwell’ to use these substances,” she told Capital Current. “This also assumes that the only legitimate purpose for using these substances is to ‘cure’ or for therapeutic purposes.”
“There is also a fundamental question of what counts as valid knowledge,” he said, pointing to millennia of history of psychedelic drug use, including the Maya of Central America, who called hallucinogenic mushrooms “the flesh of the gods,” and the Tucano people of Brazil’s use of the ayahuasca plant.
Dr Tehseen Noorani, a leading researcher into the effects of psychedelic drugs, said she believes such research can have colonial functions.
“[Psychedelic research]uses a reductionist lens to focus on individual compounds, like psilocybin, and position them as the key to curing our problems,” he told Sapiens magazine in an interview, “and then seeks to own, expand and export the methods of administering these compounds, including to the people from whom the original knowledge and plant medicines were harvested.”
Just because we can’t make them completely safe doesn’t create the false illusion that no one will ever use psychedelics. We want reliable science. We want both the science and the debates around it to be critical and truth-seeking. Criticism should be welcomed, not treated as the enemy of religion.
Reverend Joe Welker, author of books on psychedelics, religion and spirituality
Joe Welker, pastor of East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church in Craftsbury, Vermont, has also written extensively about the intersection of psychedelics, religion and spirituality. In his Psychedelic Candor series, he discusses the flaws in research into mystical experiences of religious leaders who take psilocybin.
Welcker said he doesn’t personally agree that psychedelics are necessarily a tool of religion, but he supports religions’ freedom to use them. He opposes what he sees as pseudoscience that promotes the use of psychedelics as part of a campaign to promote some kind of religious or spiritual experience.
“(It’s) science with a societal challenge.”
Despite the many underground churches and groups that use and administer psychedelics, Welcker said he believes safety is an issue.
“I strongly believe that it’s impossible to make psychedelics completely safe,” Welcker said. “Just because we can’t make them completely safe doesn’t give us the false illusion that no one will ever use them. I want credible science, and I want both the science and the debates around the science to be critical and truth-seeking. Criticism should be welcomed, not treated as the enemy of religion.”
“There’s no such thing as a perfectly safe surgery, right? You know there are things that can go wrong, and you take that into account when making the decision to have the surgery or not,” he says.
Welcker told Capital Current that the question of whether psychedelics should be used in society comes down to different ideological beliefs about how substances should be used. He said organizations that promote psychedelics as something great for society as a whole see them as being on the “right side of history.”
Dana Larsen, a Vancouver drug advocate and owner of three psychedelic dispensaries, believes the case for psilocybin and psychedelics is similar to that of legal marijuana, but it doesn’t have as much support.
“Changing the law requires not just political agreement, but being at the top of the agenda. There has actually been a huge political, social and cultural movement going on with cannabis. And with psychedelics, we’re not there yet.”
“I think we need more pressure, more shops, more awareness, more determination. It’s not just an important thing that’s been put on the back burner, it’s important enough for a political party to campaign to make a change and actually end the ban,” Larsen said.
He believes the next federal Liberal government will see big changes to the law regarding psilocybin and other psychedelics.
“I don’t think Trudeau is keen to do that because he legalised marijuana and he’s had a lot of backlash on the drug issue, so I don’t think he’ll do it. If the Conservatives were in power, I don’t think they’re likely to do it unless they’re forced to by a court ruling.”
“Sometimes having a more hostile government makes people more rebellious, so my prediction is that the next Liberal government after the current one will be a few years away.”
Toronto lawyer Paul Lewin, who is currently representing a spokesman for the London, Ontario, mushroom shop Funguys, believes the future of psilocybin shops lies in a regulated environment where members of the public can come in and consume mushrooms responsibly, after being vetted for safe consumption.
“This isn’t going to be an open drug market where you go down to Yonge and Dundas and everyone shares needles. This is going to be some kind of practical, responsible, very real Canadian-style solution. It might be a little boring, but adding a boring Canadian spin doesn’t take away from what’s great about psilocybin and people will still have a great experience.”
