Brain Food: Psycho-active Fungi & Mushrooms / The Inner Psyche

A recent article - in of all places The Economist / 06 June 2019 - says that the world needs more tools to deal with depression and addiction.
Magic mushrooms should be decriminalised.

Research into their therapeutic uses should not be bogged down in legal difficulties

That was never on your MesaZona blogger's mind in a different lifetime years ago hanging-out at a bar called "The Pharmacy" in NYC's Lower East Side, when someone asked, "Would you like to smoke a mushroom?" Sure, that's one thing I've never done before. We lit up and inhaled together. Then it hit in a zap like a lightning bolt, knocking me off the bar stool. . . three days later, life afterwards would never be the same. No way I was looking for therapy, depressed or addicted.

De-fraggelized. For sure. Let's get back to that article:

". . . The rehabilitation of psychedelic drugs, banned in most countries, is under way (see article)

• Oakland, California, in effect decriminalised psychoactive plants and fungi this week
• a Republican state senator wants to do the same in Iowa
• Denver decriminalised magic mushrooms last month
• campaigns in California and Oregon demand ballots to decriminalise psychoactive plants and legalise the therapeutic use of psilocybin, respectively.

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Around a dozen small studies have been carried out at American universities and at Imperial College. They hint that psilocybin, along with supportive psychiatric care, may be an effective treatment for depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and the anxiety that often afflicts people when death is approaching.

At present this is no more than a possibility, but an exciting one. . . a large-scale study of Americans showed no association between taking psychedelic drugs and mental health problems. Psilocybin has potential both to heal people’s ills and to give them pleasure.

A third of volunteers in a study rated the mystical experience it induced as the most profound of their lives, and another third put it in the top five. It is also, by the standards of other mood-altering substances, pretty safe. It is not addictive, there is no known lethal dose, and—unlike alcohol—any damage is usually restricted to those who take it.
Certainly, moves to decriminalise psychedelics should be accompanied by campaigns to educate people about the risks. Those who take them should get the setting right—a safe place, with benevolent people and a sober friend around. But humanity should celebrate the fact that it has such powerful medicine available to it, rather than jailing people for taking it."