Can ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Help Dying Patients?

By JoNel Aleccia, Kaiser Health News

Back in March, just as anxiety over COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S., Erinn Baldeschwiler of La Conner, Washington, found herself facing her own private dread.

Just 48 and the mother of two teenagers, Baldeschwiler was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer after discovering a small lump on her chest, no bigger than a pea.

Within weeks, it was the size of a golf ball, angry and red. Doctors gave her two years to live.

“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “Frankly, I was terrified.”

But instead of retreating into her illness, Baldeschwiler is pouring energy into a new effort to help dying patients gain legal access to psilocybin — the mind-altering compound found in so-called magic mushrooms — to ease their physical and psychic pain.

“I have personally struggled with depression, anxiety, anger,” Baldeschwiler said. “This therapy is designed to really dive in and release these negative fears and shadows.”

Erinn Baldeschwiler

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal, a Seattle palliative care physician, and Kathryn Tucker, a lawyer who advocates on behalf of terminally ill patients and chairs a psychedelic practice group at Emerge Law Group, are championing a novel strategy that would make psilocybin available using state and federal “right-to-try” laws that allow terminally ill patients access to investigational drugs.

They contend that psilocybin — whether found in psychedelic mushrooms or synthetic copies — meets the criteria for use laid out by more than 40 states and the 2017 Right to Try Act approved by the Trump administration.

“Can you look at the statute and see by its terms that it applies to psilocybin?” Tucker said. “I think the answer is yes.”

Currently, psilocybin use is illegal under federal law, classified as a Schedule 1 drug under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act, which applies to chemicals and substances with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, such as heroin and LSD.

Recently, however, several U.S. cities and states have voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of psilocybin. This month, Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin for regulated use in treating intractable mental health problems. The first patients will have access beginning in January 2023.

It’s part of a wider movement to rekindle acceptance of psilocybin, which was among psychedelic drugs vilified — and ultimately banned — after the legendary counterculture excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.

“I think a lot of those demons, those fears, have been metabolized in the 50 years since then,” Aggarwal said. “Not completely, but we’ve moved it along so that it’s safe to try again.”

He points to a growing body of evidence that finds that psilocybin can have significant and lasting effects on psychological distress. The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, launched this year, has published dozens of peer-reviewed studies confirming that psilocybin helped patients grappling with major depressive disorder and suicidal thoughts.

Researchers are also looking at psilocybin as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Lyme disease syndrome, cluster headaches and migraines. A small placebo-controlled study by Yale researchers found that migraine sufferers experienced a significant decrease in weekly migraine days after only one dose of psilocybin. 

“Psilocybin was well-tolerated; there were no unexpected or serious adverse events or withdrawals due to adverse events. This exploratory study suggests there is an enduring therapeutic effect in migraine headache after a single administration of psilocybin,” researchers found. 

Psilocybin Shifts Perception

Psilocybin therapy appears to work by chemically altering brain function in a way that temporarily affects a person’s ego, or sense of self. In essence, it plays on the out-of-body experiences made famous in portrayals of America’s psychedelic ’60s.

“What psychedelics do is foster a frame shift from feeling helpless and hopeless and that life is not worth living to seeing that we are connected to other people and we are connected to a universe that has inherent connection,” said Dr. Ira Byock, a palliative care specialist and medical officer for the Institute for Human Caring at Providence St. Joseph Health.

“Along with that shift in perspective, there is very commonly a notable dissolution of the fear of dying, of nonexistence and of loss, and that’s just remarkable.”

The key is to offer the drugs under controlled conditions, in a quiet room supervised by a trained guide, Byock said. “It turned out they are exceedingly safe when used in a carefully screened, carefully guided situation with trained therapists,” he said. “Almost the opposite is true when used in an unprepared, unscreened population.”

The FDA has granted “breakthrough therapy” status to psilocybin for use in U.S. clinical trials conducted by Compass Pathways, a psychedelic research group in Britain, and by the Usona Institute, a nonprofit medical research group in Wisconsin. More than three dozen trials are recruiting participants or completed, federal records show.

But access to the drug remains a hurdle. Though psychedelic mushrooms grow wild in the Pacific Northwest and underground sources of the drug are available, finding a legal supply is nearly impossible.

End of Life Washington, a group focused on helping terminally ill patients use the state’s Death With Dignity Act, recently published a policy that supports psilocybin therapy as a form of palliative care. Other treatments for anxiety and depression, such as medication and counseling, may simply not be practical or effective at that point, said Judith Gordon, a psychologist and member of the group’s board of directors.

“When people are dying, they don’t have the time or the energy to do a lot of psychotherapy,” she said.

Baldeschwiler agrees. With perhaps less than two years to live, she wants access to any tool that can ease her pain. Immunotherapy has helped with the physical symptoms, dramatically shrinking the size of the tumor on her chest. Harder to treat has been the gnawing anxiety that she won’t see her 16-year-old daughter, Shea McGinnis, and 13-year-old son, Gibson McGinnis, become adults.

“They are beautiful children, good spirits,” she said. “To know I might not be around for them sucks. It’s really hard.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.