From his spot on the beach front that night in Maine, the stars looked awfully brighter than usual. With the residue of his 100mg tab of LSD long dissolved and his hockey mates sound asleep in their beds, 18-year-old Connor Smith laid on the shoreline with nothing but his floating thoughts, the music idly playing from his phone, and the swirling trails of starlight dancing above the ocean spray for company. Smith said that his first psychedelic trip — a pilgrimage he resolved to take during his gap year after watching the Michael Pollan documentary "Change Your Mind" tout the medicinal benefits of psychoactive compounds — brought with it an otherworldly sense of total contentment.
"I think the only adjective that seems appropriate is just ineffable," Smith said. "Everything was quiet and everything felt at peace. It was a mental stillness that I don't think I'd ever experienced before."
In the weeks and months after his psychonautic journey, Smith spent countless hours journaling and reflecting to process his experience. While Smith has occasionally dabbled with acid and magic mushrooms since, he asserts that single dose of LSD was all it took to radically change his life.
"Since that day, I have never had a panic attack," Smith said. "I think up to that point I was very unsure of myself and unsure of my place in the universe and what my life would amount to. When I took LSD, all of a sudden the world opened up to me and I realized that I didn't have to be anxious about that sort of thing."
What happens when traditional medicine and armchair therapy talks fail? Some search for answers in the bottom of a freezing ocean or in the burn of a marathon sprint. Others still look to nebulas, rainbow arches, or prayer for comfort. Today, Smith and others are turning to psychedelics as the cure — but without bipartisan approval, taking the trip of their lifetimes carries the risk of getting thrown behind bars. A growing body of breakthrough peer-reviewed medical research suggests psychedelic chemicals that have long been off limits may have the potential to usher in a new era for psychiatry. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has criminalized drugs like psilocybin (the naturally occurring psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms), DMT, LSD, and ketamine since the 1970"s. Despite their current classification as drugs that pose a high safety risk and next to no medicinal value under the Schedule I substance label, the FDA recently issued new guidance allowing scientists to study their positive and enduring effects on conditions like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
This new avenue for experimental treatment have allowed patients like Monica Matthews, a university teaching professor who asked that her real name not be used to protect her privacy, to reap the benefits of this mind-altering therapy treatment. After receiving a referral from her psychiatrist over seven years ago, Matthews began legally ingesting ketamine lozenges at a clinic with the help of a licensed practitioner that integrated talk therapy sessions before, during, and after her trips. Matthews said she didn't immediately have an earth-shattering out-of-this-world experience, but just taking any amount of the drug — let alone enough to induce a psychedelic trip — was enough to rewire her brain when all previous methods had failed.
"My practitioner is very cautious and would start with a low dose and then try another dose on a later occasion," Matthews said. "But eventually I got to one where I had a psychedelic experience. Just taking the ketamine, regardless of subjective experience, seems to eliminate suicidal ideation. During most of my life, I've frequently had suicidal thoughts, and those just disappeared, which wasn't the case with other antidepressants." Psychedelics are known to promote brain neuroplasticity by activating key neurochemicals and proteins — a process that research indicates can influence gene expression for months or even years after a single dose. Will Culpepper, a licensed clinician who works at Connecticut's Behavior Wellness Clinic and specializes in psychedelic integration therapy, said that the drugs" immediate impact on brain circuitry — and the immensely tactile sensations they induce — are what sets them apart from other psychiatry approaches.
"So many people in therapy get burned out," Culpepper said. "When they continue to talk about similar topics with therapists again and again, sometimes people can feel a bit like they plateaued or like they're stuck. What's really powerful about psychedelics is that they are very powerfully experiential". It can really free someone from all the sort of imprints and signals that they received about how to carry and present themselves and just bring them into this really intimate experience with their inner world, their inner experience."
Today, instead of traveling twenty miles to a clinic by public transportation, Matthews visits her vast inner world by taking a weekly topical dose of ketamine in her own home; wearing an eye mask, in her bed, with her husband close by.
"The impact on my life has been huge — I no longer think every day about killing myself," Matthews said. "I'm much more resilient. I've let go of previous trauma that I've had since early childhood. It's helped me and my husband make some good decisions — the effects on me have been very positive."
For Culpepper, practicing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is especially rewarding because of the profound and enduring changes his patients experience — effects that he said would normally take years of work to achieve.
"Ketamine can do a great deal of heavy lifting for us — things that therapists could do in a decade of therapy," Culpepper said. "A person has this experience that goes beyond their ability to know things. It's so vast and it's beyond their comprehension. It can be extremely intellectually humbling, and that could put someone in a really, really right position to do some really deep psychotherapy work."
As patients and practitioners tout life changing results and clinical trials continue, the future of psychedelic drug legalization remains trapped in limbo. While representatives in key states and city municipalities have passed new legislature to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms and ratify psychedelic treatment for trauma disorders, the federal government has the final say on prosecuting drug use. Smith, who is now a third-year student studying neuroscience with a specialization in psychedelic compounds at Northeastern University, believes psychedelics are best kept in the hands of doctors.
"It would be really dangerous to just legalize psychedelics without educating people on how powerful these drugs are because at the molecular level in the brain, these drugs really put people in vulnerable states," Smith said. "They put your brain in a very plastic state similar to early in neurodevelopment when you"re a child. So I think the correct place for these drugs to be used is in the clinic."
Culpepper said that conversations about the criminalization of psychedelics need a shakeup that emphasizes helping people rather than hindering medical progress.
"Prohibition doesn't work — it's not effective long term," Culpepper said. "Even if its aims are noble, I think we need a bit of paradigm shift to think about it less like a criminal issue, but more so a mental health issue."