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Oregon's Novel Psilocybin Experiment Takes Off (apnews.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the they'll-grow-on-you dept.
Thousands of people in Oregon have signed up to experience tripping on magic mushrooms at America's first license psilocybin service center. The Associated Press reports: Epic Healing Eugene -- America's first licensed psilocybin service center -- opened in June, marking Oregon's unprecedented step in offering the mind-bending drug to the public. The center now has a waitlist of more than 3,000 names, including people with depression, PTSD or end-of-life dread. No prescription or referral is needed, but proponents hope Oregon's legalization will spark a revolution in mental health care. The Oregon Psilocybin Services Section, charged with regulating the state's industry, has received "hundreds of thousands of inquiries from all over the world," Angela Allbee, the agency's manager, said in an interview. "So far, what we're hearing is that clients have had positive experiences," she said.

First, customers must have a preparation session with a licensed facilitator who stays with clients as they experience the drug. The facilitator can deny access to those who have active psychosis, thoughts of harming anyone, or who have taken lithium, which is used to treat mania, in the past month. The clients can't buy mushrooms to go, and they must stay at the service center until the drug wears off. Oregon Psilocybin Services spent two years establishing regulations and began accepting license applications in January. There are now 10 licensed service centers, four growers, two testing labs and dozens of facilitators. [...] The report notes that costs can be high, with some clients paying over $2,000 and annual licenses for service centers and growers costing $10,000, with a half-price discount for veterans.

As for doses, state regulations allow up to 50 milligrams but it will ultimately depend on the facility and client. One of the facility's first clients took 35 milligrams and described seeing a "kind of infinite-dimension fractal that just kept turning and twisting."
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Oregon's Novel Psilocybin Experiment Takes Off More

Oregon's Novel Psilocybin Experiment Takes Off

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  • and do they have an road side test ready for that?

    • and do they have an road side test ready for that?

      Driving while impaired is illegal regardless of the drug.

      You can be arrested for failing a roadside sobriety test if the cop suspects you are high.

      You'll be taken to the police station and given a blood or urine test. But most tests don't include psychedelics, so you'll likely get away with it.

      But driving while high on mushrooms isn't a common problem. People drink alcohol at bars and parties and then need to get home. The alcohol impairs their reflexes and judgment while often making their driving more agg

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by slarabee ( 184347 )

        Mushrooms are different. Neither judgment nor reflexes are impaired as much, and the user knows that the hallucinations make driving unsafe. So they wait until they subside.

        An optimistic view of a substance that substantially mucks with your brain chemistry. Brain chemistry kinda being the way by which parses reality.

        "The alleged gunman in the Gorge Amphitheatre campground shooting Saturday told police he ingested mushrooms and believed the world was ending when he grabbed a handgun from his Dodge Ram pickup and shot and killed two women who happened to be walking by, according to court documents." -- little event from the Pacific Northwest earlier this year

        It is the drug fo

        • Re:and do they have an road side test ready for th (Score:4, Informative)

          by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Saturday September 16, 2023 @12:34AM (#63852802)

          It is the drug for which the phrase 'bad trip' was coined.

          that's why "curating set and setting" is so important and is supposedly observed in these therapeutical sessions with professional support, and actually in most private consumption for self exploration and to great extent for entertainment too.

          then again, albeit the reputation, bad trips are actually rare, and there is usually a reason for them. the vast majority of the experiences are benign, and a small portion are actually epiphanies that have deep and long lasting positive impacts in people's lives and conditions.

          psychopath anecdotes ofc aren't representative at all (you know, people do weird stuff even without any kind of substance) but i would even go as far as classifying this particular instance as bullshit. mushrooms can be very confusing but they are also very physically impairing, so pics or that didn't happen. it is indeed very possible to get oneself into harm's way while being high (one of the reasons why the "set" is curated), and you could potentially harm another person (specially if impaired too) but i would say that the idea of going into a (successful) killing spree while hallucinating on psylocibin is just not credible, someone is most likely lying about the finer details of that story.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Shakrai ( 717556 )

            that's why "curating set and setting" is so important and is supposedly observed in these therapeutical sessions with professional support, and actually in most private consumption for self exploration and to great extent for entertainment too.

            then again, albeit the reputation, bad trips are actually rare, and there is usually a reason for them.

            I've had the misfortune of getting people through bad trips. They all failed at set and setting. The worst was the person who went into the experience with the intention of "Picking a fight with God." We tried to talk them out of it but they would not listen to reason. We told them we would not help so they took the drug without telling us. We were then obligated to keep them safe, because we're not assholes, but it was a miserable experience for all concerned. With the wide availability on the illegal

            • Oregon is trying to do it right

              Iffy.

              While leaving it to the gurus is just asking for trouble, leaving it to the "professionals" has all the connotations of the abuses of psychology (and with a hefty mark-up to make it a bonafide business). Never underestimate the ability of money to fuck-up a good thing.

              Nevermind there's a lot of ugliness brewing in the subconscious of most people. Even the best set and setting won't keep that from bubbling over.

              Maybe like with rave crowd of yore, thems the risks you take.

              I

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shakrai ( 717556 )

                It rather depends on one's motivations for the exploration. If you simply want to experience mushrooms, no, you probably don't need a licensed therapist guiding you. A knowledgable friend would suffice. On the other hand, if you're trying to come to terms with some serious trauma/PTSD, that's a lot to put on a friend, even a knowledgable one, and it's probably better left to a theoretically dispassionate professional.

                The person in my story above, they're trying to come to terms with serious childhood tr

              • People who have bad trips are reqcting to their own built up mental toxicity.

                Living a lie causes all kinds of torque in the electromagnetic domains of the brain.

                The verbal conscious mind telling itself lies in the face of the non-verbal conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious knowing the truth is a huge problem.

                Put in psychedelics which cause communication synesthesia between the parts of the brain that are normally quiet or that have conscious coping mechanisms to keep them under control, and it's

        • I dunno what else that person could have been on to get violent with mushrooms. But that is VERY atypical of a magic mushroom experience. I've had them (and stronger psychedelics) more than a few times in my own life, and been around plenty of tripping people when I was either sober or intoxicated on something else. And I NEVER got violent or saw anyone else do so.

          That's one of the things about having been a raver back when raves were still a thing. I've personally seen or experienced the full gamut, bo

          • And it was very apparent which narratives we were told about various drugs were actually true (Just stay away from meth. Really, it's IS that bad.),

            *chuckle* I used to work with a, well I won't call her sweet since she had a vicious sense of humor and was sarcastic as fuck, but little old lady. Spry. Active. Confessed before she retired that her secret was meth. Daily.

            All hail human physiology. Most certainly not one size fits all.

            But yeah, I know a whole lot of bs gets put out around recreational pharmaceuticals. On both ends. One good example was a Portland local paper talking about a fentanyl seizure - $600,000 value being enough for 3,4

            • Yah. Desoxyn (Meth) is used medicinally for some extreme cases of adult ADHD and narcolepsy. Some peopleâ(TM)s brains are just wired really weirdly and strong stimulants make them able to function. And some of those people are fortuitous to have discovered that about themselves without a doctor. It sounds like your friend is one of those people and was self-medicating versus partying. And for my part, I wouldnâ(TM)t support banning even meth. But every tweaker I ever knew back in the day was, or t

      • The voice in my head told me I'm perfectly sane. And I should feast on the organs or anyone who says otherwise.

        Feynman had a chapter in one of his books about his abortive experiments with expanding his mind. He wrote that he was almost drinking the coolaid about reaching higher states of consciousness when he suddenly had an epiphany: he wasn't taking measurements or making calculations to reach this conclusion, he was just believing his own daydreams.

      • Re:and do they have an road side test ready for th (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Saturday September 16, 2023 @12:31AM (#63852798) Journal

        Mushrooms are different. Neither judgment nor reflexes are impaired as much, and the user knows that the hallucinations make driving unsafe.

        The friends I've helped get through trips did not have enough presence remaining in our reality to make informed decisions about safety on anything. If they had they would not have required our help to remain safe through their experience. None ever attempted to drive, or expressed a desire to drive. Frankly, I'd be shocked if they could have figured out how to open the car door, let alone get it started. :)

        Micro-dosing is a different beast. I could introduce you to people who drive while micro-dosing. I do not condone it but it's more common than you'd expect and virtually impossible to prove. As you note, standard drug panels don't test for it, and without signs of impairment you aren't gonna get tested anyway.

        Amusingly, I've held driver's licenses in six different States and Oregon's DMV is the only one that asked me if I was a user of psilocybin. It was mixed in with the questions about seizures and fainting episodes. Read into that what you will, lol.

    • Here, allow me to explain how that'd work... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, pulled over by cop scene)
  • Would prefer to just dip toes in the water. Nothing that would ever lose control.

  • infinite dimension (Score:5, Funny)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday September 15, 2023 @09:47PM (#63852658) Journal

    "kind of infinite-dimension fractal that just kept turning and twisting."

    I am quite certain the user has no clue what an infinite-dimension anything looks like. Visualizing five dimensions is hard enough.

  • Shrooms will do you good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spaceman375 ( 780812 ) on Friday September 15, 2023 @10:18PM (#63852682)
    Having a therapist around would be a bit of a bummer. What you need is to not go into it specifically to deal with bad: go into it expecting to get to the good. You don't even need to address the issue at hand directly. It will pop up all by itself in intuitively revealing ways that you can process then or afterwards. Have good friends with you, more than one, less than nine. Do it in a place that has awesome scenery and no authority figures. Be sure to include music. Camping or a cabin in the woods is an excellent choice for instance. All this is for when you are going to actually trip, not just get a bit altered. If you've never tried any psychedelic, try a small amount first, say half a gram of dried shroom or less. Expect to get high, but nothing incredible will happen. Then a week later take 3 or 4 grams in the environment I've described. It will change you for the better. I always feel psychologically and spiritually fortified after a good shrooming, for quite a few weeks. Recent studies show that psychedelics in general induce the plasticity of adolescence in older brains. You literally start to rewire your synaptic connections, for weeks afterwards. The revelations of a strong dose guarantee that you will grow into a new worldview; nurture it with a positive environment and you will reap deeply meaningful benefits. The fact that shrooms make you really happy while you are on them doesn't hurt either. Shrooms taught me to Love everyone and everything. I still practice it almost 40 years after that particular trip.

  • Progress. That's good. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Saturday September 16, 2023 @01:51AM (#63852848)

    I'm in Canada. I have mushrooms in the house, awaiting the right circumstances for a blast into the past. They're under lock and key in my safe. I ordered them online, shipped via Canada Post. They are technically illegal... but... here we are. They arrived in nice, professional packages, carefully labeled, and sealed with desiccant packs. It's a very far cry from the sandwich bags of "whatever" that I was used to growing up.

    Whatever opens the door a little further is fine by me. I've tried almost everything that didn't come from a poppy, and mushrooms are the only thing I ever intend to revisit.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      I have mushrooms in the house, awaiting the right circumstances for a blast into the past.

      Great. Hope that works out for you. But the current science says that the controlled setting under which mushrooms (LSD, other psychedelics) are taken is key in determining whether its a good (possibly therapeutic) trip or one that will drive you into some sort of psychosis.

      Which is why they (psychedelics) were banned in the first place. Too many people, even a small percent of the consumers, going out of control was too great a cost for society to bear.

      I fear that even Oregon's program will end up being

      • Re:Progress. That's good. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Saturday September 16, 2023 @02:35PM (#63853584)

        None of this is true. Literally none. Well done.

        The current science says nothing of the sort. It says little to nothing about whether a controlled setting matters because it's not evaluating the uncontrolled. That's a logic breakdown.

        That's not why psychedelics (especially mushrooms) were banned. There's no history of too many people going out of control and costing society too much.

        That view is so deeply steeped in "Reefer Madness"-level discourse it both amuses and concerns me.

        My I suggest a small trip to expand your horizon? So small, in fact, that you don't have to leave your couch if you don't wish to.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PPH ( 736903 )

          My I suggest a small trip to expand your horizon?

          Berkeley or The Tenderloin in S.F. Capitol Hill in Seattle. Been there, seen it. Wasted lives aren't funny even if the traditional medias' portrayal of them is hilarious.

  • Portland's weed shops - well some are going broke. However the plentiful supply meant less harder drugs taken overall, and much less crime - if you don't count the deplorables camping on interstate verges and crazy cut-you off rude CA drivers who may not be on anything. Mushroom legalization is a step forward, given there is a critical shortage of shrinks needed to reform those deplorables (who do not have health fund money). Now if only we can produce GM mushrooms with less alkaloid's that may damage kidn

    • Drug use, homelessness and crime has been severely on the rise in Oregon. Turns out when you run out of money on the legal drugs, illegal drugs are slightly more affordable, especially when cut with even cheaper stuff sponsored by Chinese pharmaceutical companies. Have fun with the zombies that literally have their flesh slopping off their bodies which is now a common sight in Portland.

      • Portland, and other places that allow $900 in your face shoplifting where even Walmart has to shut down is a problem. 90% is done by gangs/teams for profit, not individuals. Little to do with drugs, more to do with unaffordable housing. See excrement on SF streets. Once proposed free heroin injections for all inmates: one condition: a strict no-resuscitation policy. As mushrooms are cheap, it will again cut into druglord profits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      However the plentiful supply meant less harder drugs taken overall, and much less crime

      I don't know about Portland. But here in Seattle, legal pot shops are just an invitation to steal a car (usually a Kia), ram the front door of the shop after hours and make off with a few hundred dollars in product.

      Really? Considering all that effort, you couldn't just get a job (for which openings are going begging), take your paycheck and stand in line at the counter?

  • Groovy.

  • And I have to hang out with you while I take them? GTFO.

    As a mental health provider, it really grinds my gears to watch my profession being used as a sort of gatekeeper for recreational drug use. It's essentially as if we are being granted a very, very, very expensive liquor license. And the liquor license comes encumbered with a mindbending array of meaningless bureaucratic rules.

    I say "meaningless", because the conditions they place on the drug use are pretty meaningless. "The facilitator can deny acce

    • Re:$2000 for a bag of shrooms? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Saturday September 16, 2023 @11:59AM (#63853314)

      This isn't about recreation, though some people will use it that way.

      Here in the US we have a LOT of people taking anti depressants, and it's getting worse. In your average high school, 10% of girls and 5% of boys were taking them pre-pandemic. Those numbers go up in every category as you look at older people. They do relieve symptoms and they help a LOT of people. They aren't a cure though. They become a daily maintenance medication you take for decades that causes lack of sex drive, anxiety, weakness, fatigue, weight gain, and (personal observation) apathy.

      Decades of research indicates that psychedelic mushrooms taken in a safe clinical setting guided by a trusted therapist has high double-digit *cure* rates for both depression and ptsd. This research started out with whackos in communes originally, but it has advanced through many high quality trials since then.
      The study that put this on my radar was a DOD funded attempt to see if it would work to fix people they broke in Afghanistan. If I'm remembering it right, they had to modify the study to shorten it because after 6 months the participants no longer met the clinical definition of PTSD. That's an astounding result. (...to the severe dismay of the manufacturers of Zoloft.)

      If you just want to enjoy them, this isn't the program for you. This is for the people that would like to be able to live without popping pills and telling their spouses they once again "have a headache".

      • The truth is a little more nuanced than your post would suggest. We don't really, at this point, have "decades" of high-quality research regarding the effects of psilocybin on PTSD. Here's a fairly recent (and non-paywalled) review article which sums up most of the research that has been done: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.o... [psychiatryonline.org]

        As you can see, most of the studies have been open-label (admittedly it is hard to do a proper RCT with a substance like psilocybin, since it's fairly obvious to both the patient and

    • Say a whole bunch to say you don't understand mental health or psychedelics at all.

      Gross bruh.

      • Say a whole bunch to say you don't understand mental health or psychedelics at all.

        Gross bruh.

        I'm a board certified psychiatrist with 20 years of real world experience. I've also read and enjoyed the works of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Shulgin, and so on. If you want to refute my arguments, you'll have to try a little harder than that. Bruh.

        • No need to refute anything.

          Your ignorance and ridiculousness is self evident, even though you try to hide behind your credentials.

          All you have done is to make yourself immune to facts, wrapped in your self-righteous arrogance.

          The kind of PTSD being treated in veterans requires a bunch of support.

          Proper medications to bring someone down from a place they are no longer able to progress. That means a doctor on hand. Not cheap.

          Personnel to interface with the patient in a constructive manner while under the inf

          • Are you seriously trying to give me a lecture on how my job works? There's a word for that sort of thing, you know.

            I'm not expecting anyone to agree with me based on my credentials. (There are lots of people with impeccable credentials who believe and promote dumb things). My arguments are supported by the peer-reviewed literature, and as a distant second, they're supported by my professional experience with how things actually work in the mental health field. If you want to educate yourself about the

  • Apparently, Oregon has determined that it has too few crazy people, now that immigration from California has tapered off.

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