A new digital billboard campaign has appeared around London in the past few days, asking one striking question: Could magic mushrooms be medicine?
🍄 COULD MAGIC MUSHROOMS BE MEDICINE? 🍄 Today @PAR_global_ launched the UK’s first psychedelic ad campaign asking the public to support #PAR for researchers! Check it out at 6 sites across London! Congratulations to @austint @Rosie_Psi and the gang! #psilocybin #psychedelic pic.twitter.com/1UAhmnIkx3
— Timmy Davis (@TimmyJSDavis) February 13, 2023
The idea of psychedelics as therapy has been in the scientific ether for well over a decade. Where the UK was once a world leader in this nascent research field, though, in recent years scientists have warned that we risk being left behind countries like the US and even Australia because of our restrictive drug classification laws.
Since the early 2000s, clinical research into compounds like psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) but also LSD, MDMA and DMT has returned promising results in the treatment of mental health disorders. These have proven so promising that from July 2023 psychiatrists in Australia will be able to prescribe psilocybin and MDMA as treatments for depression and PTSD.
In the UK, though, the legal status of these drugs means that even clinical research trials are proving difficult to run.
Now, the UK’s first pro-psychedelics advertising campaign points to a growing grassroots movement as organisations take the fight to reschedule psychedelics directly to the government.
“I’ve seen people that have been healed from the most horrendous traumas, from addictions, depression — I’ve seen people come back from the dead, effectively, and it was thanks to these drugs. That’s the reason that we’re doing what we’re doing,” says Tara Austin, one of the founders of Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR), the group responsible for the billboards. “We’re hoping this campaign will drive more people to sign our petition which aims to reschedule psilocybin for medical research.”
Currently, the ‘Schedule 1’ classification of psilocybin, makes it an incredibly difficult drug for scientists to access. Drugs belonging to this class are thought to have no therapeutic value and therefore cannot be lawfully possessed or prescribed. “At the moment, we’re not asking for legalisation or decriminalisation,” says Austin. “We just want to make it easier for this vital research to continue.”
Leonie Schneider was part of one such clinical trial run by researchers at Imperial College London in 2019, which tested the effects of psilocybin on people with depression.
Schneider was first diagnosed with the condition in 1996. “I was at university at the time and was basically told that it was a serotonin problem —and that I would pretty much be on SSRIs for the rest of my life.” Over the next twenty years she bounced between different medications and talking therapies, “though,” she points out, “things still became unbearable at times.” What drove her to seek out an alternative was the realisation that “at best, the SSRIs were keeping me functional. Outwardly, I was doing well — but inside, it felt like a life half lived. Everything was muted - without much colour or joy. The depths of the depression were kept at bay but I also couldn’t experience much of life’s brilliance.”
It was after hearing a talk given by neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris that she decided to sign up for the clinical trial. “It felt safe, because it was being held in a medical centre, with therapists who’d be able to support me. And so I stepped forward.” She is quick to point out that the treatment — which included a number of sessions of psilocybin alongside long-term therapeutic support - didn’t ‘cure’ her depression. “I think there’s a risk that psychedelics are being painted as a panacea, or a silver bullet - that it’s ‘once and done’. And I really don’t want to be part of that narrative, because that certainly hasn’t been my experience.” What she has found, though, is that the treatment allowed her to get “under the hood and to the roots of my depression in a way that twenty years of SSRIs and talking therapy never did.”
The clinical trial was, she points out, “the start of a long and hard process. So, you have a [psilocybin] dosing one day - and that opens up six months or a year’s worth of insights and experiences to work with, which you can then integrate with the help of trained therapists.” One of the biggest things Schneider confronted was the loss of her mother to dementia. “I had real sadness around my mum’s quality of life,” she explains. “She had early onset dementia, so I cared for her for 15 years. Ultimately she died because she forgot how to swallow — so it was very difficult to witness her deterioration over such a long period. With the psychedelic experience, though, I found I was able to zoom out from just the negative thoughts around my mum’s condition, and to see her life in a wider context. It was an incredibly visceral experience - but I got this small nugget of insight which I was able to take into therapy with me afterwards.”
Like many supporters, Schneider argues that scientifically-sound research into these compounds is needed to stop people trying to access them in ways which are illegal and potentially unsafe.
Timmy Davis is the Psilocybin Rescheduling Project Manager for the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group, a think tank and campaign group chaired by the Tory MP, Crispin Blunt. He argues that the UK’s attitude to psychedelics comes down to a quirk in our legal history. “At the time of the 1971 misuse of drugs act,” he explains, “no application had been made to the MHRA (the regulatory body which licences medicines), to register these drugs as potential medical therapeutic tools. And so when the pieces of legislation around them were drawn up, these drugs were just considered potentially dangerous, non-medical drugs of abuse.
“Ongoing medical and therapeutic research has shown that that’s not the case. And so we currently find ourselves in a situation where psilocybin, MDMA and other high research value drugs that have been traditionally stigmatised and demonised, are extraordinarily difficult to research. But there’s no rational, evidential basis for them being in the categories they’re in.”
“This is no longer weird and hippy stuff, this is mainstream science,” agrees Austin. “The US and Australia are taking it very seriously and we cannot be so far behind here in the UK.” Davis argues that, as the global psychedelics industry continues to grow (it is currently estimated to be worth $8.3bn by 2028), we can only stand to gain by making the UK a major player within this research space. “We need to take a very nuanced and careful look at these drugs, and a regulatory system for them needs to be in place — but the only way for that to happen is if we facilitate the research in the first place. And the time for that is now.”
