LOS ANGELES — I'm familiar with magic mushrooms from back in the day. I took them a couple times in college — including on a particularly memorable Halloween — and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. So I was curious about a Santa Monica-based startup called the Reality Center that's been trying to expand the mind and aid in healing the body via digital psychedelics — a proprietary combination of pulsing lights, sounds and vibrations — instead of consuming drugs.
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is enjoying a peak pop-culture popularity not seen since the 1970s. Although illegal at the federal level, its consciousness-altering properties have shown promise in helping to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety and addiction. And recently I've heard Angelenos at cocktail parties swapping stories about their adventures in microdosing mushrooms (taking extremely small amounts) as casually as they might have discussed cannabis a decade ago.
The use of psilocybin mushrooms was legalized in Oregon in 2020 and decriminalized in Colorado as of January, but recent efforts to give similar access to Californians have so far been unsuccessful (though a handful of cities — including San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz — have passed resolutions effectively decriminalizing magic mushrooms).
