New research on the experiences of people who took magic mushrooms through Oregon's homegrown psychedelic industry — the first program of its kind in the U.S. — is offering a largely favorable picture. The study, based on almost 350 people who took the drug at state-licensed centers, is the most rigorous analysis yet of the real-world implications of regulated psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Most of the participants described their trip as beneficial, and more than half ranked it among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
Meanwhile, the data suggests the program was overall quite safe. Only a very small number had "serious adverse reactions," according to the analysis published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Todd Korthuis, who led the research team based at Oregon Health & Science University, said that initially, even he was skeptical about dosing people with psilocybin outside of a tightly controlled medical setting.
"The data has swayed me," he told NPR. "These results are very reassuring." Want the latest stories on the science of healthy living? Subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter.
Much of the recent momentum around psychedelics has centered on running drug development trials, with the aim of eventually winning approval from the Food and Drug Administration so that psilocybin, LSD and other substances can be used to treat mental health conditions. Psilocybin has a shot at being approved as early as next year, based on results from large human studies that used a synthetic form of the drug for hard-to-treat depression The new Oregon data represents a very different pathway. In 2020, the state's voters approved a nonmedical model for psilocybin, meaning most people over 21 can take the drug under the supervision of a facilitator at a designated center, without a prescription or medical referral. (Colorado has also launched its own psychedelic program, although adults there do have the option of using the drug outside of a supervised setting.) Other scientists involved in psychedelics research were surprised that the real-world results out of Oregon look so promising.
The number of adverse events is roughly what you'd expect from other psychiatric interventions, says Balázs Szigeti, a clinical data scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn't involved in the study. "In clinical settings, there are a lot of eyes on the patients, a lot of medical attention," he says. "To see that the whole thing did not blow up in this regulated business environment is definitely good news for psilocybin." Participants' rationale for taking psilocybin varied — curiosity, self-improvement, mental health and trauma were the most common reasons given.
The average dose was about 30 milligrams, which is a bit higher than what tends to be administered in clinical trials. More than half of people in the new report said their mental health symptoms improved afterward, but Szigeti says those findings are hard to interpret because the study was uncontrolled and people had varying degrees of symptoms at baseline. However, the positive change in mental well-being — another measure used in the study — is similar to what's reported in studies looking at the effect of meditation, he adds.
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