Last December, I attended my first Psychedelics in Recovery (PIR) meeting, where people are following a 12-step programme. They ‘may or may not use’ various psychedelic plant medicines to help them get off and stay off drugs, not to mention address ‘treatment-resistant’ depressions, and long-standing trauma.
A part of PIR’s preamble notes the potential risk of taking them too often, and although there’s much enthusiasm there for ‘journeying’ and ‘ceremonial use’, it’s very unusual that peers start using plant meds the way we drank or shot dope. I don’t know about you, but I’d likely end up in a secure unit if I took them the way I used heroin.
The group sprang out of a US drug policy event years ago, when it turned out there were around 50 psychonauts present with past addiction issues. It seemed beyond coincidence that they should all be in the same space together, so they grabbed the moment, and leapt bravely into growing PIR.
To contextualise – the US gave birth to the 12 steps in the 1930s, and Bill Wilson, who co-founded AA, took a couple of different psychedelic medicines to help him out of prolonged depressions. So for those of you wondering how a group can call itself 12-step while occasionally taking these meds, the answer, as ever, is written into the implicit search for healing.
PIR friends regularly share how folk originally from AA and NA either don’t tell their fellows that they’re using plant medicines, or the ‘mixed’ responses when they do. Until fairly recently, sharing about taking any drugs in such fora was thought to be unwise, but slowly-slowly our communities are changing.
The AIDS Coalition’s (ACT UP) slogan ‘Ignorance = Fear’ became imprinted upon my consciousness decades ago, and it reminds me that the psychedelic renaissance is relatively new. Not everyone knows these medicines can stop depressions or reduce the ongoing impact of trauma, and so I don’t get preachy about it.
Ketamine is being used to treat alcoholism but is dependency-forming itself, so some PIRers are unsure about it. Also, people must be free of opiates and SSRIs before they would be considered in most psychedelic research protocols, including for ibogaine. This raises questions for me. Around 2000, I took an ibogaine trip that had me immobile for six hours. I was on SSRIs at the time but the outcome of that journey was ten of the calmest months of my life – the peace and stability I’d craved since childhood. So no adverse affects, though I understand how researchers are currently treading carefully and are reticent to include people on other currently-contraindicated drugs, the potential danger being serotonin syndrome.
If a person’s primary mental health challenge were only suicidal ideation, you might be lucky and find yourself on a psychedelic research protocol. But if you’ve ever been diagnosed with bipolar or schizophrenia, forget it. When I first worked that out over years of chats with friends at Breaking Convention and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), I wasn’t delighted.
Anyways, I did my first community detox from opiates and SSRIs, arguably a dumb thing to do given I live in chronic/severe pain. My conclusion so far is that it was definitely a good idea to stop the SSRIs. Not sure about the low-level opiates, as I’m always struggling with physical pain, acute or not.
As for the million-dollar question about whether microdosing psilocybin will stall decades of depression, I would answer yes, though you’d better have the money to afford them. Just like medical weed, they’re not cheap, but if you shop around you may find a reasonable price.
Moreover, I am not yet personally convinced that psilocybin is more successful at treating depression than some SSRIs, but I haven’t spent the last decade of my life empirically researching this. What I will say is that it can only be a good thing to have increased medicinal choices on this planet, in this historical period where war-related trauma and the climate emergency are creating high levels of mental health trauma and associated illnesses.
Andria Efthimiou-Mordaunt is an activist, who visited PIR as an observer