San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE WELLNESS TRIP
A Bay Area push to use plant-based psychedelics to heal.
For most of his adult life, Carlos Plazola kept his stress and anger at bay with exercise. Running didn’t solve all his problems, but it kept him going.
When his knees gave out in his late 40s, he turned to yoga for his mental health needs. Then he added meditation. And when that wasn’t enough, he tried psychedelics.
In October, he got a dose of magic mushrooms (psilocybin) from a friend of a friend, who also set him up with a bedroom in a house where he could take the drug. Plazola asked another friend to come along and make sure he was safe while he was under the influence. He shut himself in the bedroom and swallowed the mushrooms.
“I went through a very powerful journey,” said Plazola, 50, an Oakland resident who had never tried psychedelic drugs before.
He’d always been prone to anxiety and angry outbursts. He learned from his psychedelic trip that his sometimes outofcontrol emotions came from childhood trauma that he’d never dealt with, and a deeply rooted, hairtrigger fear response. He realized that he could change his behavior now that he understood where it was coming from.
Blown away by his new insight, Plazola started looking for others who had had similar experiences. He found a thriving, underground community of people using and providing plantbased and often homegrown psychedelics. Within a few months, Plazola was leading Oakland’s grassroots effort to decriminalize socalled natural psychedelics like mushrooms. The measure was approved by the Oakland City Council in early June. The next step for proponents is a statewide decriminalization measure, which could go on a 2020 ballot. After that, attempts to legalize the drugs may be next.
The Bay Area has been cozy with psychedelics since at least the 1960s, when labmade LSD and other, more natural hallucinogenics mixed freely with the openyourmind hippie culture. When psychedelics were roundly outlawed by the federal government in the ’60s and ’70s, the Bay Area’s community went subterranean, but it hardly disappeared.
Mushrooms remained a trendy party drug on college campuses through the ’80s and ’90s and beyond. More recently, microdosing, which involves taking small, precise amounts of psychedelics, has taken off among Silicon Valley techies who swear it increases their creativity.
But even as niche groups have come and gone, the community of wellness users — people committed to psychedelics for physical, emotional or spiritual wellbeing — has remained. It’s evolved into a loosely structured cluster of people who grow or import the drugs, which are almost always plantbased, and people who guide others on safe, responsible use.
In more recent years, thanks in part to a resurgence in academic study and popular interest from people like Michael Pollan, who wrote a book on psychedelics last year, the drugs are starting to slip into the mainstream. “When I found this community that was actively engaged in healing with psychedelics, I learned that it wasn’t a bunch of 1960s and ’70s hippies — they were doctors and therapists and psychiatrists,” Plazola said. “It was mind blowing.”
Plazola recognizes that he’s part of a new generation of users: many of them people in their 30s and 40s who may have shunned psychedelics in the past after coming of age amid widespread antidrug campaigns, or who dabbled with them for fun when they were young.
Now, they’re joining the Bay Area’s older hippies who never gave up on the supposedly mindbending spiritual and emotional applications.
“A lot of the elder community in San Francisco had to deal with 30 or 40 years of prohibition and stigma. It was always, ‘keep it a secret, keep it quiet.’ That was very isolating,” said Larry Norris, executive director of Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education, a San Francisco nonprofit focused on plantbased psychedelics.
In 2012, his group organized a conference on psychedelics to help energize and embolden the community that already existed underground. About 200 people attended. They’ve since held other conferences every year, plus smaller events to share resources on plantbased psychedelics, though the organizers say they are careful to draw the line at helping people access the drugs.
His group also cohosts monthly “integration circles” during which people who have used psychedelics share what they saw while they were under the influence and how that experience has affected their health or reshaped their world view.
“We’re in a pretty tricky place right now, legally,” Norris said. “It feels risky just to talk about it.”
Decriminalization is a natural next step in the evolution of the psychedelic community, proponents like Norris say. Even though psychedelics have long been a low priority for police and prosecutors in the Bay Area — Oakland had only about a dozen arrests a year before the decriminalization measure — laws that forbid use are always going to be stigmatizing and create barriers to access.
Removing those barriers will let people speak freely about their use of psychedelics and help the community as a whole develop more formalized guidelines on best practices, say advocates for decriminalization. It will allow more people to learn about and use drugs that could be profoundly helpful to their mental health, they argue.
Not everyone is convinced of the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, or that anyone should be encouraged to use them. Most proponents of the drugs are users themselves and inherently biased, said Keith Humphrey, a Stanford psychiatrist who supports decriminalization but does not believe psychedelics should be made widely available.
The academic research that looks promising so far has mostly been done on small, carefully selected groups of patients, he said. He’s not convinced the results will hold up under more rigorous study.
And although psychedelics aren’t addictive, they aren’t without risks. A small percentage of people could develop permanent, chronic psychosis from psychedelic use. People under the influence can have a bad trip and hurt themselves or others. If they take the drugs in an insecure space, they can be vulnerable to physical or sexual assault.
Proponents of the drugs acknowledge those risks, and they argue that’s a large part of why decriminalization is so important. The psychedelic community needs to have open conversations about how to safely use the drugs: where to buy them, how much to use, how to prepare for a psychedelic trip and what to do after an experience.
They need to talk about creating safe, com
fortable spaces, where users don’t have to worry about sexual predators or someone stealing their cell phone while they’re under the influence. They need to explain to new users that a bad trip doesn’t have to be terrifying — but that they probably shouldn’t take a psychedelic if they’re experiencing major emotional drama like a recent death or a bad breakup. The community needs to train doctors, therapists and emotional “guides” how to sit with someone who has taken psychedelics and keep them safe, how to handle some who is having a bad trip, and how to talk to them in the days or weeks after a trip about what they experienced. “You want to know that the person you’re working with is experienced, that they’re educated on the power dynamic that can exist when you’re in a vulnerable state of consciousness,” said Julie Megler, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who recently opened a holistic medicine clinic called Sage Integrated Health in Berkeley.
Megler does not provide psychedelics at the clinic because they’re illegal, but she’s used the drugs in the past and would one day like to help people access them. She also cohosts the integration circles with Norris. She thinks that more open discussion about psychedelics will lead to safer, more beneficial use.
“It’s like talking about sex to kids,” she said. “They’re going to do it, so let’s have a conversation about it so they do it safely. People are going to seek out psychedelics.”
One East Bay provider said he’s seen a significant increase in psychedelic use over the past five years or so — enough so that he’s eager to train more providers just to meet the community needs. Last year he started a series of training workshops.
Behind his fencedin property he has a lush garden of hallucinogenic plants, which he opens periodically to anyone interested in learning about natural psychedelics. The garden is for education only, he said. But he also hosts group sessions, during which as many as a dozen people take psychedelics at once, about once a month, and as frequently as every other week
Around the Bay Area, he says, he believes there are similar gatherings happening just about every weekend.
“But things are underground for a reason,” said the provider, who did not want to use his name for fear of legal repercussions. He supports decriminalization efforts in large part because so many people are asking for psychedelics and it’s impossible to meet all their needs, he said.
“You have people coming to you asking for help, and you know that it’s available, but you have conflicts about sharing that help,” he said, because the drugs are illegal. “It’s heartrending sometimes. To be blunt, that’s a lot of my motivation for this conversation around decriminalization.”
Plazola said that his own experience convinced him of the need to decriminalize not only to make the drugs more accessible to those whom he believes could benefit, but to make the experiences safer and more comfortable for those who are already finding a way to use them.
His first time using mushrooms was incredibly powerful and lifechanging, he said. But in hindsight he sees that he made mistakes. He wasn’t able to talk to a therapist or someone familiar with psychedelics before or after using them. Though he had a friend standing guard while he was under the influence, he didn’t have anyone sitting with him in case he had a bad trip.
He’s a middleaged man with a successful business, who has supportive friends and family, and he still found it challenging to access the proper care around taking psychedelics. The people who could most benefit from the drugs — people who have experienced severe trauma or who come from communities of color — rarely have that access, he said.
“The first time, because I didn’t know anyone really in the community, I was alone and it was a bit scary,” Plazola said. “After that, I’ve had experiences with people who are really well trained and it’s a world of difference.
“The structure is there, it already exists, but it’s only for people who know about it and have access to it. People who know people.”
Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com