Colorado Newsline reporter Lindsey Toomer wrote about the Natural Medicine Health Act this week, basically warning us not to get too excited about the new Colorado law that will, presumably, start licensing ‘healing centers’ to provide ‘mushroom therapy’.
Someday, that is. Maybe in 2024. Or 2025.
The general idea of mushroom therapy seems to be, you take someone with psychological issues — maybe PTSD or chronic depression — and you send them on a trip into a bizarre, psychedelic waking dream (hopefully not a nightmare) and they come back realizing that the normal world is not quite so bad as they thought.
Or maybe they’re just acting like they’re cured, so you won’t give them another dose?
The new law created by Proposition 122 also makes it legal to grow psychedelic mushrooms in your basement (or wherever) and share them with your friends. But you can’t sell them to your friends. So these would likely be your actual friends… not, like, your Facebook friends.
To kick things off, in terms of ‘healing centers’, the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies will establish the Natural Medicine Advisory Board and appoint initial members by January 31, 2023. The Board will have 15 members appointed by Governor Jared Polis, with the consent of the Colorado Senate.
The law isn’t clear about whether these state-appointed board members are required to have experience with mushrooms, but I would hope so. They ought to know what they’re getting us into.
The new board will have 18 months to come up with regulations, so we can’t expect the ‘healing centers’ to begin getting licensed until maybe September 2024, and likely won’t be able to begin offering trips — I mean, therapy sessions — until 2025.
If you’re suffering from PTSD or chronic depression — or maybe you’re just trying to quit smoking? — and Summer 2025 seems like a long ways off, you might want to make friends with someone who has a damp basement.
We don’t need everyone going around depressed until 2025, just because the government takes two years to do something a small group of people on mushrooms could do in a couple of hours.
Two months ago, the CDC published a scientific study that reported on the levels of depression among U.S. childcare workers during the COVID crisis, and found that “45.7% (n = 37,376) screened positive for depression.” That’s, like, half of the people who are raising our children for us.
The CDC authors concluded, “…efforts should be directed toward developing effective and scalable interventions for improving the physical and mental health of childcare professionals and addressing stressors that may undermine their well-being.”
I worked at a university childcare center for about 6 months, when I was studying child psychology in college, and I would liken the experience to a psychedelic “bad trip”. Especially my attempts to get the kids to finger-paint safely. So I can see why half the childcare workers were depressed during COVID.
Maybe mushrooms would be an antidote?
Soon?