Magic Mushrooms and Magic Bullets

Last week, California senators introduced a bill to legalize hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, ketamine, mushrooms, and MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstasy. The sponsors say the bill is one small step in ending the War on Drugs, which, since the 1980s, has cost billions of dollars and resulted in the United States having the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

That’s the good news. Many people are coming around to the idea that drug addiction should be treated as a public health crisis, not a law enforcement issue. But when it comes to the second reason the sponsors gave for legalizing psychedelics—“paving the way for medical treatment” for depression and PTSD—I am skeptical. As someone who has battled both substance abuse and mental health issues, I’m concerned that psychedelics will become another failed magic bullet to “cure” addiction, depression, and trauma.

We’ve been promised miracle cures and magic bullets before. In the early 2010s, the media was bursting with stories about a new cure for PTSD: the drug propranolol, which had been on the market as a blood pressure medication since the 1960s. By 2011, it was approved for psychiatric use, and doctors began giving it to soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD.

Journalists made outlandish—and, as we know now, irresponsible—claims that propranolol could “erase” traumatic memories. Everyone from severely wounded vets to car accident survivors were assured they could pop a little blue pill and never relive the trauma again. As I read these reports, I had questions already. First, if this common blood pressure medication was really the cure for panic attacks and trauma responses, why were we just hearing about it now? How had no one noticed the miraculous effects during propanolol’s first half-century on the market?

But at the time, I was dealing with my own mental health issues, and I had a baby at home. I needed something effective. After experimenting with a series of antidepressants and other drugs, I was willing to give anything a shot. Who wouldn’t want to take a drug that could eliminate traumatic memories forever?

I took the propranolol prescription exactly as prescribed—and was shocked to find it did nothing even remotely close to “memory erasure.” I’d already suspected the claims about propranolol were exaggerated, but I didn’t expect them to be so flat-out false. While it did make me somewhat less anxious, I also felt tired, weepy, and easily overwhelmed. It took some research to find out that this reaction was normal. Even people who take propranolol for blood pressure problems experience these side effects.

After giving it a try for two months, I threw my prescription bottle in the trash. It was a waste of shelf space. Maybe the drug had some promise for people with anxiety. But for me, it was worthless. I stopped taking cocktails of medications when my daughter was a year old—and I felt better than I had in years.

Almost a decade later, search results for propranolol return articles with overblown titles, such as “Beta-blocker drug erases the emotion of fearful memories.” I assure you that it can’t and doesn’t. I’ve often wondered how many other people have taken this drug, expecting life-changing results—and felt like intractable failures when it didn’t deliver. After being promised an easy fix, were they left feeling like there was something wrong with only them? Considering the high rate of suicide among Iraq veterans with PTSD, it’s nightmarish to think about.

Around the same time, the media began reporting other “miracle cures,” this time for alcoholism: the drugs naltrexone and campral, also decades-old drugs. Researchers later backtracked their claims and admitted these drugs are hardly a cure for full-blown alcoholics. If anything, they help heavy drinkers to use less. Naltrexone, as an opiate antagonist, it can reduce the pleasurable effects of alcohol, and therefore a heavy drinker might decide to have two drinks instead of five. But it won’t cure an addict—who are known to keep using despite a barrage of negative effects.

Medications can help with mental health issues to some degree. But they can’t compensate for the hard emotional and mental work it takes to truly recover from these conditions. For most people, it requires talk therapy and lifestyle changes—something that hasn’t changed since the days of Freud and early psychology.

As for psychedelics, it appears drugs like Ecstasy have some power to alleviate depression. In other news: getting high on drugs makes you high. The problem with drug-induced highs is that they tend not to last. The user gains tolerance, starts experiencing negative side effects, and eventually crashes. Every addict is familiar with this cycle, and the good feelings never last for long. I won’t be surprised if the people who become human guinea pigs for psychiatric experiments with psychedelic drugs end up worse off than ever.

I’m glad to see California is backing away from the failed War on Drugs. But if they’re expecting hallucinogenic drugs to cure a myriad of mental health problems, all I can say is: don’t hold your breath.