What's Ahead in the World of Magic Mushrooms

Shrooms have made science and medical headlines off and on since the 1990s and especially since 2000, when the US government granted regulatory approval to resume research in psychedelics. The funky fungus—or at least the chemical compound psilocybin—has been hailed for its potential to help remedy everything from anxiety, depression, and PTSD to brain and spinal injuries. Also, some subjects experienced life-changing spiritual awakenings. Writing for Salon, Troy Farah opens his report with a further catalog of landmarks and milestones, including evidence that shrooms, or "magic mushrooms," have played a role in human society for thousands, if not millions, of years. The pharmaceutical industry has taken note.

What makes shrooms so great, they ask? Why, it must be the psilocybin, which can possibly be derived in a lab and sold in patent-protected formulas. After all, anyone with a little mycological expertise can harvest the world's 180 known varieties of psychoactive mushrooms. Farah's report focuses on debate within the science realm over the difference between lab-made psilocybin and good ol' shrooms. Some within that debate are chasing venture capital and making startups. Others, including the FDA, are focused on the drug's confirmed therapeutic effects. The same federal agency that ensures the safety, efficacy, and security of legal drugs (psilocybin is not yet legal) awarded the drug "Breakthrough Therapy" status for depressive disorders in 2018 and again in 2019.

Suffice it to say that more research is needed, but one thing lab-made psilocybin doesn't produce is the "entourage effect," which comes from psilocybin plus all the other chemical compounds in a typical psychoactive shroom. One scientist with "psychedelic startup" Filament Health explained the entourage effect as "the idea that the sum of all of these individual compounds ... could be greater than the individual parts." Asked for comment, a psychologist at Ohio State's Center for Psychedelic Drug Research said, "When I hear of a for-profit company examining the entourage effect of psilocybin mushrooms, what I hear is, 'We're looking to see whether we can isolate a combination of substances [and] make money off of it as a proprietary substance.'" Farah notes that the latest forecast is for psilocybin to become an FDA-approved drug by 2026. (Read the full story.)