Magic mushrooms can help smokers get ahead

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Using magic mushrooms to quit smoking may seem counterintuitive, but researchers have other ideas.

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Professor Matthew Johnson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore has been studying the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin, a compound found in magic mushrooms, in terms of tobacco addiction for the past 13 years.

“The data seem to indicate that people quit smoking because of the psychotherapeutic process that psychotherapy facilitates,” Johnson said, adding that there also appears to be less irritability and craving afterward.

“People have deeply introspective experiences. They have an increase in mental flexibility and openness of personality. And then people are more willing to make long-standing changes, to really see themselves from the big picture, to get out of the story of, you know, ‘I’m just a smoker.’ I am addicted. I can’t quit. I have tried 100 times. Why bother?’ We know that acute psilocybin offers a very different psychological experience with lasting significance. And when that is linked to this transition, from being a smoker to a non-smoker, to quit smoking, that gives it a psychological gravity. “

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In his most recent studies, Johnson said that about 60 patients in a controlled setting received about five dry grams of pure psilocybin in pill form, which is two to three times larger than “a typical dose (of magic mushrooms) that someone might want to drink before going to the Grateful Dead or Phish concert, ”explained Johnson.

The patient relaxed on a couch in a lab under observation with a pickup by a loved one arranged afterward, so Johnson stressed that people shouldn’t try this on their own.

Talk therapy is also done before and after that session.

“It’s one (dose) and that’s it,” Johnson said. “And that is what is really amazing about this field is that it is not the continuous use of these substances. It is having a valuable and useful psychological experience that you can take advantage of. This really, when it works well in these sessions, people can really get to the heart of the addiction. People often just make this decision, obviously they can quit. “

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Johns Hopkins just received a nearly $ 4 million US grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct more research over the next three years in coordination with the University of Alabama at Birmingham and New York University.

“Research interest in this has increased dramatically in recent years,” Johnson said.

“It has been a long time since the sensationalism of the 60s. The association of these drugs was really with the counterculture. And then time went by and replicating these really phenomenal results (in treating depression and addictions). In recent years, it has finally been recognized that we are in absolutely dire straits in terms of our social response to mental health. So I think there is an opening that was not said 10 or 20 years ago. “