LOS ANGELES — Melanie Senn’s father, long dead, appeared to her as she lay back in the dimly lit room at the Santa Monica clinic, a mask over her closed eyes, and the psychedelic trip began.
More precisely, it was his thumb. It was disembodied and huge, materializing in her mind to wipe away her own image. Just as a parent might lick a thumb, she said, and use it to clean the dirtied cheek of a child.
“It wasn’t like an aggressive move,” said Senn, 51, recounting the experience. Her father’s thumb had appeared right after the word “goodbye” stretched before her, like a banner in the sky.
“It was like, ‘Goodbye. We’re going somewhere else. And you cannot take this version of yourself,’” she recalled.
Her father had died decades earlier after struggling with alcohol use disorder and bouts of homelessness. She didn’t see herself as an alcoholic — it was a word that seemed out of place in her stable life as an educator, wife and mother — but she had begun to think about how much wine she was drinking at night, the sapped energy and headaches she endured by day.
Senn, who lives in San Luis Obispo, said she had signed up for the clinical trial, hours away in Santa Monica, to see whether therapy with psilocybin, the chemical compound in “magic mushrooms” that can cause hallucinations, might change her relationship to a much more familiar and socially sanctioned drug.
“If my dad had had access to psilocybin treatment,” she had wondered before her trip at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, “could that have helped him?”
Psilocybin and many other psychedelics are broadly prohibited under federal law, categorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration as having “no currently accepted medical use.”
Yet U.S. researchers have been legally scrutinizing possible uses of psychedelics in scores of clinical trials approved by the government, addressing their effects on anorexia, migraines and a range of other maladies.
The Food and Drug Administration has deemed psilocybin a potential “breakthrough therapy” for treating depression, a designation that could fast-track the path to new pharmaceuticals.
Popular interest in psychedelics has been bolstered by the books of Michael Pollan, whose writing inspired Senn to look up psilocybin trials. And money, long the limiting factor in psychedelic research, is pouring into the field from corporate investors and intrigued philanthropists.
Addiction treatment has been one of the most keenly watched areas of psychedelics research in recent years, as studies explore whether they could help people shake off the need for other substances, both legal and illegal.
Early studies have shown promise with treating addiction to tobacco and alcohol. The question has gained urgency as the U.S. faces an overdose surge that is killing more than 100,000 people annually, the majority linked to opioids, and a spike in deaths tied directly to alcohol, which have hit their highest rate in decades.
Peter Hendricks, a public health professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham, said cocaine users have asked skeptically, “You’re going to help me stop getting high — by getting me high?” He is studying whether psychedelics paired with therapy could ease cocaine dependency.
Hendricks said he explains that psilocybin is not considered to be addictive. Some participants, he said, “will tell me, ‘Look, this sounds kind of crazy, but I’ve tried everything at this point, so I’m willing to give it a try.’”
