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If you have questions about subscribing, call us at 613-2150735 or e-mail christine@ngtimes.ca their medicinal properties.

But the recent move by Alberta to allow psychedelic-assisted therapy means licensed providers can now treat patients with higher doses of psychedelic mushrooms for mental health disorders. A psychiatrist must oversee any treatment.

The great hope is that, even with a single dose of a psychedelic mushrooms, the brain can be redirected away from troubling memory and mood ruts. For terminally ill patients, experimental treatments are showing profound results in easing the prospect of death.

Dr. Sean O'Sullivan, a clinical psychiatrist and Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University, explains, "Psychedelics disassemble the default mode network and they allow a person to have new experiences in a carefully controlled clinical setting. When the default mode network is put back together, it's not put back together in the same way as

He reports, for example, treatment of an advanced stage lung cancer patient with “one psilocybin mushroom session occasioning a mystical-type experience that she rated 4 months later as being the single-most personally meaningful experience of her life.”

In 1943, Winston Churchill gave the commencement address at Harvard University, noting with customary eloquence, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” That was wartime talk about knowledge as power. But now at Harvard, it’s the modest but potent mushroom taking center stage.

Michael Pollan is a member of Harvard’s English Department and well known for challenging notions about psychoactive plants. “Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on Earth,” he says.

Thanks to documentaries like Dosed 2: The Trip of a Lifetime, which follows a terminally ill cancer patient’s legal use of magic mushrooms to treat anxiety, understanding among com-

Erika Dyck is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health and Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. In a thoughtful commentary published by theconversation.com, she cautions against the race “to push psychedelics into the medical marketplace.”

Dyck says we should “take a sober approach to the psychedelic hype.”

The question remains. If a safe, natural, and low-cost mushroom can, in one wellguided experience, dramatically improve the well-being of someone suffering from conditions like PTSD and depression, why wouldn’t a caring society want to enable its use?

We say, let’s put in place the right safeguards. And on this one, perhaps we would be well advised to turn to traditional healers for advice, not the medical establishment.

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