This is the second story in a series about psychedelic drugs in Denver. Read the first here.
DENVER – Brendan Caldwell had enjoyed plenty of magic mushroom trips. So he expected the same when he took just a little bit of the hallucinogen before hosting his birthday party.
Instead, Caldwell’s experience resulted in what he calls "psychedelic trauma."
"I've had lots of positive, really positive experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, but this one in particular was just very, very difficult," Caldwell told Fox News as he leaned against a tree, sitting cross-legged.
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Caldwell estimates that he ate less than a gram of dust from a baggie that contained mushrooms about a year earlier. A dose that size would typically produce only minor effects.
But when the psilocybin — the psychoactive compound in shrooms — kicked in, Caldwell started to feel heavy, "almost like gravity had kind of been turned up."
Then he collapsed.
"I lost control of my body. I was thrashing around on the ground," Caldwell said.
"My hands had folded in like a tetany sort of thing in my chest," he added as he clenched his fingers together. "I had this intense feeling of panic."
That lasted for what seemed like about an hour. A few hours after that, he didn’t feel like he was tripping anymore — but he also didn’t really feel anything at all.
"I was just flat—in neutral," Caldwell said.
"For maybe the next 18 months or so, I woke up with the sun every day with a feeling of panic in my body that just wouldn't desist until the sun went down," he continued.
Colorado, where Caldwell lives, is at the forefront of a resurgence in psychedelic drugs. In November, voters passed Proposition 122, which decriminalized several hallucinogenic substances and paved the way for wellness clinics to let clients use them as part of their therapy.
Denver in particular is undergoing a sort of psychedelic renaissance. The city similarly passed a decriminalization bill years earlier, and a community of hallucinogenic users have surfaced above ground.
Dr. Libby Stuyt, an addiction psychiatrist who’s worked in the behavioral health field for 30 years, worries that decriminalization will lead to more people consuming psychedelic drugs, which can cause people to act erratically and sometimes dangerously. And while she acknowledged that recent research has shown that certain psychedelics can safely help treat some mental illnesses in controlled settings, Stuyt said she was concerned that those results would encourage people to take drugs in uncontrolled settings and without supervision from a qualified professional
"In a controlled environment, there is some really great research coming out in terms of using these substances therapeutically, but that's in a really controlled environment," she told Fox News. "But the research is still in the infancy stage, in my opinion, and we don't really have a lot of good data on it in terms of safety."
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"Denver has been a pioneer in this whole area," the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblin, told the Denver Business Journal.
His organization in June hosted Psychedelic Science in the Mile High City, dubbed "the largest psychedelic conference in history." It attracted about 10,000 attendees with keynote speakers like New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Dozens of panels over five days dished on everything from religion to business opportunities to research showing how substances like psilocybin and MDMA — commonly called ecstasy or molly — in clinical settings can help with some mental illnesses.
And even though Denver may be leading the psychedelic movement, which is expected to balloon into a multi-billion-dollar industry, interest is blossoming nationwide. The Wall Street Journal recently published a feature outlining how psychedelic drugs have become part of the corporate culture in Silicon Valley, where tech titans believe the substances can help lead to business advancements.
In 2018 and again in 2019, the Food and Drug Administration put psilocybin on a fast-track approval process for certain uses. Last month, the agency released draft guidelines for psychedelic drug trials — an important step in more formal acceptance.
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Caldwell, since his experience with psychedelic trauma, has become a psychedelic-assisted therapist — basically a clinician who uses certain hallucinogens as part of their treatment regimen.
In other words, Caldwell may give his therapy clients psychedelic mushrooms — the very substance that ultimately left him with severe anxiety for over a year.
"That experience, while it was really, really difficult, it really forced me to take my mental health more seriously," he said. "A lot of what I owe today for my progress in my own mental health journey has come from things that I adapted into during that really dark period that was sort of started by this really traumatic psilocybin experience."
Caldwell feels patients are safe from facing a psychedelic trauma similar to his — or even a lighter version — under guidance from a qualified facilitator. He was, however, clear that medicinal use of hallucinogenic drugs "is new enough that I think we're really still starting to figure out exactly what like the short-term and long-term risks might be."
Studies are limited and ongoing, but research has shown that certain psychedelic drugs have had profound effects on mental illness in clinical settings. A recent Johns Hopkins University study found that two doses of psilocybin, paired with psychotherapy, can ease major depressive disorder symptoms for up to a year.
"There is a lot of research coming out right now and the landscape is constantly changing, but what we've seen so far is especially promising research that I've seen so far includes psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder, especially treatment resistant depression," Caldwell said. He also pointed to successes with substances abuse issues, like alcoholism, and benefits for terminal patients facing their own mortality.
"There's a lot of stuff that it probably is going to be very useful for that's just now starting to be shown in scientific studies," Caldwell added.
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Patients can’t simply get drugs from their therapists to take home so they can and hallucinate for a few hours while watching music videos or bring them to a concert to trip out. Usually, psychedelics are administered behind closed doors and not until after other methods have failed.
Even then, patients typically go through a preparation meeting — sometimes multiple — while the psychedelic sessions can often be emotionally challenging or painful as they face things like resurfacing trauma. And either after the psychedelic sessions or in between them, they’ll meet with their therapists to "integrate" their experiences.
"Integration sessions are really oriented towards trying to make meaning out of the experiences you’ve already had and trying to cement long-term therapeutic change," Caldwell said.
Essentially, taking psychedelics in these settings isn’t fun — it’s work. Expensive work. In Oregon, where all drugs are decriminalized, one psychedelic session could cost $3,500, Axios Denver reported.
Even in a clinical setting, Caldwell said mushrooms or psychedelics more generally aren’t always the best solution for every patient. Rather, they should be another tool added to therapists’ belts.
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Caldwell believes that people who use psychedelic drugs outside of therapeutic or clinical context can still reap long-term benefits, though he also said the risk of having a negative experience with lasting consequences is higher. He said he'd repeatedly enjoyed positive outcomes from recreational mushroom use before facing psychedelic trauma.
Kess Hirsheimer, the president of Denver's Psychedelic Club, previously told Fox News that psychedelics can be deeply transformative for people who use them recreationally. Her own first experience with psychedelics helped relieve her of a deep and painful depression.
But Stuyt, the addiction psychiatrist, worries that people will see therapeutic benefits being touted and try psychedelics on their own in an uncontrolled environment and without a qualified facilitator. Prop 122’s broader decriminalization, she said, makes the drugs more accessible and adds to that risk.
"I'm concerned more about people taking from that 'oh, this works. This really works for you. So let me just try it and see,' without going through the proper protocols and actually being with a therapist," she told Fox News.
Stuyt also said she’s had several patients die while hallucinating on psychedelic drugs. One person, for example, jumped out of a second story building.
"These are not benign drugs and they have potential real side effects," she said. "The biggest problem is the altered perception of reality and then people doing things that they wouldn't normally do not under the influence."
Without a professional to help guide a drug user, there’s an increased threat of mental scarring, according to Caldwell.
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"I would say the risk is higher for having an experience that is too much, too fast, too soon and becomes traumatic and leaves you with longer term symptoms related to that trauma," Caldwell told Fox News. He added, however, that he’s never heard of anyone facing psychedelic trauma as intense as his.
The clinicians also said those experiences could exasperate any mental health issues a user is already experiencing.
"In my experience of patients, the people that have had really bad trips, they never went back to using it again because they never wanted to experience that again," Stuyt said. "But they were not the same after that trip. And so they ended up having a lot of anxiety or panic attacks, that kind of thing."
She told Fox News that some patients said they hallucinated demons chasing after them and that they thought they would die.
Caldwell clarified that traumatic drug trips could stem from something like taking too many mushrooms, but they could also be set off from bad settings like being in a crowded, uncomfortable room or from starting in a vulnerable emotional state, such as having just broken up with a partner.
"If you're on a psychedelic and you start to have a traumatic experience, let's say you're confronting feelings you don't want to have," Caldwell said, "if that isn't facilitated well by a qualified and capable therapist, that can result in like longer term instability where the person might be worse than they were when they started, at least for some period of time."
He said those experiences could be "somewhat destabilizing."
That’s part of why Caldwell goes into Denver to run an integration circle — a sort of group therapy session for psychedelic drug users. Sometimes people in the meeting, which is open to the public, share positive experiences, but frequently they’re describing situations that were confusing or traumatic.
Additionally, while Prop 122 decriminalized many aspects of psychedelic drugs, sale is still illegal. That means there’s no real regulations on the substances for recreational users.
"On the recreational scene, there also is some issues with not knowing exactly like what you're consuming or how much of it you're consuming," Caldwell said.
Still, Caldwell believes even traumatic psychedelic experiences can ultimately lead to positive outcomes if they’re properly digested. More generally, he said he believes that true personal growth is borne out of adversity, like his own psychedelic trauma.
"I don't think I would be here practicing intentionally and spiritually and therapeutically with psychedelics and mushrooms specifically if I hadn't had that experience," Caldwell said. "I needed to be woken up to how truly powerful and sacred these substances are."
