Mr Blunt sees drug prohibition as one of the “greatest policy failures of the last 50 years”. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign followed a decade later. Scientists immediately recognised their potential to unlock the secrets of the mind, but their efforts were cut short when, in 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug use to be “public enemy number one”, effectively banning research and marking the start of the war on drugs. Magic mushrooms and LSD first exploded into American counterculture in the middle of the last century. It’s not so much rags to riches as overdose to cure. In the House of Commons, Mr Blunt told the powerful (and well rehearsed) story of their renaissance. Most aspiring fast moving consumer products have a “backstory” and hallucinogens are no different. So what’s behind the incredible rise of psychedelic therapies are these drugs which once caused a few hippies to “see the light” (and others fall from windows) really poised to set us free and ease Britain’s mental health crisis? Or might there be something else going on?Īnd, if so, might an investment fund called “Psych Capital Plc” have anything to do with it? The UK was “trailing behind Australia, Canada and the United States”, he said, with the Home Office imposing “disadvantage on our prestigious universities and research companies”. Speaking at a debate in the Commons, which his Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group has long campaigned for, he argued that psilocybin should be bumped from drug Schedule 1 into Schedule 2, meaning that British doctors could prescribe trips to their patients, just as psychiatrists in Australia will be able to do from July.Ī “psychedelic renaissance” was under way and Britain must not be left behind, he told MPs. On Thursday, Mr Blunt made the latest in a long series of passionate pleas to have psilocybin, the chemical that puts the “magic” in magic mushrooms, put on the road towards legalisation for medical use. Step forward Crispin Blunt MP, the honourable member for Reigate in Surrey, a straight-talking sort of chap who was educated not in Carnaby Street or some trendy redbrick sociology department but at Wellington College and then Sandhurst. but this time around, it is not so much those who would “stick it to the man” who are leading the way but the man himself. In the 1960s it was the likes of Jagger, Joplin and Hendrix who played the pied piper. Those championing the new “shroom boom” are a very different breed to their forebears. “I took magic mushrooms to relieve the stress of motherhood,” read a headline in The Times the other week. “ I took magic mushrooms at 64 and the fog I’ve lived under my whole life lifted,” an enthusiast told The Telegraph in November. Not only is it now acceptable to undergo a psychedelic sojourn, but fashionable. It’s even possible to buy “functional mushroom” capsules from the shelves in Holland & Barrett. The BBC and other media are full of case studies about formerly depressed people who, like Harry, have seen the light after a trip. But this time round it’s weirdly respectable.Įsteemed scientists, raised in the 1960s and 70s on Woodstock and hemp, are back experimenting with LSD – some finding that it works on their patients almost as well as electric shock treatment. Britain, and much of the rest of the Anglosphere, is in the grip of a psychedelic mania we have not seen since 1968. “They’re unlocking so much of what we’ve suppressed,” he enthused. Taking magic mushrooms, he told the world, was a “fundamental” part of his new life something that had “changed” him and helped him “deal with the traumas and the pains” of his past. When Prince Harry sat down for an interview with psychiatrist Gabor Maté in March, he said something that once would have caused outrage.
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