Magic Mushrooms may be on More Plates Next Year
Can You Really Cook Psychedelic Mushrooms?
I was reading recently about a growing interest in foods and beverages incorporating the psychoactive substance psilocybin as a “grownup functional ingredient.” Yes, that psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in some species of mushrooms.
Many people aren’t big fans of the taste of psychedelic mushrooms. They can be very earthy, gritty, and bitter. If you want to mask that mushroom taste, mix them into more palatable dishes with other dominating flavors. Adding them to tastier dishes will ease you into your psychedelic experience with a positive first encounter.
There isn’t a lot of data on the temperature at which psilocybin degrades, or how fast this process occurs, so the primary focus should be not overheating the mushrooms. The loss of potency is considered a trade-off for the outcome of the recipe; if you are against losing potency of your mushrooms, don’t apply heat to them.
Ingestion Process:
Individual consumes mushrooms
Onset of effects typically occur about 45-minutes to 1 hour after consumption
Peak sensitivity to the effects of the mushroom occurs at about 2-5 hours
Individual comes back down to baseline levels
Psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms, has been the subject of emerging research on treating mental health conditions including depression, anxiety and mood disorders, as well as a handful of cookbooks. Several cities have decriminalized the substance. The consumer adoption of mushrooms to help your body respond to stress, anxiety and fatigue, or to boost brain performance, is breaking ground for psilocybin to become part of a “wellness culture.”
Talk of total legalization is premature, but there’s a growing school of thought that many of these ingredients hold the key to dealing with stresses of modern life.
Psilocybin can cause hours of vivid hallucinations. Indigenous people have used it in healing rituals for centuries, and scientists are currently looking into whether it can ease depression, help longtime smokers quit or alcoholics stop drinking. Currently illegal in the U.S., Oregon and several cities have decriminalized it. Starting in 2023, Oregon will begin its supervised use by licensed facilitators. And several British companies have been approved to test this “new” approach.
Exploring the Use of Psychedelics
Psychedelic drugs may offer great promise in the treatment of mental health problems, offering almost immediate benefits, compared with antidepressants, which often take up to three months to take full effect. The treatment pathway works entirely differently to that of antidepressants, getting to the root cause, rather than just dampening symptoms. While it’s not known exactly how psilocybin works in the brain, researchers believe it increases connections and, at least temporarily, changes the way the brain organizes itself.
Less is known about how enduring those new connections might be. In theory, combined with talk therapy, people might be able to break bad habits and adopt new attitudes more easily. However, some patients described life-changing insights that gave them lasting inspiration.
Fighting depression
Some scientists believe the use of psychedelic drugs to treat conditions such as depression could become a standard treatment within five years. This approach seems to reset the networks in the brain, helping to end ingrained negative patterns of thought, and making patients far more receptive to therapy.
Small Pharma, a British company, is leading the world’s first regulated clinical trial, which combines the hallucinogenic drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine) with psychotherapy in patients with major depressive disorder. The hope is that such therapies could soon become a standard way to treat depression, in a way that gets to the root cause of the problem, rather than simply masking symptoms.
Treating alcoholism
Only three conventional drugs — disulfiram, naltrexone and acamprosate — are approved to treat alcohol use disorder, and there’s been no new drug approvals in nearly 20 years. The compound in psychedelic mushrooms has helped heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely in the most rigorous test of psilocybin for alcoholism.
More research is needed to see if the effect lasts and whether it works in a larger study. Many who took a placebo, a generic antihistamine with some psychoactive effects, instead of psilocybin also succeeded in drinking less, probably because all study participants were motivated and received talk therapy. Almost half who took psilocybin stopped drinking entirely compared with 24% of the control group.
Conclusion
While I certainly don’t advise the aimless use of psychedelic substances, nor any illegal substances for that matter, I’m all for anything that will make people better. It’s intriguing that they could become in more common use in the near future, whether in our food, beverages or medications. When it’s safe, I look forward to it.
In the meantime, be safe, be smart, be well!