Peek Inside Philadelphia’s Psychedelics Revolution
Tripping's not just for deadheads anymore: Philly parents — and lots of other people — are learning that the secret to health, happiness, and healing might just come from some formerly far-out drugs.
Below are some highlights from the article. Read the full piece here.
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Hannah McLane, one of the leaders of Philly’s movement toward greater access to psychedelic drugs and the founder and executive director of SoundMind, the first psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy treatment center in Philly, says the idea of microdosing a psychedelic every few days can miss the larger intention of the medicine. If we want to heal from trauma and move forward from emotional struggles, she says, small daily doses won’t necessarily achieve that goal.
“Microdosing isn’t particularly innovative; it’s just what people are used to,” McLane says — a way to make the larger treatment more palatable to the masses. Since microdosing can feel similar to taking an antidepressant or anxiety med every day — just more natural, so to speak — there’s a risk that psychedelic medicine could become just one more pharmaceutical intervention, a pattern that many in the psychedelic movement hope to avoid. “Higher doses sound a little bit scary, and everyone’s afraid they’re going to run down the street naked. And it’s like, no, the scary part is actually where the healing comes,” says McLane. “You have to go into the part of your mind that you didn’t go into before.”
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“I think Philly is special,” says the SoundMind Center’s McLane. “We have a history of innovation and art, and, you know, we’re the original capital of the country.” For Philly to be the next spot where people feel safe using psychedelics to explore trauma and pain makes sense, McLane says: “If you want a place that is a snapshot of American culture — the good and bad parts about American culture all contained within one little city? It’s Philly.”
The SoundMind Center looks like a lot of other houses in West Philly. It’s one half of a twin, with a big front porch and austere pillars in that classic brown. But at the treatment center where McLane, a physician and psychotherapist who trained at Penn, Temple, Harvard and Brown, is running the show, there’s a lot going on behind those doors that looks like nothing else in the city.
SoundMind is a psychedelic healing center and educational facility where patients experiencing debilitating symptoms impacting their mental health, like depression, anxiety and PTSD, can sit with a trained therapist during a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy session. Ketamine — technically the same ketamine that Marissa’s club friends would do in the ’90s — has been legal as an anesthetic for more than 50 years, but only in the past decade has research been done on its potential benefits for mental health. Ketamine produces short trips — between 45 and 90 minutes — so it’s an easier sell than using mushrooms or other psychedelics for a traditional medical community that’s only just dipping its toes into administering psychedelic medicine.
Ketamine isn’t McLane’s first choice of drug to work with, but it’s the one she’s got right now. While psilocybin has been legalized in Oregon and MDMA-assisted therapies are in trial stages for specific conditions like deep trauma and PTSD in other states, she anticipates it could be several years before the latter is approved for the same kinds of treatment that ketamine is.
There are more than 600 people on the SoundMind wait list, all hoping to see whether psychedelics can alleviate their depression, anxiety and/or PTSD. Many of them suffer from trauma caused by the pandemic. Out of all the treatment options, McLane is most excited by the promise of MDMA.
“What MDMA does is circumvent the amygdala, which is the fear center in the brain,” she explains. “So you’re essentially able to engage with a trauma memory or a difficult memory without dissociating. And that is the way you can heal.” In clinical trials for MDMA-assisted therapy, patients sit for eight hours, typically wearing an eye mask and listening to music, with two therapists who check in while the patients talk about what they are experiencing and feeling. (MDMA is a very talkative drug, so that inevitably happens quickly.)
“The gold standard for therapists working in trauma is prolonged exposure therapy, in which you’re asking someone to tell the trauma over and over again,” McLane says. “And they have about a 40 percent dropout rate, because it’s really uncomfortable.” In MDMA-assisted therapy, patients establish an intention (like processing a difficult life event or unshakable emotion) beforehand and allow that subject to naturally come up during the trip, then are usually better able to engage with feelings than they would be in traditional therapy. “Sometimes it comes up two hours in or four hours in,” McLane says. “You can’t always predict how someone’s going to get to the difficult memory. Sometimes it seems like a totally random other story.” Because of this, McLane says, the patient is “able to stay present, go into the memory, and feel it.”
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At the same time, those in the movement are aware that the treatments are less accessible to those in the region who might need them most. “Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA-plus people, those who are neurodiverse — we all experience higher rates of mental illness yet have lower access to care,” says Aubrey Howard, BIPOC protocol coordinator at SoundMind, which seeks to make these therapies more available to traditionally marginalized communities. “There is definitely a barrier to entry for people of color when talking about wellness or holistic medicine or psychedelic medicine.” In other words, according to Natalie Ginsberg: “It’s generally much safer for white folks to speak publicly about drugs and drug use.” (Not to mention to use. People of color are still criminalized more often for drug use, and by extension, trust levels around these supposedly wonderful natural, still largely illegal medicines are low in marginalized communities.)
If this movement is going to succeed, Howard says, there has to be access for all, not just for those who have the time, space and money to get in touch with their inner selves for a day. “I feel that these medicines have immense potential to be agents of change in America and over all the world,” Howard says. “We don’t want to see the same thing happen with psychedelics that happened with the cannabis movement, where it’s a very small group of people, probably white, probably wealthy, who are the ones given access.”
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Read the full piece here.