There’s a strange pattern in the history of psychoactive substances. Humans discover something that fundamentally alters consciousness. They build ceremonies around it, integrate it into their spiritual and medical practices, pass the knowledge down through generations. Then, for various reasons, that knowledge gets suppressed, forgotten, or driven underground. Sometimes it stays buried. Sometimes it resurfaces centuries later, gets rediscovered, and the cycle begins again.
Psilocybin mushrooms have been through this cycle more times than almost any other drug. They’ve been sacrament and medicine, contraband and Schedule I narcotic, hippie party drug and breakthrough therapy for depression. They’ve been worshipped by ancient civilizations, condemned by colonial powers, studied by scientists, criminalized by governments, and are now, improbably, being reconsidered by those same institutions that tried to eradicate them.
The story spans at least three thousand years, possibly much longer. It crosses continents and cultures. It involves Aztec priests, Spanish conquistadors, a New York banker, a Mazatec healer, a Harvard psychologist who became the counterculture’s most famous advocate, and contemporary neuroscientists running clinical trials at major universities.
What makes the history of psilocybin mushrooms particularly strange is how many times the same knowledge had to be rediscovered. The Aztecs and Maya had sophisticated traditions around mushroom use, but the Spanish conquest drove those practices into hiding for four centuries. When Western scientists finally “discovered” psilocybin in the 1950s, they were really just catching up to what indigenous communities had known all along.
And then, having rediscovered it, having isolated the compounds and studied the effects, Western society promptly made it illegal and shut down all research for three decades. We’ve spent the last twenty years slowly, cautiously, rediscovering what we knew fifty years ago, which itself was a rediscovery of what people knew five hundred years ago, which was passed down from traditions that go back thousands of years before that.
If that sounds absurd, that’s because it is: But it’s also instructive. The pattern reveals something about how cultures relate to consciousness-altering substances, particularly ones that don’t fit neatly into our categories of medicine or recreation. Psilocybin mushrooms have always been hard to classify. They’re not addictive like opioids. They’re not stimulating like cocaine. They don’t numb you like alcohol. They don’t even reliably produce euphoria, which is what we usually associate with drugs of abuse.
What they do is stranger and harder to quantify. They produce experiences that people describe as mystical, spiritual, transcendent. They make you see geometric patterns that aren’t there and feel profound connections to things you can’t articulate. They can be terrifying or beautiful or both at once. The experiences are notoriously difficult to put into words, which is part of why every culture that’s encountered these mushrooms has wrapped them in ceremony, myth, and religious language.
For most of recorded Western history, psilocybin mushrooms existed in rumor and myth. There were references in colonial Spanish texts to indigenous people using “inebriating mushrooms” in their pagan rituals, but those accounts were dismissed as exaggeration or confused reports about other substances. Most scholars assumed that if such practices had ever existed, they’d been stamped out by the Catholic Church centuries ago.
They were wrong. The practices survived, hidden in plain sight in remote mountain villages, protected by language barriers and cultures of secrecy built over generations of persecution. The mushrooms kept growing. The ceremonies kept happening. The knowledge kept being passed down. And then, in the 1950s, a banker from New York went looking for them.
This is the story of how humanity found magic mushrooms, lost them, found them again, criminalized them, and is now, slowly, bringing them back into the light.
The Mesoamerican Tradition
The indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica were using psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and they left extensive evidence.
The Aztecs called them teonanácatl, which is often translated as “flesh of the gods,” though the more accurate translation is “divine mushroom” or “sacred mushroom.” The name comes from teotl, meaning divine, and nanacatl, meaning mushroom. The similarity to nacatl, meaning flesh, led to the more poetic but less accurate translation that stuck in popular culture.
Mushroom use in Mesoamerica goes back at least to 1000 BCE, possibly earlier. Archaeologists have found hundreds of small stone carvings, called mushroom stones, in Guatemala, Ecuador, and southern Mexico dating to this period. These are effigies of mushroom-shaped figures, often with faces or human features, suggesting they represented deities or were used in ritual contexts.
By the time the Aztecs dominated central Mexico in the 14th and 15th centuries, mushroom ceremonies were a well-established part of religious and social life. The mushrooms were consumed by priests, nobility, and visiting dignitaries in festivals, healing rituals, and divinatory ceremonies. They were expensive and difficult to procure, requiring all-night searches, which made them a luxury good accessible primarily to the elite.
The ceremonies had structure. Participants would fast beforehand. The mushrooms were often consumed with honey or mixed into cacao drinks. They were eaten in pairs, representing male and female principles, a pattern that continues in indigenous ceremonies today. The Nahuatl word for consuming mushrooms was monanacahuia, meaning “to mushroom oneself,” which gives you a sense of how the act was understood: you weren’t just taking a drug, you were transforming into something else.
Under the influence of the mushrooms, participants would enter trance states and report visions, encounters with deities, communication with ancestors, and insights into illness or future events. The experiences were guided by shamans or priests who sang chants, burned copal incense, and created a ceremonial space designed to direct the journey.
A 16th-century Spanish friar named Bernardino de Sahagún documented Aztec mushroom use in the Florentine Codex, one of the most comprehensive records of Aztec culture. He describes mushroom ceremonies at coronations, festivals, and other major events. He notes that the mushrooms caused people to see visions of war, demons, and “all kinds of things.” His tone is disapproving, filtered through Catholic doctrine that viewed the practices as pagan idolatry.
The Spanish conquest in the early 16th century brought this tradition to a violent halt. Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors observed mushroom ceremonies and were horrified. To them, it looked like devil worship. The Catholic Church launched a systematic campaign to eradicate indigenous religious practices, including mushroom use. They burned codices, destroyed temples, and punished anyone caught participating in the ceremonies.
The suppression was effective. For centuries, Western scholars assumed the mushroom cults had been completely wiped out. References to teonanácatl in Spanish colonial texts were treated as historical curiosities, remnants of a dead culture.
But the traditions didn’t die. They went underground.
In remote indigenous communities, particularly among the Mazatec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, mushroom ceremonies survived in secret. Shamans continued to use psilocybin mushrooms for healing and divination, carefully hidden from outsiders. The ceremonies were passed down through generations, preserved in oral traditions and protected by a culture of secrecy born from centuries of persecution.
For four hundred years, this knowledge stayed hidden. Then, in 1955, a banker from New York showed up asking questions.
The Rediscovery
R. Gordon Wasson was not an obvious candidate to become the father of modern psychedelic research. He was a vice president at J.P. Morgan, a respectable financier with no formal training in anthropology or mycology. But he had an obsession.
In 1927, on his honeymoon in the Catskill Mountains, his wife Valentina, a Russian pediatrician, started picking wild mushrooms in the forest. Wasson, raised in America where mushrooms were viewed with suspicion, was horrified. She, raised in Russia where mushroom foraging was a beloved tradition, was delighted. The stark cultural difference fascinated them both.
For the next three decades, the Wassons became amateur ethnomycologists, studying the role of mushrooms in different cultures. They documented the divide between mycophilic cultures, like Russia, that loved mushrooms, and mycophobic cultures, like America and Britain, that feared them.
In 1952, they received a letter from English poet Robert Graves containing a journal article about the ritual use of mushrooms by Mesoamerican peoples in the 16th century. The article referenced work by American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who had written about teonanácatl in the 1930s and suggested it was still being used in remote parts of Mexico.
Wasson became consumed by the idea of finding these mushroom rituals. Beginning in 1953, he made repeated trips to Mexico, searching for evidence that the ceremonies still existed. He traveled to remote villages, asked locals, and followed leads that usually went nowhere. Most indigenous people had learned not to talk about the ceremonies with outsiders.
Then, in June 1955, Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson traveled to Huautla de Jiménez, a small town in the mountains of Oaxaca. They asked a local official if he could help them learn about the divine mushroom. “Nothing could be easier,” the official replied, and took them up a mountainside to meet María Sabina.
María Sabina was a Mazatec curandera, a traditional healer who had been conducting mushroom ceremonies for over thirty years. She was well-respected in her community, known for her ability to diagnose illness and locate missing people through the visions the mushrooms provided. She had consumed psilocybin mushrooms regularly since she was seven years old.
Wasson lied to gain access to the ceremony. He told Sabina he was worried about his son back in the United States and needed information about his well-being. This wasn’t true. He had no son in distress. He just wanted to experience the velada, the all-night mushroom ceremony.
Sabina agreed. On the night of June 29, 1955, Wasson and Richardson became, in Wasson’s words, “the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms.”
The experience was profound. Wasson later wrote that “for the first time the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it did not mean someone else’s state of mind.” He saw geometric patterns, vivid colors, and architectural visions. He felt a sense of connection to something larger than himself. It was, he said, like finding God.
Wasson returned to the United States with samples of the mushrooms and a mission to share what he’d found. He sent specimens to French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified them as species of Psilocybe, including Psilocybe mexicana and Psilocybe aztecorum. Heim sent samples to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had synthesized LSD two decades earlier.
In 1958, Hofmann successfully isolated the active compounds in the mushrooms, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. He was able to synthesize them in the lab, creating pharmaceutical-grade versions of the compounds that had been used in Mesoamerican ceremonies for thousands of years.
But the biggest impact came from Wasson’s article.
The Article That Changed Everything
In May 1957, Life magazine published Wasson’s photo essay, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Life was one of the most widely read magazines in America. The article reached millions of people.
Wasson described the ceremony in vivid detail. He wrote about the chanting, the darkness, the visions. He included photographs, though he initially used a pseudonym for María Sabina and didn’t reveal the exact location of Huautla de Jiménez. A Life editor added the term “magic mushroom” to the title, bringing that phrase into popular culture for the first time.
Six days later, Valentina Wasson’s first-person account appeared in This Week, a Sunday magazine inserted into 37 newspapers across the country with a combined circulation of 12 million readers. The story went viral by 1950s standards.
The impact was immediate and disastrous, at least for the Mazatec community.
Beatniks, hippies, scientists, celebrities, and spiritual seekers flooded into Huautla de Jiménez. They came looking for María Sabina and the magic mushrooms. They came by the hundreds. Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Keith Richards were rumored to have visited, though these claims were never substantiated. What’s certain is that the tiny mountain village was overwhelmed by outsiders who had no understanding of or respect for the sacred context of the ceremonies.
María Sabina later expressed deep regret. “Before Wasson, nobody took the children simply to find God,” she said. “They were always taken to cure the sick.” The mushrooms were medicine, used for healing within a spiritual framework. The Westerners wanted recreation, novelty, a shortcut to enlightenment without the cultural or ceremonial structure that gave the experience meaning.
The attention brought consequences. Sabina was briefly jailed. Her house was burned down by villagers who blamed her for the invasion. She was accused of prostituting the sacred tradition. The Mexican police, seeing the influx of drug-seeking foreigners, began treating her as a drug dealer.
Wasson later admitted he regretted the publicity. In the 1970s, he expressed misgivings about the wide exposure the article brought to the Mazatec culture and the defilement of the mushroom ritual. But by then, the damage was done. The secret was out. Psilocybin mushrooms had entered Western consciousness.
And one person who read that Life article with intense interest was a young psychology lecturer at Harvard named Timothy Leary.
The Harvard Years
In August 1960, Timothy Leary was on vacation in Mexico when he ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. He was 39 years old, a respected academic, and by his own account, fairly conventional in his thinking. He taught psychology at Harvard. He had published well-regarded papers on personality assessment. He was, in many ways, the establishment.
The mushroom experience shattered that.
Leary described it as the deepest religious experience of his life. He felt he had learned more about his mind, about psychology, about the potential of human consciousness in those few hours than he had in his entire career. “I learned more about the mind, the brain, and its structures in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than I had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and research in psychology,” he later wrote.
He returned to Harvard determined to study psilocybin scientifically. This was not an impulsive decision. Leary spent months reading everything he could find about psychedelics, including Wasson’s Life article, Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception,” and the limited clinical literature that existed. He consulted with colleagues. He developed protocols.
In 1960, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (who later became Ram Dass) launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to investigate the therapeutic and transformative potential of psilocybin in controlled settings. Hofmann’s pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, was producing synthetic psilocybin and distributing it to research institutions, so Leary had access to a reliable, pharmaceutical-grade supply.
The early research was genuinely promising. Leary and his team conducted several studies that, by the standards of the time, were relatively well-designed. The Concord Prison Experiment gave psilocybin to inmates in a Massachusetts prison, combined with group therapy sessions, and tracked recidivism rates after release. Initial results suggested lower rates of re-offending, though later analysis revealed methodological flaws and the findings didn’t hold up.
The Marsh Chapel Experiment, conducted on Good Friday 1962, was more successful and more famous. Twenty divinity students at Boston University participated. Ten received psilocybin, ten received a placebo (niacin, which causes flushing and could serve as an active placebo). The setting was a chapel during a Good Friday service, with organ music and religious readings creating a sacred atmosphere.
The results were striking. Most of the students who received psilocybin reported profound mystical experiences, characterized by feelings of unity, transcendence, sacredness, and encounters with the divine. They ranked these experiences among the most spiritually significant of their lives. The control group reported some religious feelings, but nothing comparable.
In 2006, researcher Rick Doblin conducted a 25-year follow-up study, tracking down the original participants. Remarkably, most of the psilocybin group still rated the experience as one of the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives, decades later. Several said it had influenced their life’s work and their understanding of spirituality. The study provided long-term evidence that a single psilocybin experience, in the right setting, could have lasting impact.
But the Harvard Psilocybin Project was also chaotic in ways that would eventually doom it. Leary and Alpert were not just conducting clinical research in sterile lab settings with rigorous protocols. They were taking psilocybin themselves, regularly, at parties and in informal settings. They were giving it to friends, artists, writers, and graduate students. They hosted sessions at Leary’s house in Newton, Massachusetts, where the boundaries between research, therapy, and recreation became blurred.
Allen Ginsberg took psilocybin with Leary. So did Arthur Koestler, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and numerous other counterculture figures. Some of these sessions were loosely framed as research. Others were just social experiments. Leary believed that to truly understand these substances, you had to experience them personally and repeatedly, and that the conventional boundaries between researcher and subject were artificial constraints that limited genuine understanding.
The Harvard administration, along with much of the psychology department, disagreed profoundly. Concerns were raised about ethical protocols, informed consent, and whether Leary and Alpert were still doing science or had crossed into advocacy. Graduate students complained that they felt pressured to take psilocybin to maintain good relationships with their advisors. Parents of undergraduates complained that their children were being given experimental drugs.
By 1963, the situation had deteriorated completely. Alpert was fired in May for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment, a violation of the agreement to conduct research only in clinical settings with proper supervision. Leary was fired shortly after, officially for failing to attend scheduled lectures, but the real reason was that the administration wanted him gone and needed a pretext.
After leaving Harvard, Leary didn’t retreat into obscurity. Instead, he doubled down. He became the public face, voice, and advocate for the psychedelic movement. In 1966, he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, which used LSD as a sacrament and argued for psychedelic use as a religious practice protected by the First Amendment.
He coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” at a 1967 speech in San Francisco. The slogan became a countercultural mantra and an establishment nightmare. “Turn on” meant activate your neural equipment, discover the creative potential inside. “Tune in” meant interact harmoniously with the world around you. “Drop out” meant detach from institutional games and power structures.
To the establishment, it sounded like he was telling young people to take drugs and abandon society. To Leary, he was offering a roadmap for consciousness expansion and cultural transformation. The gap between those two interpretations defined the battle lines of the psychedelic wars.
Leary argued that psychedelics could save humanity, expand consciousness, and break down the oppressive structures of society. He testified before Congress. He debated academics and politicians. He appeared on talk shows. He wrote books. He was brilliant, charismatic, quotable, and utterly reckless about the consequences of his advocacy.
President Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.” That assessment, while hyperbolic, captured how much of a threat the establishment considered him. Leary wasn’t just promoting a drug. He was promoting a worldview that challenged authority, questioned conventional reality, and suggested that consciousness itself could be reprogrammed.
He made psychedelics famous, gave them cultural cachet, and brought them into the mainstream conversation in ways that Wasson and Hofmann never had. But in doing so, he also made them a target. His flamboyant advocacy provided fuel for the backlash that was coming. When the crackdown arrived, Leary’s face was on the wanted posters, literally and figuratively.
The Backlash
By the mid-1960s, the counterculture had fully embraced psychedelics. LSD and psilocybin mushrooms were spreading through college campuses, music festivals, and urban bohemian enclaves. The media covered “acid tests,” “be-ins,” and reports of young people dropping out of society to pursue consciousness expansion.
The establishment panicked.
Psychedelics became associated with anti-war protests, rejection of traditional values, and threats to social order. Parents, politicians, and law enforcement saw a generation of young people rejecting everything their elders had built, and LSD and magic mushrooms were the symbols of that rejection.
In 1968, psilocybin and psilocin were made illegal in the United States. In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act classified them as Schedule I drugs, meaning they were deemed to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. The classification was based more on politics than science. Research into their therapeutic potential was effectively shut down.
The irony is that compared to many Schedule I drugs, psilocybin is remarkably safe. It’s not addictive. It doesn’t cause physical dependence. The lethal dose is so high that it’s almost impossible to fatally overdose. But safety wasn’t the issue. Control was. Psychedelics represented a challenge to authority, and authority struck back.
For the next three decades, psilocybin research was essentially frozen. A few brave researchers continued to work on the margins, but funding was scarce and regulatory hurdles were enormous. An entire generation of potential research was lost. If studies had continued in the 1970s, we might have learned decades ago what we’re only discovering now: that psilocybin has profound therapeutic potential for conditions like depression, PTSD, and addiction.
Instead, psilocybin mushrooms went underground. They never disappeared completely. People still foraged for them, grew them in closets, and passed them around at parties and festivals. But they existed in the shadows, unregulated, unstudied, and illegal.
The Long Silence
From the 1970s through the 1990s, psychedelic research was dormant. A few scientists kept the flame alive, but they worked in obscurity, often with their own money, because institutional support had evaporated.
In popular culture, mushrooms were relegated to stoner jokes and drug education warnings. They were a hippie relic, something your parents might have tried in college but certainly not a legitimate area of scientific inquiry.
The War on Drugs, launched by President Nixon and escalated by President Reagan, created a climate where even discussing psychedelics in a positive light could damage your career. Researchers who wanted to study psilocybin had to navigate layers of bureaucracy, justify their work to skeptical review boards, and deal with the stigma of being associated with “drugs.”
But quietly, attitudes were starting to shift.
In the 1990s, a handful of researchers at Johns Hopkins University, led by Roland Griffiths, began planning studies on psilocybin. Griffiths was a highly respected psychopharmacologist who had spent decades studying drugs like caffeine and benzodiazepines. He had impeccable credentials, which turned out to be essential. If someone less established had proposed giving people psilocybin and measuring mystical experiences, they would have been laughed out of the room.
Griffiths spent years designing the studies, building relationships with regulators, and ensuring that every protocol met the highest scientific standards. He wasn’t interested in recreating the freewheeling experiments of the 1960s. He wanted rigorous, peer-reviewed science that could withstand scrutiny.
In 2006, the team published their first major paper in the journal Psychopharmacology. The study gave psilocybin to healthy volunteers in a carefully controlled setting with trained guides and found that a substantial percentage had experiences that met criteria for mystical or spiritual significance. More importantly, follow-up surveys showed that participants rated the experience as one of the most meaningful of their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
That paper reopened the door.
The Renaissance
Since 2006, psychedelic research has exploded. What started as a trickle has become a flood. Universities, medical schools, and research institutions around the world are now studying psilocybin for a range of conditions.
The data has been striking. Studies have shown that psilocybin-assisted therapy can produce rapid and sustained reductions in depression, even in patients who haven’t responded to conventional treatments. Cancer patients given psilocybin report decreased anxiety and improved quality of life. People with alcohol use disorder show reduced drinking. Smokers trying to quit have higher success rates with psilocybin-assisted therapy than with any other known treatment.
The mechanism isn’t fully understood, but the leading theory is that psilocybin promotes neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new connections and reorganize itself. It seems to temporarily break down rigid patterns of thought, allowing people to see their problems from new perspectives and form healthier mental habits.
In 2018 and 2019, the FDA granted “breakthrough therapy” designation to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder. This is a classification reserved for drugs that show substantial improvement over existing treatments for serious conditions. It accelerates the development and review process.
In 2024, the FDA granted breakthrough therapy designation to CYB003, a deuterated psilocybin analogue being developed by Cybin, for major depressive disorder. Clinical trials showed that 75 percent of participants who received two doses achieved remission and no longer showed signs of depression at the four-month follow-up.
Multiple pharmaceutical companies are now developing psilocybin-based therapies. There are over 100 ongoing clinical trials investigating psilocybin for 54 different conditions. The research spans depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, chronic pain, and end-of-life distress.
The science is cautiously optimistic. Not everyone responds. The effects aren’t always permanent. And there are risks, particularly for people with a history of psychosis or certain psychiatric conditions. But the potential is undeniable. After decades of stagnation in mental health treatment, psilocybin represents something genuinely new.
Decriminalization and Legalization
Parallel to the scientific renaissance, a grassroots movement for decriminalization has been gaining momentum.
In May 2019, Denver, Colorado became the first city in the United States to decriminalize psilocybin. The ballot initiative, which passed with just over 50 percent of the vote, didn’t legalize mushrooms but prohibited the city from spending resources to prosecute people for possession or use. It was a narrow victory, but it was the first crack in the wall.
One month later, Oakland, California followed. The city council voted unanimously to decriminalize not just psilocybin but all naturally occurring psychedelics, including ayahuasca, peyote, and ibogaine. Santa Cruz did the same in January 2020.
Then came the big one. In November 2020, Oregon voters approved Measure 109, making Oregon the first state to legalize psilocybin for supervised therapeutic use. The measure created a regulatory framework for licensed facilitators to administer psilocybin in controlled settings. It’s not recreational legalization. You can’t buy mushrooms at a dispensary. But if you’re over 21 and want to have a guided psilocybin session with a trained facilitator, you can do so legally.
The rollout has been slow and complicated. Counties can opt out if their residents vote to do so, and several have. Licensing requirements for facilitators are extensive. The program didn’t launch until 2023. But it exists. For the first time since 1970, there’s a legal pathway to access psilocybin in the United States.
Colorado followed in 2022 with Proposition 122, which legalized psilocybin and psilocin for personal use and created a regulated system for healing centers. The measure passed with 53 percent of the vote.
Washington, D.C. decriminalized psilocybin in 2020 through Initiative 81, making enforcement the lowest priority for police. Several other cities have followed suit: Ann Arbor, Michigan; Seattle, Washington; Detroit, Michigan; and others.
The movement is gaining momentum, though it’s far from universal. Many states remain firmly opposed. But the trajectory is clear. As the science accumulates and public attitudes shift, the political pressure for reform is building.
The Ethical Complications
The resurgence of psilocybin research and the push for legalization have raised thorny ethical questions, particularly around indigenous rights and intellectual property.
The mushrooms that R. Gordon Wasson brought out of Huautla de Jiménez in 1955 are the basis of the current psilocybin industry. Those mushrooms were identified, cultivated, and chemically analyzed, leading to patents on extraction methods, synthesis procedures, and therapeutic applications.
The Mazatec people, who preserved the knowledge of these mushrooms for centuries under threat of persecution, hold none of these patents. They receive no financial benefit from the billions of dollars being invested in psychedelic medicine. Their traditional knowledge was extracted, commodified, and profited from without acknowledgment, recognition, or compensation.
María Sabina died in poverty in 1985. The pharmaceutical companies developing psilocybin therapies are worth billions.
This is a pattern that repeats across the history of drug development. Indigenous knowledge is “discovered” by Western researchers, who then patent the compounds and profit from them while the original stewards of that knowledge are left with nothing.
Some activists and researchers are pushing for benefit-sharing agreements, similar to those that exist for other biological resources. The idea is that indigenous communities should receive royalties or other compensation when their traditional knowledge contributes to commercial products. But implementing this is complicated. Who gets compensated? How much? What counts as traditional knowledge?
There’s also the question of whether legalizing psilocybin for therapeutic use while keeping it illegal for traditional indigenous ceremonies is itself a form of cultural appropriation and discrimination. The Mazatec have been conducting mushroom ceremonies for centuries. Why should a licensed facilitator in Oregon be allowed to do what a Mazatec curandera cannot?
These are not easy questions, and they’re not being addressed as urgently as they should be. The psychedelic renaissance is happening, and it’s happening fast, but it risks repeating the same extractive patterns that characterized Wasson’s original encounter with María Sabina.
What We’ve Learned
The modern clinical research on psilocybin has taught us several things that the ancients probably knew intuitively.
First, set and setting matter enormously. The physical environment, the mental state of the person taking psilocybin, and the presence of skilled guides all influence the outcome. A mushroom trip at a music festival is a different experience than a guided session in a clinical setting, which is different again from a Mazatec velada. The drug is the same, but the context shapes the journey.
Second, psilocybin is not a magic bullet. It works best when combined with therapy, intention, and integration. Taking mushrooms alone doesn’t cure depression. But taking mushrooms in a therapeutic setting, with preparation beforehand and support afterward, can catalyze genuine psychological change.
Third, there are risks. Bad trips happen. People with a family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder are at higher risk of adverse reactions. The experience can be psychologically destabilizing, particularly if you’re not prepared for it. This is why the clinical protocols involve extensive screening, preparation sessions, and follow-up care.
Fourth, the mystical or spiritual quality of the experience seems to be therapeutically important. Studies have found that people who report having a complete mystical experience, characterized by a sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, and sacredness, tend to have better therapeutic outcomes. This is strange from a conventional medical perspective, where we usually try to separate subjective experience from clinical efficacy. But with psilocybin, the subjective experience appears to be part of the mechanism of action.
Where We’re Going
So where does this leave us?
We’re in a transitional moment. Psilocybin is still illegal under federal law in the United States, classified as a Schedule I substance with no accepted medical use. But that classification is increasingly out of step with reality. The FDA has granted breakthrough therapy designation. States and cities are decriminalizing or legalizing it. Clinical trials are showing efficacy. At some point, something has to give.
The most likely path forward is rescheduling. Psilocybin could be moved from Schedule I to Schedule II or III, acknowledging its medical potential while maintaining some restrictions. That would make research easier, allow doctors to prescribe it in certain contexts, and remove some of the stigma.
Full legalization, like what happened with cannabis in several states, is probably further off. The regulatory model for psychedelics is likely to be more restrictive than cannabis, closer to how we handle powerful prescription medications. You won’t see psilocybin dispensaries next to coffee shops anytime soon, though some advocates are pushing for that.
The therapeutic model, like what Oregon and Colorado have implemented, is the middle ground. It allows access in controlled settings with trained facilitators, which addresses concerns about safety while making the substance available to people who want it.
There’s also the question of how the psychedelic renaissance will affect broader drug policy. If psilocybin, a Schedule I substance, turns out to have profound therapeutic benefits, what does that say about the rest of the Schedule I list? Does it undermine confidence in the drug scheduling system? Does it create political momentum for broader reform?
And then there’s the cultural dimension. If psilocybin becomes widely available, even in therapeutic contexts, it will change how people think about consciousness, mental health, and the relationship between mind and brain. These are not trivial cultural shifts.
The Unfinished Story
What happened to shrooms? Nothing and everything.
They never went away. For thousands of years, across Mesoamerica and beyond, humans have been consuming psilocybin mushrooms in ceremonial contexts. The Spanish tried to stamp them out. The War on Drugs tried to eradicate them. It didn’t work. The mushrooms kept growing. The knowledge kept being passed down. The experiences kept happening.
What changed is that they moved from the underground to the mainstream. From secret indigenous ceremonies to Life magazine. From Mazatec veladas to clinical trials at Johns Hopkins. From Schedule I prohibition to FDA breakthrough therapy designation.
We’re watching the culmination of a story that began thousands of years ago in Mesoamerica. A story that was interrupted, suppressed, and nearly lost, but never completely erased. A story that R. Gordon Wasson and María Sabina brought back into the light in 1955, despite the cost to her and her community.
The question now is what we do with this knowledge. Do we repeat the extractive patterns of the past, taking indigenous wisdom and turning it into profit without reciprocity? Do we medicalize and sterilize these substances, stripping away the spiritual and ceremonial contexts that gave them meaning for millennia? Do we commercialize them, creating a psychedelic industry that mirrors the worst aspects of the pharmaceutical industry?
Or do we find a different path? One that acknowledges the indigenous roots of this knowledge. That respects the ceremonial contexts while also embracing rigorous science. That makes these medicines available to people who need them without creating new forms of exploitation.
The history of psilocybin mushrooms is a story about how humans have always sought to expand consciousness, confront mortality, and touch something beyond the everyday. It’s a story about the tension between tradition and innovation, between sacred and secular, between control and freedom.
It’s also a story that’s still being written. The psychedelic renaissance is happening now, in real time, and the decisions we make in the next few years will shape how this chapter ends. Or doesn’t end. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that these mushrooms have a way of surviving, adapting, and re-emerging no matter how hard we try to suppress them.
They were here before us. They’ll probably be here after us. The only question is whether we’re wise enough to learn from the thousands of years of human experience that came before, or whether we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes, just with better technology and fancier patents.
The mushrooms don’t care. They’ll keep growing either way.
Want to learn more like this?
Check out my book, Altered States: A Field Guide to Your Brain on Drugs to learn more history, how mushrooms act in your body, and why!