State officials look into potentially allowing ‘magic mushroom’ use in New Mexico

NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – Are magic mushrooms legal in New Mexico? Not yet. It’s a relatively new area of study for treating conditions like depression. Wednesday, state lawmakers heard from the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) and University of New Mexico (UNM) professors about their research and how it might work in our state.

“Effects include hallucination, change in perception, distortion of time, and the perception of maybe having a spiritual experience,” said Lawrence Leeman, M.D., professor at UNM School of Medicine. Making psilocybin, otherwise known as magic mushrooms, legal is on the table for state lawmakers. Last legislative session, lawmakers from both chambers and both parties asked researchers to look into it for medical purposes: “Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. It’s converted from psilocybin to psilocin which is the active agent in the blood,” Leeman says.

“What we intended to do was not really propose a path forward essentially. We tried to do a pretty thorough survey of the research that’s been ongoing around psilocybin as a therapeutic medicine. We wanted to look at the regulatory environment; maybe other challenges that other states are facing in implementing these kinds of programs; and just really wanted to provide the community and the legislature, the executive, just a foundational knowledge of sort where we’re at in the country with this as a medicine,” said Arya Lamb, director of the Policy and Communications Division at the NMDOH.

Doctors told lawmakers about the current studies underway in New Mexico and around the country for the medical use of psilocybin. “For psilocybin, it’s for depression, major depression, and treatment-resistant depression. That’s being fairly vigorously studied around the country,” Leeman said.

So far, trials for hundreds of people are underway at UNM. “It’s a therapeutic model that we’re looking at. We’re not looking at a recreational model,” Leeman said.

“There’s about three phase three trials going around the country. We’re part of one of them that we started a couple of months ago and this whole study will take about one year for each patient, probably two years for the whole study,” Leeman says.

Unlike cannabis, experts said psilocybin would not be for daily use but rather used with medical supervision possibly twice a year. “The dosing for psilocybin in the research and as I think they’re doing in some of the other states: six to eight-hour session, comfortable setting, with session facilitators guiding the process,” Leeman said with post-dose therapy sessions following.

“The effects are relatively short acting, they come on in about 15 to 45 minutes. Peaks at around four to six hours and after that, they’re done so about eight hours the whole session is done,” Leeman said.

Doctors said they think psilocybin works by opening the mind and allowing the brain to rewire itself: “Some of the ideas of the way that psilocybin works in the brain is that it increases what’s called neuroplasticity—neuroplasticity is sort of a time period after the use of the psilocybin where new connections are made in the brain,” Leeman said.

So, how should New Mexico move forward? It’s part of what experts looked into. “We looked at what other states were doing to try to figure out what would be a good way to, what’s the feasibility of establishing a program?” said Gary French, M.D., medical director for the Center for Medical Cannabis at the NMDOH.

The panel offered lawmakers four paths: the first option is to wait and see what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does. “Our estimate is that 2027 is probably the soonest the FDA could possibly approve psilocybin. If they approved psilocybin from that, it would be approved for depression,” Leeman said.

The second option would be to approve use in supervised therapy centers like what’s currently in effect in Utah and Oregon. The third option would be to decriminalize it altogether and possibly commercialize the drug like Colorado: “There would be risks because there’s not that supervision going on,” French said. The fourth option would be to have the state fund more research into the drug.

While experts did not recommend a specific option at this meeting, they did tell lawmakers that moving forward, it will be important to ask the community what it wants the state to do. “If we were to pursue you know, a policy avenue in the future, it would be very important to engage community in a very robust way. We would want to engage stakeholders and make sure that we’re really providing adequate time to do that community engagement,” Lamb said.

“A big question is safety considerations: as the state looks at this, I think that everybody is concerned about that if the state decides to move forward, how can one move forward safely?” Leeman said.

Experts said it cost Oregon and Colorado between four and seven million dollars to regulate psilocybin in their respective states.

To view the whole presentation, click here.

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