Psychedelic substances need to be used with responsibility, care, and context
As the popularity of these drugs increase, youth should learn about the cultural and contextual story before experimenting with magic mushrooms, or we risk repeating historical harms.

In psychology, the ego is the mental glue that holds together someone’s enduring sense of who they are—their identity—and, in more colloquial terms, indicates one’s self importance. Imagine facing others’ criticism or even ridicule. Our mind’s ego quickly interjects to deny the validity of such criticisms when our self-importance has been tested or bruised. 

Think of the ego as a barbed wire barrier meant to bolster one’s individuality even at the expense of our interconnectedness as a species. Psychedelics are hallucinogenic substances that cause alter our perception, mood, attention, and thinking. Psychedelics such as magic mushrooms or LSD (commonly known as acid) nibble away at the barriers we’ve erected between ourselves and the world, allowing us to experience sensations of connectedness and unity like never before. 

My personal experience

As much as our egos protect us, they also isolate us. During the summer of 2024, I experimented with a higher dose of magic mushrooms—approximately 3.5g. With the house empty and echoey, I lay alone in the middle of my mattress and stared at the ceiling, feeling a slight agitation in my lower stomach, which I blamed on my anxious nerves. As the breeze blew in through the window, I began to take gradual notice of my limp body on the sloppy mattress, feeling the exact contours of my hips as they dug into the bed. 

Thirty minutes later, the skin on my chest and shoulders, apart from gathering a slight sheen of sweat, assumed a new capability to sense almost every lock of ebony hair that frazzled across it, and even though the noise of the world dimmed like a bulb low on battery, my vision sharpened. The patterns on my carpet, which had always been rectangular and boring, began to move slowly and gracefully.

An hour later, I was still in my room, too preoccupied with its mere details that I had not cared to notice in the last three years I had lived here. Time began to distort, though I was not cerebrally aware of it. Experientially however, I could only focus on the here and now, the indispensability of the immediate moment, and could give no regard, no matter how much I tried, to the past or future. 

The poets tell us that the past and future are but mere illusions, and neuroscientists who study chronoception—the science of time perception—know that time in the mind is an illusory reality constructed by the brain to help us navigate our environment. I had experienced time dilation before when a two-hour-long exam felt like an eternity or when a twenty-minute game of Cards Against Humanity felt like the quickest five minutes of my life. 

But even then, notions of the past and future still existed in the background of my immediate life, just not terrorizing me. What began as a sense of melting into my bed ended with the dazzlingly unfamiliar experience of not being confident in who I thought I was. The ordinary things that ornamented my identity—my name, social circles, my career aspirations, political and philosophical convictions, the colour of my skin and texture of my hair which gave way to my ethnicity—were all rendered hollow, if not meaningless. 

Unarmed, metaphorically nude, no longer pressed between the walls of the past and future, and feeling my body in new ways, I was at the apex of my psychedelic “trip”. The feeling of separateness, a pocket of the world created by my previously astonishingly durable ego that only belonged to me, was weakened. At a higher dose, I am sure it would have been in shambles.  

The exploitative antics of the west’s “discovery” of psychedelics

For some, psychedelics are reminiscent of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and the increasingly liberal attitudes towards love, sex, and politics that defined the zeitgeist of the era. For others, psychedelics remind them of rich spiritual and ritualistic traditions that Indigenous elders in their family practice or practiced. For science geeks and mental health advocates, psychedelics represent astonishing breakthroughs in health, psychology, and neuroscience.

But no matter which angle you explore, the rich and often neglected history of psychedelics’ origins remains unflinchingly true: the introduction of psychedelics to the western world displays a history of neglect and colonial exploitation of Indigenous communities, specifically in modern-day Mexico. 

The Mazatec are one of many Indigenous Peoples whose use of psychedelics for spiritual gains is well-documented through anthropology. In spiritual ceremonies called Velada, shamans guide community members as they eat mushrooms to “cure the spirit, communicate with Mazatec deities, ask profound questions, and seek guidance from an ‘ultimate source’.” In the wake of inducing an altered state, marked by visual hallucinations and unlikely thought patterns, a cacophony of songs and drums, prayers and reflections erupt, and ceremonial tobacco use follows. Shamans then proceed to guide individuals through elaborate and meditative rituals, fostering deep relationships and insights many believe to be the core of the drugs’ power.

In the 1950s, American ethnomycologist Robert Wasson stumbled across the Mazatec and their activities surrounding psychedelics. He then convinced the spiritual leader of their community—Maria Sabina—to let him participate in these elaborate rituals. 

After persuading Sabina to allow him to engage in sacred rituals only meant for Indigenous community members, Wasson quickly gathered his insights and travelled back to the U.S. to publish multiple articles on his “findings,” and in the process completely betraying Sabina’s trust and identity. Wasson didn’t even hesitate to bring back sacred Indigenous knowledge when his findings and enthusiasm would eventually kickstart mass synthetic development and scientific breakthroughs about psilocybin and LSD’s surprising therapeutic role in improving the symptoms of mental disorders. 

The introduction of magic mushrooms to the Western world was conveniently timed, though steeped in colonial antics: not only did Wasson forgo any regard for Sabina and her community’s privacy, but his framing of mushrooms as simply psychological remedies or groundbreaking spiritual agents utterly sensationalizes and trivializes thousands of years of Indigenous sacred significance. 

Context and intention are essential 

I am not an avid psychedelic user, nor will I ever be. But I have microdosed on psilocybin—the ingredient that makes up shrooms—and experimented with higher doses of it twice in the cozy and private cove of my bedroom (away from my parents, obviously). But what began as an intellectual and scientific interest in psychedelics turned into me honestly playing with a substance while neglecting its cultural sanctity in Mesoamerican Indigenous communities—even when I was aware of this. 

I am not advocating that psychedelics stay within the Indigenous community. That’s simply not a reasonable demand now that we are decades into exploring their interaction with the mind. However, I have noticed the rise in commodifying psychedelics—both the substance and the experience. 

The pharmaceutical industry, I believe, is eager to latch onto the financial gains that the demand for psychedelics can have. Beyond corporate fascination, the science community too seems to overwhelmingly treat psychedelics as this magical panacea for the deeply complex nature of mental illness. You can also now buy “psilocybin gummies” and tea bags, or go on retreats and oases promising “the trip of a lifetime.”

This is dangerous. Psychedelics have become products of consumption—a problem I am guilty of contributing to, more than once—and in the process, we risk trivializing, erasing, and disrespecting a 10,000 year cultural history that we have no real way of understanding. Some of us don’t even have the desire to understand it, and instead are swept up in the popular appeal of these “mind-bending” drugs. 

I learned from my experience that context and intention are essential when interacting with psychedelics, either as consumers or enablers. We need to make a better individual and collective effort towards approaching these sensitive experiences with intentions rooted in personal growth, exploration, and community building; we need to check where our interests come from, and whether they are manufactured by mass media. 

We need to remind ourselves that when we experiment with these drugs, we are actually piggybacking off of a neglected history of extractivism and scientific and cultural abuse. All of this starts with cultivating awareness in our social circles, and more importantly, holding industries and individuals who abuse these substances to account. Or else, we risk repeating Wasson’s harm.